Roger Stone's ridiculous prison sentence proves William Barr is exactly who Trump thought he was

This is the teachable moment none of us wanted to arrive

The dandyish criminal Roger Stone got his just desserts today, as United States District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson sentenced the Republican operative to 40 months in prison. Stone, who was convicted this past November of seven counts of obstruction, witness tampering, and making false statements to Congress, was one of the many conservative soldiers who fell during Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

As a patriot, I am personally thrilled that Stone — who often counts himself above the law — is finally facing jail time for his acts against America. And, as a patriot, I am gravely disturbed by the final result of Stone’s sentencing, which betrays an indisputable truth about the current iteration of the American justice system: Things are very deeply broken indeed.

Roger Stone’s original sentencing recommendation, as made by prosecutors, was seven to nine years in prison. That’s the minimum one should expect someone like Stone, who shows a flat disregard for the law, to serve in prison. But, upon word of that recommendation, President Trump intervened, tweeting a not-so-subtle directive to Attorney General William Barr. The message was clear: the president wanted the final say on all things judicial.

In deference to his boss, and demonstrating the administration’s sick sycophancy, Attorney General Barr followed his boss’s lead, dismissing the prosecutorial recommendation. As a result, members of the Department of Justice quit in protest. Others penned a lengthy missive, asking for Barr’s resignation.

Despite a flaccid attempt to reclaim moral authority — Barr went on television last week to assert that he is an independent arbiter of the law, and that his opinions are based on right versus wrong, as opposed to political persuasion — the Attorney General’s credibility is shot. But that’s not the worst part of this Stone ordeal. The worst part is that Stone’s sentencing-lite is proof positive that the Department of Justice is no longer an independent body. Instead, it has bent and turned to conduct the business of the president. Trump asked for a non-impartial Department of Justice, and he got exactly what he wanted.

We now know, with clarity, that William Barr, who assumed an oath of office while promising to Congress that he was his own man, capable of considering the law above the petty desires of the president, is no better than the rest of the fools that rubber-stamp the White House. There is no longer objectivity, or fact. There is no longer any way for Americans to believe, wholly, that the Department of Justice will pursue what is in the best interest of the country over what is in the best interest of the president.

Of course, this instance is not the only circumstance in which Barr has shown his true colors. Following the conclusion of the Mueller investigation, he released an unprompted, several-page brief, distilling his (largely inaccurate) take, which was that the president was guilty of nothing. Barr has also retaliated against the intelligence agencies that reported on Russia’s interference with the 2016 election, by initiating an investigation into those same agencies. Finally, Barr limited what investigations could even take place pursuant to the president: a true perversion of the justice system.

Still, Roger Stone’s sentencing is the most clear example of the justice system gone wrong. The president’s tweet about the so-called injustice of the sentencing recommendation was almost immediately met with a revision, and it’s impossible not to draw from that revision the conclusion that the president’s desires will always usurp the mission of justice, so long as William Barr is Attorney General of the United States. We knew, already, that Trump had a withering disrespect for the rule of law. What we did not know was that his appointees — lifetime servants in the public sphere — would be so easily malleable.

Whether or not the Department of Justice can ever reasonably recover from this brand of corruption is a question we will only be able to unpack after this administration has gone. In the meantime, Americans can expect nothing less than the absolute worst when it comes to fairness under the law. It’s a teachable moment, maybe, but not one at which we had hoped to arrive.