This Roger Stone controversy is the last straw — Bill Barr needs to go while we still have a democracy to save

Prosecutors have been dropping like flies, with one even quitting his entire job this week as it becomes more and more obvious that Stone merely represents the President's interests

Thomas Jefferson wrote, “The most sacred of the duties of government [is] to do equal and impartial justice to all its citizens.” But the US Department of Justice (DOJ) has clearly abandoned that principle under the leadership of Attorney General William Barr, and that’s why Barr needs to go.

In an unprecedented and deeply unnerving move, the DOJ intervened this week in the impending sentencing of Trump’s former ally and intermediary with WikiLeaks during the 2016 election, Roger Stone. The prosecutors had submitted their recommendations to the federal judge in the case, arguing that Stone should be given something within the federal sentencing guidelines for witness tampering and lying to Congress, so a total of seven to nine years in prison.

President Trump tweeted that the recommendations for sentencing were “horrible and very unfair situation”. After Trump’s tweet, the DOJ filed a memo significantly lowering the sentencing recommendation — something unheard of by federal prosecutors, especially in cases of perjury and witness tampering — and actions which strike at the pillars that uphold our justice system.

Then, in another unprecedented move, all four prosecutors handling Trump ally Roger Stone’s case resigned from the case, with one prosecutor even quitting his job as the special assistant US Attorney in the Washington DC office.

In September 2017, Roger Stone gave false testimony to Congress’s House Intelligence Committee, which was investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election at the time. Stone’s involvement was exposed by Special Counsel Robert Muller’s investigation. He was then convicted by a federal jury early last year of lying to Congress and tampering with witnesses during the 2016 presidential elections. Muller’s investigation exposed multiple other Trump team members who have subsequently been convicted for criminal acts, including Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, Michael Cohen, and George Papadopoulos.

The antics of this administration have gotten so bad that we no longer question whether every move Trump makes is in his self-interest rather than in the interest of the nation (see: the Senate impeachment trial). But any person who has ever lived under a dictatorship can tell you that when the federal institutions bow unquestioningly to the whims of a volatile and narcissistic political leader, democracy may have already gone down the drain.

The actions of William Barr, the nation’s top law enforcement official, spelled trouble for the nation’s democracy since before he stepped onto the scene in his second act as Attorney General (his first being for then-president George H W Bush from 1991 tp 1993). When former AG Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Muller investigation in March 2017, Trump began attacking Sessions for not investigating Hillary Clinton, his opponent in the 2016 election. Then, in an apparent bid for the job and while he Sessions was still AG, Barr sent an unsolicited 19-page memo to the White House and the DOJ in June of 2018 attacking Mueller’s investigation. In September 2018, Jeff Sessions resigned from his role as AG and in February 2019, Barr stepped in.

At the end of the Mueller investigation, the Special Counsel released the full report to Barr of his investigation’s findings. Barr then sent Congress a four-page letter in March 2019 completely mischaracterizing the Mueller report’s findings. Barr then left this misleading letter as the only information available to Congress and the Americans public. Mueller later stated that Barr’s letter didn’t “capture the context of the Trump probe” at all.

The DOJ was created after the end of the Civil War, when a large and increasingly expensive amount of litigation involving the US prompted concerned Congress to create "an executive department of the government of the United States" with the Attorney General as its head. The Act creating the DOJ came into law on July 1, 1870 and stipulated that the institution was empowered to handle “all criminal prosecutions and civil suits in which the United States had an interest.”

The mission of the DOJ is to “enforce the law and defend the interests of the United States according to the law;…to provide federal leadership in preventing and controlling crime; to seek just punishment for those guilty of unlawful behavior; and to ensure fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans.” And while the US Attorney’s offices fall under the leadership of the AG, prosecutors are supposed to be independent and have a duty to uphold the rule of law – in fact, our whole adversarial criminal system depends largely on the independence and impartiality of our government prosecutors.

The Justice Department itself is designed to be independent of the president and stands as one of several institutions that can curb presidential overreach. But not if the head of that institution doesn’t care, and certainly not if the President and the Republican-led senate that prostrates to him doesn’t see the value in separation of powers, either. It’s clear that Barr sees himself as the President’s counsel, not as the lead justice official for the United States of America and its people.

The federal judge in the case can decide whether or not to follow the DOJ’s revised sentencing recommendations, but it doesn’t matter in the long run because Trump can, and probably will, use his Art. II, Sec. 2 constitutional power to pardon Stone. We know that Trump and his nepotistic, inept administration is corrupt to the core, but we remain hopeful that our institutional checks and balances will preserve and uphold our democratic form of government.

Eager to take the lead of Trump’s rabid pack of sycophants, AG Barr has all but shackled himself to the President, bending the law to fit the Trumpian will. I fear that the outrageous and entirely unconstitutional antics of this administration and key players like Barr have exposed major faultlines in our democracy for the world to witness and pry open, as Russia already has. From the Mueller investigation to the impeachment and now the DOJ’s intervention in the sentencing of a convicted criminal on behalf of the president, America is starting to look, smell and feel more like a right-wing dictatorship every day.