Trump tweet about Stone wasn't a directive to Barr, Conway says 

WASHINGTON — A pair of top Trump administration officials on Sunday defended President Donald Trump's tweets weighing in on Justice Department cases, amid calls from former federal prosecutors for Attorney General Bill Barr to step down over his handling of the case of longtime Trump ally Roger Stone.

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, appearing on "Fox News Sunday," defended Trump’s recent tweets urging the Justice Department to reduce the sentence of his longtime friend Stone, saying that Trump never directly “had a conversation with Bill Barr” about the case.

“We’ve seen how the president weighs in. The president weighs in to the whole world,” Conway said of Trump’s Twitter use. “He didn’t have a conversation with Bill Barr about the Roger Stone case, he had a conversation with the whole world. ... He tells everybody what he thinks on any number of issues, including the Stone case.”

Barr on Sunday faced calls for his removal in a letter signed by more than 1,100 former Justice Department officials. The letter came after the department retreated on the initial sentencing recommendation put forth by the prosecutors handling Stone’s case for a more lenient sentence. The prosecutors recommended a 7-to-9 year sentence for Stone — a Republican operative who served a short stint as a Trump campaign adviser — after he was found guilty of lying to Congress and witness tampering in connection with his efforts to obtain hacked Democratic campaign emails from WikiLeaks.

The move to reduce the sentencing recommendation came shortly after Trump took to Twitter to rail against the recommendation as “horrible” and “very unfair.” The department has said it was not acting in response to Trump’s tweets, but the move prompted the four prosecutors on the case, which stemmed from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, to withdraw from the case.

Barr, in an interview with ABC News Thursday, said that Trump’s tweets weighing in on the Stone case and other high-profile Justice Department cases “make it impossible for me to do my job and to assure the courts and the prosecutors in the department that we’re doing our work with integrity.”

Barr said: “It’s time to stop the tweeting about Department of Justice criminal cases.”

Asked if Trump would “respect Barr’s request for him to stop commenting on current cases,” Conway did not answer the question directly, instead she reiterated that Trump never asked Barr “privately” to intervene in Stone’s case. "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace noted that after the Watergate scandal toppled Richard Nixon's presidency, presidents have avoided intervening in criminal cases to avoid the appearance of political interference.

Marc Short, who serves as Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, told CNN’s “State of the Union” that Trump would likely continue tweeting about high-profile cases because his Twitter use “is something that helped propel him to the presidency.”

“It's one of the things that the American people love about him, is they can communicate directly with him,” Short said. “He's going to keep doing it. ... It's what he's done from the beginning. And I think it's a very effective way for him to communicate to the American people.”

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), a Trump ally who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the tweets put Barr in an “awkward spot,” and he suggested that Trump tweet less on such cases.

“Does the president have a right to tweet about a case? Of course,” Kennedy told CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “Just because you can sing, though, doesn't mean you should sing. You can have a voice like Mick Jagger, but you wouldn't want to start belting out ‘Honky Tonk Woman’ in church. This is a case where tweeting less would not cause brain damage.”

As Trump’s defenders took to the Sunday show circuit, more than 1,100 former Justice Department officials released a joint letter calling for Barr’s removal.

The letter, signed by lawyers who served under Democratic and Republican administrations, notes that the Justice Department’s rule book states that legal decisions “must be impartial and insulated from political influence.”

“President Trump and Attorney General Barr have openly and repeatedly flouted this fundamental principle, most recently in connection with the sentencing of President Trump’s close associate, Roger Stone, who was convicted of serious crimes,” reads the letter.

The former officials argued that the decision to override the initial sentencing recommendation poses “a grave threat to the fair administration of justice.”

“In this nation, we are all equal before the law,” reads the letter. “A person should not be given special treatment in a criminal prosecution because they are a close political ally of the President.”