Judge calls Justice Dept. move in Roger Stone case 'unprecedented'
Roger Stone outside federal court in Washington on Thursday. Credit: Getty Images/Chip Somodevilla
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson stopped just short on Thursday of accusing President Donald Trump's Justice Department of giving the case of his longtime adviser Roger Stone special treatment.
What led her there is well-known.
Prosecutors at first called for Stone to serve up to 9 years for hampering a congressional investigation into Russia's visible pro-Trump role in the 2016 campaign.
But then their bosses softened the recommendation, and Trump lamented on Twitter about the justice system's alleged unfairness to Stone.
Jackson sentenced Stone to 3 years and 4 months. She may well have done that regardless of the unusual high-level interest in the case, which led four Justice Department officials to quit the case.
Here's what Jackson said, dryly alluding to federal sentencing guidelines and the different prosecutors' recommendation:
“For those who woke up last week and became persuaded that the guidelines are harsh and perhaps sentences shouldn’t be driven by strict application of a mathematical formula … I can assure you that defense attorneys and judges have been making that argument for a very long time.
“But we don’t usually succeed in getting the government to agree.”
In other words, Attorney General William Barr's prosecutors are not ordinarily the ones expected to chafe against "strict application." That's normally the role of defense attorneys and judges.
Jackson even called the intervention "unprecedented."
Stone, she said, “was not prosecuted for standing up for the president; he was prosecuted for covering up for the president.”
Arguing for leniency, the defense offered some interesting words of its own.
Lawyer Seth Ginsberg argued that New York City activist and radio host Randy Credico, who Stone threatened, understood that the self-proclaimed dirty trickster was "all bark and no bite."
Credico said in a letter appealing for leniency: “The bottom line is Mr. Stone, at his core, is an insecure person who craves and recklessly pursues attention …"
Pleading buffoonery may serve Stone's immediate purpose. But it has to make you wonder why Trump keeps such a clown so close, so many years after publicly calling him a loser and a braggart.
Or how anyone would consider it a matter of justice or mercy for Trump to pardon Stone as hinted, or call for a retrial as he's done, or post nasty tweets about the judge and jury forewoman on Twitter.
Maybe it's just that, even after three years in the Oval Office, Trumpian political antics have a way of coming close to a farcical drama when they reach a criminal courtroom.
Another example arose overseas this week.
In a magistrate's court in London, lawyers for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who's fighting extradition to the U.S. over hacked documents, leveled a startling claim.
Trump, they said, sent a message through former Rep. Dana Rohrabacher that he was "offering a pardon or some other way out if Mr. Assange … said Russia had nothing to do with the DNC [Democratic National Committee] leaks."
Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), widely known as Kremlin-friendly while in office, has said he made the proposal on his own without White House endorsement.
"I was on my own fact-finding mission at personal expense to find out information I thought was important to our country," he wrote on his blog.
"I told him that if he could provide me information and evidence about who actually gave him the DNC emails, I would then call on President Trump to pardon him."
The White House, meanwhile, denied Assange's claim and said the president barely knew Rohrabacher.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
