Roger Stone sentencing proposal change was ‘highly unusual’ but politics didn’t play an improper role, DOJ watchdog says

(CNN) — The Justice Department’s decision to water down the sentence proposal for Roger Stone, a Donald Trump ally convicted of lying to Congress, was “highly unusual,” the department’s internal watchdog said Wednesday, but that it did not find evidence that politics played an improper role.

The investigation was launched after the Justice Department issued a second sentencing memo for Stone called for a prison sentence “far less” than the 7-9 year recommendation his trial team initially put forward.

The reversal came after Trump tweets bashing the initial recommended range, and on the day the second memo was filed, all four members of the Stone trial team quit the case – one of them resigning from the Justice Department altogether.

Stone was sentenced to 40 months in prison, but that sentence was ultimately commuted by Trump.

However, the inspector general found in Wednesday’s report that even career department lawyers believe “reasonable minds” can disagree on whether the initial sentencing recommendation for Stone was too high.

The report also revealed that after Aaron Zelinsky, one of the line prosecutors on Stone’s case, testified to Congress in 2020 about indications of improper pressure to cut Stone a “break,” top officials in the US attorney’s office reported him for allegedly false testimony to the DOJ office that investigates misconduct by its attorneys.

Inspector General Michael Horowitz said that, while his office did not find “evidence sufficient to establish improper political considerations or influence,” Zelinsky was not “unreasonable” in the beliefs he communicated to Congress because of comments made to him by other DOJ officials.

The new inspector general report said that the department’s move to file a second sentencing memo for Stone was “highly unusual” and that the involvement of then-Attorney General Bill Barr and the interim DC US attorney at the time “resulted in questions being asked and allegations being made about the Department’s decision making.”

The IG noted that Barr declined to be interviewed in the probe, as did other members of department leadership during the Trump administration.

The inspector general placed the blame on the then-interim US Attorney in DC, Timothy Shea, and his “ineffectual leadership, which was marked by indecisiveness and poor communication.” After putting off a decision on whether to overrule the trial team’s proposed recommendation, Shea waited until the day the filing was due to seek Barr’s advice, the report said.

Despite discussing with Barr a strategy to suggest a sentence below the recommended range, Shea nonetheless signed off on the first memo. Barr told his staff that evening, after seeing the news of the higher recommendation, that it needed to be “fixed,” according to the report.

“Thus, we found that Barr had articulated his position about the sentencing recommendation both before and shortly after the first sentencing memorandum was filed, and before the President’s tweets,” the inspector general said.

Shea did not respond to CNN’s request for comment, nor did Barr.

The 85-page report detailed the intense and sometimes heated internal deliberations in the lead-up to the initial sentencing filing, as the trial team’s supervisors repeatedly urged them to soften the proposed recommendation.

Over time, the line prosecutors came to believe that politics was causing their Stone proposal to get much more scrutiny and pushback than what they’d see for a typical defendant. The comments during these deliberations formed a “substantial basis” for Zelinsky’s congressional testimony, the inspector general said.

“The rule of law depends on prosecutors pursuing and telling the truth. My client is gratified the report confirms that he told the truth about what he saw and heard,” Zelinksy’s attorney Joshua Matz told CNN.

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CNN’s Evan Perez contributed reporting.