In an extraordinary move, all four federal prosecutors who took the case against longtime Donald Trump confidant Roger Stone to trial withdrew Tuesday after top Justice Department officials undercut them and disavowed the government’s recommended sentence against Stone.

The mass withdrawal of the career prosecutors on the case was a stunning response to the controversial and politically charged decision by Attorney General William Barr and other top Justice Department officials to reduce prosecutors’ recommended sentence of up to nine years, which came just hours after Trump publicly criticized it on Twitter.
The rapid fire developments in the case — the prosecutors’ withdrawals came one by one through court filings over the course of two hours Tuesday afternoon — spilled tensions between Justice Department brass and the career prosecutors into the open, raising questions about the Justice Department’s independence from political pressure. In a new filing Tuesday, the US Attorney’s office in Washington revised the sentencing recommendation to be “far less” than the seven-to-nine years recommended on Monday. It was not signed by any of the prosecutors who worked the case.
Ultimately, the presiding judge in the case will have the final say on Stone’s sentence.
Trump denied any involvement in the sentencing revision, but the turnaround drew howls from congressional Democrats, who called for the Justice Department inspector general to investigate.
Of the four prosecutors who withdrew from the case — Aaron S.J. Zelinsky, Jonathan Kravis, Adam Jed and Mike Marando — Zelinsky and Kravis also resigned from the DC US attorney’s office. Zelinsky, who worked on former special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, did not resign from the Baltimore US attorney’s office, where he is based.
The mass withdrawal was set in motion on Monday when the prosecutors from the DC US Attorney’s office, who are Justice Department employees, wrote in a filing that Stone should be sentenced seven to nine years in prison after he was convicted on seven charges last year that came out of Mueller’s investigation, including lying to Congress and witness tampering.
Trump weighed in on Twitter overnight on Tuesday, calling it a “horrible and very unfair situation.”
“The real crimes were on the other side, as nothing happens to them. Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!” Trump said. On Tuesday afternoon, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that he didn’t ask the Justice Department to change the sentencing recommendation.
By midday Tuesday, a senior Justice Department official said that the original sentencing recommendation from the prosecutors, transmitted to a judge and signed off on by the office’s top prosecutor, had not been communicated to leadership at the Justice Department.
“The Department was shocked to see the sentencing recommendation,” the official told CNN. “The Department believes the recommendation is extreme and excessive and is grossly disproportionate to Stone’s offenses.”

His offense? Showing the brief spark of decency, albeit far too late, and far too feebly.

Republicans cannot tolerate that, and they will punish those that shine a light on what they have become.