House Democrats want to interview the four federal prosecutors who quit the Roger Stone case in protest after President Trump and Attorney General William Barr said they recommended too harsh a sentence and demanded it be changed, a new report said Friday.
Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler asked for the interviews on Friday in a letter to Barr that also sought documents and testimony from others about allegations of political interference in the Justice Department by the commander-in-chief, Politico reported.
The four ex-Stone prosecutors — Aaron Zelinsky, Adam Jed, Michael Marando and Jonathan Kravis — top the list of those he wants to grill.
The Manhattan Democrat also wants to interview officials involved in the case of Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and is awaiting sentencing.
He also wants sitdowns with John Durham, the US attorney from Connecticut whom Barr tabbed to review the origins of the FBI’s probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, and Jeff Jensen, the US attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, whom Barr picked to review Flynn’s case.
Others on the list include Robert Khuzami, the former New York prosecutor who supervised the case against Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen, and Richard Donoghue, the US attorney for the Eastern District of New York, in Brooklyn, whom Barr picked to review the Ukraine scandal that led to Trump’s impeachment in the House last year, the website reported.
Nadler asked Barr to respond to his request by March 13, and Barr himself is expected to testify to the Judiciary Committee on March 31.
The four prosecutors had recommended that Stone serve seven to nine years behind bars following his November conviction for lying to Congress and other charges.
Trump ripped the recommendation as too extreme for Stone, a longtime pal and self-described political dirty trickster, and criticized both the judge and jurors in the case.
Barr then directed the prosecutors to seek a more lenient sentence, prompting the mass resignations of the career prosecutors.
Federal Judge Amy Berman Jackson in DC ultimately sentenced Stone to 40 months in the slammer, and Stone sought a new trial in a motion Jackson has yet to rule on.
Nadler also wants to interview Jessie Liu, the former DC US attorney who oversaw the Stone case, who left her position recently and had been chosen by Trump for a senior Treasury Department role.
Her nomination was later yanked after Trump’s acquittal in his Senate impeachment trial earlier this month.