Aaron Zelinsky, a lawyer prosecuting President Trump’s longtime associate Roger Stone who later resigned from the case in protest after being forced to seek a lesser prison sentence, submitted a statement to Congress this Tuesday and dropped a “bombshell” revelation about the “wrongful political pressure” that he endured.
“What I saw was the Department of Justice exerting significant pressure on the line prosecutors in the case to obscure the correct Sentencing Guidelines calculation to which Roger Stone was subject – and to water down and in some cases outright distort the events that transpired in his trial and the criminal conduct that gave rise to his conviction,” a portion of his statement read. “Such pressure resulted in the virtually unprecedented decision to override the original sentencing recommendation in his case and to file a new sentencing memorandum that included statements and assertions at odds with the record and contrary to Department of Justice policy.”
“What I heard – repeatedly – was that Roger Stone was being treated differently from any other defendant because of his relationship to the President,” his statement continued. “I was told that the Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Timothy Shea, was receiving heavy pressure from the highest levels of the Department of Justice to cut Stone a break, and that the U.S. Attorney’s sentencing instructions to us were based on political considerations. I was also told that the acting U.S. Attorney was giving Stone such unprecedentedly favorable treatment because he was ‘afraid of the president.’”
Zelinsky is set to testify before Congress this Wednesday. According to Business Insider, he’ll tell lawmakers that a supervisor on Stone’s case told him that there were “political reasons” to seek a lighter sentence for Stone, even though the supervisor acknowledged that a lighter sentence would be “unethical and wrong.”