Injustice with trump and Barr

Remember when a number of trump's cronies and campaign handlers were caught, charged with felonies, convicted, plead out, and/or sentenced to jail?

That shit's over now.

Now that the Congressional Republicans have signed off on trump getting away with any crime he likes, trump has set his sights on clearing out the debris of the legal matters surrounding his people getting dirty with the Russians and lying about it all.

All it will take is trump tweeting out a message about something he doesn't like and then his lackey William Barr at the Attorney General's office will do his bidding and fuck things up.

For example, just today: trump's campaign ally Roger Stone was getting set to have a hearing on the sentencing recommendations that the prosecutors - working from the Mueller investigations - were filing over the seven GUILTY counts Stone received from a jury about witness tampering, lying to investigators, and obstruction.

When it got out that the prosecutors were looking for seven to nine years total - roughly one year for each Guilty count - trump tweeted out his displeasure that the sentencing was too harsh.

Let's go to Andrew Prokop at Vox.com for details:

Stone was indicted by Mueller’s team in January 2019 and charged with making false statements, obstruction, and witness tampering. The charges focused on Stone’s alleged lies to the House Intelligence Committee in 2017 about his statements on and efforts to get in touch with WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign. He was convicted on all seven counts at trial in November.

With Stone’s sentencing date of February 20 approaching, prosecutors had to submit their sentencing memo for him on Monday. In it, the prosecutors said that a sentence for Stone of between 87 and 108 months (about seven to nine years) — a range calculated by the probation office, in accordance with standard sentencing guidelines — would be “appropriate.”

President Trump responded to this with outrage in a set of late-night tweets and retweets. “This is a horrible and very unfair situation,” he tweeted at 1:48 am Tuesday. “The real crimes were on the other side, as nothing happens to them. Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!”

This immediately stoked speculation about whether Trump planned to pardon Stone or commute his sentence. Then later Tuesday morning, reporters started to hear that the Justice Department was in fact going to change its position.

A senior Justice Department source told the Washington Post Tuesday that “the Department finds seven to nine years extreme, excessive and grossly disproportionate” — and that they’d “clarify” their position “later today.” That source claimed they made this decision to do so before Trump posted his tweet (a claim that’s been greeted with much skepticism).

Such interference in a sentencing recommendation made by career prosecutors is highly unusual. And what happened next was even more unusual — Zelinsky informed the court he was withdrawing from Stone’s case just days before sentencing and resigning his special posting with the DC US Attorney’s Office. Kravis then said he was resigning from DOJ entirely, which was followed by Jed and Marando withdrawing from the case as well...

The prosecutors, clearly seeing their authority getting kneecapped by their boss Barr, decided to resign rather than accept the bullshit getting shoved down their throats. The replacement guy then presented the judge with an open-ended "Well, we don't know what will be appropriate" and left everything burning in the dumpster as of now.

This is what happens, Republican Senators, when you tell a corrupt, self-serving bankrupt con artist that he can break every law and violate every procedure to his "Absolute Authority" whims. But they wanted this, after all. The Republican Party for years showed disdain for the federal system of checks and balances, they hate it when their own have to answer to the law, and now they've got a guy in the White House and a willing lackey in the Attorney General's office to let them do what THEY will at the expense of our legal system.

Any minute now, we should expect trump to issue pardons to Mike Flynn, Paul Manafort, and everybody else who plead out or got jailed for doing trump's dirty work back in 2015-16.

trump and the Republicans are gleefully destroying each branch of the federal government one agency at a time. Here goes the Dept. of Justice, America.

We are so very royally extremely fucked.