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Former AG Whitaker suggests DOJ’s defiant Roger Stone move was a ‘set up’ to nail Barr

February 14, 2020 | | Print Article
(Fox News video screenshot)

A couple of hours after Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton speculated that the now-withdrawn prosecutors who’d originally handled Roger Stone’s case had purposefully laid a “trap” for Attorney General Bill Barr, former temporary Trump administration AG Matthew Whitaker echoed the exact same idea but offered a bit more clarification.

“It is very clear from [Barr’s] interview they had told him that they were going to do quite the opposite, then did exactly what he had said ‘no, let’s go another direction’ or a decision had been made, and they went another direction anyway,” he explained while speaking late Thursday on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle.”

He added, “This seems to be a little bit of a setup to cause this exact kerfuffle. Very much choreographed.”

Listen:


(Source: Fox News)

In an ABC News interview published earlier that day, Barr explained that he’d expressed to the prosecutors his concerns about the “excessive” nine-year sentence they’d been seeking for Stone, a former Trump campaign official convicted for process crimes committed during the potentially illegitimate Russian collusion delusion probe.

But after news broke late Monday that the prosecutors were moving forward with the nine-year recommendation anyway, Barr vowed to take action.

“I was very surprised,” he said to ABC News. “And once I confirmed that that’s actually what we filed, I said that night, to my staff, that we had to get ready cause we had to do something in the morning to amend that and clarify what our position was.”

But before he could actually take action, the president posted the following tweet:

Because of the timing of the tweet, which the president dropped before the AG’s team could formally take action, a firestorm of outrage from congressional Democrats and their media allies erupted, with the left accusing both Trump and Barr of corruption … again.

“This is an abuse of power,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed during her weekly press conference Thursday. “The president is again trying to manipulate federal law enforcement to serve his political interests.”

Meanwhile, the House Judiciary Committee announced that Barr is now scheduled to testify before the committee in late March about a variety of matters, including his intervention in Stone’s sentencing.

“In the past week alone, you have taken steps that raise grave questions about your leadership of the Department of Justice. These include … the decision to overrule your career prosecutors and significantly reduce the recommended sentence for Roger Stone, who has been convicted for lying under oath, at the apparent request of the President — a decision that led to all four prosecutors handling the case to withdraw from the proceedings in protest,” the committee wrote.

That’s clearly not what happened, but the optics admittedly make it look otherwise. And as stated by Whitaker and also Fitton, it all seems awfully convenient.

“Bill Barr has fallen into a trap laid for him by these Mueller prosecutors. And now they’ve created another scandal for the next phase of the coup against him and Donald Trump,” the Judicial Watch president said earlier in the evening on Fox Business Network’s “Lou Dobbs Tonight.”

In fact, talk of a second impeachment has already emerged.

Case in point:

But just like the Democrats’ original impeachment drive, it appears this new drive is based on just as faulty of a premise.

“Fundamentally, all of their powers [that of the prosecutors] is driven from the president and the attorney general,” Whitaker noted to FNC’s Laura Ingraham. “And if the attorney general is led to believe that we should make this recommendation and they don’t, they shouldn’t resign — they should be concerned about being removed.”

The host concurred.

“This is article two,” she said, referring to Article Two of the U.S. Constitution, which establishes the executive branch. “The president is the head of the executive branch. I mean, this gets lost on a lot of people. It’s like these runaway detailees from the CIA or some other  department or some prosecutor gets to run the show.”

Ideally, yes, but in recent times otherwise lower-level, narcissistic “detailees” such as disgraced former U.S. National Security Council member Alexander Vindman have seemingly sought to force their personal agenda on the executive branch.

Note also that the now-withdrawn prosecutors who were the architects of Stone’s original sentence recommendation are former members of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russian collusion delusion probe.

“I would think the attorney general’s job is made more difficult by these Mueller holdovers that he allowed to be in place and outflank him on the Roger Stone sentencing recommendation,” Fitton said of them to Dobbs earlier Thursday.

He was pushing back on criticism Barr had lobbed at Trump over his tweets. But according to Fitton, the real problem isn’t the president’s tweets but rather the “locus of evil” that the AG has unwittingly allowed to fester in the DOJ.

Listen:


(Source: Fox Business Network)

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Vivek Saxena
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