Institutional decay

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Attorney General Bill Barr and his allies are centralizing control over the Justice Department and acting in increasingly blatant ways to protect President Donald Trump’s interests and allies. This became evident in dramatic fashion Tuesday when the entire team prosecuting longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone withdrew from that case after Justice Department higher-ups made clear they planned to override their sentencing recommendation. But the Stone controversy was just the latest in a series of recent moves by Barr to “take control of legal matters of personal interest to President Donald Trump,” as Carol Lee, Ken Dilanian, and Peter Alexander of NBC News reported.

Senior Justice Department officials also intervened to change the sentencing recommendation for another Trump ally, Michael Flynn, last month. Barr put in a close ally in the politically sensitive US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia job (in a procedurally unusual way). And Barr instituted new rules requiring his personal approval for any new investigations into presidential campaigns, staff, or foreign contributions — something that naturally would help the investigation-plagued Trump campaign. All this has unfolded as Trump has separately taken revenge on witnesses in the impeachment inquiry: dismissing Alex and Yevgeny Vindman from the National Security Council staff and firing EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland. The president also pulled a Treasury Department nomination for the former US Attorney for DC, who had supervised Stone’s prosecution.

It’s not clear whether Barr is acting in response to explicit private instructions from Trump, but it’s largely irrelevant. Trump has made it unmistakably clear that these are the sorts of things he wants Barr to do — he tweeted before the change to Stone’s sentencing recommendation that it should be changed, and he praised Barr personally for doing so afterward.

The Roger Stone case and the fiasco at Bill Barr’s Justice Department, explained - Vox