When 74-year-old President Donald Trump was acquitted in his Senate impeachment trial Feb. 5, 73-year-old House Judiciary Chairman Jerold Nadler (D-N.Y.) was foiled again, trying but failing to remove Trump from office. Looking for anything to besmirch the president during an election year, Nadler heard from disgruntled DOJ prosecutors that wanted to lock up 67-year-old Roger Stone for lying to Congress and Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe looking into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Forget about the fact that Mueller’s 22-month, $40 million probe found nothing related to allegations that Trump and his 2016 campaign conspired with the Kremlin to beat former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham. Nadler’s been fit-to-be-tied trying to get rid of Trump only to find himself foiled again with his colleague House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.)
Nadler will hear the testimony from former Department of Justice prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky tomorrow, one of four prosecutors who quit Feb. 11, protesting Atty. Gen. William Barr to give Stone a more lenient sentence. “What I heard—repeatedly—was that Roger Stone was being treated differently from any other defendant because of his relationship to the President,” Zelenisky told Nadler. “I was also told that the acting U.S. Attorney was giving Stone such unprecedentedly favorable treatment because he was ‘afraid of the president,’” Zelensky will say. Zelensky knows exactly Barr’s rationale for requesting leniency for Stone, having nothing to do with Trump. Zelensky knows that Stone was an extraneously player in the “Russian Hoax” saga that eventually fizzled out because Mueller debunked Trump’s allege Russian collusion in his March 23, 2019 Final Report.
Zelinsky knows that Mueller’s Special Counsel probe stemmed from 59-year-old former FBI Director James Comey’s counterintelligence investigation into Trump and his 2016 campaign based on Hillary’s paid opposition research AKA “The Steele Dossier,” claiming Trump and his campaign had ties with 67-year-old Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin. Stone was snared in an illegal investigation where former President Barack Obama’s Justice Department, FBI, National Security Agency [NSA] wiretapped Trump campaign officials based on Hillary’s lies about the Trump campaign. Zelinsky knows that Barr’s currently investigation into the origins of Comey’s counterintelligence investigation will likely deliver indictments of key Obama administration officials. Mueller’s prosecutors snared Stone, a minor player, in defending himself against false charges.
Zelinsky’s remarks are strangely reminiscent of Comey who said Trump once asked him to go lightly on Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, also accused by the FBI of giving false statements. Zelinsky said he was told by senior Justice Department officials to give Stone a “break,” the same nonsense Comey said about Trump. Mueller’s team accused Stone of contacting WikiLeaks’s fugitive founder Julian Assange for the email dump into hacked material from the Democratic National Committee [DNC] and former Hillary Campaign Chairman John D. Podesta. Any cursory review of Stone’s role in the Special Counsel’s Russian collusion investigation knows he played an inconsequential role in anything. Whether he was truthful with Congress or Mueller, Stone played no significant role in a poorly predicated investigation built off faulty evidence from Hillary’s fake Steele dossier.
Zelinsky fed right into Nadler’s narrative that something nefarious went down at the Justice Department. Nadler, Schiff and Pelosi have accused Barr of acting like Trump’s personal attorney, not attorney general. “[W]e were told by a supervisor that the U.S. Attorney had political reasons for his instructions, which our supervisor agreed with unethical and wrong,” Zelinsky told Nadler. When Zelinsky talks of “political reasons,” he’s implying that Trump ordered Barr to lighten Stone’s sentence. “Trump said the prosecutors threw the book at Stone asking for seven-to-nine years, when Stone’s charges amounted to a hill of beans. Trump called the prosecutors decision “horrible and very unfair.” “Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!” Trump tweeted Feb. 11. Barr was leaning on more leniency for Stone because he knew the basis for the Special Counsel Mueller investigation was built off Hillary’s fake dossier.
Nadler wants no part of admitting that Obama’s DOJ, FBI and NSA spent years investigating Trump and his campaign over spurious allegations contained in Hillary’s paid opposition research. When the late Sen. John McCain (R-Az.) handed Hillary’s bogus dossier to Comey in July 2016, he knew that it was paid opposition research without a shred of credibility. Yet neither McCain nor Comey cared one bit about the quality of the evidence, no matter how fabricated and concocted, they only wanted to sabotage Trump chances in the 2016. Zelinsky knew this but presented a twisted explanation to Nadler that something nefarious took place. Nadler used Zelinsky to recycle an old conspiracy theory that Barr overstepped his boundaries. In seeking a lighter sentence for Stone, Barr was trying to put in perspective that Stone was snared in an illegal counterintelligence probe based on Hillary fake dossier.
