The prosecutor’s remarks relating to the Roger Stone case were posted as the Justice Department has come under scrutiny for the abrupt dismissal by Attorney General William Barr, shown, of the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, Geoffrey Berman.
Photo: Evan Vucci/Associated PressA prosecutor in the criminal case against former Trump adviser Roger Stone said supervisors repeatedly told him Mr. Stone would receive special treatment “because of his relationship with the president,” according to prepared remarks posted Tuesday before a House hearing.
The prosecutor, Aaron Zelinsky, said the U.S. Attorney in Washington, D.C. was “receiving heavy pressure from the highest levels” of the department to “cut Stone a break.” In an episode that roiled the agency, senior officials earlier this year ordered prosecutors to seek a more lenient punishment than sentencing guidelines suggested.
A jury convicted Mr. Stone in November of lying to Congress and witness tampering, and prosecutors who had handled the case initially recommended he serve more than seven years behind bars. A day later the department reversed itself and asked for less time. Mr. Zelinsky and the three other prosecutors withdrew from the case as a result.
Mr. Stone was ultimately sentenced to around three years in prison. However, the judge criticized what she described as the Justice Department’s “unprecedented” turnabout and said prosecutors were right to endorse a sentence within the guidelines, as they do in the most criminal cases.
The remarks were posted as the Justice Department has come under ongoing scrutiny this week for Attorney General William Barr’s abrupt Friday night dismissal of the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, Geoffrey Berman. The House Judiciary panel’s hearing, “Political Interference and Threats to Prosecutorial Independence,” is expected to feature testimony Wednesday from both Mr. Zelinsky and John Elias, a 14-year Justice Department official now serving in the antitrust division.
The chairman of the panel, New York Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler, has said he expected Mr. Berman to testify before the committee at a later date.
A Justice Department spokeswoman had no immediate comment. Senior Justice Department officials previously defended their decision regarding Mr. Stone’s sentence as appropriate and not driven by requests for leniency from the president. He had tweeted that the initial recommendation was “horrible,” hours before it was reversed.
In a 13-page statement, Mr. Zelinsky, who remains employed at the Justice Department and is currently a federal prosecutor in Maryland, described the handling of the sentencing recommendation as “unusual and unprecedented.”
“What I saw was the Department of Justice exerting significant pressure on the line prosecutors in the case 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,” Mr. Zelinsky said.
The prosecutor said he wasn’t himself involved in discussions with political leadership about the case but said the motivations were relayed to him by other supervisors. “I was told 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,’” Mr. Zelinsky said.
On the antitrust front, Mr. Elias’s written testimony alleges improper political interference in two areas of enforcement. Because marijuana commerce is unpopular with Mr. Barr, the department forced companies in 10 proposed mergers in the cannabis industry to comply with unduly lengthy and expensive government requests for documents and information, Mr. Elias alleged.
He also alleged the department had improper motivations for investigating four auto makers that had reached a tailpipe-emissions deal last summer with the state of California.
Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom has previously alleged the probe was an attempt by the Trump administration to prevent more auto makers from joining California and agreeing to stronger emissions standards.
The department closed the investigation in February, finding no evidence of collusion among the car companies.
The Justice Department’s top antitrust official, Makan Delrahim, appeared before the Senate last September and testified that politics played no role in the auto maker investigation.
Write to Aruna Viswanatha at Aruna.Viswanatha@wsj.com and Brent Kendall at brent.kendall@wsj.com
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