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Politics Influenced Justice Department In Roger Stone Case, DOJ Lawyer Tells Hill – NPR

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Critics have called Attorney General William Barr too willing to do the bidding of President Trump. Justice Department attorneys say they’ve seen political pressure in big cases.

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Updated at 7:14 p.m. ET

A current Justice Department prosecutor is planning to tell lawmakers on Wednesday that in his many years in the government, “I have never seen political influence play any role in prosecutorial decision making. With one exception: United States v. Roger Stone,” according to a copy of his prepared testimony.

Aaron Zelinsky, who has worked at the department since 2014, is scheduled to testify at a House Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday as one of two “whistleblowers” set to describe politicization at the Justice Department, said Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D–N.Y.

In his written statement, Zelinsky said he heard that Stone received different treatment “because of his relationship to the president.”

Zelinsky said the person in charge of the U.S. attorney’s office at the time was “receiving heavy pressure from the highest levels of the Department of Justice to cut Stone a break.”

And, he said: “I was also told that the acting U.S. Attorney was giving Stone such unprecedentedly favorable treatment because he was ‘afraid of the President.’ “

Zelinsky described “significant pressure … to water down and in some cases outright distort the events that transpired in [Stone’s] trial and the criminal conduct that gave rise to his conviction.”

Eventually, higher-ups in the office overrode the original recommendation about how stiffly to punish Stone and filed a new memo “at odds with the record and contrary to Department of Justice policy.”

Zelinsky ultimately withdrew from the case, along with three others, after the department refused to heed their objections that “such political favoritism was wrong and contrary to legal ethics and department policy.”

A judge eventually sentenced Stone to serve 40 months in prison. He had been due to report there next week. But Stone’s lawyer filed an unopposed motion to delay his surrender until September, citing a “heightened risk” of COVID-19 in the “close confines” of a prison.

DoJ: Witness didn’t talk with Barr

Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec called it notable that Zelinsky had no discussion with the attorney general, the U.S. Attorney and other members of political leadership at Justice about the Stone sentencing.

“Instead, Mr. Zelinsky’s allegations concerning the U.S. Attorney’s motivation are based on his own interpretation of events and hearsay (at best), not first-hand knowledge,” Kupec added.

Attorney General Bill Barr said at the time of Stone’s sentencing that he’d acted on his own to get involved with the submission of a second memo asking the judge in the case to impose a lighter sentence than contemplated in the first one.

But Trump also wrote about the case on Twitter, which brought criticism about the perception that the president was calling the shots. Barr eventually reached the point of publicly asking Trump not to comment on Justice Department matters. The president hasn’t complied.

Anticipating questions from lawmakers

Ahead of the hearing, Zelinsky’s prepared testimony said that he understands the Justice Department may wish to shield certain facts about the case against Stone, a longtime political adviser to Trump.

And in many cases, Zelinsky said, he will respect the DOJ’s assertions of legal privileges.

But, he added, “the deliberative process privilege does not apply when testimony sheds light on government misconduct, or when the government has disclosed deliberative information selectively and misleadingly.”

A second Justice Department attorney, John W. Elias, intends to tell House lawmakers that he was so concerned about antitrust investigations launched under Barr that he reported his fears to the department’s inspector general, according to his prepared testimony.

Elias said he feared possible “abuse of authority, a gross waste of funds, and gross mismanagement.”

Elias, who has worked as a career lawyer at the Justice Department for presidents of both political parties, said he had two sets of concerns. The first involved a directive by Barr to launch 10 full-scale reviews of mergers taking place in the marijuana industry, a step Elias said did not meet “established criteria” for such probes.

The second, Elias said, is an investigation that the antitrust division initiated four days after tweets from Trump criticizing an arrangement between California and four automakers on fuel emissions.

Elias said that investigation was opened under atypical process and without considering what defenses the auto companies might raise. It was closed, without charges, in February 2020.

The Justice Department spokeswoman said that Barr “has and will continue to approach all cases at the Department of Justice with that commitment to the rule of law and the fair and impartial administration of justice.”

Unusual testimony

It’s unusual for current Justice Department lawyers who are not supervisors to testify before Congress. In fact, the department told the U.S. House of Representatives in a 2000 letter that it generally barred line attorneys and agents from appearing on Capitol Hill to protect their independence.

But the official who wrote that letter, Robert Raben, told NPR that Wednesday’s hearing is a different matter altogether for the Justice Department.

“It is being accused of using enforcement as a political weapon,” Raben said. “It has no standing in this context to cry ‘politics.’ The normal thing to do would be for Barr to testify and hold himself politically accountable, which he is. But we are not in normal times.”

Nadler, the committee chairman, told MSNBC this week that Democrats expected to issue a subpoena to the attorney general in the coming days. Relations between the House majority and Barr have long been sour; last year Nadler’s committee voted to hold him in contempt of Congress.

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Recall Gondek group planned to launch its own petition before political novice did – CBC.ca

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The third-party group helping promote the recall campaign against Mayor Jyoti Gondek had devised plans to launch its own petition drive, as part of a broader mission to make Calgary council more conservative.

Project YYC had planned with other conservative political organizations to gather signatures demanding Calgary’s mayor be removed, says group leader Roy Beyer. But their drive would have begun later in the year, when nicer weather made for easier canvassing for supporters, he said.

Those efforts were stymied when Landon Johnston, an HVAC contractor largely unknown in local politics, applied at city hall to launch his own recall drive in early February. Since provincial recall laws allow only one recall attempt per politician per term, Project YYC chose to lend support to Johnston’s bid.

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“Now we have to try to do door-knocking in the winter, and there’s a lot of preparation that you have to contemplate prior to starting. And Landon didn’t do that,” Beyer told CBC News in an interview.

Project YYC has helped gather signatures, created a website and erected large, anti-Gondek signs around town. It has supplied organizational heft that Johnston admits to lacking.

Their task is daunting.

According to provincial law, in order to force a recall plebiscite to oust the mayor before the term is up, they have two months to gather more than 514,000 signatures, an amount equal to 40 per cent of Calgary’s population in 2019.

They have until April 4 to collect that many signatures, and by March 21 had only 42,000.

Beyer criticizes the victory threshold for recall petition as so high that it’s “a joke,” and the province may as well not have politician recall laws.

So if he thinks it’s an impossible pursuit, why is he involved with this?

“You can send a message to the mayor that she should be sitting down and resigning … without achieving those numbers,” Beyer said.

Project YYC founder Roy Beyer, from a Take Back Alberta video in 2022. He is no longer with that provincial activist group. (royjbeyer screenshot/Rumble)

He likened it to former premier Jason Kenney getting 52 per cent support in a UCP leadership review — enough to technically continue as leader, but a lousy enough show of confidence that he announced immediately he would step down.

Gondek has given no indication she’ll voluntarily leave before her term is up next year. But she did emerge from a meeting last week with Johnston to admit the petition has resonated with many Calgarians and is a signal she must work harder to listen to public concerns and explain council’s decisions.

The mayor also told the Calgary Sun this week that she’s undecided about running for re-election in 2025. 

“There used to be this thing where if you’re the mayor, of course you’re going to run for another term because there’s unfinished business,” Gondek told the newspaper.

“And yes, there will be unfinished business, but the times are not what they were. You need to make sure you’re the right leader for the times you’re in.”

The last several Calgary mayors have enjoyed multiple terms in office, going back to Ralph Klein in the 1980s. The last one-term mayor was Ross Alger, the man Klein defeated in 1980.

Beyer and fellow conservative organizers launched Project YYC before the recall campaign. The goal was to elect a conservative mayor and councillors — “a common-sense city council, instead of what we currently have,” he said.

Beyer is one of a few former activists with the provincial pressure group Take Back Alberta to have latched themselves to the recall bid and Project YYC, along with some United Conservative Party riding officials in Calgary. 

Beyer’s acknowledgment of his group’s broader mission comes as Premier Danielle Smith and her cabinet ministers have said they want to introduce political party politics in large municipalities — even though most civic politicians have said they don’t want to bring clear partisanship into city halls.

Although Beyer admits Project YYC’s own recall campaign would have been a coalition effort with other conservative groups, he wouldn’t specify which ones. He did insist that Take Back Alberta wasn’t one of them.

A man in a grey baseball cap speaks to reporters.
Calgary business owner Landon Johnston speaks to reporters at City Hall on March 22 following his 15-minute conversation with Mayor Jyoti Gondek. (Laurence Taschereau/CBC)

Johnston says he was approached by Beyer’s group shortly after applying to recall Gondek, and gave them $3,000 from donations he’d raised.

He initially denied any knowledge of Project YYC when documents first emerged about that group’s role in the recall, but later said he didn’t initially realize that was the organizational name of his campaign allies.

“They said they could get me signatures, so I said, ‘OK, if you can do it by the book, here’s some money.’ And it’s worked,” he said.

Johnston has said he’s new to politics but simply wants to remove Gondek because of policies he’s disagreed with, like the soon-to-be-ended ban on single-use plastics and bags at restaurant takeouts and drive-thrus.

He’s no steadfast conservative, either. He told CBC’s Calgary Eyeopener that he voted for Rachel Notley’s NDP because one of its green-renovation incentives helped his HVAC business.

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Larry David shares how he feels about Trump – CNN

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Larry David shares how he feels about Trump

“Curb Your Enthusiasm” star Larry David shares how he feels about former President Donald Trump and the 2020 election. Watch the full episode of “Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace,” streaming March 29 on Max.


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Trump's claims on crime rates clash with police data – NBC News

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Surging crime levels, out-of-control Democratic cities and “migrant crime.”

Former President Donald Trump regularly cites all three at his campaign rallies, in news releases and on Truth Social, often saying President Joe Biden and Democrats are to blame.

But the crime picture Trump paints contrasts sharply with years of police and government data at both the local and national levels.

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FBI statistics released this year suggested a steep drop in crime across the country last year. It’s a similar story across major cities, with violent crime down year over year in Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C.

NBC News analyzed crime data to evaluate Trump’s assertions about the topic.

U.S. and big city crime rates

Trump’s campaign often refers to crime levels, regularly pointing the finger at Biden.

“On Joe Biden’s watch, violent crime has skyrocketed in virtually every American city,” the campaign said in a news release published this month on its site.

Trump himself has made similar remarks.

“Four years ago, I told you that if crooked Joe Biden got to the White House, our borders would be abolished, our middle class would be decimated and our communities would be plagued by bloodshed, chaos and violent crime,” Trump said in a speech last month at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “We were right about everything.”

Government figures don’t support that characterization.

Reported violent crime dropped 6% across the board when comparing the last three months of 2022 to the same period in 2023, the FBI reported.

The reported drops were especially pronounced in the big cities that Trump often assails, many of which have Democratic mayors. Violent crime dropped by 11% in cities with populations of 1 million or more, according to FBI data, while murders dropped by 20%, rape was down 16%, and aggravated assault fell by 11%.

Reached for comment, the Trump campaign pointed to other reports indicating that certain types of crimes increased in specific cities.

At the national level, the reported rate of violent crime in 2022, the most recent full year with comprehensive FBI data, was 380.7 offenses per 100,000 people. That’s lower than the overall reported violent crime rate from 2020 — the last full year Trump was in office — when the figure was at 398.5.

The lowest reported violent crime rate of Trump’s presidency was in 2019, when the metric was at 380.8 — in line with the 2022 rate.

The FBI said it will release more comprehensive 2023 crime data in October, just before the election.

The Trump campaign, reached for comment, cited certain categories of violent crime, such as motor vehicle theft, as having increased during the Biden administration, according to FBI figures.

“Joe Biden is trying to convince Americans not to believe their own eyes,” campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement, adding that “Democrats have turned great American cities into cesspools of bloodshed and crime.”

New York City crime

Trump, who was born and raised in New York but now lives in Florida, often rails against what he portrays as an increasing crime rate in his former hometown.

Those references to soaring violence have only increased as he faces criminal charges in New York accusing him of falsifying business records related to hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels. Trump, who has pleaded not guilty in that case, must also post a $175 million bond to prevent state Attorney General Letitia James from collecting the judgment from a New York civil fraud case.

“I did nothing wrong, and New York should never be put in a position like this again,” Trump posted on Truth Social about the civil judgment in all capital letters. “Businesses are fleeing, violent crime is flourishing, and it is very important that this be resolved in its totality as soon as possible.”

In a separate post, he claimed that “murders & violent crime hit unimaginable records” in the city.

However, major crimes in New York City are down this year by 2.3%, according to police department data comparing year-to-date figures to the same period in 2023.

Those figures for last year were also far below the highs from recent decades. In 1990, more than 527,000 major crimes were reported, compared to more than 126,000 last year, according to New York police data — a drop of more than 75%.

In 2001, more than 162,000 major crimes were reported in New York. The figure dropped by more than 20% over the next two decades.

At the same time, New York City data indicates that the number of major crimes increased in the past few years, though reported violent crimes like murder and rape were down last year from previous years.

‘Migrant crime’

Trump’s dehumanizing language about migrants has become a mainstay of his political speeches since he first sought office in 2015.

In a news release this month, his campaign said the “border Crisis has created a tragic surge in violent crime against innocent American citizens at the hands of some of the world’s most violent criminals.”

Trump has also focused his energy on high-profile cases such as the death of Laken Riley, who was killed in Georgia while jogging. The suspect is a Venezuelan citizen who entered the U.S. illegally in 2022.

“Every day, innocent citizens are being killed, stabbed, shot, raped and murdered because of Biden migrant crime,” Trump said in a video posted to his campaign’s X account last week.

However, there is no evidence of a migrant-driven crime wave in the U.S., according to local police department data.

Crime reports have decreased in several major cities targeted by Texas’ Operation Lone Star, a program backed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott that flies or buses migrants from the state to Democratic-run cities across the U.S.

Several of those cities — New York, Chicago, Washington and Philadelphia — have had decreases in year-to-date reported crime totals compared to the same period last year.


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