Former Attorney General Bill Barr did not improperly pressure prosecutors to reduce sentencing recommendations for political activist Roger Stone, according to a new government watchdog report. The exoneration of Barr came more than four years after a deluge of media reports alleging wrongdoing.
However, J.P. Cooney, a Justice Department official now serving as Special Counsel Jack Smith’s top deputy, cultivated a politically toxic environment, disseminated baseless conspiracy theories about Trump and his political appointees, and engaged in unprofessional conduct as he oversaw the team making sentencing recommendations, according to the same report.
Cooney is mentioned (as the “Fraud and Public Corruption Section Chief”) a whopping 394 times in the 85-page report released from the Justice Department’s inspector general on July 24. Cooney supervised a team of four attorneys who prosecuted Stone for what the government successfully argued in front of a Washington, D.C., jury were lies and obstruction during Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump campaign officials. Mueller’s two-year, $32 million investigation was itself spun up by anti-Trump officials in the Justice Department after the Democrat National Committee and Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton bought and paid for an information operation falsely alleging the Trump campaign was in cahoots with Russia to steal the 2016 election. Two members of Cooney’s team also worked on the Mueller investigation.
The Fraud and Public Corruption (FPC) team sought an unprecedented sentence of seven to nine years in prison for Stone, dramatically beyond what others convicted of similar crimes faced. When developing that
