Mueller deputy who quit Stone case to testify before House panel

Zelinsky took Stone’s case to trial, and was one of the four prosecutors to quit the case when Barr softened the prosecutors’ sentencing recommendation for Stone, a friend and adviser to President Donald Trump. He has the potential to be one of the most potent witnesses about Barr’s recent decision-making from the Mueller investigation, given his laser focus on Stone, one of the team’s signature prosecutions, his experience with the Justice Department leadership’s influence in the case and his decision to stay within the Justice Department afterward, which few Mueller prosecutors have done.

It’s not yet clear if the Justice Department will try to restrict any part of the officials’ testimony next week.

Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec declined to comment on the subpoenas.

Zelinsky’s testimony comes amid a sustained attack on the special counsel’s team from Trump’s allies inside and outside the Trump administration. Two Senate Republican chairmen are investigating the origins of the FBI’s Russia investigation that became the Mueller probe, and have been granted wide-ranging subpoena authority. Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein faced pointed questions from Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans about his decision to appoint Mueller in testimony earlier this month, and the panel’s chairman, South Carolina GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, has said he also expects a representative of the Mueller team to testify.

The Justice Department is also scrutinizing the origins of the FBI’s investigation into members of Trump’s team and the abuses surrounding foreign surveillance warrants obtained on a former Trump adviser, with an investigation led by US Attorney John Durham.

A House GOP aide said Republicans were likely to call a witness for next week’s hearing, too, which they can do under committee rules.

Nadler has accused Barr of refusing to testify before his committee, after an earlier scheduled appearance in March was scrapped due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Again and again, Attorney General Barr has demonstrated that he will cater to President Trump’s private political interests, at the expense of the American people and the rule of law,” Nadler said in a statement Tuesday.

Zelinsky, a federal prosecutor based in Baltimore, focused his efforts in the Mueller investigation on prosecuting Stone. He was the Mueller team member who flew to Florida the day Stone was arrested there, and stayed with the case in a special assignment in Washington even after Mueller’s office closed. He since returned to the Maryland US Attorney’s Office, taking on fraud and public corruption investigations, including related to the coronavirus pandemic.

Zelinsky could decline to speak about some internal deliberations, though many salacious details from the Stone case and the prosecutors’ handling of his sentencing are already public.

Details about the Stone case had been redacted in the Mueller report when it was released before his trial, but the Justice Department has said they’ll lift many of those redactions this Friday, essentially re-releasing the report. A federal judge also questioned a prosecutor in court about what had happened with Stone’s sentencing memo and the departures of Zelinsky and others. The prosecutor, John Crabb Jr., who stepped into the case following the departures, told the judge Zelinsky’s team had worked in good faith on Stone’s original sentencing recommendation of seven to nine years in prison and had followed department policy. Crabb couldn’t explain more, however, about the “miscommunication,” as he called it, between the team Zelinsky worked on and the attorney general’s interest in a lighter sentence for Stone.

Stone is still challenging the jury’s conviction in a longshot appeal, openly advocating for a presidential pardon and Trump tweeted last week Stone “can sleep well at night!”

This story has been updated with additional developments Tuesday.