Byron York's Daily Memo: The Trump-Zelinsky affair
by Byron York, Chief Political Correspondent |
| June 24, 2020 08:15 AM
THE TRUMP-ZELINSKY AFFAIR. Democrats are absolutely giddy about the prospect of former Mueller special counsel prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky testifying before the House Judiciary Committee today. The committee has already released Zelinsky's prepared remarks. In them, he will say that he and fellow prosecutors came under "heavy pressure from the highest levels of the Department of Justice" to go easy on Trump associate Roger Stone in sentencing Stone for lying to Congress.
"I immediately and repeatedly raised concerns, in writing and orally, that such political favoritism was wrong and contrary to legal ethics and Department policy," Zelinsky will testify.
It's no secret that Rep. Jerrold Nadler, chair of the Judiciary Committee, was a weak link in the Democratic effort to impeach President Trump. Now, Nadler seems to be poised to get back some anti-Trump momentum by hosting Zelinsky and another DOJ lawyer, John Elias.
But this hearing could blow up in Nadler's face just like the committee's fabled September 17, 2019 impeachment hearing with former Trump campaign chief Corey Lewandowski. Lewandowski ran circles around Nadler and his staff, underscoring House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's decision to give the leading impeachment role to Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff, rather than Nadler.
THE ZELINSKY MATTER HAS TWO WEAKNESSES. First is the Stone case. Remember that Zelinsky and his fellow Justice Department prosecutors recommended that Stone serve between 87 and 108 months in prison. Top Justice officials said no, that's too much – a more reasonable sentence would probably be between 37 and 46 months.
And what sentence did the judge ultimately give Stone? Forty months – right in the middle of the Justice officials' range, not Zelinsky's. So the question is: What's the scandal? Maybe Zelinsky will have an answer. Maybe he won't.
The second hearing weakness is that Republicans get to play, too. Democrats can spend all their time asking about Stone. But committee Republicans can question Zelinsky about anything they want. And Zelinsky's appearance gives them the opportunity to ask a lot of questions about the Mueller investigation. Zelinsky, for example, handled the George Papadopoulos case, one of the key moments in the Trump-Russia investigation.
There are a thousand questions about what Mueller's prosecutors knew about Papadopoulos and the FBI agents and informants who investigated him. There are questions about the sketchy foreign figures who seemed to come in and out of Papadopoulos' life. And there are questions about the role of foreign intelligence services in the case. While Democrats fixate on Roger Stone's sentence, Republicans can use the Zelinsky testimony to learn a little bit about what Mueller was really doing all those years.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/byron-yorks-daily-memo-the-trump-zelinsky-affair
Looking forward to this one.