A former U.S. attorney in Wisconsin is one of thousands of former Justice Department employees calling on Attorney General William Barr to resign for his handling of the case of President Donald Trump's advisor and ally, Roger Stone.
John Vaudreuil signed an open letter released this week condemning Barr and Trump for their actions around the sentencing of Stone, the president's longtime political ally and advisor.
Speaking Friday on WPR's "The Morning Show," Vaudreuil said it was "extraordinary" for a president to publicly criticize a prosecutor's sentencing recommendations in an active case.
"Every president I worked under has an absolute right to set policy — we're going to emphasize violent crime, or human trafficking," he said. "But no president, at least that I've ever been aware of, would intervene in any sort of individual case."
After the president's tweets about Stone, Barr overruled the federal prosecutors who'd made the sentencing requests, but said the president hadn't asked him to do so.
Vaudreuil said their actions put at risk the public's confidence in the justice system.
"The public won't trust that process, and I think that's the long-term damage," he said. "People will start to think we're a government where the president gets to say who gets prosecuted, who gets sentenced, and how that gets handled. And that's not a government of law."
A U.S. Department of Justice spokesperson said this week that Barr has "no plans to resign."
Vaudreuil served as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Wisconsin from 2010 to 2017, and worked in the district’s office for 37 years.
He left the job in March 2017, when then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions asked for the resignations of all 46 U.S. attorneys.
