U.S. Attorney General William Barr listens to concerns raised about public safety in rural Alaska during at a roundtable discussion at the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium on Wednesday, May 29, 2019, in Anchorage, Alaska. Barr did not take questions from reporters in his first public appearance after former special prosecutor Robert Mueller spoke to reporters after resigning at the completion of his report into Russian interference into the 2016 election. (AP Photo/Mark Thiessen)

The excessive, abusive and I believe, retaliatory, sentencing recommendation for political operative and former Trump campaign advisor Roger Stone has sucked up a lot of airwaves this week. If anyone is unfamiliar with the sequence of events, here is a brief summary:

On Monday, it was reported that federal prosecutors had recommended a sentence of seven to nine years behind bars for Trump associate Roger Stone following his conviction on making false statements and witness tampering charges. Many of us were shocked and saw this as unreasonable, abusive and a continuation of the injustice we’d grown used to during the Mueller investigation.

President Trump strongly condemned this excessive sentence. He tweeted, “This is a horrible and very unfair situation. The real crimes were on the other side, as nothing happens to them. Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!”

A Justice Department official issued a statement in which he characterized the sentence recommended by the prosecutors on the case as  “extreme, excessive and grossly disproportionate.” Additionally, he said the proposed sentence was “not what had been briefed to the Department.”

On Tuesday morning, the Associated Press reported that the DOJ had taken the “extraordinary step” of reducing Stone’s sentence.

By early Tuesday evening, each of the four prosecutors handling the case had (separately) announced their resignations. It won’t surprise you to hear that three of them, Jonathan Kravis, Aaron Zelinsky, and Adam Jed, had been members of Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel team. Nor that, according to the Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross, “witnesses and attorneys who have dealt with Zelinsky described him as among the most aggressive prosecutors they’d dealt with on the special counsel’s team.”

The fourth prosecutor to withdraw from the case was Michael Marando.

During his podcast on Thursday, Fox News contributor and investigator Dan Bongino discussed this story and asks several very valid questions. Did the four prosecutors set this up to cause precisely the media frenzy that has ensued? Did they intentionally seek to create the appearance that Attorney General William Barr had intervened on President Trump’s request? Was this done to damage Barr’s credibility?

Bongino:

The sentencing recommendation made to Bill Barr and the Justice Department was not the sentencing recommendation that they showed up in court with. So they go to court and they recommend nine years in jail for a witness tampering case. He allegedly tampered with a witness, Randy Credico, and the witness is saying, ‘I didn’t feel intimidated at all.’ It’s pretty fascinating to have a witness tampering case, just like the quid pro quo case in Ukraine, where the Ukrainians said, ‘We didn’t feel pressured’…

Synopsis: The prosecutors recommend a ridiculous sentence, they go to Bill Barr, Bill Barr says that’s outrageous, revises their sentence down, says that’s crazy, prosecutors resign.

There’s a theory out there that’s starting to gather a little bit of steam that I’m starting to believe is true.

The prosecutors on the case who were pushing to put Stone in prison so he would die there – nine years for an absurd charge. These prosecutors may have made that absurd charge knowing that, and hid it from Barr – they briefed him on a different amount of time, they didn’t tell him nine years – knowing Barr would react and say, ‘That’s ridiculous, you didn’t tell us you were going to push for nine years.’ So then they could resign from the case in protest to make Barr look like he’s intervening in a case to help Trump.

It’s a little 4-D chess here…

That these prosecutors may have made these ridiculous sentencing recommendations against Stone knowing that that’s not what they’d told Barr, knowing that Barr would be furious…

And then, knowing Barr would object, they can [say] ‘We’re protesting. We’re protesting. We’re resigning from the case. Knowing what? That the media sycophant, boot-licking butt-kissers would pick up the story and say “Look at this. These moral prosecutors are resigning because they have spines of titanium to stand up against Bill Barr and Donald Trump’s interference in the justice system again. Obstruction!”

And, of course, on cue we have lunatics like that nut bag from California, Eric Swalwell, saying, ‘Hey, hey, we could impeach over this, you know.’

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s all a setup. The Democrats and the media, these people don’t have an ounce of integrity. And they all know each other. They’re all hiding their role in the Spygate debacle. And they’re just setting up the Trump team, narrative after narrative, playing them for fools, because they know that the boot-licking, surgically attached to the caboose of the Democratic Party media will automatically follow the story.

Is anybody in the media even remotely interested in the fact that these very same prosecutors, these alleged men principle, that what they told Bill Barr and the Justice Department they were going to sentence Stone to, they didn’t go into to court and actually do? Is anybody even remotely curious as to why they would do that?

He then goes on to describe the prosecutors. As mentioned above, three out of the four of them were members of Robert Mueller’s highly partisan, anti-Trump Special Counsel team. They all have connections to players in the deep state. For example, one had worked under Rod Rosenstein for years.

The idea sounds perfectly plausible to me, especially after listening to Barr’s interview on Thursday evening with ABC’s Pierre Thomas. Barr confirmed that they had told him something quite different. I posted about that here.

Bongino is right that this theory is gaining steam.

Former acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker joined Fox New’s Laura Ingraham last night. (Whitaker’s remarks can be viewed on the second video below) He said:

It is very clear from his interview that they had told him that they were going to do quite the opposite and then did exactly what he had said, no let’s go in another direction. The decision had been made and then they went in the opposite direction anyway. This seems to be a little bit of a set-up to cause this exact kerfuffle. Very much choreographed. Fundamentally all of their power is driven from the President and the Attorney General. And if the Attorney General is led to believe that we should make this recommendation and they don’t! They shouldn’t be concerned about resigning, they should be removed.

This appears to be a continuation of the deception the deep state has been getting away with for years. But why now? It sure looks like they’re trying to damage Barr’s credibility in advance of what will likely be an incendiary Durham report.

(Relevant portion begins at 14:50)