Timothy Shea

A reduced sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone, a political consultant and Trump advisor who was found guilty of witness tampering and lying to investigators in the Mueller investigation on Russian interference in the 2016 election, led to a national controversy in Shea's first weeks on the job.[4] On Feb. 11, 2020, Barr took the rare step of reducing a sentencing recommendation by four prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney's office that President Donald Trump had called “very horrible and unfair".[13][14][15][16] Barr told ABC News that Shea had initially signaled to him that the recommendation would be about half the time that the line prosecutors requested.[4] Shea's name was attached to both the initial recommendation of a seven- to nine-year prison term for Stone, and Barr's version a day later that called the first version "excessive".[4] The four line prosecutors resigned from the case, and one resigned from the Justice Department entirely.[13][17]

Assistant United States Attorney Aaron Zelinsky testified to the House Judiciary Committee that he "was explicitly told that the motivation for changing the sentencing memo was political, and because the U.S. Attorney [Shea] was 'afraid of the President.'"[18]

In March 2020, Shea's office dropped its two-year-long prosecution of two Russian shell companies, Concord Management and Concord Consulting, which had been charged with conspiring to defraud the United States by running a social media campaign to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.[19][20] The Justice Department said the companies were exploiting the case to gain access to information about the investigation's sources and methods that Russia could weaponize. A Mueller-related case continues against 13 Russians including a part-owner of Concord, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, an oligarch who is sometimes known as "Putin’s chef".[20]

Shea wrote the Justice Department's motion on May 7, 2020, to dismiss the charges against Michael Flynn, the former U.S. national security advisor to Donald Trump. Flynn had pled guilty to charges of lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation about his conversations in 2016 with Russia's ambassador. Shea's motion said that the FBI agents’ questioning of Flynn "was untethered to, and unjustified by, the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Flynn."[21] Shea alone signed the court document — an unusual departure, as court filings are usually signed by lower-level career prosecutors, not political appointees.[22]

Shortly before his departure, Shea reorganized the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney's office. Officials had discussed an overhaul of the unit for years, but some lawyers in the office were said to express concern because some prosecutors were moved out of the public corruption unit, which handles politically sensitive matters like the Roger Stone case.[12]