U.S. Department of Justice building in Washington, D.C. Photo by Diego M. Radzinschi/THE NATIONAL LAW JOURNAL.

Three months ago, Jonathan Kravis resigned from the U.S. Justice Department in protest, dismayed by the decision of Attorney General William Barr to overrule career prosecutors and recommend a shorter prison term for President Donald Trump's longtime friend Roger Stone.

Since then, Kravis has described his decision to resign as the "most painful" of his career. Still, in a message to graduates of his alma mater, Williams College, he offered unsolicited career advice: "Consider government service."

His commencement-style message to the 2020 class, published in the Williams Record, included a recounting of Stone's case. Kravis noted that, a day after he and other career prosecutors suggested a prison term of between seven and nine years for Stone, Trump criticized the recommendation as a "miscarriage of justice." The Justice Department leadership stepped in to overrule the trial team and recommend a shorter prison term for the longtime Trump ally.

Stone was later sentenced to more than three years in prison and is now appealing his conviction on charges he obstructed a congressional inquiry, lied to investigators and threatened a witness.

In his message to the Williams College graduates, Kravis said the Justice Department leadership's intervention in the Stone case amounted, in his view, to an abandonment of "its commitment to equal justice under the law." It was that commitment, he said, that had initially drawn him to the Justice Department a decade earlier, which brought him to his "second piece of career advice."

"If you do decide to pursue government service—and I hope that you will—stay true to the principles that led you to serve. For me, that principle was our nation's commitment to equal justice under law, the idea that the government makes decisions in criminal cases based on facts and law, not on the defendant's power or wealth or political connections," he said. "I resigned from a job I loved because I was not willing to serve a department that would so easily abdicate its responsibility to this principle."

Kravis closed with a recommendation for what to do when the "institution you serve is no longer faithful to the values that led you to serve it in the first place."

"If that happens, I hope you will remember that your principles are more important than any job, and that sometimes you best serve an institution that you love by leaving it," he said.

Kravis' remarks to the graduating class echoed, and expanded on, an op-ed he wrote for The Washington Post earlier this month. He spoke out, for the first time then, after Barr moved to drop the prosecution of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, who twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his communications with the Russian ambassador to the U.S.

"In both cases, the department undercut the work of career employees to protect an ally of the president, an abdication of the commitment to equal justice under the law," Kravis wrote. "Prosecutors must make decisions based on facts and law, not on the defendant's political connections. When the department takes steps that it would never take in any other case to protect an ally of the president, it betrays this principle."

The Justice Department has denied that its maneuvering in the Flynn and Stone cases was politically motivated. Barr has called the case against Flynn an "injustice." Thousands of former Justice Department prosecutors have assailed Barr over his push to abandon the Flynn case. The federal judge presiding over Flynn's prosecution has appointed a lawyer to argue against the effort to walk away from the case.

After departing the Justice Department, Kravis found a way to remain in government. In April, he joined the office of the D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine as a special counsel, a three-month consulting role in which he is helping to build up a new section focused on public corruption cases.

Kravis, who served as deputy chief of the fraud and public corruption section of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington, is also advising Racine on legislative changes that might be needed to empower the new unit in his office.

Read more:

Flynn Judge Emmet Sullivan Hires Veteran Trial Lawyer Beth Wilkinson

'A Loss to the Pursuit of Justice': Praise for Roger Stone Prosecutor Who Resigned

'When Character Matters Most': What Lawyers Said About Stone Prosecutors

'A Very Difficult Time': Challenges for Career Lawyers at Trump's DOJ

'Slammed': What Has Driven Departures From Trump's Justice Department