Attorney General William Barr on Tuesday revealed new details about his direct involvement in the sentencing recommendation for longtime Trump ally Roger Stone, including that he was told career prosecutors in the case were threatening to resign if they could not file their original sentencing memo.

Barr, testifying before the House Judiciary Committee for the first time, faced a panel of skeptical Democrats who repeatedly pressed him over the Stone case, which featured a highly unusual intervention from Main Justice on the recommended length of his prison sentence. President Donald Trump earlier this month commuted Stone's 40-month sentence days before he was due to surrender to federal authorities.

Barr said he was first approached by then-acting U.S. Attorney Tim Shea before the sentencing memo was filed, and he decided the department should not make a formal recommendation on the sentence. He said that Shea met with members of his senior staff earlier on, but he wasn't given details of those conversations.

Barr acknowledged an enhancement the line prosecutors applied to the recommended sentence over Stone's threats to a witness "technically could apply" to the case.

"But in this case, it really didn't reflect the underlying conduct," Barr continued. "And the overarching requirement in the Department of Justice is that we do not presume and automatically apply the guidelines, we make individual assessments of the defendant."

The attorney general accused the career attorneys of "trying to force the U.S. attorney, who was new in the office," to go with their memo. That recommendation was filed with the court and signed by Shea—the U.S. attorney Barr was referring to.

Barr's characterization—that he wanted "fairness" in Stone's sentencing—stands in contrast with congressional testimony offered by one of the career attorneys who prosecuted the case. Former Stone prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky told the House Judiciary committee earlier this month that he and other members of the trial team were told officials in the U.S. Attorney's Office for D.C., which absorbed the Stone prosecution after Special Counsel Robert Mueller III's probe shuttered, were under political pressure to cut Stone "a break" because of his ties to the president.

Other prosecutors in the D.C. office filed a second memo with the court that did not ask for a specific sentence, but did ask for one "far less" than the original seven to nine years presented to U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the District of Columbia. And when Jackson asked about the discrepancy between the recommendations at Stone's sentencing, a federal prosecutor demurred on providing details but offered a rare apology.

Barr laid out the sequence of events on his involvement in the Stone case after a heated exchange with Democratic Rep. Ted Deutch, who pushed Barr to say specifically what Justice Department policy he felt the Stone memo violated. Barr failed to explicitly point to a single policy, both in response to Deutch's questions and later in the hearing, but claimed it was an outlier compared to other similar cases.

Instead, Barr leaned on Jackson's 40-month sentence for Stone, noting it was less than that called for by the original trial team. "The judge agreed with me," Barr said. Judges hand down sentences using their own discretion and based on a number of factors.

Experts have said that, while a sentence of up to nine years may appear excessive, it's within the guidelines set by the Justice Department. A 2017 memo signed by Barr's predecessor, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, directs prosecutors to seek the toughest sentence possible.

Barr on Tuesday said he viewed the recommended sentence as falling within the guidelines, but it "was not within Justice Department policy, in my view." Instead, he called for fairness in the Justice Department's approach to sentencing. "Do you think that it's fair for a 67-year-old man to be sent to prison to seven to nine years?" Barr asked Rep. Hank Johnson. Barr then claimed the sentence was not within the guidelines, as he originally said.

House Democrats addressed Barr's intervention in the Stone case while airing broader concerns about the politicization of the Justice Department under his leadership. 

"Again and again, you personally have interfered with ongoing criminal investigations to protect the president and his allies from the consequences of their actions," said U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee. 

"The message these actions send is clear. In this Justice Department, the president's enemies will be punished, his friends will be protected—no matter the cost, no matter the cost to liberty, no matter the cost to justice," he added. 

Barr later said Trump has "never asked me, directed me, pressured me to do anything in a criminal case." 

Earlier in the hearing, Barr challenged House Democrats to identify a single indictment they viewed as unjust, and he reiterated his support for the Stone prosecution while defending his decision to overrule a sentencing recommendation he viewed as overly harsh.

"I agree the president's friends don't deserve special breaks, but they also don't deserve to be treated more harshly than other people," he said.

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