Roger Stone, a nasty, sleazy person who refused to participate in the Russian hoax, was convicted of lying to Congress and making ill tempered threats that his "victim" found laughable.  He was a first-time, nonviolent, elderly offender, so, of course, prosecutors tied to Bob Mueller decided to pay exquisite homage to the letter of the law, without reference to the spirit, and demanded of the judge that Stone get 7–9 years in prison.  Political leakers and hardcore criminals get shorter sentences.  Insiders like Andrew McCabe don't even get prosecuted.

When Trump learned about the prosecutors' demands, he posted a tweet calling out this travesty.  Simultaneously, and completely separately from Trump's angry tweets, Bill Barr also learned for the first time about the sentencing request and pulled it, instead asking the judge to exercise her discretion when it came to sentencing Stone.  While all this was going on, it turned out that the jury foreman lied about her animus toward Trump and his circle, as well as her knowledge about and hostility toward Stone.

The Democrats hate Barr because they understand that he is focused on the law as it should be, not on politics as it is.  With Barr applying common sense and rationality to an extreme and partisan attack on an old man, the leftists think they've got him:

More than 1,100 former federal prosecutors and Justice Department officials called on Attorney General William P. Barr on Sunday to step down after he intervened last week to lower the Justice Department's sentencing recommendation for President Trump's longtime friend Roger J. Stone Jr.

They also urged current government employees to report any signs of unethical behavior at the Justice Department to the agency's inspector general and to Congress.

"Each of us strongly condemns President Trump's and Attorney General Barr's interference in the fair administration of justice," the former Justice Department lawyers, who came from across the political spectrum, wrote in an open letter on Sunday. Those actions, they said, "require Mr. Barr to resign."

Eric Holder, who famously described himself as Obama's wingman and whom Congress held in contempt, chimed in with the demand that the Resistance work to destroy a duly elected president's Department of Justice:

To Eric Holder. The Era of Obama-Holder's Deep State DOJ is still with us. Hopefully during the second term of President Trump - if more of your Deep State moles don't resign - they will be fired. https://t.co/JZEFlNCg3y

— Bo Snerdley (@BoSnerdley) February 16, 2020

What we're seeing here is the fruit of the leftists' long, slow, Gramscian walk through the academy.

The organization behind the open letter is Protect Democracy.  It came into being in early 2017 "to prevent American Democracy from declining into a more authoritarian form of government."  The same people who formed it were unperturbed when Obama announced that, as president, he'd use his pen and phone to bypass Congress.

Project Democracy is a microcosm of lawyers who graduated within the last 30 years, all of them steeped in academic leftism.

Ian Bassin, the co-founder and executive director, graduated from Yale Law School within the last 20 years.

Justin Florence, the co-founder and legal director, is a Yale Law graduate and a current Harvard faculty member.

Sarah Johnson, the operations associate, is a 2016 Annapolis graduate.

Jonathan Arone, a paralegal, is a 2017 University of Chicago graduate whose history degree saw him focusing on "how misogyny emboldened the KKK during Reconstruction," a very "woke" and "intersectional" concept.

Aaron Baird, "communications," has a poly sci B.A. from UCLA and an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics, founded by the socialist Fabian Society.

Jamila Benkato, worked for the ACLU for immigrant rights (read: Open Borders) and got her J.D. from U.C. Irvine, one of the most anti-Semitic schools in the anti-Semitic University of California system.

What we see at Protect Democracy is a list of young(ish) people who attended various prestigious schools of higher education.  The problem is that, if you spend even a few minutes on a website such as Campus Reform, you learn that all of these institutions educate from a Leftist perspective.

The Leftist trend in academia means that thirty years of college grads have been learning about America and her institutions from a hard-left perspective.  Moreover, the kids who go on to become professionals are the top students in their classes, meaning they are the ones who didn't party their time away in college but, instead, actually paid attention.

No wonder, then, that Protect Democracy was able to find 1,100 former Justice Department employees who will gladly sacrifice legal principles for political goals.  And no wonder that, with the signers standing in as representatives of their academic and ideological peers still working for the DOJ, Barr and Trump are finding the battle against the swamp so treacherous.