WASHINGTON — The House Judiciary Committee heard Wednesday from two current Justice Department prosecutors who testified that decisions from Attorney General Bill Barr and others at the highest levels of the department had been improperly influenced by politics and the personal desires of President Donald Trump.

In less than a week, Barr has faced two instances of extraordinary public pushback from within his own department. Just days before the hearing, the then-sitting US attorney in Manhattan, Geoffrey Berman, took to Twitter to publicly rebuke an effort by Barr to remove him from office. The two men exchanged barbed statements over the course of 24 hours, and Berman ultimately only agreed to leave once he was satisfied with a new succession plan.

It’s common to see former political appointees and prosecutors criticize policies and prosecutorial decisions that they disagree with once they leave the department. It’s highly unusual to have current employees and officials air grievances in such a public way.

Aaron Zelinsky, an assistant US attorney in Maryland who had worked in special counsel Robert Mueller’s office, testified by video on Wednesday that a decision by senior DOJ officials to contradict Zelinsky and other line prosecutors’ recommendation of a stiff sentence for Trump ally Roger Stone was motivated by the president’s desire to “cut Stone a break.” Zelinsky said that a supervisor told him that Timothy Shea, the interim US attorney in Washington, DC, at the time gave Stone special treatment because Shea was “afraid of the president.”