On Thursday the attorney general appeared on ABC News to assert his independence, telling Trump to stop tweeting about Justice Department cases. But given the slavish way Barr has enacted Trump’s agenda, there’s no reason to see his words as anything but cheap P.R. meant to quell mounting fury at the way he’s corrupting his agency.

It’s perfectly legitimate to argue that the sentencing guidelines that the original prosecutors relied on in the Stone case are too harsh; America sends too many people to prison for too long. But Barr, in general, does not have a problem with draconian punishments for people who are not personal allies of the president. In August, he lambasted progressive prosecutors, saying they “spend their time undercutting the police, letting criminals off the hook and refusing to enforce the laws.” In Trump’s America, only a select class of criminals are shown magnanimity. As former President Óscar Benavides of Peru allegedly said: “For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.”

Yet defenders of Trump and Barr are pointing to Credico’s letter to suggest that they were remedying an injustice, rather than perpetrating one. On Fox News, Katie Pavlich claimed that Credico “said that it was actually a joke and they talk about stuff like that all the time and he actually didn’t feel intimidated.” In the Justice Department’s updated Stone sentencing memo, Credico’s letter is an important part of the case for a shorter prison term. Credico, the memo said, “asserts that he did not perceive a genuine threat from the defendant but rather stated that ‘I never in any way felt that Stone himself posed a direct physical threat to me or my dog.’”

Note the wording: Stone himself. “I never thought Stone personally was going to do it himself,” Credico told me. Rather, he thought that one of Stone’s supporters might. “I look like the guy that’s going to be the guy that’s going to force Stone to talk to the feds and say everything that he knows on the president,” he said. “So I’m expendable at that point. That’s what I’m thinking.”

Now Credico is in the odd position of both hoping that Stone is spared a long prison sentence and of being horrified about the way the workings of justice are being manipulated on Stone’s behalf. He’s effusive about the upright decency of the four prosecutors — “guys of integrity” — who’ve since withdrawn from the case, saying it was “agonizing” that his letter undermined them. Credico said, “These guys were career civil servants, and for Trump to be slamming them is an outrage.”

Outrage seems rather too mild a word. There is now one set of laws in this country for people who serve Trump and another for everyone else. During Trump’s impeachment trial, the House managers repeated a quote attributed to Ben Franklin over and over again: “A republic, if you can keep it.” We haven’t kept it. The question now is whether we ever get it back.