The president’s explosive comments come amid an escalating political crisis involving his Justice Department, which ramped up significantly on Tuesday after the department backed off a previous sentencing recommendation for Stone and four government prosecutors withdrew from the case.

Appearing alongside President Lenín Moreno of Ecuador at the White House, Trump also laced into various perceived villains from former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, which resulted in Stone's arrest in January 2019 and indictment on seven felony charges. A Washington jury found him guilty on all counts in November.

“You look at what happened, how many people were hurt, their lives were destroyed, and nothing happened with all the people that did it and launched this scam,” Trump said, going on to single out former FBI officials including James Comey, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.

Earlier Wednesday, Trump praised Attorney General William Barr online for “taking charge” of the Stone matter — provoking further outrage from congressional Democrats who have accused the president and Barr of politicizing the criminal justice system.

“Congratulations to Attorney General Bill Barr for taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Evidence now clearly shows that the Mueller Scam was improperly brought & tainted. Even Bob Mueller lied to Congress!”

A spokesperson for the Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the president’s social media post.

Federal prosecutors had urged Monday that Stone be sent to prison for roughly seven to nine years for impeding congressional and FBI investigations into connections between the Russian government and Trump’s 2016 campaign.

But after the president blasted that proposal early Tuesday as a “horrible and very unfair situation,” the Justice Department submitted a revised filing that offered no specific term for Stone’s sentence and stated that the prosecutors’ recommendation “could be considered excessive and unwarranted.”

Trump also took shots on Tuesday targeting Mueller’s squad of federal prosecutors — two of whom served on the team that prosecuted Stone — as well as U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who is scheduled to sentence Stone on Feb. 20 and has overseen several other Mueller-related cases.

By the end of the day, the four attorneys who shepherded Stone’s prosecution had either resigned or notified the court that they were stepping off the case. Trump reprised his attack on their initial sentencing filing Wednesday, suggesting it was perhaps the product of “Rogue prosecutors.”

“Two months in jail for a Swamp Creature, yet 9 years recommended for Roger Stone (who was not even working for the Trump Campaign),” the president tweeted, making apparent reference to a former Senate Intelligence Committee aide who pleaded guilty in 2018 for lying to the FBI. “Gee, that sounds very fair! Rogue prosecutors maybe? The Swamp!”

Speaking from the White House on Wednesday afternoon, Trump again slammed the original sentence suggestion and repeatedly claimed that the basis of Stone’s conviction was unclear.

“You have murderers and drug addicts, they don’t get nine years. Nine years for doing something that nobody can even define what he did?” Trump said, adding that the prosecutors “ought to apologize to a lot of the people whose lives they’ve ruined.”

Echoing Trump’s denials, Hogan Gidley, the White House’s principal deputy press secretary, said Wednesday that neither the president nor anyone at the White House pressured the attorney general or other department officials to recommend a reduced sentence for Stone.

“Unequivocally, no,” he told Fox News, adding that the president “did not interfere here with anything.”

“Look, he’s the chief law enforcement officer. He has the right to do it. He just didn’t,” Gidley said of Trump. “He didn’t make any comment — didn’t have a conversation, I should say, rather, with the attorney general, and that’s just ludicrous. It’s just another scandal that the Democrats are trying to push forward.”

A senior Justice Department official said on Tuesday that the decision to alter the prosecutors’ filing was unrelated to the president’s venting on social media and came before Trump issued his critical tweet. Instead, the official said, department leaders were “shocked” by the proposal, which “was not the recommendation that had been briefed to the department.”

Still, Democratic lawmakers quickly denounced the department’s intervention in the Stone case, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Tuesday asking for an investigation by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz into the reversal.

Democrats' condemnation continued Wednesday, as Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) demanded Barr’s resignation.

“I think that Attorney General Barr has no choice but to follow these dedicated prosecutors out the door,” he told MSNBC. “Because he’s acting simply as a henchman — a political operative — of the president, who’s always wanted the attorney general of the United States to be his Roy Cohn, his personal attorney.”

Blumenthal, who serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee, also said he had not heard back from that panel’s leader, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), regarding his request to investigate the Justice Department’s actions.

Although Graham told reporters that he did not intend to bring in the attorney general to testify on the subject, news broke later Wednesday of Barr’s having accepted an invitation to appear before the House Judiciary Committee at the end of March.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) joined the calls for the attorney general’s removal, tweeting that “Barr should resign or face impeachment.” She also argued that Congress should use its power of the purse “to defund the AG’s authority to interfere with anything that affects Trump, his friends, or his elections.”

Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), another member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, had similarly harsh words for the attorney general.

“Bill Barr is demonstrating that he is not the attorney general for the people of the United States,” he told CNN. “He swore allegiance to the Constitution, not to one president, and I suspect it’s a tough day for a lot of career prosecutors in the U.S. Department of Justice. This is a critical moment for rule of law in our country.”

Some Republican lawmakers, meanwhile, registered displeasure with the president for inserting himself into the Stone case and ginning up further conflict.

“I don’t think he should be commenting on cases in the system. I don’t think that's appropriate,” Graham told reporters.

Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) added: “You want to let the legal process to move forward in the way it’s intended to.”