“You know, the saddest thing is that because I’m the president of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department,” President Donald Trump said in a radio interview in November 2017. “I am not supposed to be involved with the FBI. I’m not supposed to be doing the kind of things that I would love to be doing. And I’m very frustrated by it.”

That frustration likely ended on Tuesday as the Justice Department finally and fully bowed to Trump’s whims by urging a court to go easy on one of his allies. One day earlier, on Monday, federal prosecutors said in a court filing that they would recommend a prison sentence of seven to nine years. “Roger Stone obstructed Congress’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, lied under oath, and tampered with a witness,” the department originally said on Monday. “And when his crimes were revealed by the indictment in this case, he displayed contempt for this court and the rule of law.”

Stone, a longtime Republican political operative with a reputation for dirty tricks, was found guilty in November of witness tampering and lying to Congress. The charges stem from his efforts to obstruct the federal and congressional inquiries into the Trump campaign’s connections with Russian meddling. During the 2016 election, Stone had served as an intermediary of sorts between WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and the Trump campaign in a semitransparent attempt to get dirt on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton from foreign sources.

In a series of late-night posts on Twitter, Trump denounced the prospective sentence for his longtime political ally. “This is a horrible and very unfair situation,” he wrote. “The real crimes were on the other side, as nothing happens to them. Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!” By late Tuesday morning, the Justice Department’s upper ranks began signaling that it would revise the sentencing recommendation downward. While department officials anonymously denied any connection between their actions and the president’s tweet to The New York Times and The Washington Post, the timing was unmistakable.

The second filing, which was sent to the court on Friday afternoon, bore the signatures of Timothy Shea, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, and John Crabb Jr., the acting chief of that office’s criminal division. It reads more like an argument on Stone’s behalf than an adversarial attempt to prosecute him. While it still recommends a prison sentence for Stone, it does not suggest the length. Instead the filing tells the court that it was “unclear to what extent the defendant’s obstructive conduct actually prejudiced the government at trial,” undercutting the case made by line prosecutors to convict him. It also asks the court to take into account the defendant’s “advanced age, health, personal circumstances, and lack of criminal history.” (Stone is 67 years old.)