WASHINGTON >> President Donald Trump and his supporters today praised Attorney General William Barr’s decision to drop the prosecution of Michael Flynn, even as career law enforcement officials warned that the action set a disturbing precedent and Democrats accused the administration of further politicizing the Justice Department.

“Yesterday was a BIG day for Justice in the USA,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Congratulations to General Flynn, and many others. I do believe there is MUCH more to come! Dirty Cops and Crooked Politicians do not go well together!”

But some rank-and-file prosecutors said they saw Barr’s action as politically motivated and damaging to the department’s credibility. Several compared the move to his forcing prosecutors in February to reduce a standard sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone, a friend of Trump, saying it would leave a lasting mark on the department.

The Flynn decision comes as Trump and his allies have renewed their attacks on law enforcement officials, including the FBI director, Christopher Wray. With unemployment rates entering Great Depression territory and deaths from the pandemic mounting, Trump returned his attention to a familiar nemesis: the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and whether any of his campaign associates were involved.

Since taking office, Barr — an outspoken critic of the Russia investigation even before Trump appointed him — has voiced skepticism of the Flynn case. He laid the groundwork to dismiss it in February, when he appointed an outside prosecutor to review the matter. His intervention spared Trump any need to pardon Flynn, which the president had said he might do.

Democrats reacted with fury, accusing Barr of undermining the rule of law, and on Friday all 24 of them on the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to the Justice Department’s inspector general asking for an investigation.

In the Flynn case and many others, it said, “the current leadership of the department has taken extraordinary steps to protect the president’s allies and punish his enemies, real and imagined. In our view, these cases represent a systematic breakdown of impartial justice at the Department of Justice and suggest overt political bias, if not outright corruption.”

Many current and former federal prosecutors across the country said they were shocked by the Flynn decision. But current and former department lawyers and FBI officials also sent department leaders “significantly positive feedback” and “applauded the recommendation” to drop the Flynn case, said Kerri Kupec, a department spokeswoman.

The critics of Barr’s decision noted that no one who had worked on the case signed the legal paperwork effectively ending the Flynn prosecution except for Timothy Shea, the interim U.S. attorney in Washington. There were signs of haste. Shea mistakenly used the District of Columbia bar identification number of his predecessor.

While the ailing economy seemed to reduce the chances of a wave of resignations, some career officials quietly sounded out potential private-sector jobs, fearing that their own cases could come under internal attack, said two people briefed on the matter.

“Bill Barr’s conduct is unprecedented and, what’s worse, unchecked,” said Christopher Hunter, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who worked at the Justice Department under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

Nowhere was morale lower than in the Washington office, where federal prosecutors were still reeling from the sudden departure earlier this year of the previous U.S. attorney, Jessie Liu; the installation by Barr of a close aide, Shea, as her interim successor; and Barr’s decision to intervene in Stone’s sentencing recommendation.

Barr had asked an outside prosecutor from St. Louis to vet the Flynn case. The Washington office’s newly installed top deputy pushed the Flynn team to disclose more documents to the defense, which frustrated lawyers in the office and the FBI, according to three people familiar with their thinking.

The department justified its motion to drop the Flynn case by telling a court that his admitted lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador was no crime because the false statements were not “material” to any legitimate counterintelligence investigation used as a basis to question him.

“People sometimes plead to things that turn out not to be crimes,” Barr said in an interview Thursday with CBS News.

The FBI had initially decided to close an investigation into Flynn, having found no evidence that he was conspiring with the Russians. But because the investigation was still open as a paperwork matter, they used it as a basis to question him.

“For the attorney general to now suggest this interview was unusual or that the FBI deviated from the usual protocol is wrong,” said Gregory Brower, a former FBI official and Republican U.S. attorney in Nevada. “FBI agents try to interview people in a way that gets them to talk in an unguarded way and, hopefully, to tell the truth.”

Several other legal specialists said Barr’s intervention could still leave Flynn with legal exposure.

That is because Flynn was not just facing jeopardy for making false statements about his conversations with the Russian ambassador. He was also accused of lying to the Justice Department about his paid work on behalf of the Turkish government when he submitted belated disclosures under the Foreign Agents Registration Act in March 2017.

Under the plea deal with the office of the special counsel, Robert Mueller, the Justice Department had agreed never to prosecute Flynn in connection with the Turkey-related project. Now he could be exposed to charges about Turkey after all, legal specialists said.

In an interview with CBS News on Thursday, Barr was asked whether other charges could be brought against Flynn “for other actions he took during the presidential campaign or during the transition.” He replied only, “Well, no charges like that have been brought, and I’m not going to speculate about what charges there may be.”

The turmoil has also called into question the standing of Wray, the FBI director Trump appointed after firing the former director, James Comey.

Some allies have told the president that Wray opposed the recent declassification of some Russia investigation-related material, a claim that Wray has denied, and Trump was said to have expressed anger about Wray after the Justice Department recently provided Flynn’s defense team with internal FBI notes.

The president, who has complained about the FBI director on and off since shortly after he appointed him in 2017, wanted to fire Wray, according to people familiar with this thinking. But some of Trump’s closest aides alerted Barr, who went to the White House to calm down the president, people familiar with the events said, and Trump agreed to hold off.

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