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But as Mr. Trump attacked that sentencing recommendation on Twitter, the department began to work on a new, more lenient recommendation to the judge meting out Mr. Stone’s punishment. The four prosecutors quit the case, and the request was submitted without their signatures.

Ms. Kupec said that Mr. Barr had not discussed the sentencing request with the president and that he had decided to intervene before Mr. Trump tweeted about it.

Mr. Zelinsky will say that a supervisor working on the case told him there were “political reasons” for more senior officials to resist and then override prosecutors’ recommendation to follow the sentencing guidelines and that the supervisor agreed that doing so “was unethical and wrong.”

Mr. Zelinsky did not say in his written statement who specifically told him about what was going on. Jonathan Kravis, another prosecutor who quit the case in protest — and, unlike Mr. Zelinsky, also resigned from the Justice Department — has written in an op-ed in The Washington Post that he “resigned because I was not willing to serve a department that would so easily abdicate its responsibility to dispense impartial justice.”

The intervention came days after Mr. Barr had maneuvered the Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Jessie K. Liu, out of her role and installed Mr. Shea, who had been a close aide from his own office.

Mr. Zelinsky planned to say he was told that Mr. Shea “was receiving heavy pressure from the highest levels of the Department of Justice to cut Stone a break” and complied because he was “afraid of the president.” He and other line prosecutors were told that the case was “not the hill worth dying on” and that they could lose their jobs if they did not fall in line, according to the statement.

Mr. Zelinsky, a prosecutor in Baltimore, had been detailed to Washington to continue work on the Stone case that was begun while he worked for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. Mr. Stone, citing the spread of the coronavirus in federal prisons, asked a federal judge Tuesday for a two-month delay before he is forced to begin serving his sentence, which he was due to report for next week. His motion said that the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington had told his lawyers that based on the department’s guidance about handling pandemic-related issues, the government was not opposed.