Justices strike obstruction charge for Jan. 6 rioter, likely impacting others 28JUN24

 IF donald drumpf / trump is elected (NOT MY) president again he will no doubt pardon or commute or do whatever he can to free and exonerate all the traitors, the neo-nazi fascist who have been tried and convicted for their roles in the treasonous 6 JAN 21 insurrection he instigated. The supreme court looses all credibility with this ruling. Our democratic Republic is on the verge of being destroyed from the inside due to the voluntary ignorance about drumpf / trump and the acceptance of his deception and propaganda by the American electorate just as the Weimar Republic was destroyed from the inside due to the voluntary ignorance of the German electorate about hitler and their acceptance of his deception and propaganda. From the Washington Post.....

Justices strike obstruction charge for Jan. 6 rioter, likely impacting others

Hundreds have been charged with felony obstruction, among other counts, for their role in the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol

By Ann Marimow

Ann Marimow covers the Supreme Court for The Washington Post. She joined The Post in 2005, and has spent a decade writing about legal affairs and the federal judiciary. She previously covered state government and politics in California, New Hampshire and Maryland. Twitter

By Devlin Barrett

Devlin Barrett writes about the FBI and the Justice Department, and is the author of "October Surprise: How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election." He was part of reporting teams that won Pulitzer Prizes in 2018 and 2022. In 2017 he was a co-finalist for the Pulitzer for Feature Writing and the Pulitzer for International Reporting.  Twitter

Federal prosecutors improperly charged a Jan. 6 defendant with obstruction, the Supreme Court ruled on Friday, a decision that will likely upend many cases against rioters who disrupted the certification of the 2020 presidential election and which Donald Trump’s legal team may use to try to whittle down one of his criminal cases.

After the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, federal prosecutors charged more than 350 participants in the pro-Trump mob with obstructing or impeding an official proceeding. The charge carries a 20-year maximum penalty and is part of a law enacted after the exposure of massive fraud and shredding of documents during the collapse of the energy giant Enron.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said prosecutors’ broad reading of the statute gives them too much discretion to seek a 20-year maximum sentence "for acts Congress saw fit to punish only with far shorter terms of imprisonment.”

It wasn’t immediately clear what impact that decision may have on the pending case against Trump, the former president and presumptive Republican challenger to President Biden, for allegedly conspiring to obstruct the 2020 election results. Special counsel Jack Smith, who brought the case against Trump, has previously argued that even if the Supreme Court ruled in this direction, the criminal charges against Trump would still stand. Two of the four charges Trump faces are based on the obstruction statute at issue in the court’s decision.

Trump’s lawyers have filed a host of legal arguments seeking to get those charges thrown out of court, and it remains to be seen if they will try to use the Fischer v. United States decision to further those efforts. A Trump spokesman did not immediately comment on Friday’s ruling, but Trump posted “BIG WIN!” on social media shortly after the 6-3 decision was issued.

Attorney General Merrick Garland said he was disappointed with the ruling but insisted it was not a body blow to the overall investigation and prosecution of the riot at the U.S. Capitol.

“January 6 was an unprecedented attack on the cornerstone of our system of government — the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next," Garland said in a written statement.

“The vast majority of the more than 1,400 defendants charged for their illegal actions on January 6 will not be affected by this decision,” he added, noting that not a single Jan. 6 defendant was charged solely with the crime at issue in the Fischer case. “For the cases affected by today’s decision, the Department will take appropriate steps to comply with the Court’s ruling.”

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How the justices ruled

Decision author

Joined the majority

Dissented

LIBERAL BLOC

CONSERVATIVE BLOC

Sotomayor

Jackson

Kagan

Roberts

Kavanaugh

Barrett

Gorsuch

Alito

Thomas

To use the obstruction statute, Roberts wrote in the decision, prosecutors must establish that a defendant “impaired the availability or integrity” of records, documents or other objects used in an official proceeding.

In dissent, Justice Amy Coney Barrett — joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — said the court’s reading of the obstruction statute is too limited and requires the majority to do “textual backflips to find some way — any way — to narrow the reach” of the law.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a liberal former public defender, joined the the five conservatives who made up the rest of majority but wrote separately, saying “there is no indication whatsoever that Congress intended to create a sweeping, all-purpose obstruction statute.”

She noted, however, that the charges facing Fischer and other Jan. 6 defendants may still withstand legal challenges if the Justice Department can show in additional court proceedings that they interfered with records or documents used to count electoral votes.

The defendants most likely to be significantly affected by the decision are those for whom the obstruction count was their only felony conviction or charge, with their other counts limited to misdemeanors. About 27 rioters are serving time in prison for only this felony. About 110 more are awaiting trial or sentencing, according to prosecutors. Some rioters who have challenged their sentences based on the argument made in Fischer have already been granted early release.

But nearly 80 percent of the 1,400 people charged in the attack on the Capitol were not charged with obstructing the proceeding. Most were charged with trespassing federal property and assaulting or resisting a law enforcement officer. Prosecutors reserved the obstruction charge for defendants accused of knowingly and intentionally attempting to stop Congress from certifying the election and formalizing the transfer of presidential power.

More broadly, the Supreme Court’s decision will affect which tools prosecutors have to charge anyone who tries to disrupt a government proceeding through protest that turns violent. The ruling is consistent with a trend in recent years in which the high court has narrowed prosecutorial discretion in certain criminal cases because of concerns about over-criminalization.

The challenge to the obstruction charge was brought by Joseph W. Fischer, an off-duty Pennsylvania police officer who attended the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6 and faces other charges in addition to obstruction, including assaulting a federal officer in the police line outside the Capitol.

Defense lawyers said prosecutors overreached by charging rioters with a crime that is limited to conduct that destroys or tampers with evidence sought by investigators. The government’s broad application of the statute, the lawyers said, would allow prosecutors to target protesters or lobbyists who disrupt congressional committees.

The Justice Department argued that the violent disruption of the peaceful transfer of power after a presidential election, including attacks on police officers, is no minor interference. Government lawyers pushed back against the idea that using the statute this way would violate the First Amendment, saying there are no examples of prosecutors using the two-decade-old obstruction charge against legitimate protesters exercising their right to free speech.

At issue for the court in Fischer v. U.S. was how to interpret the text of a statute Congress amended in 2002 as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which followed the Enron scandal, and particularly the meaning of the word “otherwise.”

The law includes a penalty of up to 20 years in prison for anyone who “corruptly — (1) alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding; or (2) otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so.”

All but one of the 15 judges to rule on the question in a Jan. 6-related case at the D.C. federal courthouse have sided with prosecutors’ view that the second clause of the law should be read as a “catchall.” Those judges said the rioters who sought to keep Congress from certifying Biden’s victory were “otherwise” obstructing that proceeding, even though they were not destroying or concealing documents.

The outlier was U.S. District Judge Carl J. Nichols, a Trump nominee, who sided with Fischer and said the word “otherwise” refers only to other efforts to tamper with or destroy records or documents.

A divided U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reversed the decision by Nichols, and it is that appeals court opinion that the Supreme Court was reviewing.

Judge Florence Pan — a Biden nominee — said Nichols’s decision was too narrow and at odds with the text of the statute. “We cannot assume, and think it unlikely, that Congress used expansive language to address such narrow concerns,” she wrote, joined in part by Judge Justin Walker, who was nominated by Trump.

Judge Gregory Katsas — also nominated by Trump — dissented, writing that a broad reading of the obstruction statute, such as the one used by prosecutors against Jan. 6 rioters, would put law-abiding activities like lobbying and protest at risk.

This is a developing story. It will be updated.

Spencer S. Hsu contributed to this report.

The Jan. 6 insurrection

The ruling: The Supreme Court ruled that federal prosecutors improperly charged hundreds of Jan. 6 defendants with obstruction. Here’s what’s next for the Jan. 6 riot probe after the Supreme Court’s decision.

The report: The Jan. 6 committee released its final report, marking the culmination of an 18-month investigation into the violent insurrection. Read The Post’s analysis about the committee’s new findings and conclusions.

The final hearing: The House committee investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol held its final public meeting, where members referred four criminal charges against former president Donald Trump and others to the Justice Department. Here’s what the criminal referrals mean.

The riot: On Jan. 6, 2021, a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification of the 2020 election results. Five people died on that day or in the immediate aftermath, and 140 police officers were assaulted.

Inside the siege: During the rampage, rioters came perilously close to penetrating the inner sanctums of the building while lawmakers were still there, including former vice president Mike Pence. The Washington Post examined text messages, photos and videos to create a video timeline of what happened on Jan. 6. Here’s what we know about what Trump did on Jan. 6.