Attorney General Merrick Garland is no doubt blowing smoke out of his ears after the Supreme Court ruled on Friday to limit the scope of a federal obstruction statute that was being used by various prosecutors to slap more than 300 defendants allegedly involved in the riot at the Capitol building back on Jan. 6, 2024, which includes former President Donald Trump.
According to ABC News:
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the 6-3 majority, said the government must show in those cases that the alleged obstruction related to “impairing the availability or integrity” of “records, documents, or objects” used in the disrupted proceeding.
The Justice Department had applied the charge more broadly in many cases, alleging that the physical presence of some of the rioters inside the Capitol was alone “obstruction of an official proceeding” under the law.
Roberts said the statute in question — the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 which was enacted after the Enron scandal to prevent destruction of evidence in financial crimes — must be read in context.
“It would be peculiar to conclude that in closing the Enron gap, Congress actually hid away … a catchall provision that reaches far beyond the document shredding and similar scenarios that prompted the legislation in the first place,” Roberts went on to write in the majority opinion.
The ruling was at least a partial win for Joseph Fischer, a former police officer from Pennsylvania who was one of the individuals involved in the incident, who issued a legal challenge to the obstruction charge. The penalty for the charge could be up to 20 years in prison.
The Supreme Court made clear, however, that prosecutors could retain the obstruction charges if more properly framed and supported by evidence that the defendants’ actions involved documents of some kind.
One of the weirder aspects of the case is how normally conservative SCOTUS Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined with Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan in their dissent, saying, “Congress meant what it said.”
Barrett, in the dissenting opinion she wrote, said that the law “is a very broad provision,” before going to add, “and admittedly, events like January 6th were not its target. (Who could blame Congress for that failure of imagination?) But statutes often go further than the problem that inspired them, and under the rules of statutory interpretation, we stick to the test anyway.”
Garland was not a happy camper about the decision, though he said it wouldn’t have an impact on most of the 1,400 criminals cases that are connected to the incident.
“There are no cases in which the Department charged a January 6 defendant only with the offense at issue in Fischer,” Garland went on to say in a statement. “For the cases affected by today’s decision, the Department will take appropriate steps to comply with the Court’s ruling.”
It was also not clear how much of an impact the court’s decision would have on special counsel Jack Smith’s election interference case against Trump. Two of the four charges involve the same obstruction statute used against Fischer.
“It will be a much tougher case to argue that he impaired an official proceeding if the prosecution must also show that it related to the destruction or alteration, or related activities, of documents,” Notre Dame law professor Derek Muller, an election law scholar, remarked about the situation.
“For rioters physically present at the Capitol that day, it will be a tougher but possible showing. For Trump, however, it may be more about whether paperwork submitted to Pence relating to other electoral votes or what to do with those votes rises to the level of criminal activity in the statute,” Muller explained. “We’ll see whether the Department of Justice keeps this charge against Trump, but it may fall back to some of the other charges and rely more heavily on them instead.”
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