Supreme Court Rules On Jan 6th Case – Weakens Case Against Trump?
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The Supreme Court just dealt a massive blow to some Jan 6th cases.
The ruling narrowed a charge that the DOJ relied on in more than 300 cases – this includes the case against Donald Trump.
The Supreme Court on Friday made it more difficult to prosecute some Jan. 6 rioters, and may have weakened the Justice Department’s case against former President Trump in the process.
The big picture: The court narrowed one specific charge that the Justice Department has relied on in more than 300 Jan. 6 cases, including Trump’s.
That charge — obstructing an official proceeding — has previously been used almost exclusively for white-collar crimes like evidence tampering. But the Justice Department had argued that the Jan. 6 riot was an attempt to obstruct an official proceeding: the certification of the 2020 election.
To prove an obstruction charge, the court said Friday, prosecutors would need to show that a defendant interfered with documents, records or other material parts of an official proceeding.
Chief Justice Roberts wrote this in the majority opinion.
In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts argued that if Congress intended for prosecutors to be able to tack 20-year prison sentences on to the kind of conduct witnessed on January 6, 2021, lawmakers would have said so.
“Nothing in the text or statutory history suggests that (the law) is designed to impose up to 20 years’ imprisonment on essentially all defendants who commit obstruction of justice in any way and who might be subject to lesser penalties under more specific obstruction statutes,” Roberts wrote.
