US Supreme Court Ruling on Obstruction Law Helps Cases of Jan. 6 Defendants

US Capitol, January 6, 2021. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

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WASHINGTON — A former Pennsylvania police officer who joined the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol that delayed the certification of the 2020 presidential election results cannot be charged with obstructing an official proceeding unless a court of law first instance rules otherwise, the US Supreme Court ruled Friday.

The ruling calls into question the cases of potentially hundreds of Jan. 6 defendants who faced the same charge, as well as a portion of Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith’s four-count indictment alleging that former President donald trump planned to nullify the 2020 presidential election.

But the attorney general Merrick Garland said after the ruling that he predicts the decision will not affect the “vast majority” of the Jan. 6 cases.

In a 6-3 opinionthe judges, led by Chief Justice John Robertswrote that the charge Fischer faces — a subsection of an obstruction law from the early 2000s — can only apply to tampering with physical records.

“To prove a violation of Section 1512(c)(2), the Government must establish that the defendant impaired the availability or integrity for use in an official proceeding of records, documents, objects, or, as we explained previously, other things used in the process, or attempted to do so,” Roberts wrote.

“The judgment of the D.C. Circuit is therefore vacated and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion,” Roberts wrote.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson issued a concurring opinion.

Justice Amy Coney Barrettjoined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, dissented.

Impact on January 6 Trump Defendants

The decision has the potential to affect more than 355 January 6, defendants accused of the same crime, which carries a fine and no more than 20 years in prison.

Dozens, Including leaders of the extremist Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, have already been convicted of the charge, according to the Department of Justice.

The case, Fischer v. U.S, centered about whether Jan. 6 defendant Joseph W. Fischer violated the obstruction law when he joined the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol and delayed Congress, and Vice President Mike Penceto certify the results of the 2020 presidential election that declared Democrat Joe Biden the winner.

Trump also faces an obstruction charge as part of his four-count federal indictment that claims he worked with others to overturn the election results in seven states, pressured Pence to join him, and whipped his base into a frenzy that culminated in the Jan. 6 attack.

Trump will almost certainly contest the accusation, as his legal team has already done so. argued he is completely immune to it.

Trump’s attorneys, D. John Sauer and William Owen Scharf, did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

Instead, Trump’s 2024 campaign spokesman Steven Cheung responded to the email with a link to Trump’s post on his social media platform Truth Social. The post, published at 11:41 a.m. on Friday, read “BIG VICTORY!”

The cases against those who participated in the Jan. 6 riot have become a rallying cry for Republicans ahead of the 2024 presidential election. Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee, has repeatedly promised to pardon the defendants.

U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana told reporters Friday that the Supreme Court ruling “effectively says the court agrees that several defendants in the Jan. 6 lawsuit were overcharged.”

“And that’s something that I also think a lot of people have recognized for some time, and now the highest court in the land has declared that to be so,” Johnson said during a wide-ranging hearing. Press conference.

How the accusations came about

The obstruction provision examined by the high court is contained in section 1512(c) of the Sarbanes-Oxley Actenacted following the Enron accounting scandal in 2001. The scandal erupted following revelations that the energy company doctored its financial records to inflate its value.

The provision targets “anyone who corruptly (1) alters, destroys, mutilates or conceals a record, document or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to harm the integrity or availability of the object for use in an official process; or (2) otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official process, or attempts to do so.”

Fischer and hundreds of other Jan. 6 defendants, as well as Trump, are charged under the second subsection, cited in court documents as 1512(c)(2).

Significant period during the month of April oral arguments focused on whether the second part of the statute depended on the first clause, meaning the law could only be applied if physical evidence was involved.

The government has argued that the two parties are separate and that Fischer, who sent texts leading up to the riot and is shown in police camera footage inside the Capitol, intended to disrupt an official congressional proceeding.

Fischer’s team argued that he did not actually enter the Capitol until Congress had already stopped the process and that he did not stay long.

A lower federal court agreed last year with Fischer’s motion to dismiss the felony charge.

A federal appeals panel in Washington, D.C., did not. Judge Florence Y. Pan – who was also part of the panel during Trump’s presidency immunity appeal – wrote at the beginning opinion that the law is “unequivocal” in its meaning as to what constitutes obstruction of an official process.

Other charges

The obstruction charge is not the only charge filed against Fischer following his participation in the January 6 riot.

The original indictment against him also included charges of civil disorder; assaulting, resisting or impeding certain officers; enter and remain in a restricted building or land; disorderly conduct; and parade, demonstrate or picket a Capitol building, among others.

Fischer’s lawyer, Jeffrey Green, who he spoke told the States Newsroom in person following the April oral arguments, told the media outlet in an emailed statement Friday that his team is “ecstatic.”

“The various opinions offer a particularly clear window into the different modalities of legal interpretation among the judges of today’s Court. And the impact of the opinion on other prosecutions remains to be seen, but we are happy to have taken this criminal statute back into its proper territory of tampering with evidence,” the Bethesda, Maryland attorney wrote.

Frederick “Fritz” Ulrich, federal public defender for the Middle District of Pennsylvania and Fischer’s attorney, told States Newsroom in a written response Friday that the Supreme Court “interpreted the scope of 1512(c) as consistent with the intent of Congress and our argument that it is an evidence-compromising offense, not some form of collective obstruction offense.”

“And at the end of the day, the government has many crimes it can charge to capture the conduct in question. As for Mr. Fischer, the D.C. Circuit should ultimately remand back to the district court for trial,” Ulrich wrote.

DOJ reacts

Garland said in a statement Friday that he was “disappointed” in the court’s decision, which he said “limits an important federal law that the Department has sought to use to ensure that those most responsible for this attack face appropriate consequences.”

However, Garland does not anticipate the ruling will affect a significant portion of the hundreds of cases from Jan. 6, he said.

“The vast majority of the more than 1,400 defendants charged for their illegal actions on January 6th will not be affected by this ruling. There are no cases in which the Department charged a January 6th defendant solely with the crime at issue in the Fischer case,” Garland continued.

The department “will take appropriate steps to comply with the Court’s ruling” for any cases that will be affected, he said.

“We will continue to use every tool available to hold accountable the criminals responsible for the January 6 attack on our democracy,” Garland said.

He described the riot as an “attack on the cornerstone of our system of government – ​​the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to another.”

Majority justices question government’s claim

Writing for the majority on Friday, Roberts disagreed with the DOJ’s position that the two parts of the obstruction law could be applied completely separately.

“While the Government’s sweeping interpretation may be literally permissible, it defies the most plausible understanding of why (the two subsections) are united,” Roberts wrote.

“Given that subsection (c)(2) was enacted to resolve the Enron disaster, and not some other set of hazards, it is unlikely that Congress would have responded with such an unfocused and grossly incommensurable patch,” he wrote, citing the federal government. appeals court dissent opinion by Judge Gregory Katsas.

In her concurring opinion, Supreme Court Justice Jackson wrote that the high court “properly construes” the statute and “correctly vacates the ruling below and remands this case for further proceedings.”

Jackson wrote that Congress’ certification of the presidential election results on January 6, 2021 “clearly utilized certain records, documents, or objects – including, but not limited to, those relating to the electoral votes themselves.”

“And it may well be that Fischer’s conduct, as alleged here, involved deteriorating (or attempting to violate) the availability or integrity of things used during the January 6 process ‘in ways other than those specified in (c) (1)’,” she wrote, citing the first subsection of the obstruction law.

“If so, then Fischer’s prosecution under §1512(c)(2) can, and should, proceed. This issue remains available for lower courts to determine pretrial detention,” concluded Jackson.

In his dissenting opinion, Barrett argued against the majority’s “narrowing” of the subsection.

“There’s no getting around it: Section 1512(c)(2) is a broad law,” she wrote.

Congress, in writing the law, “established the outer limits of responsibility,” she continued.

“(The) Executive Branch has the power to select specific cases to process within these limits. By textually restricting §1512(c)(2), the Court did not respect the prerogatives of the political branches,” Barrett concluded.

Shauneen Miranda contributed to this report.

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