(TargetDailyNews.com) – As legal cases against figures big and small on the right continue to fall apart, the Department of Justice (DOJ) under the Biden administration is scrambling to find a way to continue its prosecution of hundreds of Americans held in jail for their participation in the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
More than 350 people are in jail, charged by the DOJ under a federal law called Section 1512(c)(2). This law makes it punishable by up to 20 years in prison to obstruct, impede, or influence any official government proceeding. The DOJ’s theory is that those who entered the Capitol were obstructing the business of Congress.
However, the Supreme Court recently disagreed, ruling that the statute cannot be used to charge these defendants. The Court stated that this law is only properly applied to defendants who tamper with actual records or documents necessary for government business. In other words, “obstructing” government business by protesting, even rioting, doesn’t fall under the scope of the statute the DOJ wants to use.
Now, the DOJ is trying to figure out how to proceed against approximately 355 people who can’t be charged with what the government wanted to level against them. Just after the Supreme Court ruling, Attorney General Merrick Garland said his agency would “continue to use all available tools” to make the defendants pay for what he believes is an “attack on our democracy.”
Some of those “tools” include asking lower courts to give the DOJ extra time to parse the high court ruling.
Criminal defense lawyer David W. Fischer wrote in a guest Substack post that the DOJ is “not happy” with the court’s ruling and is looking for ways to “circumvent” it. He suggested the DOJ might change the wording in its indictments to suggest the defendants tried to tamper with things like the ceremonial ballot box at the Capitol in order to jimmy the defendants’ behavior into something chargeable under Section 1512.
However, “creative language,” he wrote, does not change the fact that there is no evidence that any Jan. 6 participant was aiming to obstruct access to necessary government documents.
Whether the DOJ will be able to salvage the majority of these cases remains to be seen, but some of the jailed have already been released. As a result of the Supreme Court ruling, Alexander Sheppard, Kevin Seefried, and Thomas B. Adams Jr. have already been let out of prison.
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