Attorney for Jan. 6 defendants: DOJ 'frontloading' unproven affidavits

FPI / July 8, 2022

Team Biden's Department of Justice is manufacturing evidence against Jan. 6 defendants and "hiding evidence" that may exonerate a number of them, according to lawyers and lawmakers.

Joseph McBride, an attorney for multiple Jan. 6 defendants, said the DOJ is using lengthy and unproven affidavits that are “much different than your normal cases." McBride added: "And they’re frontloading these complaints with facts that aren’t proven and these allegations are subsequently being weaponized in the court of public opinion.”

McBride, who told The Epoch Times he has “five, going on six” criminal defendants related to Jan. 6, said complaint affidavits are generally written as hastily as possible because the only purpose of a complaint affidavit is to initiate the legal process by establishing probable cause. Complaint affidavits are normally followed quickly by the return of an indictment by a grand jury.

But, McBride added, the Jan. 6 complaint affidavits can run in excess of 20, 30, 40, and even 50 pages long.

Because DOJ policy only allows the government to make public comments about matters that are already a matter of public record, McBride said making sure all of that detail is part of the public record enables the government to release the information to the public in order to destroy the reputations of the accused ahead of a trial.

“You are not allowed to punish a pre-trial detainee in the United States of America because you are innocent until proven guilty” McBride told The Epoch Times. “It is only after you have been convicted of a crime or plead through a crime that you can be punished for a crime. Punishment for a crime is deprivation of freedom. …

“My clients and others like them have been brutally assaulted,” McBride added. “They’ve been locked away in cells for months at a time. They’ve been denied medical care and have had their human rights, their civil rights, and their constitutional rights violated by the staff at the D.C. gulag, by the staff at the Northern Neck jail because they have been green-lighted by the Biden machine to harm anybody who showed up at the Capitol on January 6 to speak out about the election results. It is unconstitutional. It is immoral. It is un-American. It is wrong.”

Texas Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert noted: “We still can’t get all of the videotape,” a reference to the 14,000 hours of surveillance video from Capitol security cameras that has been withheld under “sovereign immunity.”

“They continue to hide that information,” Gohmert asserted. “As every lawyer knows who has dealt with any criminal case, it’s been a Constitutional requirement for the Supreme Court for decades, if you have evidence that’s of an exonerating nature for the defendant, you have to turn that over.”

Attorney Bill Shipley called into question the validity of some of the photo and video screenshot “evidence” used in his Jan. 6 cases.

The DOJ said video showed Brian Mock, who Shipley is representing, shoving and officer to the ground and then kicking the officer. Shipley said the DOJ "relied heavily" on a single screenshot from the video in which Mock’s right foot appears to be off the ground.

“If the government had video of Mr. Mock’s right foot striking the victim officer, it is quite certain it would have included a screenshot of that particular moment instead of the one it chose,” Shipley argued. “The obvious conclusion is the government has no such video. It hasn’t produced one in discovery.”

Free Press International