More than 300 J6 defendants, including former President Donald Trump, could see felony charges against them dropped as the U.S. Supreme Court said on Wednesday that it will take up one defendant’s appeal of the Department of Justice’s use of evidence-tampering law to prosecute the defendants for obstruction of Congress.
The Supreme Court granted the petition of Joseph Wayne Fischer, who is challenging the most widely charged felony in J6 cases. The charge carries up to 20 years in prison.
Defense attorney William Shipley predicted that the Supreme Court's decision to take up the obstruction case would put an end to the D.C. prosecution of Trump.
“The decision by SCOTUS today to take up the appeal on the 1512 ‘obstruction of an official proceeding’ case means the Trump D.C. case will not be going to trial,” Shipley wrote on X. “This is the easy way to make that happen without directly acting on the Trump case on an expedited basis.”
Independent journalist Julie Kelly, who has broken several major J6 reports, said she can’t see a scenario where the Supreme Court upholds the DOJ's use of the obstruction law in J6 cases.
“Hard to overstate the total humiliation of DOJ and 15 D.C. district court judges who upheld 1512c2,” Kelly wrote on X. “Only one — Judge Carl Nichols — dismissed the count in 3 cases. The beauty here is that DOJ appealed Nichols. If DOJ would’ve left it alone, this wouldn’t be at SCOTUS now.”
One of the 327 defendants clapped with the obstruction charge, William Pope of Topeka, Kansas, wrote on X: “The tide has turned. The Supreme Court taking up the obstruction of an official proceeding appeal is a clear message to the DOJ that government extremism has gone too far; that more than three hundred Americans, including President Trump, myself, and many currently in prison, were wrongfully charged.”
Pope dded: “Sadly, the DOJ has for the last three years used the obstruction charge — which the Supreme Court is now primed to throw out — to pressure January 6 defendants into taking bad plea deals. The outcomes of many cases would be far different if not for this DOJ malpractice.”
Marina Medvin, a defense attorney who co-authored a friend-of-the-court brief supporting the challenge of the DOJ’s prosecutions, said the 327 cases at issue should never have been felonies.
“If the case turns in favor of the defendants, this will be life-altering for hundreds of people who were unjustly persecuted for a felony offense instead of the misdemeanor that was crafted by Congress for the trespass behavior at issue,” Medvin wrote on X.
Defense attorney Joseph McBride said the novel use of §1512(c)(2) by the DOJ is rooted in “corruption and political hatred.”
“For the love of God, what do the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and election-related protests have to do with each other?” McBride said in a statement to The Epoch Times, referring to the 2002 act that created the 1512 statute. “I’ll tell you, absolutely nothing. Were protestors running around capturing ballots or shredding documents to obstruct an official proceeding on January 6, 2021? No, they most certainly were not. So how is it that a law designed to prosecute white-collar document shredders was applied to a bunch of blue-collar J6 protestors?”
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