US Supreme Court hears rioter's obstruction case, with Trump implications

The justices will hear arguments on April 25 in Trump's assertion of presidential immunity from prosecution in the election subversion case brought against him by Smith. Fischer is awaiting trial on six other criminal counts, including assaulting or impeding officers and civil disorder, while he challenges his obstruction charge at the Supreme Court.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday was hearing arguments in a Pennsylvania man's bid to avoid an obstruction charge related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol - a case with possible implications for the federal prosecution of Donald Trump for his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss. Joseph Fischer has appealed a lower court's ruling rejecting his attempt to escape a federal charge of corruptly obstructing an official proceeding - the congressional certification of President Joe Biden's victory over Trump that the rioters sought to prevent. Arguments in the case were ongoing.

Trump faces the same charge in a criminal case brought against him last year by Special Counsel Jack Smith. Jeffrey Green, a lawyer for Fischer, argued for a narrow application of the obstruction charge - only against defendants who tampered with evidence. Green said that the Justice Department had committed prosecutorial overreach by misapplying an obstruction provision from the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act - passed after the accounting fraud scandal at now-defunct energy company Enron - to Fischer's case.

"The Jan. 6 prosecutions demonstrate that there are a host of felony and misdemeanor crimes that cover the alleged conduct. A Sarbanes-Oxley based, Enron-driven evidence-tampering statute is not one of them," Green told the justices. The court's liberal justices challenged Green's narrow interpretation of the law.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor compared it to a sign posted at a theater that says, "'You will be kicked out of the theater if you photograph or record the actors, or otherwise disrupt the performance.'" "If you start yelling," Sotomayor said, "I think no one would question you could be kicked out under this policy, even though yelling has nothing to do with photographing or recording."

Justice Elena Kagan told Green that there were "multiple ways" in which the lawmakers who drafted the relevant language in the statute could have made it clear that they intended the law to operate "only in the sphere of evidence spoliation. But it doesn't do that." "Certainly the statute could be written more precisely," Green said. "Any statute could be written more precisely."

"It's not a question of 'precisely,'" Kagan told Green. Fischer is accused of charging at police officers guarding a Capitol entrance during the attack, according to prosecutors. Fischer, at the time a member of the North Cornwall Township police in Pennsylvania, got inside and pressed up against an officer's riot shield as police attempted to clear rioters. He remained in the building for four minutes before police pushed him out.

'A VERY DIFFERENT ACT' "Attempting to stop a vote count or something like that is a very different act than actually changing a document or altering a document," Green said.

The obstruction charge carries a sentence of up to 20 years in prison, though Jan. 6 defendants convicted of obstruction have received far lesser sentences. Federal prosecutors have brought obstruction charges against about 350 of the roughly 1,400 people charged in the Capitol attack. The legal issue in the case involves how two parts of the obstruction law fit together. The first provision prohibits obstructing an official proceeding by destroying "a record, document or other object." The second part makes it a crime to "otherwise obstruct" an official proceeding.

The Justice Department argued that Congress included the second provision to give the obstruction law a broad sweep. "It ensures that unanticipated methods of corruptly obstructing an official proceeding - like occupying the Capitol building and forcing the suspension of Congress's joint session certifying the election results - are prohibited," U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote in a brief.

A Supreme Court ruling dismissing the charge against Fischer could make it more complicated - but not impossible - to make Trump's obstruction-related charges stick, according to experts. The Supreme Court next week confronts another major case involving Trump, the Republican candidate challenging the Democratic president in the Nov. 5 U.S. election in a 2020 rematch. The justices will hear arguments on April 25 in Trump's assertion of presidential immunity from prosecution in the election subversion case brought against him by Smith.

Fischer is awaiting trial on six other criminal counts, including assaulting or impeding officers and civil disorder, while he challenges his obstruction charge at the Supreme Court. U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, dismissed Fischer's obstruction charge, ruling that it applies only to defendants who tampered with evidence. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reversed that decision.

After the 2020 election, Trump and his allies made false claims that it had been stolen from him through widespread voting fraud. On the day when Congress met to certify Biden's victory, Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, broke through barricades, attacked police officers, vandalized the building and forced lawmakers and others to flee for safety. In August 2023, Smith brought four federal criminal counts against Trump: conspiring to defraud the United States, corruptly obstructing an official proceeding and conspiring to do so, and conspiring against the right of Americans to vote.

 

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)