The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the epitome of a liberal court has overruled the lower court in DC by saying that sentences for “interfering with the administration of justice” for the January 6 defendants to be outrageously long. This could affect hundreds of Biden’s political prisoners who are serving lengthy sentences imposed by biased judges after extremely biased juries found them guilty of crimes they didn’t commit.
Who can forget the guilty verdict in the Enrique Tarrio trial for the J6 protests even though he wasn’t even in DC on that day? In this case corrupt prosecutors charged hundreds of people with “interfering with the administration of justice” which was never the case according to the DC Circuit Court. And the ruling was unanimous at 3 to 0.
This case was brought by Larry Brock, one of the rioters, who was sentenced to two years in prison. D.C. Circuit Judge Patricia Millett wrote in a unanimous ruling, joined by Judges Cornelia Pillard and Judith Rogers:
“Brock’s interference with one stage of the electoral college vote-counting process — while no doubt endangering our democratic processes and temporarily derailing Congress’s constitutional work — did not interfere with the ‘administration of justice.’”
It is not immediately known how many cases this ruling will affect, but there have been 330 people charged with interfering. The same court will hear another case that could affect many other of Biden’s political prisoners in April.
VISIT OUR YOUTUBE CHANNELWilliam Shipley, an attorney who has represented several Jan. 6 defendants, including “Qanon Shaman” Jacob Chansley, told the Washington Examiner that the reverberations from the D.C. Circuit’s decision are “potentially huge.”
“But it will be meaningless if the Supreme Court throws out 1512 in the Fischer case,” Shipley said, noting that the forthcoming case could potentially upend obstruction charges for every defendant sentenced under that statute for their actions on the day of the riot.
“Basically, if the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Fischer, what it’s saying is the statute doesn’t apply to the proceedings on Jan. 6, it wouldn’t apply to anybody,” Shipley said.
That might be good news for some. But it’s the Fischer case, which the court will hear in April, that has the potential to upset the apple cart for DoJ.
The Fischer case involves the definition of “obstruction of an official proceeding,” which includes “corruptly” obstructing, impeding, or blocking an official government proceeding. In this context, what did the J6 defendants do to “corruptly obstruct” Congress?
Trump was charged with this same offense and made a strong argument in October as to why the charge should be dropped.
Attorneys for the former president wrote in an October filing seeking to dismiss the case that Smith’s indictment inappropriately applied the statute in question to their client. The “indictment takes a statute directed at the destruction of records in accounting fraud and applies it to disputing the outcome of a Presidential election. This stretches the statutory language beyond any plausible mooring to its text,” the attorneys wrote.
The charge in question carries the stiffest penalty available to prosecutors so far in the Jan. 6 cases they’ve brought, and it has also been applied to several notable figures involved in the riot, including Enrique Tarrio and Stewart Rhodes, leaders of the groups the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, respectively. Tarrio was sentenced to 22 years in prison in September, and Rhodes was sentenced to 18 years in May.
