Writes Adam Liptak, in "Live Updates: Supreme Court Rules for Member of Jan 6. Mob in Obstruction Case/The decision concerned the scope of a 2002 law enacted in the wake of the collapse of Enron to address accounting fraud and the destruction of evidence" (NYT).
At issue was part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which was enacted after the collapse of the energy giant Enron and contains a broad catchall provision that makes it a crime to corruptly obstruct, influence or impede any official proceeding. Most Jan. 6 defendants have not been charged under the law, which prosecutors have reserved for the most serious cases, and those who have been charged under it face other counts, as well....
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A mob is a group of people whose politics I disagree with.
crime to corruptly obstruct, influence or impede any official proceeding. Most Jan. 6 defendants have not been charged under the law....
That may be accurate, but I thought a parallel provision in the sentencing guidelines was exploited for the bonkers sentencing enhancements prosecutors have been getting in these cases. It's been some time since I looked, though, so I might be misremembering.
J6 gulag is twice as aggregious as palmer s raids
"A member of the mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6th, 2021 ...".
Adam Liptak is a member of the mob that stole our country during the first week of November, 2020. There isn't a lamppost high enough.
But who will charge the overchargers?
IF that "otherwise" was meant to include protests with destruction of evidence, it certainly violates fair notice.
Can anyone explain Brown Jackson voting with the majority and Coney Barrett voting with the minority?
@Balfegor, I think I've heard something similar and of course the provision has likely been used as a threat when plea bargaining.
Jackson defended the 20th hijacker so...
If the riot was planned, organized, facilitated, provoked by the FBI, the Capital police and anti-Trump members of Congress and the Executive, as is often claimed, wouldn't they be guilty of violating this law? And of conspiracy?
Excellent. A Supreme Court decision is just the thing needed. Soon President Trump will reestore the innocent patriots unjustly convicted, and punish the people who think lawfare only cuts one way.
The political prisoners will have to wait for Trump's inauguration, assuming he isn't assassinated first.
The comments on this readily predictable decision clearly establishes that NYT readership contains a plethora of partisan pinheads.
"...sided with a member of the mob..."
How cute.
So how many of the persecuted patriots of January 6th have spent time in prison that wouldn't have been spent as of today if the DoJ hadn't twisted Sarbanes-Oxley this way? Do they get any compensation for the time spent in prison that was unjustly assigned?
The prosecutors involved in this really should pay the monetary compensation out of their own pockets- it is really the only way to prevent this sort of shit from happening in the first place. In the end no one is held responsible since it is all passive "mistakes were made" horseshit.
The thing that is clear is that statute was devised for that purpose capisce
Adam Liptak is one of the bags of dogshit that write about D.C. politics.
Not devised it was about destroying records subpoenaed by government
In junior high I started a craze where we used to trace our hands with chalk on the board and write the words "The Mob" on the palm area.
Good times.
"Most Jan. 6 defendants have not been charged under the law..."
- Liptak
"After the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, federal prosecutors charged more than 350 participants in the pro-Trump mob with obstructing or impeding an official proceeding."
- W. Post
I'm surprised that it had escaped my attention that this case was centered on Sarbanes-Oxley.
I suppose that if the press widely reported that a law regulating corporate financial record-keeping practices was used to incarcerate political protestors, it might risibly conflict with the political sensibilities of journalists and reflect badly upon Democrats.
"Joseph Fischer allegedly participated in a riot at the Capitol that forced the delay of Congress’s joint session on January 6th. Blocking an official proceeding from moving for-
ward surely qualifies as obstructing or impeding the proceeding by means other than document destruction. Fischer’s alleged conduct thus falls within (c)(2)’s scope."
- Justice Barrett
"the law criminalizes any act that “corruptly … obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so” and is punishable by up to 20 years in prison."
You'd need a bigger Gulag if Barrett's opinion were to hold. She's becoming a disappointment, favoring Government control of the people and trusting it to exercise that control fairly.
Torture of Political Prisoners are the new fruit of the Soros-Obama-Biden tree. If Trump loses, then DC will need renaming as KGB Gulag City with monuments.
But the Supremes even having an opinion irks the Dem Crime Gang. Here comes the Dems cancel the Supreme Court push.
No miss barrett the protests were designed to stop the objections
There were "serious" cases? That's news to me.
Maynard said...
Can anyone explain Brown Jackson voting with the majority and Coney Barrett voting with the minority?
Neither of them seem to be particularly intelligent nor do they have the ability to read the constitution.
But they graduated from the right schools.
But they graduated from the right schools.
Barrett graduated from Notre Dame.
Code Pink just breathed a big sigh of relief, they won't be convicted for obstructing so very many Senate and House hearings with pre-planned protests for the cameras. Not that they ever were, anyway.
"Can anyone explain Brown Jackson voting with the majority and Coney Barrett voting with the minority?" Step 1, read the opinions. My guess is that Brown Jackson voted with the majority because she agreed with the majority opinion, and Coney Barrett agreed with the dissent. Does it have to be more complicated than that? If so, step 2 is to explain Why it's more complicated than that.
"Can anyone explain Brown Jackson voting with the majority and Coney Barrett voting with the minority?"
Simple. The J6 cases are political, and the Justices wanted to avoid a partisan split that had 6 Rs on one side and 3 Ds on the other. So jackson and ACB switched sides. It didn't matter because Roberts had the votes.
If you remember the 2000 Gore v. Bush case Breyer actually voted with the majority but then wrote a concurring opinion that would've allowed the Recount to go on and Gove to win. He joined with the R's to make it seem "Nonpartisan" .
Love how the Pravda - NYT's NEVER lets go of the politically charged language. J6's are a "Mob" that "Stormed the capital". Even though of the 1000 J6ers who've been charged only about a 100 have been arrested for any violence or damage. The rest just walked in, or in many cases were let in by the Guards.
In fact, many protesters who NEVER entered the Building have been put in prison, merely for being on the grounds.
--- Barrett graduated from Notre Dame.
But she's certainly not intelligent. At least, not in Robespierre's league.
i love how the MSM says: 'the overwhelming majority were Not charged with this law'..
instead of:
A quarter of protesters HAVE been charged under this law, and MOST were threatened with it
SCOTUS ruling on Jan 6th obstruction charge materially affects at most about 6% of all Jan 6th cases. That leaves about 94% of the cases materially unaffected..
Supreme Court says prosecutors improperly charged some Jan. 6 defendants
https://www.npr.org/2024/06/14/nx-s1-5005999/supreme-court-jan-6-prosecutions
RCOCEAN II said...
Love how the Pravda - NYT's NEVER lets go of the politically charged language. J6's are a "Mob" that "Stormed the capital". Even though of the 1000 J6ers who've been charged only about a 100 have been arrested for any violence or damage. The rest just walked in, or in many cases were let in by the Guards.
In fact, many protesters who NEVER entered the Building have been put in prison, merely for being on the grounds.
Name some. Can you name one? A protester who "never entered the building [and was] merely... on the grounds"? I can; but it would be Enrique Tarrio. (And a few other ringleader charged/convicted insurrectionists.)
You're talking about some imaginary class of peaceful protesters, aren't you? I could help you with some links to DoJ and NPR spreadsheets of convictions and guilty pleas, but I'm not that kind of guy. You can do it however you want to. Tell us all about the innocents who have been persecuted for January 6.
I don't think you can do it.
A Pelosi-rrection, a Whitmer conspiracy, demos-cracy is aborted at the twilight fringe in novel Green (toxic) deals.
This was pure LawFare, and every attorney and judge who signed on to it should be disbarred. It involves an intentional misinterpretation of 18 USC 1512(c), which has two parts: (c)(1) that lists some types of financial crimes, and (c)(2) adds otherwise obstructing an official proceeding. It reads:
(c) Whoever corruptly—
(1) alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding; or
(2) otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so,
shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both
Normal rules of statutory construction require that (c)(2) be interpreted in view of (c)(1), limiting what types of official proceedings covered by (c)(2). The “otherwise” makes that explicit. But by taking (c)(2) out of the context of (c)(1), they invented themselves a handy Obstruction of Official Proceeding criminal statute. It was, of course, a fairly blatant Due Process violation, since those J6 defendants couldn’t have been on notice that their almost entirely peaceful protests of the crooked election would be a felony, since a fair interpretation of § 1512(c) would not have put them on notice that their protesting was a felony.
Bruce Hayden said...
This was pure LawFare, and every attorney and judge who signed on to it should be disbarred...
What a fucking TrumpWing joke you are, Bruce. I know that you are a lwayer. And you know that I am a lawyer. I don't even have to get into arguments about the merits of the Fischer case itself, or any debate about which opinion was correct.
You set the terms for what I now have to say. And I propose to rub your fucking nose in it.
You claim that the application of Section 1512(c) by the Justice Department was so outside of all prosecutorial bounds, so incomprehensible, that "every attorney and judge who signed on to it should be disbarred..."
You wanna know who "signed on" to this application of Section 1512(c)? Almost every judge below the level of the Supreme Court, that's who. And most SCOTUS Justices who do not have wives who are MAGA maniacs.
Thw following is from Just Security. Read it and weep:
2. Near unanimous support for the Justice Department’s interpretation of the statute by federal district court judges (14-1).
It is wrong to cast doubt on the DOJ’s decision to charge the 1512(c)(2) offense in connection with the January 6th events. Fourteen out of fifteen district court judges affirmed that the statute was applicable and rejected defense challenges analogous to Fischer’s interpretation of the statutory provision. Those fourteen judges include three Trump appointees (Judges Dabney L. Friedrich, Timothy J. Kelly, and Trevor N. McFadden). No Biden appointee has ruled on this issue.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in United States v. Fischer had upheld the DOJ’s interpretation of the statute in a 2-1 decision.
3. A reasonable interpretation of Section 1512(c)(2).
The Justice Department’s reading of the statute was entirely reasonable. Indeed, in addition to the many judges who had supported its usage, many an objective observer will be persuaded by Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s dissent in Fischer (see especially pages 2-3). Indeed, Justice Barrett, with Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joining, writes: “The case for the Government’s interpretation is straightforward.”
4. A practice followed by both the Trump and Biden administrations.
The Trump administration’s Department of Justice was the first to use this specific obstruction statute – 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2) – to prosecute individuals who participated in the Capitol riot (see for example, Indictment of Jacob Chansley on Jan. 11, 2021 and the Criminal Complaint against Joe Biggs on Jan. 19, 2021).
So you want to "disbar" dozens, perhaps hundreds, of attorneys in the Trump DoJ as well as the Biden DoJ? Along with 14 of the 15 United States District Court Judges in the DC Disctrict, plus their 14 or so U.S. Magistrates and their dozens of law clerks, 2 of the Judges of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (and their dozen or so law clerks), and finally Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett along with Justices Kagan and Sotomayor.
Good luck with that, sport.
Oh wait; I'm not done bashing Bruce quite yet. I had not done it before, but I have now read the DC Circuit Court of Appeals' decision in Fischer. Two of the sitting judges on the panel were Trump nominees (Judges Walker and Katsas). One (Judge Pan) was a Biden appointee. All three judges concurred in at least part of the decision. Judge Walker authored a dissent in which he agreed that the indictment should proceed, albeit with certain narrowed definitions of the crime and statute in question wherein he departed from his two other colleagues. For its part the (majority) Court's opinion noted additionally the number of times that the statute had been applied by other U.S. Circuits, confirming the DC's broadly plain-meaning interpretation. Just about every federal judge, with some very few exceptions, saw the statute's application as the DoJ saw it.
Again I say to you, Bruce; disagree all that you want with the terms of the various opinions at the District, Circuit and Supreme Court levels. They are all interesting statutory interpretation decisions written with intelligence and in good faith.
But your pontificating about how "[t]his was pure LawFare, and every attorney and judge who signed on to it should be disbarred," is just howlingly stupid. Consistent, in that regard, with so much of Trumpism.
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