Justices to decide scope of charge in Trump case

Obstruction key to Jan. 6 case as trial delayed

The Supreme Court agreed Wednesday to decide a question at the heart of the federal election interference case against former president Donald Trump and hundreds of prosecutions arising from the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021: Can the government charge defendants in those cases under a federal law that makes it a crime to corruptly obstruct an official congressional proceeding?

The decision to hear the case will complicate and perhaps delay the start of Trump’s trial, now scheduled to take place in Washington in March. The Supreme Court’s ultimate ruling, which may not arrive until June, is likely to address the viability of two of the main counts against Trump. It could severely limit efforts by the special counsel, Jack Smith, to hold the former president accountable for the violence of his supporters at the Capitol.

The court’s eventual decision could also invalidate convictions that have already been secured against scores of Trump’s followers who took part in the assault. That would be an enormous blow to the government’s prosecutions of the Jan. 6 riot cases.

The case the court agreed to hear involves Joseph Fischer, who was indicted on seven charges for his role in the Capitol attack. Prosecutors say he assaulted police officers as Congress met to certify the results of the 2020 election. Like hundreds of other rioters whose actions disrupted the certification proceeding in the Capitol, Fischer was charged with the obstruction count, formally known as 18 USC 1512.

Fischer sought dismissal of a portion of the indictment brought under the obstruction law, which was passed as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, a statute aimed primarily at white-collar crime. Prosecutors have routinely used the obstruction charge, in lieu of more politically contentious counts like insurrection or seditious conspiracy, to describe how members of the proTrump mob disrupted the peaceful transfer of presidential power.

Judge Carl J. Nichols of the US District Court in Washington granted Fischer’s motion to dismiss, saying that the law required defendants to take “some action with respect to a document, record, or other object” — something he said was missing from Fischer’s conduct at the Capitol.

A divided three-judge panel on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reversed Nichols’s decision, ruling that the law “applies to all forms of corrupt obstruction of an official proceeding.” Three Jan. 6 defendants, including Fischer, ultimately asked the Supreme Court to decide whether the law had been properly applied to the Capitol attack.

The obstruction charge was never an easy fit in the cases stemming from the storming of the Capitol. When it was passed in the early 2000s, the law was aimed at curbing corporate malfeasance by outlawing things like destroying documents or tampering with witnesses or evidence.

Defense lawyers representing Jan. 6 rioters argued that federal prosecutors improperly stretched their scope to cover the violence that erupted at the Capitol and interfered with the proceeding in which lawmakers had gathered to certify the results of the election.

The lawyers also took issue with using the charge against people who stormed the Capitol, saying that many were not acting “corruptly,” as the law requires, because they believed they were protesting a stolen election.

“The statute has been used to over-criminalize the Jan. 6 cases,” said Norm Pattis, a lawyer for Jake Lang, one of the three defendants who appealed to the Supreme Court. “Congress never intended that.”

Pattis said the Supreme Court’s review was “significant” in hundreds of criminal cases stemming from the Capitol riot and was also “yet another reason the 2024 case against Donald Trump should be delayed.”