Former President Donald J. Trump has been indicted by a D.C. grand jury on four counts for his alleged role in instigating the Capitol protest on January 6 and related efforts to prevent swing states and Congress from ultimately certifying Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential election.
"The attack on our nation's Capitol on January 6, 2021 was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy. It is described in the indictment as fueled by lies." The case appears to be assigned to Judge Tanya Chutkan, appointed to the D.C. District Court by Barack Obama in 2014.
Much of the indictment focused on the pressure campaign against former Vice President Michael Pence and the so-called "Fake electors" stunt tied to numerous Trump associates including Clark and Trump's election attorney John Eastman-a description of one of the attorneys named as a co-conspirator appears to Eastman-the author of the controversial memo outlining how Pence could use an alternative slate of electors in contested states to replace Biden electors during the January 6 proceedings.
After D.C. District Court Judge Carl Nichols twice dismissed the charge against January 6 defendants-the only judge to do so-DOJ appealed his decision to the Circuit Court.
"1512(c)(2) has been on the books for two decades and charged in thousands of cases-yet until the prosecutions arising from the January 6 riot, it was uniformly treated as an evidence-impairment crime [Until] the January 6 prosecutions, courts had no occasion to consider whether it sweeps more broadly, because all the caselaw had involved conduct plainly intended to hinder the flow of truthful evidence to a proceeding." Defense attorneys representing two separate January 6 defendants are seeking relief at the Supreme Court.
DOJ enjoys a near-perfect conviction rate in January 6 cases; many defendants choose to accept plea offers from the government rather than take their chances with a jury composed of residents in a city that voted 92 percent for Biden.
While admittedly a longshot, case law in January 6 cases gives Smith the grounds to seek pretrial detention for the former president.
No comments:
Post a Comment