https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/10/splintered-court-ruling-throws-j6-prosecution-into-chaos/
A Massachusetts man on Friday was charged with a felony related to his participation in the protest at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Mark Sahady already faced misdemeanors for his nonviolent and brief jaunt through the building that afternoon, but the Justice Department decided to add the common “obstruction of an official proceeding” charge to Sahady’s case on April 7.
That same day, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia threw Sahady—and more than 300 January 6 defendants charged with the same obstruction felony—a potential lifeline. In what one judge described as a “splintered decision,” a three-judge panel narrowly reversed a lower court ruling that tossed the obstruction count against three Capitol protesters. D.C. District Court Judge Carl Nichols dismissed the charge last year largely based on the argument that the statute “requires that the defendant have taken some action with respect to a document, record, or other object in order to corruptly obstruct, impede or influence an official proceeding.”
A fair reading of the law proves Nichols is correct. Passed in 2002 in the wake of the Enron scandal as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, section 1512(c)(2) closed a legal loophole related to evidence tampering. The law applies to “whoever corruptly . . . otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so.” It’s a crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
When he signed the bill into law in 2002, President George W. Bush, as I explained here, noted that the word “corruptly” would compel the government to prove a defendant’s “criminal state of mind” and the overall provision must not infringe “on the constitutional right to petition the Government for redress of grievances.”
But that hasn’t prevented Attorney General Merrick Garland from weaponizing the statute in exactly that way for more than two years. Dozens of defendants have pleaded guilty or been convicted at trial. Jacob Chansley, the “QAnon Shaman,” spent months in solitary confinement and was denied bail before Garland’s prosecutors successfully tormented him into pleading guilty to obstruction. Judge Royce Lamberth, who repeatedly denied his release, sentenced Chansley to 41 months in prison.