Donald Trump’s winning streak rolls on.
That’s bad news for Joe Biden.
And now the Supreme Court has smacked Jack Smith with a loss that has Democrats in tears.
A six-to-three majority on the Supreme Court handed Joe Biden’s weaponized Justice Department and Jack Smith a huge setback by narrowing the use of Section 1512(c)(2) of the Corporate Fraud and Accountability Act of 2002 to prosecute Donald Trump and his supporters on charges of obstructing an official proceeding with regards to January 6.
Two of the four charges in Smith’s sham indictment of Trump were for obstructing an official proceeding.
The Biden Justice Department used this statute to prosecute more than 350 Trump supporters and hit them with prison sentences of up to 20 years.
Congress initially passed this law – known as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act– after the Enron scandal of 2001.
The relevant legislative text was about corporate executives destroying documents.
Section 1512(c)(2) 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.
Joseph Fischer challenged his conviction on these grounds around the government’s use of the statute as being overly broad.
Chief Justice Roberts writing for the majority agreed, saying the government needed to prove January 6 defendants destroyed documents or interfered with the official record whereas the Biden Justice Department claimed their mere presence in the building amounted to obstruction.
“To prove a violation of Section 1512(c)(2), the Government must establish that the defendant impaired the availability or integrity for use in an official proceeding of records, documents, objects, or as we earlier explained, other things used in the proceeding, or attempted to do so,” Roberts wrote.
“The judgment of the D. C. Circuit is therefore vacated, and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion,” Roberts added.
Roberts shot down the Biden administration jumping over statutes that described actual crimes that may have been committed to cherry-pick one section of law because it carried a greater prison sentence.
“The Government’s reading of Section 1512 would intrude on that deliberate arrangement of constitutional authority over federal crimes, giving prosecutors broad discretion to seek a 20- year maximum sentence for acts Congress saw fit to punish only with far shorter terms of imprisonment—for example, three years for harassment under §1512(d)(1), or ten years for threatening a juror under §1503,” Roberts added.
The Biden administration wanted to punish Trump supporters for opposing Biden so they reached for the harshest penalties possible without considering the law.
As for Smith, two of his charges against Trump are for the so-called “fake electors” plot, which was really just Trump supporters wanting an alternate slate of electors to challenge results like JFK did when he submitted an alternate slate of electors for Hawaii in the 1960 election.
The indictment accused Trump of using “knowingly false claims of election fraud to obstruct the federal government function by which those results are collected, counted, and certified.”
But now those charges look like they just got gutted.