Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Will Scharf is running for Attorney General in Missouri. Scharf was instrumental in confirming Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, and wrote legislation that put an end to “abortion sanctuary cities” in Missouri.
On Thursday Scharf joined Ivory Hecker on Gateway: Beyond the Headlines to discuss the recent news that the Supreme Court will hear the lawsuit involving the unconstitutional DOJ 1512(c)(2) charges against Trump supporters protesting on January 6 at the US Capitol.
Will Scharf broke this down for the Gateway: Beyond the Headlines audience.
Will Scharf: What we’re dealing with here is a statute. It’s 18 United States Code 1512. The parts of the statute in question were passed into law in 2004 as part of the Sarbanes Oxley law, which was a response to the Enron scandal and other primarily financial scandals. This particular subsection relates to evidence destruction, that sort of way of obstructing an official proceeding. What the DOJ has done here is taken that statute, that statutory provision, and attempted to apply it to the January 6 protesters and to President Trump himself on the theory that their objective was obstructing the electoral count process and that that falls within the catchment of this law. In front of the DC circuit, an outstanding conservative judge named Judge Katzus wrote a scathing dissent saying that this just made no legal sense at all, that there was no basis to be charging all of these people under this statute. And it affects, as you said, hundreds and hundreds of January 6 defendants in addition to President Trump himself.
Ivory Hecker: So how could this impact President Trump? Exactly? Because he’s got a list of charges against him.
Will Scharf: So in the DC federal case, the case brought by the Special Counsel’s team, Jack Smith, in relation to the events that occurred after the 2020 election. Two of the four charges are brought under this subsection. President Trump is charged with obstructing an official proceeding in violation of section 1512 and conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding in violation of section 1512. Now, if the Supreme Court were to rule that 1512 was improperly applied to these January 6 defendants, and I expect that the Supreme Court will, that would likely require the dismissal of both of those charges against President Trump, effectively gutting half of the case against him before we even get to trial or before we deal with other issues like presidential immunity or double jeopardy that we’re currently litigating…
…We expect that the Supreme Court will rule by the end of its term this June. But as you said, that’s little comfort to the hundreds of people who have been prosecuted in some cases convicted and put in prison based on this flawed understanding and flawed application of section 1512 and the January 6 stories, many of them really are tragic. I was speaking to a Missouri about a month and a half ago from Vernon county in western Missouri. He’s serving a year in prison for totally peacefully protesting in the Capitol. He walked in through an open door when they asked him to leave, he left. And yet he is sitting today in federal prison for engaging in what I believe is core political speech and peaceful protest. It’s un american. It’s tragic. And hopefully, the supreme Court will do something to alleviate the situation that’s been created here.
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