Jack Smith wants to see Donald Trump die in prison.
But Jack Smith got some bad news.
And that’s because Jack Smith will be red with rage when he sees this judge’s ruling.
Judge throws out obstruction charges against January 6 defendants after Supreme Court ruling
One of the sham charges Jack Smith filed against Donald Trump was obstruction of an official proceeding.
Prosecutors reached back to the 2022 Sarbanes-Oxley law passed in the wake of the Enron scandal to charge Trump supporters for “obstructing an official proceeding” by entering the Capitol.
The plain text of the law clearly stated the law applied to destroying documents and other evidence.
In the case of Fischer v. United States, the Supreme Court held the government unconstitutionally applied the obstruction of official proceeding statute to Trump supporters just for entering the Capitol.
This decision came back to haunt prosecutors when Obama appointee U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell ruled that Proud Boys members Nicholas Ochs and Nicholas DeCarlo be released from prison as the obstruction charges no longer held up in light of the Fischer case.
Howell wrote that while DeCarlo and Ochs intended to stop members of Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 election, that didn’t meet the definition of obstruction of an official proceeding.
“To the contrary, the record amply shows defendants’ intent to stop Members of Congress from proceeding with the certification,” Howell stated. “But Members are not evidence.”
Howell rejected prosecutors’ claim that DeCarlo and Ochs entering the Capitol forced members of Congress to remove the certificates of the slates of electors from the floor of the House.
“In the context of the overall catastrophic security breach posed by non-security screened rioters roaming Capitol corridors and rooms, the removal of the ballots from the Senate and House chambers preserved their availability for use in the certification process, rather than impaired that availability,” Howell added.
But the ballots changing location didn’t mean they were tampered with any way.
“No evidence suggests that the electoral ballots’ ‘integrity,’… was affected by the events on January 6, 2021, and the government does not argue otherwise. Due to the specific events that occurred on January 6, 2021, this theory of impaired availability stretches beyond a fair reading [of the Supreme Court ruling],” Howell added.
This case could also have reverberations for other January 6 defendants and Trump.
Howell is a leftist judge that the other left-wingers on the D.C. Circuit look to.
While her ruling isn’t binding on any other judge, it will carry weight with the other judges and defendants are likely to cite it on appeal.
Howell also handed down multiple negative rulings against Trump in other cases against Trump, such as allowing Jack Smith to pierce Donald Trump’s attorney client privilege in the Mar-a-Lago document hoax.
But Howell’s ruling in this case shows another pillar of Smith’s witch hunt against Trump is on the rocks.
