Every DOJ Beat Journalist Fails to Mention a Dozen Judges Approved of 1512 Charge for January 6

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CNN didn’t mention it.

WSJ didn’t mention it. (Update: they now have.)

WaPo didn’t mention it (though it did break the news that Ed Martin says he’ll be appointed DC USAO). (Update: They’ve now added it.)

NBC didn’t mention it in a piece focusing on the firing of Trump investigators.

None of these outlets — among others — mentioned that every single DC District Judge approved the use of 18 USC 1512(c)(2) for January 6, and only Carl Nichols required that it include an evidentiary component (the stance ultimately adopted by SCOTUS).

  1. Dabney Friedrich, December 10, 2021, Sandlin*
  2. Amit Mehta, December 20, 2021, Caldwell*
  3. James Boasberg, December 21, 2021, Mostofsky
  4. Tim Kelly, December 28, 2021, Nordean; May 9, 2022, Hughes (by minute order), rejecting Miller
  5. Randolph Moss, December 28, 2021, Montgomery
  6. Beryl Howell, January 21, 2022, DeCarlo
  7. John Bates, February 1, 2022, McHugh; May 2, 2022 [on reconsideration]
  8. Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, February 9, 2022, Grider
  9. Richard Leon (by minute order), February 24, 2022, Costianes; May 26, 2022, Fitzsimons (post-Miller)
  10. Christopher Cooper, February 25, 2022, Robertson
  11. Rudolph Contreras, announced March 8, released March 14, Andries
  12. Paul Friedman, March 19, Puma
  13. Thomas Hogan, March 30, Sargent (opinion forthcoming)
  14. Trevor McFadden, May 6, Hale-Cusanelli
  15. Royce Lamberth, May 25, Bingert

None of these outlets mentioned DC Circuit approved the application.

None mentioned that when SCOTUS required an evidentiary component, they left open the possibility that the fake elector certificates would justify the application.

DOJ just launched an investigation into prosecutors who applied a law in a way approved by over a dozen judges, at least four of them Trump appointees.

Update: On Xitter, an influential propagandist, Julie Kelly, wondered who first applied the 18 USC 1512(c)(2) statute, claiming that Matthew Graves, who is Black, was too stupid to have done so.

I guess she didn’t consider basic rules of physics, which say that a guy confirmed in October 2021 could not have made the decision to charge (just as one example) Proud Boys Nicholas Ochs and DeCarlo with 1512 on February 4, 2021.

Update: 18 USC 1512(c)(2) was charged at least as early as January 11, 2021, with Jacob Chansley. Ed Martin is going to have to investigate Donald Trump! (Or at the very least, Michael Sherwin. He does not want to investigate Michael Sherwin, trust me on this.)

17 replies
  2. Boycurry says:

    So shouldn’t that be the end of it then? If the judges signed off, end of story, or beginning of setting the narrative to go after Garland and Smith?

    • Peterr says:

      The end of it will likely have to wait until a federal judge is faced with the new DOJ bringing some kind of charge against one of the old DOJ investigators, and gives the lawyer the same kind of “You’ve got to be f-ing kidding me!” as was delivered by the judge who put a temporary restraining order on the presidential executive order to gut the birthright citizenship clause of the constitution:

      “I’ve been on the bench for over four decades,” Coughenour, a Ronald Reagan appointee, said. “I can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order.”

      Hell, one of these lawyers simply applying for a search warrant before any charges would probably get the same kind of judicial reaction.

      Trump’s acting US Attorney for DC might not realize that pissing off the entire panel of DC Circuit judges, both District and Appellate, is probably not a good thing to do on your first week on the job, especially when you expect your office to be facing these judges for the next four years.

      Imagine the coin flip before the start of the Super Bowl, and after the referee shows both sides the coin and asks for the call, the captain of one of the teams spits in the referee’s face and says “This is for that call in the game two months ago. Now then, we call ‘heads.'”

  4. Scott_in_MI says:

    WaPo article mentions it now:

    “While the Supreme Court last June ruled that federal prosecutors could only apply it to defendants who sought to impair the integrity of physical evidence used to certify the 2020 presidential election result — and not to impede Congress’s overall certification on Jan. 6, 2021 — all but one of the 15 trial judges to rule on the question had sided with prosecutors’ broader, “catchall” view, as did two of three federal appellate judges.”

  5. dadidoc1 says:

    A new January 6th investigation would require testimony under oath. If so, wouldn’t the folks given blanket pardons be required to testify without fifth amendment protections?

    • TMooretxk says:

      In a Republican run committe, who do you think will subpoena them? (See Cassidy Hutchinson subpoena considerations)

  7. dopefish says:

    Joyce Vance’s substack has a good piece about this.

    The real witch hunt is here. And it’s a warning to all other federal employees to mind their loyalty if they want to keep their jobs. That’s the point. Trump knows he can’t lawfully fire these people in this manner. He wants to make the point that he’s willing to do it, in hopes others will stay in line.

    And if you want a real cheery thought-experiment, over on the Bulwark’s youtube channel, Jonathan V. Last and Tim Miller discuss for 15min how Trump’s frontal assault on the rule of law, immunity supplied by the SC, and lack of pushback from the media, R’s in Congress, etc. has created a system that is leading the U.S. to a very dark place. Like an opponents-of-Putin-falling-out-of-windows dark place.

    • dopefish says:

      Proofreading fail, sorry!
      “good piece about this” referred to an elided sentence. Pretend it says “about the purge of Federal prosecutors”.

      Edit: Good grief, Trump admin has so many massacres of civil servants in progress that I can’t keep them all straight. Schedule F? Inspectors-General? Jan 6 prosecutors? CDC Scientists working with WHO?

  8. Stephen Calhoun says:

    I wonder who the audience for the J6 rewrite is. It’s not the historians. It’s not MAGA in any transformative sense—MAGA, which has entertained a number of re-writes and spawned a revisionist cottage industry. It’s not the unbeliever (who remember what they saw on TV.). It’s not the old rule-of-law legal system.

    But, yes, this could be a way of founding the law-of-rulers system; a system where there is only one side.

    Can this effort survive without overturning the constitutional order? I have my doubts about whether the constitutional order can accommodate it. (And I write this and can’t help but acknowledge, “but what do I know?”)

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