Source: Reuters
“The U.S. Supreme Court raised the legal bar on Friday for prosecutors pursuing obstruction charges in the federal election subversion case against Donald Trump and defendants involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. The justices ruled 6-3 to throw out a lower court’s decision that had allowed a charge of corruptly obstructing an official proceeding — congressional certification of President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory over Trump that the rioters tried to block — against defendant Joseph Fischer, a former police officer. The court, in the decision authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, took a narrow view of the obstruction statute, saying that prosecutors must show that a defendant ‘impaired the availability or integrity’ of documents or other records related to an official proceeding — or attempted to do so.” (06/29/24)