Eyes are on Manhattan this week as jury selection in Donald Trump’s first criminal trial gets underway. But if you’re also interested in the fate of Trump’s federal election interference case in Washington, D.C., you’ll also want to follow an appeal being heard at the Supreme Court on Tuesday.
Such is the case of alleged January 6 rioter, Joseph Fischer. He was charged, among other things, with obstructing official proceedings. It’s a charge widely used against people who disrupted the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory. It’s also one of the charges Trump himself faces in the federal election interference case, so how the justices interpret it in Fischer’s case could also impact Trump’s prosecution.
Fischer says the government went too far by charging him under the federal obstruction law, which he says is aimed at tampering with evidence. But while both he and the former president are charged under that same statute, a Supreme Court victory for Fischer would not necessarily quash Trump’s obstruction charge.
Special prosecutor Jack Smith certainly doesn’t think so. In his Supreme Court brief ahead of Trump’s April 25 immunity hearing in the United States, Smith argues that Trump’s obstruction charges would survive even Fischer’s interpretation. At that point, the special counsel cited the alleged Trump-backed scheme to use fraudulent voter rolls during the joint session of Congress. So even where their charges overlap, Trump is in a different legal position than the rioters.
Of course, we’ll first see if Fischer wins his case at the Supreme Court, and then we’ll look at the rationale of the ruling to see how it applies to Trump’s case. It could have limited impact, and even then only on some of Trump’s charges. That’s because the former president faces four charges in his indictment against Washington, two of which are related to obstruction.
The justices are likely to rule on Fischer’s case in late June, the same unofficial deadline for a ruling in Trump’s immunity appeal. So if Trump’s case does actually go to trial in Washington — a dubious prospect given the Supreme Court’s decision to grant his immunity bid at all — it could be tried with the justices’ upcoming interpretation of the obstruction law in mind. Both Trump and Fischer have pleaded not guilty.
Regardless of the implications of Fischer’s call to Trump, it will be broadly relevant to other cases involving rioters on January 6. It could strengthen or topple dozens of such prosecutions.
But when it comes to the case of Trump’s federal election interference, the upcoming Fischer ruling is another potential headache for Smith in his bid to try the presumptive Republican nominee for November’s presidential election. A victory for Trump would put him back in the same office where the entire alleged election interference scheme was designed to keep him in. And the office would give him the power to destroy the very cause that wants to hold him accountable for that effort.
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This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
