President Trump’s new US prosecutor in Washington has opened internal investigation into the use of a struggle of obstruction presented against dozens of people accused of participating in the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021, according to an email obtained by the new York Times.
The measure of Ed Martin, who was appointed by Trump last week to direct the federal prosecutor’s office, was the last example of how he has sought in recent days, even discredited, the broad investigation of the office on the Capitol’s attack . He arrived the same day that the senior officials of the Department of Justice fired several prosecutors who worked for special lawyer Jack Smith in two separate criminal cases presented against Trump.
In an email on Monday to the members of his staff, Mr. Martin described the use of the Obstruction Law, which was presented against more than 250 accused of January, as a “great failure of our office.”
“We need to get to the background,” he wrote, added that all prosecutors who work under him needed to deliver all “files, documents, notes, emails and other information” about their use of the statute as soon as possible.
Martin said he expected a preliminary report on the use of the office law to end before Friday, but it was not clear exactly what he intended to do with the reports of the report.
The United States Prosecutor’s Office essentially stopped using the position of obstruction, known in the Criminal Code as 18 USC 1512, in the cases of January 6 after the Supreme Court ruled last year that prosecutors had exceeded the use it.
The statute was initially used instead of more politically tense positions as a sedicious conspiracy to accuse people of interfering with the procedure in the Capitol on January 6, where Trump’s loss was certified in the elections.
But the judges said the prosecutors had gone beyond the original intention of the law, which was approved as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley law to criminalize things such as destroying documents or manipulating with witnesses in cases of corporate embezzlement.
Since he took over the United States prosecutor’s office, Martin has been executing Mr. Trump’s instructions to dismiss criminal cases related to January 6 that remain active in the Federal District Court in Washington, where all The procedures have been developed.
These instructions were part of the radical clemency proclamation that Trump issued on the day of the inauguration together with the orders to forgive more than 1,000 accused of January 6 and travel the sentences of another 14, which were accused of sedition as members of extreme right groups such as the oath guardians and the proud boys.
The motions of Mr. Martin to dismiss the cases have generated fierce criticisms of some federal judges in Washington who have reluctantly gone with their requests. But they have often done in orders that claim that nothing, not even a presidential decree, can erase the acts of what happened on January 6.
The path that Mr. Martin took to direct the federal prosecutor’s office that supervised the vast investigation of January 6 was, to say the least, an unusual.
He was an outstanding member of the “Stop The Weal” movement who sought to cancel Trump’s loss in the 2020 elections. The day before the assault on the Capitol, he called a speech so that the “true Americans” to the real ones ” until his “last breath” to “stop theft.”
He was also in the Capitol on January 6, according to his publications on social networks.
“As Mardi Gras in DC today: love, faith and joy,” he wrote in a publication. “Ignore #Fakenews. “
In addition, Mr. Martin is still List as a member of the Board of the Patriot Freedom project, one of the most outstanding funds collection organizations that work to help pay the legal fees for the defendants of January 6. He has also represented some of those defendants, facing the same federal prosecutors he now leads.
At the end of last week, Mr. Martin took the unusual step to insert himself in the case of Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the guardians of Oath, who was recently released from prison by Trump’s Clemencia Grant.
Acting even before Mr. Rhodes’s defense lawyers did, Martin opposed an order issued by the judge in the case of Mr. Rhodes who prohibited the extreme leader from visiting Washington without permission.
In the judicial documents presented on Friday, Mr. Martin argued that the judge, Amit P. Mehta, had exceeded his authority by prohibiting Mr. Rhodes and several other members of the oath guardians entering Washington.
On Monday, Judge Mehta terminated his order, admitting that the “unconditional” nature of Trump’s proclamation of clemency meant that he could not impose restrictions on the movements of Mr. Rhodes now that he is out of custody.
Mr. Martin’s decision to break for Mr. Rhodes was unusual for several reasons.
First, it was an impressive reversion for the federal prosecutor in Washington, which supervised all criminal cases on January 6 and assured the convictions of Mr. Rhodes and other members of the oath guardians at the end of 2022.
In addition, Mr. Martin signed the judicial documents that oppose the travel restrictions of Judge Mehta to Mr. Rhodes personally, an unusual movement for an American prosecutor who generally has subordinated legal reports files.
The order of Judge Mehta, except Mr. Rhodes of Washington, unless he had his permission after the extreme right leader appeared in the city after Trump’s possession. During that trip, he visited a Dunkin ‘in Capitol Hill and the local prison where many accused of January had been held.
During the weekend, Mr. Rhodes also attended a Trump event in Las Vegas, sitting in an area behind the president with another notorious figure of the extreme right: Cliven Bundy, the Nevada rancher who led an armed confrontation against officials Federal Land Management in 2014.
Mr. Rhodes and the Kath Keepers participated in that confrontation, which ended when the land administration office renounced their attempts to confiscate the Bundy family cattle in an effort to solve a dispute over Bundys’s refusal to pay grazing to the federal. government.
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