Special Counsel Jack Smith's attempt to prosecute Donald Trump may be hindered by Supreme Court challenges to a charge cited against hundreds of people prosecuted over the January 6 attack.The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has narrowly ruled in favor of the Department of Justice in two cases involving charges of obstruction of an official proceeding brought against suspects arrested over the Capitol riots in January 2021.
Supreme Court review of the Appeals Court ruling, Parloff wrote: 'The judges who wrote it can't agree about its holdings, and its holdings determine the viability of a 20-year felony that an ex-president and major presidential candidate now stands charged with violating.'Moreover, at the appeals court level, judges' acceptance of the Justice Department's interpretations of that law have been 100 percent correlated with the political party of the judge's appointer.