No Shot at a Fair Trial for January 6 Defendants in the Swamp

Biden’s Justice Department relies on the Beltway trifecta—partisan federal judges, news outlets, and prospective jurors—to codify its punitive prosecution and criminalize political dissent.

he first set of trials for the hundreds of protesters charged in the Justice Department’s sweeping criminal investigation into January 6 begins later this month. Since the Capitol building is considered the scene of the crime, every trial will be held in the District of Columbia—which means the jury pool will be composed solely of residents living in the nation’s capital.

To say this is a problem for Trump supporters facing even minor charges is a huge understatement.

January 6 defendants already have suffered the wrath of D.C.-based federal judges who’ve imposed unusually harsh prison sentences for low level misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies while routinely berating defendants from the bench.

For example, before sentencing a man who pleaded guilty to “parading” in the Capitol to serve 14 days in prison, D.C. District Court Judge Amit Mehta, an Obama appointee, declared that January 6 protesters were “told lies, told falsehoods, told our election was stolen when it clearly was not.” The defendant, Mehta claimed, “was a pawn in a game directed and played by people who should know better.”

Now the fate of hundreds of January 6 defendants is in the hands of biased judges like Mehta and a city populated with government workers who voted nearly 94 percent for Joe Biden in 2020, prompting some defense attorneys to try to move trials out of Washington. In July, a defense lawyer in one high-profile case filed a change of venue motion before Judge Mehta that explained why January 6 defendants could not get a fair trial in such a heavily Democratic, politically obsessed city. “The level of antipathy towards Trump and his supporters in the District is off the charts and makes it impossible to find an impartial jury,” David W. Fischer, the attorney representing Thomas Caldwell, charged in the multi-defendant Oath Keepers prosecution.

Politicians and the media continue falsely to portray January 6 defendants as racists, Fischer continued, an accusation certain to enrage potential jurors in a city evenly split between blacks and left-wing whites. “President Biden, in a speech ironically advertised as intended to heal America’s racial divide, referred to January 6th Trump protesters as ‘thugs, insurrectionists, political extremists, and white supremacists.’ At his confirmation hearing, Attorney General Merrick Garland pledged to ‘supervise the prosecution of white supremacists and others who stormed the Capitol on 6 January.’”

District residents “largely style themselves as chic, sophisticated, worldly, high-brow urbanites . . . repulsed by rural America’s traditional values, patriotism, religion, gun ownership, and perceived lack of education,” Fischer concluded, and further noted he has heard other D.C.-based defense attorneys refer to Trump supporters as “hillbillies” and “white trash.”

Judge Mehta, who has lived in or near Washington almost all of his adult life and clearly blames Donald Trump for what happened in...

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