The judge who presided over Martin's trial was a man who was once a senior official in the Justice Department and a line prosecutor in the district. The judge has raised questions about whether the Jan. 6 defendants are being treated more harshly than the protesters. The judge who rendered a split verdict in the Vice President case was the same one who unnecessarily forced the government to reveal where the Secret Service took him.
The prosecutors claim that Martin should have known that he was not allowed in the Capitol during the riot was rejected by McFadden. I was not at the trial to see the evidence presented, but McFadden's position is very.
The judgement of other Trump-appointed judges has been questionable in the Jan. 6 prosecutions. The government's central theory in the first trial was that Guy Reffitt had corruptly impeded Congress in certifying the electoral votes. The jury found him guilty within a matter of hours after he brought a weapon to the Capitol grounds and wentaded a mob to overtake a small number of Capitol police officers who were trying to hold them at bay. Friedrich complained about how long the trial was taking even though several days had been eaten up by the judge's inefficient jury selection process and the courtroom.
The first judge in the district to dismiss the Justice Department's obstruction-of-Congress charge was Judge Carl Nichols. His opinion, which concludes that the relevant statutory provision only prohibits obstruction with respect to a document, record, or other object, is borderline incomprehensible and relies on very strained interpretive inferences. The conclusion of the decision is more like an opinion than a legal analysis. Trump's legal defenders have argued that he can't be charged with obstruction of justice because of his actions to impede the investigation.
In the case of the contempt charge against Steve Bannon, the judge ruled that he cannot rely on the advice of his lawyer as a defense, but before that, he ordered the Justice Department to provide internal documents about the government. Since there are legal privileges and protections that insulate this material from disclosure and a policy to the contrary could chill good faith among government officials, it's highly unusual for a judge to direct prosecutors to provide information along these lines. If there was evidence that would support a serious claim ofselective prosecution, that would be a good thing, but there isn't any.
The work of being a federal trial judge used to be seen as mostly a political one. Most criminal cases are resolved using mostly settled and uncontroversial legal rules and principles. The district judge who was appointed by George W. Bush ruled against the administration on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
The recent and very dubious decisions by Trump appointees in criminal cases seem to confirm some of the concerns that many observers had about the quality and intellectual independence of Trump's appointments to the federal trial courts. This suggests that we may have entered a new era in which the judiciary at the lowest levels operates in a politicized manner in important cases. There is a veneer of a broad and consistent conservative legal philosophy at the Supreme Court. The actions of the Trump appointees in the Jan. 6 prosecutions seem to suggest that the outcome for defendants at the trial level could depend less on the merits of the arguments and more on the political persuasion of the presiding judge.
There is no easy solution to this problem. It may be one of the more unfortunate legacies of the Trump years. We don't have to pretend that this is normal.
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