https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a20899676/inauguration-riot-trial-james-okeefe-video/
This Trial Was a Farce Even Before James O'Keefe Popped Up
Now it's on another level.
We all are paying for something very funky and very weird that's going on in a courtroom in Washington, D.C. Charges that never should have been brought are falling apart (again) because the prosecution—also d/b/a the U.S. government—has managed to get itself on the wrong side of a dispute involving James O'Keefe over an allegedly dishonestly edited video. Yeah, I didn't think it was possible, either.
Back on Inauguration Day in 2017, when a smaller crowd than usual showed up to see the new president* sworn in, there were marches and protests and disturbances all over Washington. There also were some people bent on destroying things for the hell of it. They smashed windows and burned a limo and, eventually, got the tear gas and police overreaction for which they'd been begging. This is where it really gets strange.
Instead of charging the actual vandals with destruction of property and aggravated mopery while wearing stupid masks, the government charged a whole mess of people with a whole truckload, including a rarely used statute concerning felony riot. The prosecution already has failed in one trial concerning these events: 59 people were acquitted last December after a farcical trial that was delayed repeatedly because none of the lawyers knew how to work the video technology. That left the government with the six people due to go to trial in June.
Getty Images
On Wednesday, a judge dropped the other shoe on the bungling prosecution. From ThinkProgress:
The federal prosecutor who has pursued hundreds of Trump inauguration protesters on unprecedented felony riot charges for over a year lied to the court about edits her team made to a key video filmed by right-wing operative James O'Keefe's organization, a judge found Wednesday. The ruling does not guarantee that the remaining defendants in the case will go free. Judge Robert Morin agreed with defense lawyers that Assistant U.S. Attorney Jennifer Kerkhoff had illegally suppressed evidence, but declined to make a final ruling on their motion to dismiss all charges in light of the government's cheating. That motion governs only one of several clusters of defendants who may yet land in prison for marching alongside people who broke windows and threw rocks. The full video captures an undercover police officer saying of organizers from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), "I don't think they know anything about any of the upper echelon stuff." But that moment was edited out of the video before prosecutors turned it over to defense counsel in an earlier case, and was only discovered after the court ordered the government to hand over the full, unedited files.
Violating the discovery rules established in Brady v. Maryland is Stupid Prosecutor Trick No. 1. That the government managed to do so while editing footage taken surreptitiously by James O'Keefe and his trolls, however, pushes this far beyond customary stupidity. But it shouldn't be a surprise.
First of all, no prosecution ever should rely on anything O'Keefe produces. Second, the original mass arrests were an abomination—people got busted for walking near other people who threw rocks. Finally, the overcharging of the people brought to trial was so blatant that any reasonable judge would have looked for any excuse to turn down the heat. In this case, of course, the prosecution managed to hand him a legitimate one. Let them pay the hundred bucks and walk away.
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