US Attorney Says Prosecutors Turning Down Some Jan. 6 Cases

Attorney General Merrick Garland (R) speaks as officials, including the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Matthew Graves (2nd L), listen in Washington on May 4, 2023. Win McNamee/Getty Images

Federal prosecutors have charged more than 1,500 people in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol. They could have brought charges in hundreds of other cases but decided not to, the top U.S. prosecutor in Washington says.

“We have turned down hundreds of cases where the FBI is saying, ‘There is evidence here; it’s your determination, prosecutors, whether you think this should be prosecuted,’” U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew Graves told CBS’s “60 Minutes” in an interview that aired on Sept. 15.

The FBI declined to comment.

Career prosecutors in the U.S. Department of Justice established guidelines shortly after the breach regarding when to bring charges, according to Graves. Prosecutors have generally focused on people who entered the Capitol, helped others enter the building, committed violence, or illegally carried weapons on Capitol grounds.

The cases presented to prosecutors and turned down “don’t fit within the guidelines that the career prosecutors had been using, or we don’t think that there’s sufficient evidence to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt,” Graves said.

The Department of Justice prosecutors reviewed cases involving obstruction of an official proceeding, a charge that had been applied in hundreds of cases before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that prosecutors were using it too broadly.

The law in question enables charges to be brought against a person who corruptly “alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding” or who “otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so.”

Federal prosecutors have been using a novel interpretation of the law that, if allowed to continue, “would criminalize a broad swath of prosaic conduct, exposing activists and lobbyists alike to decades in prison,” Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority in the June ruling.

Since the ruling, prosecutors have dropped the obstruction charges against about 60 defendants, while sticking with the charges for about 13 others, according to a Department of Justice statement.

Of the individuals who have been convicted, the government has not opposed vacating the charges in about 40 cases.

There are some cases in each category that prosecutors are still reviewing.

One convict has had his sentence reduced in the wake of the ruling.

Overall, as of Sept. 6, federal prosecutors had charged about 1,504 people with crimes related to Jan. 6, 2021.