Judge Rejects Jan. 6 Defendant’s Bid To Delay Case Until Trump Can Pardon Him

Donald Trump’s projected victory in the presidential race has already prompted one Jan. 6 defendant to ask a federal judge for a delay to his case because Trump has “made multiple clemency promises” to nonviolent offenders.
That request was swiftly denied by a federal judge on Wednesday.
Christopher Carnell of North Carolina was just 18 years old when he and David Worth Bowman, 22, also of North Carolina, entered the U.S. Capitol among the mob of rioters on Jan. 6, 2021. They made their way inside by climbing through a Senate Wing door. Once inside, Carnell went through the crypt and rotunda and then entered the Senate chamber, where he observed other rioters and talked with them about documents they found on senators’ desks.
Carnell even remarked to another rioter rummaging through the documents that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) “is on our side” and “he’s with us.”
Carnell has a status hearing for his case slated for Nov. 8.
In a three-page filing entered onto the federal criminal docket in Washington, D.C.. on Wednesday, he urged the court to reconsider that hearing.
“The Court has asked the parties to present status arguments on Nov. 8, 2024, but as of today, Mr. Carnell is now awaiting further information from the Office of the President-elect regarding the timing and expected scope of clemency actions relevant to his case,” Carnell’s attorney wrote.
Carnell asked that the hearing be moved to Dec. 13, just two days after the deadline for the appointment of electors — when governors or other designated officials are required to certify each state’s presidential electors.
U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell rejected the request; she did not offer further explanation in her order. The hearing will stand for 9:30 a.m. on Nov. 8.
Carnell was found guilty at a stipulated bench trial with a single charge of obstruction of an official proceeding (a felony) and a number of misdemeanors, including entering and remaining in a restricted building and disorderly and disruptive conduct. The felony charge is the same one the Supreme Court narrowed this year in its Fischer v. United States ruling.
With its 6-3 decision, the conservative-leaning Supreme Court concluded that the statute used to charge Jan. 6 defendants with obstruction of an official proceeding actually meant that prosecutors had to prove defendants had impaired the availability or use of records, documents or objects used in an official proceeding. The disruption of the certification of electoral votes, in the high court’s eyes, didn’t meet that criteria.
On Oct. 7, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell issued an order vacating Carnell’s and Bowman’s felony obstruction charge. Up to that point, Carnell had asked the judge to dismiss the charge completely. A dismissal would mean prosecutors couldn’t take another shot at trying him for the obstruction charge under the narrowed meaning of the law. Prosecutors opposed a dismissal and asked instead that the judge allow them to retry Carnell on the single felony count. Carnell’s lawyers, unsurprisingly, rejected the idea and, on Oct. 23, Howell set a status conference for Nov. 8 to determine how the parties would proceed.
Looming over that hearing and many others is a critical question: Will Trump pardon Jan. 6 defendants, and, if so, will he contain clemency to nonviolent offenders like Carnell? Or will he open the gate to pardons for violent offenders too or convicted leaders of the seditious conspiracy to stop the transfer of power on Jan. 6, 2021?
James Lee Bright, an attorney who represented convicted seditious conspirator Elmer Stewart Rhodes at his monthslong trial, told HuffPost Wednesday that it’s “anybody’s guess” what Trump will ultimately do.
“I’m a bit of a cynic when it comes to politics so I am inherently skeptical of any politician, right, left, center or otherwise, of fulfilling, in a true sense, any promises that they’ve made on the campaign trail. While [Trump] is cut from a different cloth, Mr. Trump is at this point a politician,” Bright said.
For over a year, Trump has publicly declared that he would pardon Jan. 6 offenders, calling them “patriots” and “hostages.” During a panel at the National Association of Black Journalists conference this summer, he said he “absolutely” would pardon Jan. 6 defendants, even those who violently assaulted police.
“Oh, absolutely, I would. If they’re innocent. I would pardon them. They were convicted by a very tough system,” Trump said on July 31.
Bright admitted that while he is personally “biased” on the issue of Jan. 6 — the Texas lawyer said he does not think it was a “grand insurrection” but rather a “really bad day” where low-level offenders were “prosecuted to the hilt as a political bludgeon and talking point for political purposes” — he still isn’t 100% certain whether Trump would be a “man of his word” and actually pardon all offenders.
How pardons like that might influence or shape the way Americans regard the nation’s justice system is going to be “reflective of where you stand in your belief system about what did or did not happen that day,” Bright said.
Trump’s supporters and people sympathetic to those prosecuted for crimes connected to Jan. 6 have held the view for four years that the justice system was applied unfairly and that any notion of law and order went out the window already.
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An attorney for Carnell did not immediately respond to a HuffPost request for comment.