George Washington University School of Law’s Program on Extremism has created an online resource for tracking the hundreds of criminal cases filed by the Biden Justice Department against United States citizens for their alleged actions on January 6th. The Administration has charged people from all 50 states, and as is reflected in the“Capitol Hill Siege” project archive, every case has been filed in the District of Columbia.
This was far from inevitable. Despite the fact that the events on January 6th all culminated at the United States Capitol, according to federal court rules, not a single trial is required to take place in the District of Columbia. The rules do not require that the Department of Justice demand that trials regarding the events of January 6th take place in the District of Columbia.
Yet, in opposing a motion for change of venue filed by defendant Jenny Cudd, the Biden Justice Department is insisting that the trial take place in the District of Columbia. The rationale? Well, according to the DOJ, the Watergate trials took place in the District of Columbia, so why not the January 6th protest cases?
What the Biden Administration won’t outright say, but what all their legal sophistry cannot hide, is that their demand to conduct trials in the District of Columbia ultimately comes down to a question of who they want as jurors. The DOJ wants a jury drawn from a pool of potential jurors that voted 92% to 5% in favor of now-President Joe Biden (in the 2020 presidential election, Biden received 317,323 votes in the District of Columbia; former President Trump received 18,586).
If DOJ denies that this interest is paramount in its tactics for winning trials against January 6th defendants, then let it prove that to be the case—it should agree that any defendant who wants to be tried by a jury of his or her peers can have his or her trial in the District Court for the Northern District of West Virginia located in Martinsburg, a mere 77 miles from the District of Columbia federal courthouse.
Why would Martinsburg, West Virginia (which voted resoundingly for Donald Trump in 2020) not serve the interests of the Biden Administration to see that “justice” is done? Remember that for the DOJ, “justice” is not delivered only in the form of convictions—“justice” is provided by a fair trial and the verdict of an impartial jury based on the evidence offered by the government without regard to the outcome. The government is not entitled to convictions from juries, no matter how righteous it believes its cause to be.
