Jan 6 Prosecutions Collapsed Yesterday: DOJ Waiving White Flag of Surrender
The January 6 prosecutions built on wet sand collapsed yesterday in the form of the change of plea and sentencing of Karl Dresch.
After charging Dresch with a felony when he was indicted on February 3 — “obstruction of an official proceeding” — yesterday the Biden Justice Department agreed to a plea disposition in which Dresch pled guilty to the least serious offense filed against him, i.e., unlawful “parading” inside the Capitol.
That is a “petty misdemeanor” charge which has a maximum potential sentence of six months — 183 days.
At the time of his arrest, the prosecutors asked that Dresch be detained in custody pending trial. The basis for detaining Dresch was actually pretty solid. At the time of his arrest, FBI agents discovered multiple handguns and thousands of rounds of ammunition in his Michigan residence. The problem for Dresch is that he’s a convicted felon, making possession of firearms and ammunition a separate federal crime. The following day a new warrant was obtained and executed by ATF, seizing all the weapons and ammunition.
As for the January 6 case against him, Dresch was very active on social media both before and after January 6, using a lot of “provocative” language about what needed to be done in the aftermath of the election results. But his actual conduct inside the Capitol on January 6 was pretty benign — no violence or destructive behavior on his part.
Without any public indication that it was doing so, the government made a plea offer to Dresch sometime recently. The plea offer was that Dresch would enter a guilty plea to the “parading” petty misdemeanor, and the government would dismiss the remaining charges against him — including the felony.
I have already noted in an earlier story the extreme nature of departure this is from DOJ policy — prosecutors are not supposed to dismiss felonies in exchange for guilty pleas to misdemeanors.
There are several angles to explore here along the lines of some of my comments on Twitter today. I’m not going to get to all of those in this initial story, and as I noted some will be explored in more detail in an upcoming story in Human Events.
But, because of Dresch’s prior criminal history, he would have been facing a higher guideline range than did Paul Hodgkins who pled guilty and was sentenced on the felony “obstruction of an official proceeding” charge two weeks ago. In that case, the Probation Officer calculated his guideline range under the US Sentencing Guidelines at 15-21 months. Judge Moss sentenced him to only 8 months after the Biden Justice Department prosecutor asked for 18 months.
Drescher’s criminal history means that he would have been in a different “Category” of offender than was Hodgkins. If Dresch had been forced to plead guilty to the same crime, his guideline range would have been in the range of 27 to 41 months, depending on the precise details of his prior convictions in Michigan.
It is likely — especially if he pled guilty — that Judge Amy Berman Jackson would have gone below the guideline range in sentencing him, just as Judge Moss had done with Hodgkins. But because Dresch is a previously convicted felon, she could have stayed closer to the actual guideline range than did Judge Moss in sentencing Hodgkins who was a first-time offender.
What that means is that DOJ gave up a possible felony conviction with a 2+ year sentence in exchange for a petty misdemeanor guilty plea and a 6-month sentence already served.
From the live-tweeting done by certain reporters who listened in on the change of plea hearing, there isn’t any indication that Judge Jackson ever once mentioned the fact that the Biden Justice Department was dismissing a felony in exchange for a misdemeanor.
There is NOTHING normal about any of that — as Gen. Michael Flynn can attest.
Minute orders in several other cases appeared yesterday setting change of plea hearings. It seems like DOJ has opted to begin abandoning cases on whatever outcomes are readily available — likely because of the ongoing problems producing discovery and the fact that at least one Judge has begun to set trial dates within a time frame that DOJ has admitted it cannot be ready.
More to follow.
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