Last week, however, Bowman pleaded guilty to “willfully or knowingly” raising a false fire alarm, a misdemeanor. Security footage casts doubt on Bowman’s claim that the alarm was accidental. It showed him pushing a pair of exit doors, then pulling a fire alarm on the wall next to them. Bowman then “walked away from those doors without looking back at them or trying to push them open,” as the police report put it.
This might seem like the end of the matter. Bowman will get probation and pay a fine. Congress can investigate further and discipline Bowman if it chooses. But such one-off mischief in the halls of Congress might not seem like a national issue.
Thanks to an overzealous Justice Department, it could well become one. Sitting on the Supreme Court’s docket is an important case about the meaning of a federal criminal statute that is ripe for partisan abuse. Passed after the Enron scandal of 2001 as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the law — which appears in the federal criminal code as 1512(c) — provides for up to 20 years in prison for altering or destroying documents or records to prevent their use in an government proceeding.
Since the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, the Justice Department has construed this powerful law to criminalize a wider array of activity, including physically delaying congressional proceedings. Three accused Jan. 6 rioters have challenged this novel use of the law at the Supreme Court. Their briefs argue that the law was aimed at punishing those who tamper with evidence and that its residual language criminalizing behavior that “otherwise obstructs” official proceedings should be read narrowly, with the law’s main focus in mind.
The Biden administration filed its reply brief this week, urging the justices not to take the case. It wants the statute to cover “the myriad and impossible-to-anticipate ways in which an official proceeding might be obstructed.” Would pulling a fire alarm fall into that category, turning a juvenile stunt into a 20-year felony?
Bowman seems concerned it might. He told reporters that he was “grateful that the United States Capitol Police General Counsel’s office agreed I did not obstruct nor intend to obstruct any House vote or proceedings.” But as Roll Call reported, “Capitol Police pushed back” on Bowman’s self-exoneration: “Our General Counsel did not, nor anyone in our Department, make that determination.”
You can see where this is going: Under the Biden administration’s sweeping interpretation of the law, pioneered to target Jan. 6 rioters, Bowman could be in jeopardy if the Justice Department decided to bring a case. It has declined so far, but federal prosecutors in a Republican administration might not make the same decision.
Tellingly, the Biden administration’s Supreme Court brief leans on procedural arguments — suggesting that even if review of the statute might be worthwhile, it is “unwarranted at this time.” But as the Bowman saga shows, the issue is pressing. The meaning of obstruction has been injudiciously reinterpreted in response to the shock of Jan. 6, and the consequences will continue to reverberate across the political system.
All laws can be abused. But this law in particular is a ticking time bomb because it bears directly on politics. Government is a procession of “official proceedings”; in democracies, many people and groups try to influence those proceedings. Does that activity need to be violent or otherwise illegal to be covered by the “otherwise obstructs” clause? The law doesn’t say.
The Jan. 6 riot was a singularly damaging event. The violence that day can be vigorously prosecuted as violence. Same for the property destruction. But there’s no such thing as a one-time use of a criminal law. The decision to stretch a statute designed to target evidence impairment to punish unrelated activity was a mistake.
With war abroad and an election approaching, turbulent times may be in store for U.S. politics. Civil unrest is possible — as is more Bowman-style mischief at the Capitol. Without Supreme Court intervention, the Biden administration’s legal distortion will hang over all of it, inviting both prosecutorial overreach and endless accusations of selective enforcement. There’s no better time than this term for the justices to hear the Jan. 6 obstruction case.
