“Political Protest Is Not a White Collar Crime”

Diana West

On July 30, 2002, President George W. Bush signed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a post-Enron law “aimed at fraud in corporations,” as summed up in a headline in the New York Times.

The newspaper elaborated:

The bill, an extensive overhaul of corporate fraud, securities and accounting laws, creates a regulatory board with investigative and enforcement powers to oversee the accounting industry and punish corrupt auditors. It also establishes new standards for prosecuting wrongdoing and gives corporate whistle-blowers broad new protections. Executives who deliberately defrauded investors would face long prison terms.

Did you know that this same bill crafted to stop white-collar-crime is being used as a big stick felony  charge against January 6 protestors?

I refer to the provision of the law against “obstruction of an official proceeding.” It’s a crime, the DOJ website tells us, which carries “a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, fine of $250,000 or twice the monetary gain or loss of the offense.”

The financial penalty — that fine of $250,000 “or twice the monetary gain or loss of the offense” — really gives it all away. That is, the crime this law is meant to prohibit is inextricably connected to financial activity, not political protest.

This provision already has an infamous and unjust past.

Perhaps its very first application was by mad-dog-prosecutor Andrew Weissman, who was able to convince a jury to convict and thus bankrupt the accounting firm Arthur Andersen for its business-as-usual, internal-policy-perfect destruction of Enron documents in the period before the company ever received a subpoena.

The Supreme Court overruled the lower court verdict, 9-0.

Now the misbegotten provision is being totally and willfully misapplied to political protest.

Indeed, in President Bush’s brief remarks on signing the bill twenty years ago, he singled out this one section of the lengthy law to reassure the American people that it would not be used to infringe on the People’s right to protest.

As Bush put it:

To ensure that no infringement on the constitutional right to petition the Government for redress of grievances occurs in the enforcement of section 1512(c) of title 18 of the U.S. Code, enacted by section 1102 of the Act, which among other things prohibits corruptly influencing any official proceeding, the executive branch shall construe the term “corruptly” in section 1512(c)(2) as requiring proof of a criminal state of mind on the part of the defendant.

It’s well worth remembering that the right to petition the Government for redress of grievance, as attorney Joseph D. McBride explains, was continually exercised across the country for much of the year 2020 during the George Floyds protests which preceded the January 6 protest.

“January 6 did not happen in a vacuum,” McBride recently told the Blaze’s Daniel Horowitz. “In the year or so that preceded January 6, you had all the BLM and Antifa riots all over the United States of America. We saw the burning down of cities, the attacking of police officers. Members of antifa out there in black bloc covered head to toe in full riot gear going at it with police, the looting of stores—you name it, we saw it.”

As reported by Deborah Heine in American Greatness:

It is also the stuff of dictatorships to twist the law, hold show trials, and criminalize the state of mind of the political opposition.

Diana West is an award-winning journalist, a syndicated columnist for 15 years, and the author of The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy (Center for Security Policy Press, 2019), American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character (St. Martin’s Press 2013) and The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization (St. Martin’s Press 2007). In Fall 2013, West brought out a companion volume to American Betrayal titled The Rebuttal: Defending American Betrayal from the Book-Burners, which includes essays by the late Vladimir Bukovsky and M. Stanton Evans. She blogs at dianawest.net, and makes videos here. Having earned her Twitter suspension, Diana now thinks aloud and uncensored at Gab @realDianaWest.