Source: https://www.lawfareblog.com/does-fbi-investigation-qualify-under-obstruction-justice-statutes-closer-look
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 06:53:44+00:00

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In the almost 120 years since Section 1505 and its predecessor have been on the books, no court appears to have ever held that an ongoing F.B.I. investigation qualifies as a “pending proceeding” within the meaning of the statute. Instead, Section 1505 applies to court or court-like proceedings to enforce federal law. In addition to prosecutions (where charges have been filed with a court), such proceedings include actions of enforcement by federal agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service, Securities and Exchange Commission or National Labor Relations Board, in which the agency has broad powers not merely to investigate statutory violations, but also to enforce them via subpoena or other administrative proceedings.
Foley may be right. A fair bit of authority suggests that an FBI criminal investigation is not a “pending proceeding” for the purposes of § 1505. The government has long conceded this point, in fact. Indeed, the U.S. Attorney’s Manual makes the blanket concession that “investigations by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are not section 1505 proceedings”—an interpretation that may well guide Special Counsel Robert Mueller in the conduct of his duties.
The case law on obstruction of FBI investigations is sparse in part because the Bureau can charge crimes that are much easier to prove—§ 1001 for making false statements, for instance—and because key modalities of obstruction of FBI investigation are individually criminalized. It is, for example, a crime to tamper with witnesses, a crime to bribe a law enforcement officer, and a crime to destroy evidence.
So is Trump off the hook on obstruction? Hardly. For one thing, it’s not entirely clear that Higgins is correct. At least some scholars doubt that the 36-year-old district court case, whose reasoning seems counter to a number of circuit court decisions defining “proceeding,” is the best reading of the law.
The obstruction statutes have generated enormous confusion and inconsistent analyses not only in the recent responses to allegations against President Trump, but also for decades in the courts. Georgetown Law Professor (and former federal prosecutor) Julie O’Sullivan argues that the obstruction statutes—”incompletely defined, redundant, and internally inconsistent”—are emblematic of larger problems in the U.S. criminal code. Because the code has been modified in reaction to specific events such as Enron, the provisions are “fairly incoherent, often overlapping, and overbroad—leaving much to the discretion of prosecutors.” When judges must fill in gaps and try to give coherence to the tangle of statutes, the result is often inconsistency across jurisdictions and difficulty predicting how a novel set of facts might be read against the statutes. So it’s perfectly possible that the Higgins interpretation of § 1505 will not be the prevailing one.
even if [the] narrower view [of § 1505] were to prevail, Trump arguably endeavored to influence two other investigations that, as others observe, are more clearly covered by the statute: the pending grand jury investigation of Michael Flynn, and the pending congressional investigations of Russia’s role in the election. The former, in particular, seems potentially significant, given that Trump expressly mentioned Flynn during the Valentine’s Day tête-à-tête, telling Comey “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.” So, there is at least some evidence that Trump made efforts to influence one or more potentially qualifying investigations, which could constitute one or more actus rei, although there are certainly arguments the other way.
Of course, we don’t know for sure that there is a grand jury proceeding to obstruct. While there have been reports of grand jury subpoenas in the investigation into Michael Flynn, it isn’t entirely clear when exactly those subpoenas went out and whether President Trump was aware of the grand jury investigation at the time of his potentially obstructive actions. But if the grand jury investigation did exist at the relevant time, and Trump knew that it existed, and he intended to obstruct it in some way, that could add up to violation of 18 U.S.C § 1503, a related provision of the criminal code focused on judicial proceedings.
In United States v. Kelley, the D.C. Circuit rejected the Higgins formulation, holding that an AID Inspector General investigation was a § 1505 proceeding. The court noted that where other courts have found purely investigative activities to fall within § 1505, “the investigations typically have involved agencies with some adjudicative power, or with the power to enhance their investigations through the issuance of subpoenas or warrants.” In other words, “[f]or an investigation to be considered a proceeding . . . it must be more than a ‘mere police investigation.’” Although the IG lacked rulemaking or adjudicative power, because it was “empowered to issue subpoenas and to compel sworn testimony in conjunction with an investigation,” its investigation counted as a § 1505 proceeding.
The Kelley test, then, is that the proceeding must be more than a “mere police investigation,” and the proxy for what is sufficiently more than a mere police investigation is whether the investigating agency has authority to issue subpoenas or warrants or compel sworn testimony in the matter. Other courts have adopted the Kelley test. The indictment in United States v. Pacific Gas & Electric alleged obstruction of an investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) of a fatal gas line explosion. PG&E moved to dismiss the § 1505 charges, arguing that, per Higgins, an NTSB investigation was not a 1505 proceeding. The court found that under the reasoning in Kelley, the NTSB investigation was a proceeding because the NTSB had broad authorities to enhance its investigation by issuing subpoenas, administering oaths, and holding hearings.
In other words, while a run-of-the-mill FBI criminal investigation may not qualify as a “proceeding” for purposes of § 1505, a counterintelligence investigation looks a lot more like the sort of proceeding described in Kelley. In counterintelligence investigations, the agency is fulfilling a broader mandate and accordingly has broader authorities. Indeed, National Security Letters look a lot like subpoenas.
Before Congress rewrote federal obstruction of justice law in 1982, § 1510 covered the obstruction of federal criminal investigations by “misrepresentation, intimidation, or force or threats thereof” as well as by bribery. All that remains of the original proscription is the prohibition on obstruction by bribery . . .
Prosecutions under subsection 1510(a) have been more infrequent since the enactment of 1512 in 1982, perhaps because § 1512 governs the obstruction of federal criminal investigations not only by corrupt persuasion such as bribery but also by intimidation, threat, deception, or physical force.
Defendant argues that 18 U.S.C. § 1512(b)(3) is not applicable to Defendant's conduct as set forth in the Information because a violation under that statute requires the Defendant to engage in misleading conduct toward a third person with the intent to hinder, delay, or prevent the communication to a law enforcement officer. Def.'s Resp. to Govt.'s Mem. in Aid of Sent'g at 5. As such, Defendant's argument is that he could not violate § 1512(b)(3) by directly misleading a federal law enforcement officer but rather that he must do so through a third party. The Court finds this argument is without merit. As previously mentioned, the statute requires that the defendant engage in misleading conduct toward "another person." Nothing in the statutory language appears to restrict the definition of "another person" to any non-federal law enforcement officer, and courts interpreting the provision have concluded that "another person" is commonly understood to mean "any person." See, e.g., Veal, 153 F.3d at 1245 ("As the district court found, there is no ambiguity in `another person,' which is easily and commonly understood to mean any person, regardless of whether he possessed knowledge of the commission or possible commission of a federal crime from being an eyewitness or investigating official.") . . .
In sum, it’s possible that § 1512 is the more appropriate statutory provision. It also happens to be easier to prove because it doesn’t require a “pending” proceeding (though the defendant must have contemplated the existence of some future proceeding in order to intend to obstruct it). But as Julie O’Sullivan highlights, the state of the law is a mess—predictably only in the vast array of conduct it could potentially sweep up.
This case is not going to be prosecuted in federal court like a normal obstruction case—at least not in the first instance. Whether the President is immune from indictment during his time in office is an open question; the longstanding position of the Executive Branch is that the sitting President cannot be prosecuted. At a minimum, in this view, he has to be impeached by the House of Representatives and removed from office by the Senate first. Even if you don’t accept this position, the Justice Department under Attorney General Sessions is not going to indict the sitting president. So the immediate question is not whether this pattern of behavior—or any individual component of it—could support a prosecution and criminal conviction for obstruction of justice. It’s whether it would support an impeachment in the House and a removal vote in the Senate.
The critical point is that impeachment for obstruction of justice is ultimately not just a legal question; it’s also a political question, albeit a political question highly inflected by the law and often discussed in the language of the law. The boundaries of the impeachable offense are not coextensive with the boundaries of the criminal law. There are things that are not criminal that are certainly impeachable, and there are crimes that are generally regarded as too trivial to trigger the Constitution’s standard in Article II § 4 of “Treason, Bribery, and other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” The great constitutional scholar Charles Black, in an excellent volume entitled, Impeachment: A Handbook written during the Watergate era, describes this point in vivid detail.
So the real question boils down to this: Does the pattern of conduct that is emerging, in the view of a majority of the House of Representatives and a two-thirds majority of the Senate, constitute an obstruction of justice of a type that is grounds for impeachment and removal?

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