I'm John that's with Professor Richard Epstein to the Hoover Institution.

We go to federal court, well the highest federal court in the land that would be the

Supreme Court. The plan now is on April 16th the week of the 16th. The

plan now is on April 16th, the week of the 16th, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments about a case involving January 6th

and a man who's been convicted, Fisher is his name, of obstruction because as he says,

I was briefly in the building. Obstruction dates from the Enron case of earlier in the century.

The other federal case is the Supreme Court has agreed the week of the 22nd of April

to hear oral arguments on Donald Trump's claim that he's immune from

prosecution by Special Counsel Smith for the events of January 6 because he was in office and presidents are immune.

Professor the Fisher case first, this is the word obstruction.

It would seem to be creative the way Mr. is using it given the original intent was to punish people

for destroying evidence.

Yeah, well I mean I regard the case as astonishing.

I had no idea what was going on, and I had not paid much attention to this, and last night I sat down and I read the statute, and I think it's just clearly wrong.

What you do here is you have a statute which is designed to deal with the alteration and mutilation

and destruction of various kinds of record documents or other objects.

And there's a case called Yates,

which provoked a very interesting discussion

in the Supreme Court, as to whether or not

the word tangible object in a statute which

was designed to deal with documentary fraud

would allow you to treat as evidence in a case of fish that was illegally caught

...