According to a letter obtained by Bloomberg from a U.S. attorney, the Department of Justice is preparing to prosecute up to 1,000 additional individuals on crimes linked to the Jan. 6 Capitol invasion.
When the department was nearing its 900th arrest, United States Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew Graves submitted a one-page letter to Chief Judge of the D.C. District Court Beryl Howell on October 28, estimating that cases may be filed for between 700 and 1,200 additional defendants.
919 individuals have been charged with accessing a restricted government building or grounds, and 326 defendants have been charged with “assaulting, resisting, or impeding police or employees,” according to the Department of Justice.
“We expect the pace of bringing new cases will increase, in an orderly fashion, over the course of the next few months,” Graves told Howell, according to Bloomberg. Graves noted that predicting future cases is “incredibly difficult” given the “nature and the complexity of the investigation,” adding at the end that estimates may change as the office evaluates “changing resources and circumstances.”
Patricia Hartman, a spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office, told Bloomberg that the office will only comment on cases from January 6 through official filings.
The rising cases have clogged the court docket and strained resources at the federal public defender’s office and U.S. attorney’s office, according to Bloomberg. Attorney General Merrick Garland called it “one of the largest, most complex, and most resource-intensive investigations in our history” in a Jan 4. statement marking the two-year anniversary.
More on this story via The Western Journal:
Last month, FBI whistleblower George Hill testified before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, telling them that the FBI’s Washington Field Office requested the Boston Field Office open cases into each of 140 individuals who took a bus from Massachusetts to D.C. on Jan 6, despite the Washington office’s refusal to turn over video evidence proving those individuals were inside the Capitol. The Washington Office defended its decision by appealing to a need to “protect” the identity of potential undercover officers or confidential human sources on the videos, Hill said.CONTINUE READING…