Common Dreams:

Yael Bromberg is a supervising attorney and teaching fellow with the Institute for Public Representation – Civil Rights Clinic, of Georgetown University Law Center. Ms. Bromberg is also a member of the DC Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. This article reflects Ms. Bromberg’s views, and not those of Georgetown University. Eirik Cheverud is a local attorney and member of the DC Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild.

On the morning of President Trump’s Inauguration, police trapped and arrested over 230 people. Some were anti-Trump demonstrators; some were not. The next day, federal prosecutors charged them all with “felony rioting,” a nonexistent crime in DC. The prosecution then launched a sweeping investigation into the defendants’ lives, demanding vast amounts of online information through secret warrants.

Prosecutors eventually dropped a few defendants, like journalists and legal observers, but simultaneously increased the charges against everyone else. The most recent indictment collectively charged over 200 people with felony rioting, felony incitement to riot, conspiracy to riot, and five property-damage crimes — all from broken windows. Each defendant is facing over 60 years in prison.

The prosecution next obtained warrants focused on anti-Trump organizers. One sought a list of all visitors to a website that organizers used to promote Inauguration Day protests. A second sought information on all Facebook friends and related communications of two organizers, the host of a coalition Facebook page, and those who simply “liked” that page. Despite legal challenges, a court recently decided to enforce the warrants, requiring only that personally-identifiable information be redacted for “irrelevant” material.

This unprecedented prosecution follows a drastic change in local law enforcement’s response to protest. The DC Office of Police Complaints issued a report critical of the mass arrest, noting the departure from Standard Operating Procedure and the likelihood that police lacked individualized probable cause to arrest everyone. This is exactly the type of action new policies and statutes enacted in DC were meant to avoid, following a 2002 mass-arrest that caused the District to pay over $10 million in settlements.

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