Federal prosecutor accused of mishandling evidence in Trump inauguration protest cases
By Katelyn Polantz and Tierney Sneed, CNN
(CNN) — A former federal prosecutor in Washington, DC, is facing attorney discipline proceedings after allegedly obscuring evidence in cases against people who protested Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration.
That evidence included video originally from the right-wing group Project Veritas, which the Justice Department prosecutor, Jennifer Kerkhoff Muyskens, formerly of the DC US Attorney’s Office, allegedly tried to obscure so the origin of the videos would be kept secret, according to a lengthy new complaint from the attorney discipline office in Washington, DC.
Muyskens was the lead prosecutor in more than 200 cases related to riots and property destruction around the 2017 inauguration, where there were several unpermitted protests against Trump that led to street clashes in the capital city. After one of the first few trials ended in acquittals, essentially all of the cases were eventually dropped by the Justice Department by mid-2018.
Project Veritas had covertly recorded meetings of a group that organized these anti-Trump protests, and the prosecutor had used versions of those videos that edited out key information, including that Project Veritas was behind the videos, the complaint says.
Muyskens also faces an accusation that she lied to the court and misled the grand jury, the complaint states.
CNN has reached out to Muyskens, the US attorney’s office in DC where she used to work, and the US attorney’s office in Utah where she appears to currently work.
Hiding evidence can be a serious violation of a criminal defendants’ rights.
Muyskens knew that her “editing of the original videos could hurt the prosecution and help the defense,” the complaint, from disciplinary counsel Hamilton Fox, says. Fox also claimed Muyskens’ “statements and omissions to the government … were false and misleading.”
The bar’s disciplinary lawyer is accusing Muysken of editing video that she used in the cases in a way that omitted exculpatory content from the footage, include content from the planning session that suggested that aim of the 2017 inauguration march was peaceful protest.
Muysken is also accused of withholding from defense teams video footage that showed “Project Veritas operatives discussing their infiltration operation of DisruptJ20, which supported the defense’s theory that Project Veritas conspired to blame DisruptJ20 for others’ misconduct,” the complaint says.
When the authenticity of the videos was challenged by the defense team in a 2017 trial in one of the cases, Muysken and another prosecutor allegedly “did not disclose how they had edited the original videos they received from Project Veritas, nor did they disclose that they had omitted from discovery many other videos Project Veritas videos of DisruptJ20’s planning meetings.”
The complaint alleges that Muysken also made false and misleading statements in both the probe by the bar’s disciplinary office and in an DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility investigations.
The-CNN-Wire
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