An assistant U.S. attorney in Utah faces an ethics complaint alleging that she withheld and doctored evidence when she was prosecuting more than 200 demonstrators at Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration in Washington in 2017.
Jennifer Kerkhoff Muyskens is accused of using undercover footage taken by the conservative activist group Project Veritas and concealing the source of it when prosecuting protesters for rioting after some in the group smashed windows, damaged a limousine and threw objects at police.
Some 230 individuals were charged with felonies as a result of their participation in the protests, whether or not they had committed violent acts. The first batch of defendants won acquittals, and a judge dismissed charges against a second group based on the prosecution concealing evidence. The charges against the remaining protesters were dropped in 2018.
The Project Veritas footage, taken at a series of planning and training meetings before the protest, was critical to the case, the complaint states, since it purportedly showed participants conspiring to plan the riot.
Project Veritas turned over a number of videos to authorities. Despite knowing the group’s reputation for selectively editing footage, Muyskens is accused of not divulging the source of the video. Nor did she disclose that she and an officer assigned to the case had edited the footage to conceal the presence of an undercover police officer and the Project Veritas operative who recorded the video, the ethics complaint alleges.
Additional Project Veritas videos, which showed the participants being told to practice nonviolence and taught de-escalation techniques, were also withheld from defense lawyers, the complaint alleges. Two judges who viewed the complete, unedited videos found that they would have helped the defense team.
After a judge explicitly ordered Muyskens to provide all of the videos it had, she added some new videos, but not all of them, the complaint states, and still did not disclose the source or the edits that had been made.
“The undisclosed videos consistently showed that protesters were trained and instructed to expect a nonviolent protest,” Hamilton P. Fox III, disciplinary counsel for the Washington, D.C., Board of Professional Responsibility, wrote in the charges filed with the board this week.
Fox is asking the board to impose sanctions for six violations of professional conduct.
The ethics complaint alleges that Muyskens misrepresented the nature of the videos to the grand jury, made false and misleading statements to the court about the origin and editing of the videos, and misled the ethics investigators.
Muyskens did not respond to an email seeking comment.
By spring 2021, according to court records, Muyskens had begun handling cases for the U.S. attorney’s office in Utah and was handling cases for the office as recently as a few weeks ago.
A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office in Utah confirmed that Muyskens works in the office but did not respond to questions about her current status or if U.S. Attorney for Utah Trina Higgins knew of the ethics allegations when Muyskens came to the state.
