Jeanine Pirro speaking at a Trump press briefing in August.
At least six times, jurors declined to validate charges federal prosecutors were alleging.
Federal prosecutors under President Donald Trump’s local ultra-MAGA U.S. Attorney are running into an extraordinary roadblock in Washington, D.C.: local federal grand juries won’t indict.
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The latest example came Monday, when defense attorneys for Nathalie Rose Jones, a woman accused of threatening Trump online, filed a motion in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, noting that a grand jury had returned “no bill.” Jones had been charged under two federal statutes: making threats against the president and transmitting threats in interstate commerce.
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However, in their filing, attorneys from the Federal Public Defender’s Office presented a remarkable picture: when Secret Service agents first approached Jones at her New York apartment on August 15, she told them she planned to attend a protest in Washington. They neither arrested her nor discouraged her from traveling. The following day, she met with agents in D.C., repeated that she had “no intent to harm anyone, including the president,” and even consented to searches of her car and her mental health records, lawyers wrote. She had no weapons, and no evidence suggested she had ever tried to acquire one. She was in the city to attend what she called a peaceful demonstration, according to her attorneys.
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Still, she was arrested based on earlier social media posts and her comments in the interview. A magistrate initially ordered her detained, but U.S. District Chief Judge James Boasberg later released her to home detention. Now, after the grand jury rejected prosecutors’ case, her lawyers argue she should be freed outright. “Given that finding, the weight of the evidence is weak,” they wrote, urging the court to release her on personal recognizance.
The Jones case is not an outlier. In recent weeks, grand juries in Washington, composed of residents of a city that voted overwhelmingly against Trump, have turned back at least half a dozen cases brought under former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney for D.C., stemming from his administration’s “federal crime crackdown,” NBC News reports.
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Among them is Sean Dunn, a gay former Justice Department employee accused of pelting a federal officer with a Subway sandwich, whose felony assault charges collapsed in the grand jury room. His misdemeanor case, refiled without a jury, has made him a folk hero of sorts, immortalized in graffiti as “Sandwich Guy.” Grand juries also refused to indict Alvin Summers, accused of assaulting an officer, and Sidney Lori Reid, who faced three failed indictment attempts before prosecutors reduced her charges to a misdemeanor.
The refusals highlight a rare clash between federal authority and local jurors. Typically, federal prosecutors secure indictments with ease, so much so that a grand jury’s rejection is often described as extraordinary. But in Washington, where federal agents and National Guard troops patrol neighborhoods under Trump’s orders, jurors appear unconvinced.
