Ah, the holiday season: a time to gather with friends and family and reminisce about the past year. And what could be better, when gathered with your nearest and dearest, than fondly recalling the many, many times that juries told the Trump administration to pound sand.
In any other administration, we would not all be so acutely aware of the actions of grand juries, in large part because federal prosecutors almost always secure indictments. The most recent data available, from 2010, showed that of 162,000 proposed indictments presented to federal grand juries, only 11 were no-billed, meaning the grand jury declined to indict
But these days, those are rookie numbers. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice has managed to get no-billed over 11 times in just one year. And that’s not even counting how many times U.S. attorneys face-planted at trials.
Most recently, we got to witness the hilarity of a grand jury refusing to reindict New York Attorney General Letitia James not once but twice, which is quite the achievement. When a federal court ruled that Florida’s bestest insurance lawyer, Lindsey Halligan, was not the lawful occupant of the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia, the indictments of both James and former FBI Director James Comey got tossed. Hence the need to hurl the subpar James indictment at new grand juries, hoping they’ll bite.
While the frantic attempts to salvage Halligan’s indictment of James are the most high-profile embarrassments at the moment, the real superstar of getting no-billed is none other than Jeanine Pirro, the former Fox News personality and current U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.
Pirro’s litany of failures is all the more impressive because, unlike Halligan, Pirro had a lengthy career as a prosecutor, district attorney, and county judge before going on Fox News as one of the cable channel’s louder howler monkeys. She actually does know how investigations and indictments and trials work. But rather than draw on that knowledge, she just keeps bringing comically inflated criminal charges, and D.C. juries just keep laughing in her face.
By September, Pirro had racked up at least seven no-bills. But never fear! She had a foolproof plan: charge some of these same people with misdemeanors instead, which doesn’t require a grand jury indictment. Take that, naysayers. Pirro may have overlooked the part where her office would still have to take these cases to trial and win in front of those juries.
Related | Turns out this Fox News hack isn’t too good at being a US attorney
After she tried three times to get a felony indictment against Sydney Reid for allegedly impeding ICE’s transfer of gang members, she dropped the charges down to a misdemeanor. A three-day trial ensued, wherein Pirro’s office attempted to prove that Reid had assaulted an FBI agent. The agent ended up with a lightly scraped hand from helping other federal agents shove Reid into a wall because they didn’t want Reid filming them.
It took roughly two hours for the jury to come back with a resounding not guilty verdict. Turns out the average juror perhaps isn’t a big fan of people being assaulted and charged for the not-crime of watching ICE.
And who can forget that after not managing to land a felony indictment against Sean Dunn for throwing a sandwich at a federal agent, Pirro thought the best thing to do with someone who had already become a folk hero in D.C. was to charge him with misdemeanor assault and take the case to trial. Somehow having the agent testify about the horror of a sandwich that “smelled of onions and mustard” being thrown at him did not lead to the citizens of the nation’s capital convicting Dunn.
Related | Jeanine Pirro can’t indict a ham sandwich, and Harvard gets a win
Over on the other coast, it isn’t actually clear how many times Los Angeles grand juries have declined to go along with Acting U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli’s attempts to overcharge people arrested during protests there.
What we do know is that out of 38 felony cases his office filed against protesters, he got only seven indictments. Now, that doesn’t mean he got no-billed 31 times, a number that would dwarf even Pirro’s tally. His office may have decided to reduce the charges in some cases or dismiss them entirely.
In one instance where a grand jury wouldn’t indict, Essayli screamed at the prosecutor via speakerphone outside the grand jury room and told them to ignore the part of the federal government’s Justice Manual that says prosecutors should only bring cases they could win at trial. Terrific ethics you have there, Bill.
Grand juries in Chicago are also getting in on the fun. There, the U.S. attorney’s office couldn’t even get an indictment of a couple who were both carrying loaded guns at a protest outside the Broadview ICE facility. That’s probably because both Ray Collins and Jocelyne Robledo had lawful permits and never brandished their guns. Well, and maybe also because their alleged horrifying crime was just refusing to retreat when federal agents started pushing the crowd back.
That office also couldn’t secure an indictment of Nathan Griffin for allegedly trying to close a car door on a border patrol agent’s leg as they tried to get out of the vehicle. The agent ended up with a small gouge and some scrapes on his leg, but apparently a Chicago grand jury did not see that as worthy of charging Griffin with a felony, probably because it is not.
The administration’s siege of blue cities is a deliberate, intentional “fuck you” to the people who live there. Somehow it never occurred to them that the residents of those cities would take the opportunity to say that in return.
