Theater with no foundation
Judge Jeanine Pirro’s track record as a Fox News celebrity turned Donald Trump’s U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia is going as one might expect. Trump’s takeover of D.C. law enforcement, and Pirro’s tenure to date, suggests Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye, “is little more than theater with essentially no legal foundation.”
Trump’s deploying federal law enforcers and National Guard to D.C.’s streets has resulted in over 1,000 arrests in the first two weeks. But given Pirro’s record in court so far, many appear to be nuisance arrests.
“The resulting cascade on the court system has been compounded by Pirro’s push for prosecutors to bring the harshest charges allowable, even for minor infractions,” Tesfaye explains. Her aggressive posturing is “colliding with real-world constraints” as politicized prosecutions keep failing in court:
“Prosecutor Jeanine Pirro’s office has now whiffed on three cases alleging defendants assaulted federal agents during Trump’s police takeover,” HuffPost reported on Aug. 29. The New York Times observed that “one of her biggest challenges is matching her confident public messaging with results, given the mass departures of career prosecutors and support staff.”
Pirro recently revealed that she is getting help from military lawyers, because her office is short 90 prosecutors, as well as 60 investigators and paralegals. D.C. federal courts, used to processing an average of six new cases per week, now face six or more cases per day, many stemming from low-level offenses that previously would’ve been diverted or even dismissed. At the height of this recent backlog, over 125 criminal defendants appeared in a single day, forcing judges to speed through hearings and delay fair trials until as far out as 2027, according to the Associated Press. Defense attorneys are crying foul and civil rights groups are suing. It’s clear that Pirro’s directives are unsustainable.
After the $787.5 million Fox settlement paid to Dominion Voting Systems, a Fox producer called Pirro a “reckless maniac” for airing baseless claims about the 2020 election even after being told they were false.
Pirro’s incompetence as U.S. attorney appeared again after a grand jury failed to indict Sean Dunn for felony assault. The former Justice Department paralegal famously threw a Subway sandwich at an immigration enforcement officer.
The D.C. grand jury failed to indict three others arrested in the Trump-Pirro crackdown, the Washington Post reported:
Before prosecutors failed to indict Dunn, a grand jury on three separate occasions this month refused to indict a D.C. woman who was accused of assaulting an FBI agent, another extraordinary rejection of the prosecution’s case. Days later, a federal magistrate judge said an arrest in Northeast Washington was preceded by the “most illegal search I’ve seen in my life” and described another arrest as lacking “basic human dignity.”
The “most illegal search” Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui had ever seen involved the arrest of Torez Riley for illegal firearm possession:
The judge found that D.C. police officers, who were on patrol with federal agents, violated Riley’s privacy rights by searching his bag, where they found two guns. Riley had previously been convicted of weapons offenses, prosecutors said.
Police said in court documents that Riley’s bag had been searched in part because it appeared to contain something heavy. But that observation was not enough to show probable cause that Riley had committed a crime, the court found.
It was “without a doubt, the most illegal search I’ve seen in my life,” said Faruqui, a former D.C. federal prosecutor, adding that Riley had been jailed and kept away from his three children and pregnant wife for a week because “he was a Black man going into Trader Joe’s.”
Riley’s case was dismissed.
The “basic human dignity” case was that of Christian Enrique Carías Torres, charged with assaulting, resisting or impeding federal officers after an officer hit his head while tackling Carías Torres as he exited a D.C. coffee shop with a delivery order.
“I’d say we live in a surreal world right now,” Faruqui said in court. “You should be treated with basic human dignity,” he told Carías Torres. “We don’t have a secret police.”
The Post also reports on the woman accused of assaulting FBI agents:
Prosecutors alleged that Sydney Reid was obstructing and recording agents from the FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as they attempted to arrest a gang member being released from the D.C. jail who was slated for deportation. An FBI agent scraped her hand against a wall amid the fracas, and prosecutors planned to charge Reid with assaulting, resisting or impeding a federal officer, a felony offense punishable by up to eight years in prison.
Under the Fifth Amendment, however, charges that carry potential penalties of more than a year in prison must be approved by a grand jury. At least 12 members must vote to authorize an indictment. After striking out with the D.C. grand jury, prosecutors dropped the effort to charge Reid with a felony and instead filed a misdemeanor charge that does not require grand jury approval. The maximum penalty for the misdemeanor is one year in jail.
Faruqui called another arrest last week, “perhaps one of the weakest requests for detention I have seen and something that, prior to two weeks ago, would have been unthinkable in this courthouse.” This is the case of Paul Anthony Bryant, a D.C. attorney and West Point graduate (WUSA9):
Bryant was arrested Wednesday morning on a warrant out of D.C. District Court on charges of assaulting, resisting or impeding police, threating a federal official and threatening to kidnap or injure a person. His attorney said he had appeared in D.C. Superior Court on Monday but had been released.
According to charging documents, a group of Ohio and Delaware National Guardsmen who were patrolling 14th Street Sunday evening reported Bryant approached them and began yelling things, including, “These are our streets!” and, allegedly, “I’ll kill you.” Before leaving the area, Bryant allegedly “threw his left shoulder” into one of the Guardsmen’s shoulders.
[…]
Because National Guard troops patrolling D.C. don’t wear body cameras, Bryant’s attorney, assistant federal public defender Alexis Gardner, said there is no video of the alleged interaction. Another attorney who filled in to represent Bryant at Wednesday’s hearing said charging documents did not mention that Bryant, who is Black, claimed members of the Guard yelled slurs at him.
Faruqui released him over objections from prosecutors until a hearing on Tuesday. He cited Trump’s release and pardon of Jan. 6 insurrectionists:
“To charge people for what seems to be lesser conduct and then say they’re so dangerous they have to be locked up,” Faruqui said. “It puts prosecutors in an impossible position.”
Tesfaye concludes:
The collapse of her high-profile indictments has become a defining feature of Trump’s federal takeover of the nation’s capital. In an unprecedented move, Trump’s Justice Department effectively stripped local D.C. prosecutors of authority, placing federal officials — who are appointed directly by the president — in charge of everything from misdemeanors to high-profile protests. Never before has the White House asserted so much direct prosecutorial power over a U.S. city.
With Trump’s installation of shock troops like Pirro to carry out his ideological retribution under the banner of justice, judges and juries are now functioning as the final guardrails in the near-total absence of resistance from the Republican-led legislative branch. Thankfully, over 200 court orders have blocked Trump’s policies, including at least 120 rulings within the first 100 days alone.
It’s not even a good reality show. But it doesn’t have to be. Trump and his lackeys mean to chalk up enough harassment arrests to intimidate the populace into submission even if many thin cases never get to trial.
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