Jeanine Pirro’s Recent Flood of Failures

[Thiệu Ngô]

In an opinion dismissing the felony cases against two people charged as part of Trump’s invasion of DC, Donisha Butler and Terrance Wilson, Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui tallied how many of the federal cases charged in the last eight weeks (roughly the beginning of Trump’s invasion) US Attorney Jeanine Pirro has subsequently chosen to dismiss.

The term unprecedented is casually bandied about. But as Judge Sooknanan identified, these recent weeks literally have been “unprecedented.” To contextualize how unprecedented things have been, the undersigned had the clerk’s office run the numbers. Specifically, the Court pulled every motion to dismiss filed by the government in cases charged by complaint for 10 years. The results speak for themselves. Of the over 4,000 cases charged by complaint between 2014 and 2024, the government moved to dismiss less than 20 defendant’s cases. In the last eight weeks, the government has charged 95 cases by criminal complaint. And in that time, the government has moved to dismiss 20 defendant’s cases.

In the previous ten years — a period including the flood of January 6 cases, which were especially challenging given the volume of defendants, the national reach, and COVID — DOJ dismissed fewer than 20 of the 4,000 cases they charged, or less than .5%.

In the last 8 weeks, Pirro has chosen to dismiss 20 of the 95 federal cases that actually got charged, or 21%. That’s on top of cases — close to a dozen — that grand jurors have rejected. There is overlap in the cases; at least three of the cases that Faruqui lists as having been dismissed — Nathalie Jones, Edward Dana, and Paul Bryant — were dismissed after the grand jury rejected the charge.

But not all the cases overlap. Some of the cases (such with Sydney Reid, who was charged with assaulting an FBI officer) were refiled in Federal court as misdemeanors. DOJ is choosing to — or having to — dismiss cases for reasons beyond no bills, including because of Fourth Amendment violations, physical abuse of the defendant, or charges of assaulting a Federal officer in which the victim did not qualify as a federal officer (either because they were a DC cop doing DC cop things, or because they were a National Guard person from another state).

Which means Pirro has chosen to dismiss at least a fifth and close to a quarter of the cases since the invasion of DC started. Not all the cases arose out of the invasion. Two were overblown threat cases, and Reid’s predates the surge.

Nevertheless, it is an unprecedented failure, and a failure that cannot be attributed entirely to grand jurors disliking these cases.

Pirro is choosing to pursue felony charges that simply don’t hold up. And for a number of these defendants, she’s detaining them for days in the process.

By emptywheel