Jeanine Pirro Is The Biggest Loser

Petit jurors no more sympathetic than grand jurors to her office's BS prosecutions.

On Thursday, jurors in DC threw up two giant middle fingers to US Attorney Jeanine Pirro. Again. In fact, it was the fourth time the residents of the nation’s capital had flipped off Pirro in the same case.

The charges involved Sydney Reid, who was roughed up by ICE and FBI agents on July 22 while filming the transfer of immigrants from DC’s Metropolitan Police Department to federal custody. During the scuffle, FBI Agent Eugenia Bates bruised her knuckles, and Pirro’s office charged Reid with assaulting an officer … or tried to anyway.

After wasting the magistrate’s time with a criminal complaint, the government took to social media to congratulate themselves for being so big and tough.

“Assault an officer or agent — get arrested. It’s not rocket science,” ICE’s official account tweeted.

But grand jurors had other ideas, with three separate panels returning a no bill on the alleged assault.

On August 25, with the 30 days to indict expiring, the DOJ was forced to walk of shame itself back into court and admit that it had come up empty. To save face, Pirro’s office announced that it was charging Reid with misdemeanor assault, which doesn’t require a grand jury to sign the prosecution’s permission slip.

In fact, Pirro’s office has gotten no-billed at least a dozen times in the past four months — an astonishing record. Pirro raced to Fox to explain that this is because jurors in DC don’t understand the lawless hellhole they live in.

“There are a lot of people who sit on juries, and they live in Georgetown or in Northwest, or in some of these better areas, and they don’t see the reality of crime that is occurring,” she blathered. “And my office has been instructed to move for the highest crime possible consistent with the law, the statute and the evidence.”

Reid was assigned two highly competent federal public defenders, Tezira Abe and Eugene Ohm, who informed the court that she would not be waiving her speedy trial rights, thankyouverymuch. She’d like to go to trial immediately, while the memory of living under de facto military obligation was fresh in her fellow citizens’ minds.

The prosecution was an epic shitshow. The DOJ filed a superseding criminal information on October 10, claiming that Reid assaulted not just Bates, but also ICE Officer Vincent Laing because, while being manhandled, Reid’s knee jerked in his general direction leaving him in fear of injury. Judge Sparkle Sooknanan eventually threw out that part of the charge.

On the eve of trial, the prosecution admitted that a security camera which they’d claimed was inoperable had in fact captured the entire event. WUSA9, the local CBS affiliate, reports that Judge Sooknanan struck a government witness as sanction for the screw up:

“Either your agent lied, or DOC lied, or someone was sloppy,” Sooknanan said.

Prosecutors said it was unclear whether the video was ever uploaded to a server by the DOC and, if so, if it was ever downloaded by the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Assistant U.S. Attorney Travis Wolfe said the server is emptied every 60 days to save storage space.

“Your honor, I’m as frustrated as you are,” Wolfe said.

“Yeah, but you’re prosecuting a defendant in a criminal case, so your frustration rings a little hollow compared to hers or mine,” Sooknanan said.

The law enforcement agents involved also sent each other copious text messages chortling about the interaction with Reid and sharing social media videos of the scuffle. Bates, the supposed victim, called Reid a “libtard” and referred to the scrapes on her knuckles as “boo boos.”

Per WUSA9:

In the new messages turned over Wednesday morning, Bates was discussing Reid’s arrest with another ICE agent, Dinko Residovic. She compliments him for jumping into action, saying, “Your cop side was showing.” He responds, “It’s too calm at the fed level.”

The missing message was her response. She wrote, “I agree. Everyone is scared to react. So much respect!”

Prosecutors requested the messages from Bates several times over the past two weeks, but it wasn’t until Wednesday morning that Bates actually turned over the messages. Wolfe argued that she may have made a mistake while screenshotting the messages, instead of intentionally leaving it out.

“That seems to be a common theme with all your witnesses. Did they lie, or did they continuously make mistakes?” Sooknanan told Wolfe.

Judge Sooknanan issued a couple of key rulings in the defendant’s favor, including with respect to the jury instructions. The DOJ was forced to admit that there was no template for an instruction charging 8 USC § 111 as a misdemeanor, since no prior US Attorney would have bothered to go to trial after getting no-billed on the felony. The court issued an instruction requiring the jury to find that Reid had assaulted Bates, not simply obstructed her in her official duties.

In the event, it took the jurors less than two hours to return a unanimous verdict of not guilty.

Pirro did at least manage to avoiding insulting the citizens of the District this time, simply releasing a statement to The Independent conceding that “the jury has spoken and we accept their decision.”

But Reid’s lawyers issued a blistering statement rebuking the DOJ for bringing “a case that has no place in a free democracy.”

“The Department of Justice can continue to take these cases to trial to suppress dissent and to try and intimidate the people,” Abe and Ohm told the Huffington Post. “But in the end, as long as we have a jury system, our citizens will continue to rebuke the DOJ through speedy acquittals.”

Reid called the president “a crazy person,” but also expressed optimism at the verdict: “Knowing that I can stand in front of 12 of my fellow citizens and be found not guilty for standing up for basic human rights makes me feel like, despite the scary times we live in, we have hope for the future.”

In the immediate future, the DOJ will try to convict another notorious miscreant, Sean “Hoagie Hero” Dunn, who threw a sub at a CBP agent on August 10. Dunn quickly became a folk hero, and Pirro’s team got no billed when it tried to indict him for assault. As with Reid, they refiled the case as a misdemeanor, and Dunn’s trial begins on November 3.

Pirro’s office is also locked in a battle with DC Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui, who blocked the US Attorney from going to a grand jury in DC Superior Court after the federal grand jurors no-billed charges against a guy who got caught with an illegal gun in his car. On the plus side, courts are out of money now, so perhaps Pirro will get a brief reprieve from getting her ass kicked on the daily.