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Donald Trump’s top prosecutor in Washington, DC, suffered another blow after a jury acquitted a woman accused of attacking an FBI agent during a protest against immigration officials.
Federal Prosecutor in the Office of US Attorney Jeanine Pirro Sidney failed to convince three separate grand juries to indict Reed on felony charges this summer. They could not get the jury to agree on any charges against him until the case was reduced to a single, lesser misdemeanor charge.
After a brief hearing and less than two hours of deliberations, jurors returned a not guilty verdict Thursday. In a brief statement shared with Independent, “The jury has spoken and we accept their verdict,” Pirro said.
is in piro’s office repeatedly failed to bring criminal charges In Cases arising from the federal takeover of the nation’s capital by the Trump administrationWhich saw an increase in the number of federal law enforcement officers and National Guard troops patrolling the city’s streets in a show of force against crime and illegal immigration.
The influx of federal law enforcement resulted in defendants facing federal charges, which were typically handled in local courts.
On July 23, Reed was charged in a criminal complaint with assaulting federal agents as they transferred two men from FBI custody to a local jail in Washington.
While she was filming Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an officer grabbed her arms and restrained her against a wall. Prosecutors argued that Reed struck an FBI agent in the knee while he was being detained.
In Concluding remarks at trialReed’s public defender blamed the federal agents at the scene as a “goon squad” that thinks it is above the law.
“You should be outraged that the government brought this case,” he told the jury.
Prosecutors rarely present cases to grand juries without receiving an indictment, so it is extremely unusual to fail once, let alone three times.
But in Washington, Pirro is repeatedly failing to bring felony charges in many cases, showing that the cases depended on weak evidence and Trump’s political motivations.
Pirro also failed to convince a grand jury to indict a protester who threw a sub sandwich at a Customs and Border Patrol agent, whom he labeled a “fascist.”
The grand jury also dismissed Pirro’s felony case against a woman who was accused of making threats against Trump online and directly to Secret Service agents.
Reed’s case — among the only cases from Pirro’s office arising from the Trump takeover that has made it to trial — was largely captured by the testimony of the FBI agent who accused Reed of assault.
Eugenia Bates, the only witness called by prosecutors, spent more than five hours on the stand over two days, with much of her testimony focused on text messages after the incident, which revealed she called Reed a “libtard” and the scratch on her knee a “boo boo.”
Reed’s lawyers also discovered, in the middle of testingthat at least one message was missing, and surveillance footage from the scene was not revealed until the night before trial.
“These are games,” District Judge Sparkle Sooknan told Assistant U.S. Attorney Travis Wolfe on Wednesday. “We have been preparing for this trial together for several weeks and now we are in the middle of the trial and figuring it out.”