Federal prosecutors have once again failed to secure a grand-jury indictment in a case during President Donald Trump’s crime crackdown in Washington, marking yet another setback for Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.
Attorneys for the defendant, Nathalie Rose Jones, disclosed in a court filing Monday that a grand jury had passed on indicting the Indiana resident for allegedly threatening to kill the president last month.
“A grand jury has now found no probable cause to indict Ms. Jones on the charged offenses,” Jones’ attorneys wrote, noting that “the weight of the evidence” against her is “weak.”
That makes Jones at least the fourth person to avoid an indictment before D.C. grand jurors since Trump declared a crime emergency in the city. Prosecutors had accused the three others of “assaulting” or “impeding” a federal agent during encounters with the police, allegations that defense attorneys told HuffPost appeared overblown.
In one case, three separate grand juries declined to indict a D.C. resident whom prosecutors accused of assaulting an FBI agent during an inmate swap handled by Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel. The woman, Sydney Lori Reid, had been pushed against a wall during the encounter.
In another case, a grand jury took a pass on indicting Sean Charles Dunn of assaulting a federal agent. Dunn, a former Department of Justice employee, had tossed a sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection officer in a moment of viral protest, leading to his arrest.
The grand jury’s decision not to indict Jones was first reported by NBC News.
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The inability to secure indictments in such cases has been a source of embarrassment for Pirro, who’s been trying to hype Trump’s policing takeover as a massive success. Getting such an indictment is usually easy ― a decent prosecutor could “indict a ham sandwich,” the saying goes ― because prosecutors largely control the grand-jury process.
In the case of Jones, prosecutors alleged she had called a Director of National Intelligence hotline repeatedly and, after being asked to stop calling, “uttered a threat about the POTUS.”
“Specifically, Ms. Jones stated that ‘[she] should just kill [the POTUS] because he is racist’ before hanging up,” prosecutors wrote in a filing.
They also alleged she threatened Trump and referred to him as a “terrorist” and “Nazi” during an interview with the U.S. Secret Service. Jones took part in an anti-Trump protest in D.C. on Aug. 16 and was arrested outside the White House the same day, according to court filings.
Jones’ attorneys asserted that her comments had been taken out of context and were not “true threats” against the president but free speech protected by the First Amendment.
Although several defendants have avoided grand-jury indictments, that doesn’t mean their legal troubles are over. Pirro’s office has tried to reserve the right to pursue indictments again and has pursued misdemeanor cases against some defendants who were not indicted on felony charges.
Prosecutors have asked a judge that Dunn, the sandwich thrower, be arraigned on misdemeanor charges later this week.