Jeanine Pirro’s Recent Flood of Failures
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.
Trump’s record of hiring only the best people remains intact.
And remember: Pirro was considered the *reasonable* choice for USA-DC after Eagle Ed Martin’s nomination got stalled in the Senate.
Pirro maniac flaming out.
Love it.
She’s also a sad clown.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierrot
What’s the metric for “failure” here? Perp-walk, mug shot, time away from job/family leading to problems there, run through ICE background checks, same with family, flagged as “potential felon” in other places. All of that sounds exactly like that Trump wants to do to non-whites and liberals. Losing the presumption of regularity among DC judges only lasts until Trump proposes relegating DC Home Rule back to himself to replace all judges (effective from date it passed until either Jan 2, 2027 or Jan 19, 2029).
Pierro is only failing if convictions and if reduction in crime rate and if cost-effective administrative of justice are metrics.
Oh, it isn’t cost-effective administration of justice that is the real metric. The real metric is vengeance.
Perp walks, mug shots, et al. are a nice start, but each time someone walks, it takes the sting out and makes the attempt look weak and stupid. Trump hates looking weak and stupid, and each time Pirro gets shot down, that makes Trump look stupid for putting her into the job. OTOH, firing Pirro would require Trump to admit that he made a stupid mistake. Either way, Trump looks stupid.
Forcing perceived enemies out of their jobs is a partial win for Trump – see the firings/resignations at the CDC and DOD for example. That’s what he’s looking for in trying to get Microsoft to fire Lisa Monaco, as well as various college/university presidents.
But what would really count as a win would be for the DOJ to put some of Trump’s enemies behind bars. Convicted, appeals exhausted, and sitting in a prison cell. Sadly for Trump, so long as his prosecutors like Pirro can’t even get little charges on little people to result in convictions, there’s little hope for Trump that he’d ever get to see someone like Comey in a federal prison.
But the initial showcase might be the only metric Trump follows. Pirro only answers to Trump, not judges. If judges toss all her cases, but she says they are Deep-State Elitists, Liberal, Coastal Ivy League liberal elites ™, then she is succeeding at her only metric.
The epithet that seems to be sticking lately is RLDL: Rå∂içål Leƒ† Demøçrå† Lunå†içs ©. Seems to cover all bases.
Losing the presumption of regularity among federal circuit judges in DC (and elsewhere) matters a great deal, and can’t be cured by any half-baked attempt to federalize governance of the District.
You’re looking at the cost-benefit analysis from that of a human being. Like everything in the administration, is the cost of being scolded for the amount of cases dismissed less than the benefits achieved through an ally in creating mass intimidation? I would think the administration thinks they got the best of the deal
its make America white again but most of these Republicans don’t understand is America wasn’t white to begin with. There were Indigenous People living on the land
Given the invasions of apartment buildings, breaking protestors legs and arresting people without charges and detaining them without them being able to consult lawyers and abusing children it just like a re run of the Nazis in Europe during WW II and prior to.
Wonder what Americans are going to do when they realize they have no rights left, its just trump and what he and Miller want.
Dr. Wheeler, I had to snicker at the conjunction of “Jeanine Pirro” and “at least a fifth” in your capsule for this post. Cheers!
Ditto!
Legal question: Now that Comey knows that DOJ wants to perp walk him, can he just hide out until Thursday to avoid that? Does the leak of the plans mean they won’t be able to achieve them?
AFAIK, once a timely indictment is issued, the statute of limitations lapses so proceedings can’t come to a screeching halt. And an indictment doesn’t require the immediate availability of the accused either. (Assuming they’re still alive, anyway!) So Comey wouldn’t escape any consequences, whether purely legal or (as always with Trump) intimidatory showboating, by a judicious temporary absence.
Not that he needs to anyway. He’s prepared and able to take Trump head-on and he fully expects to win.
What I don’t understand is why the legal system, however it’s supposed to do it (courts, the bar association for his lawyers, whatever?) hasn’t yet branded Trump a vexatious litigant.
…or what with all these mounting case dismissals, Trump’s personal DOJ either! {grin}
Just thinking how he could avoid giving them the perp walk and the shot in handcuffs, which is what they want for their propaganda since they know this case is going nowhere. They want their chunk of retributive flesh.
Why can’t James Comey make arrangements like Trump did to be finger printed and mug shot on the quiet and released?
I was wondering what had happened to Jeanine – hadn’t heard from her in a while.
I was born in that little chunk of Northern VA that used to be DC before 1846. I grew up in MD and DC. Law school in DC, college in MD. I am steeped in this stuff. I know what it is to live without congressional representation.
This fiasco demonstrates a lot of things, and one of them is that “home rule” is but a shadow of its former self, and it’s about time DC got 2 senators and a representative or two. I’ll leave dissecting Pirro’s decline to others.
OT but another nice piece in The Guardian today by Marcy’s Law and Society teacher, Austin Sarat.
In addition to the stunning incompetence of the Trump (haha) Justice Department, we are also blessed to have a Chief Executive who can telepathically determine that we are “at war” with drug cartels that may not even exist:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/us/politics/trump-drug-cartels-war.html
Yes, things are going swimmingly here in the United States of America in 2025…..