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Revenge of the “Lib Tard:” Jeanine Pirro Wins First Humiliating Acquittal
Sydney Reid, who was arrested in July after a tussle as she was filming an ICE arrest, was just acquitted by a jury.
This was a case that should never have been charged, one of at least dozens just like it. Pirro and her prosecutors have been damaged over and over in trying to bring it to trial.
First, three grand juries no-billed the case. Pirro charged it as a misdemeanor Information anyway.
Then, the government unsuccessfully tried to exclude evidence that damaged their case and the credibility of their primary “victim,” FBI Agent Eugenia Bates.
- That Bates called her “boo boos,” “boo boos”
- That Bates twice complained that she had to turn this thing into an assault charge:
- “I’m going to the attorneys [sic] office for a bystander that I tussled. Dinko arrested her for ‘assault’ ughhh”;
- “Do you want the arrest EC separate from the ‘assault’ or am I good to put it in together in one 302”
- That she called Reid a “lib tard”
- That she declared “I sacrificed life and limb for the mission. I think it’s worth a trump coin,” after the incident
Then Reid presented evidence that prosecutors had not provided — or even collected — a video she believed would be exculpatory, an issue that Judge Sparkle Sooknanan spent several days last week considering, only to have the government’s story keep getting worse.
While I haven’t reviewed the trial transcript, in her instructions, Judge Sooknanan gave three adverse instructions against the government:
This is a case that DOJ should have given up when they were no-billed. But because Jeanine Pirro is a stubborn bully, she persisted, and now both the DC US Attorney’s Office (for the evidentiary fuck-ups) and Agent Bates (for the inconsistent testimony and bias) will be tainted by the process.
And most of all, it was an example of Federal Public Defenders — Eugene Ohm and Tezira Abe — doing superb work ensuring Reid had a vigorous defense.
We will see many more bullshit cases in months ahead. But this acquittal matters just as much as the flashier cases, because until the government stops trying to prosecute people because thuggish cops beat them up, this will keep happening.
Update: CBS’ local affiliate appears to have been the only outlet that covered the trial. It describes that Bates didn’t even turn over all her text messages.
Bates was the sole witness called by prosecutors and spent more than five hours on the stand across two days. Much of the questioning centered on her text messages following the incident, where she downplayed it and disparaged Reid as a “libtard.” She didn’t turn over additional text message evidence until early Wednesday morning, and in the middle of cross examination, Abe discovered one message was missing.
“Conveniently, the most damning one wasn’t there,” Abe said. “… Agent Bates’ story is riddled with holes.”
Update: Reid’s comment is spectacular.
Reid, in a statement through her attorneys, said the verdict shows “that this administration and their peons are not able to invoke fear in all citizens.”
“I feel sorry for the prosecutors really, who must be burdened by Trump’s irrational and unfounded hatred for his fellow man,” she said. “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.”
The Crime Wave Is Coming from Inside the [White] House
As most of you have noticed, I’ve been trying to do videos summarizing more of my work, because it’s far more accessible than what I do here. As with the Ball of Thread podcast I did last year, I’ve been doing this work with LOLGOP.
He and I are discussing how to keep this effort going long-term. So, in addition to sharing this latest video (which I think is one of our best), I wanted to set up a post for feedback on the videos and — just importantly — to put a tip jar for LOLGOP.
Please consider recognizing his work on these videos with a contribution here.
Thank you! And thanks to LOLGOP for the hilarious editing of Jeanine Pirro boasting about the subway guy.
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.
Jenna Ellis Lied and Lied and Lied and Lied and Lied and Lied and Lied and Lied and Lied and Lied
In an attempt to settle the Colorado challenge to her law license, Jenna Ellis stipulated that she made ten “misrepresentations” in public statements she made about the election in 2020.
Those, um, lies were:
- On November 13, 2020, Respondent claimed that “Hillary Clinton still has not conceded the 2016 election.”
- On November 20, 2020, Respondent appeared on Mornings with Maria on Fox Business and stated: “We have affidavits from witnesses, we have voter intimidation, we have the ballots that were manipulated, we have all kinds of statistics that show that this was a coordinated effort in all of these states to transfer votes either from Trump to Biden, to manipulate the ballots, to count them in secret . . .”
- On November 20, 2020, Respondent appeared on Spicer & Co. and stated, “with all those states [Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia] combined we know that the election was stolen from President Trump and we can prove that.”
- On November 21, 2020, Respondent stated on Twitter under her handle @JennaEllisEsq., “ . . . SECOND, we will present testimonial and other evidence IN COURT to show how this election was STOLEN!”
- On November 23, 2020, Respondent appeared on The Ari Melber Show on MSNBC and stated, “The election was stolen and Trump won by a landslide.”
- On November 30, 2020, Respondent appeared on Mornings with Maria on Fox Business and stated, “President Trump is right that there was widespread fraud in this election, we have at least six states that were corrupted, if not more, through their voting systems. . . We know that President Trump won in a landslide.” She also stated, “The outcome of this election is actually fraudulent it’s wrong, and we understand than when we subtract all the illegal ballots, you can see that President Trump actually won in a landslide.”
- On December 3, 2020, Respondent appeared on Mornings with Maria on Fox Business and stated, “The outcome of this election is actually fraudulent it’s wrong, and we understand than when we subtract all the illegal ballots, you can see that President Trump actually won in a landslide.”
- On December 5, 2020, Respondent appeared on Justice with Judge Jeanine on Fox News and stated, “We have over 500,000 votes [in Arizona] that were cast illegally . . .”
- On December 15, 2020, Respondent appeared on Greg Kelly Reports on Newsmax and stated, “The proper and true victor, which is Donald Trump . . .”
- On December 22, 2020, Respondent stated on Twitter, through her handle @JennaEllisEsq, “I spent an hour with @DanCaplis for an in-depth discussion about President @realDonaldTrump’s fight for election integrity, the overwhelming evidence proving this was stolen, and why fact-finding and truth—not politics—matters!” [my emphasis]
Remarkably, Ellis told four of these lies on Fox, the same shows that feature prominently in the Dominion lawsuit against Fox. But because the lies Ellis was telling weren’t about Dominion, they don’t show up in the Dominion lawsuit. They’re just more instances of lies that Fox broadcast unchallenged.
The presiding disciplinary judge in the case, Byron Large, only censured Ellis in response to her admitted lies, because she didn’t tell those lies in her function as lawyer. (Politico reported on the decision here.) She didn’t stipulate to making these false claims to Trump or as the attorney of record in any of the lawsuits that Trump filed, and so, according to a standard adopted by the CO Supreme Court, she should only be censured, not disbarred.
Although ABA Standard 7.2 seemingly fits the fact pattern at hand, the Colorado Supreme Court’s opinion in In re Rosen counsels against relying on that Standard outside the context of lawyers’ misrepresentations while executing their professional duties. Rosen further counsels against imposing a sanction in the gap left between ABA Standards 5.11(b) and 5.13. Indeed, the Rosen court addressed at length the appropriate Standards to apply when faced with instances of lawyer misrepresentation:
Unless deceit or misrepresentation is directed toward a client, see ABA Standard 4.6, a tribunal, see ABA Standard 6.1, or the legal profession itself (as, for example, by making false representations in applying for admission to the bar), see ABA Standard 7.0, it is considered by the ABA Standards to be the violation of a duty owed to the public, see ABA Standard 5.0. As the violation of a duty owed to the public (as distinguished from a client, a court, or the profession), even conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation, as long as it falls short of actual criminality or comparable intentional conduct seriously adversely reflecting on one’s fitness to practice law, should generally be sanctioned only by reprimand, or censure. [emphasis original; citations omitted]
So long as Ellis is not found to have committed a crime with her lies, she can keep her law license.
Therein lies the rub.
Also as part of the stipulation, Ellis described her role on the Trump campaign this way:
From February 2019 to January 15, 2021, Respondent was a senior legal advisor to the then-serving President of the United States. She “was a member of President Trump’s legal team . . . that made efforts to challenge President Biden’s victory in the 2020 Presidential Election.”1 Though Respondent “was part of the legal team . . . she was not counsel of record for any of the lawsuits challenging the election results.”2
As it is, there was actually some dispute among witnesses to the January 6 Committee about whether Ellis was playing a legal role or a media one.
For example, Alyssa Farrah described that at one point, Mark Meadows considered Ellis to become White House spokesperson.
[W]hen Meadows brought me to the White House — well, he physically brought me tothe West Wing to ask if I would come back. He asked me to be press secretary. I said no, I am not — I would not be a good face for Donald Trump, I cannot defend a lot of what he’s doing, but I can professionalize the comms operation.
He said, okay, if its not you, it’s between Kayleigh McEnany and Jenna Ellis, And said, I mean, that’s not an embarrassment of riches, but between the two, I would go with Kayleigh McEnany.
[snip]
Q When you interacted with Ms. Ellis, did it seem like she was exercising more of a communications function or a campaign surrogate for television?
A Campaign surrogate for television, yeah. I didn’t get the sense that she was particularly up to speed on what we were working on in the White House or even what the campaign was. She was just sort of floating around the broader Trump orbit.
Here, though, Ellis has invoked a legal role that would protect great swaths of her communications under attorney-client privilege.
But among the communications turned over to the J6C not covered by privilege are a number that show Ellis advocating for Pence to break the law — including one email sharing that strategy with Jeanine Pirro. She was involved in the pressure campaign in the fake elector plot. Ellis invoked the Fifth Amendment over and over in her testimony to J6C.
Those actions weren’t included in the complaint against Ellis. Large emphasized that his decision was based only on, “the limited information before the Court—which includes only the four corners of the parties’ stipulation and their arguments supporting this outcome at the hearing on March 1, 2023.”
But to get there — to get to a place where Ellis was censured rather than disbarred — she had to admit to knowingly lying when she made false claims that served actions she took that may be criminal, convincing both electors and Pence to violate their duty under the law.
This decision, by itself, will not affect Jenna Ellis much. But the admission, in addition to all the evidence that Jack Smith has in hand, could.