Rising This Week: Jeanine Pirro's humiliation

Grand juries keep tossing the ex-Fox pundit turned U.S. Attorney's attempted indictments, and a federal judge said her prosecutors have "no credibility."

U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

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Former Fox personality turned U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro keeps being forced to dismiss criminal cases that grand juries refuse to indict, and a federal judge recently said that her prosecutors have “no credibility."

“It's not fair to say they're losing credibility. We're past that now,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui said of Pirro's office, according to USA Today.

The judge made that remark after Pirro’s case alleging a threat against Donald Trump’s life collapsed.

That wasn’t an isolated humiliation.

In back-to-back defeats late last week, Pirro’s prosecutors abandoned two separate cases accusing defendants of threatening to kill Trump, after grand juries refused to return indictments. Three separate grand juries passed on the case of Nathalie Rose Jones, and one tossed the case against Edward Alexander Dana, who was charged with lesser misdemeanors.

Granted a platform on her old network, Pirro blamed her failures on a “politicized” jury and judge, but magistrate judges like Faruqui are not appointed by any president. Pirro tried to persuade the Fox audience that D.C. grand juries are so anti-Trump as to refuse to prosecute cases involving genuine threats on his life, but the record reveals the extraordinary weakness of the two cases.

In Dana’s case, the alleged threat took place during his drunken rant inside a police car when, slurring his words and visibly intoxicated, he said: “I am not going to tolerate fascism, I am going to protect the Constitution by any means necessary. If that means killing you, and killing the president, I will do that.”

According to court documents, Dana immediately followed up that comment by loudly singing: “ba ba ba ran, ba ba ran” — in what seems to be the mangled lyrics of the Beach Boys classic “Barbara Ann.”

In the Jones case, prosecutors quoted her posting on Facebook: “I am willing to sacrificially kill this POTUS by disemboweling him and cutting out his trachea,” but the government left out some of the even more bizarre context.

In a defense filing, Jones’ attorney highlighted what prosecutors left out in red, which the defense said is borne out of the “delusional” expression of mental illness.

From Jones’s defense filing.

Pirro insists that these cases represented “true threats” to Trump’s life that could have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt under existing First Amendment jurisprudence, only to have been foiled by left-wing grand jurors and judges who are unwilling to protect the safety of the president. But Pirro’s swipes at judges and juries ring hollow in light of the facts in the record. And her predecessors never faced this trend from grand juries during Trump’s first time.

Small wonder why judges think Pirro’s office has squandered its credibility, as grand juries have rejected her cases at least nine times in the past few weeks.

As

Andrew Weissmann

recently said on All Rise News, he has spent decades inside the Justice Department without seeing or hearing about a grand jury rejecting a case brought by him or one of his colleagues. He explained that is because prosecutors have a relatively light burden for an indictment: probable cause, accepted by a majority of grand jurors, without any adversarial presentation by defense attorneys.

In recent weeks, Pirro also failed to meet this burden in the cases of Shawn Dunn, who was seen throwing a sub-style sandwich at a Border Patrol officer in a viral video; Sydney Lorie Reid, who was accused of assaulting Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers while filming them; and Alvin Summers, who was accused of assaulting and resisting a U.S. Parks Officer after a foot chase. All of those incidents were recorded on bodycam videos and rejected by grand jurors — in Reid’s case, three separate times.

The government’s credibility crisis lands with remarkable timing.

On Monday, jury selection will begin in Florida in the case of Ryan Routh, the man accused of plotting to assassinate Trump outside of his golf course in West Palm Beach almost exactly one year ago in September 2024.

After Routh’s indictment, then-U.S. Attorney Merrick Garland released the following statement: “Violence targeting public officials endangers everything our country stands for, and the Department of Justice will use every available tool to hold Ryan Routh accountable for the attempted assassination of former President Trump charged in the indictment.”

Unlike Pirro, Garland’s team found no difficulty in getting a grand jury to find probable cause of the charged crimes.

Every Sunday, this newsletter lays out significant court hearings, protests and other events for paid subscribers in a regular column “Rising This Week.” The listings begin below with a preview of Routh’s trial.