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Donald Trump’s top prosecutor in Washington, D.C., was dealt another blow after a jury acquitted a woman accused of assaulting an FBI agent during a protest against immigration officials.
Federal prosecutors in the office of U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro failed to persuade three different grand juries to indict Sydney Reid on felony charges this summer. They could not get a jury to agree to any of the charges against her until reducing the case to a single, lesser misdemeanor charge.
After a brief trial and less than two hours of deliberation, jurors returned a not guilty verdict Thursday.
Pirro’s office has repeatedly failed to land criminal indictments in cases stemming from the Trump administration’s federal takeover of the nation’s capital, which saw a surge of federal law enforcement officers and National Guard troops patrolling the city streets in a show-of-force against crime and illegal immigration.
That flood of federalized law enforcement saw a series of defendants facing federal charges that would typically be handled in local courts, if at all.
On July 23, Reid was accused in a criminal complaint of assaulting federal agents as they transferred two men into FBI custody at the 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 Reid jerked into an FBI agent's knee while she was being detained.
In closing remarks at trial, Reid’s public defender blasted federal agents at the scene as a “goon squad” that thinks it is above the law.
“You should be livid that the government brought this case,” she told the jury.
Prosecutors rarely present cases to grand juries without obtaining indictments, so it is highly unusual to fail once, let alone three times.
But in Washington, Pirro is repeatedly failing to land felony indictments across multiple cases, suggesting that the cases rely on flimsy evidence — and Trump’s political motivations.
Pirro also failed to convince a grand jury to indict a protester who tossed a sub sandwich at a Customs and Border Patrol agent he labeled a “fascist.”
A grand jury also rejected Pirro’s felony case against a woman who was accused of making threats against Trump online and directly to Secret Service agents.
Reid’s case — among the only cases from Pirro’s office stemming from Trump’s takeover that has made it to trial — was largely occupied by testimony from the FBI agent who accused Reid of assault.
Eugenia Bates, the only witness called by prosecutors, spent more than five hours on the stand across two days, with most of her testimony focusing on text messages following the incident, which revealed she called Reid a “libtard” and the scrapes on her knee a “boo boo.”
Reid’s attorneys also discovered, in the middle of trial, that at least one message was missing, and surveillance footage from the scene didn’t turn up until the night before trial.
“These are games,” District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan told assistant U.S. Attorney Travis Wolfe Wednesday. “We have all been together preparing for this trial for weeks and now we’re in the middle of trial figuring this out.”
The Independent has requested comment from the Department of Justice.
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