Jury Acquittal Hands Jeanine Pirro A Big L

A lot has happened. Here are some of the things. This is the TPM Morning Memo.

Three times loser

In a closely watched case, a federal jury on Thursday acquitted a woman of charges of assaulting a federal law enforcement officer over the summer during a detainee transfer to ICE outside the Washington, D.C., prison.

Federal grand juries refused three times to charge Sydney Reid with criminal charges related to the incident. Rather than drop the case, DCUS attorney Jeanine Pirro charged her with a misdemeanor and took her to court. U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan said this may be the first time a criminal defendant has been federally charged in Washington for misdemeanor assault of a federal officer, WUSA’s Sophie Rosenthal reports.

Although the case has been widely considered an example of jury nullification, it is more accurately classified as an overcharged case. The evidence against Reid was weak, but that didn’t matter. Pirro had ordered his prosecutors to bring the toughest federal charges possible during Trump’s wave of retaliation against law enforcement in Washington. Some federal judges have balked at some of the cases that ended up in federal court and that normally could have been prosecuted in Washington Superior Court — or not prosecuted at all.

For prosecutors, the search for as many charges as possible has made it more difficult to win their case. But in Reid’s case, prosecutors didn’t do themselves any favors.

Prosecutors — and the two federal agents who were the alleged victims in the case — were slow to release discovery. Some findings were never revealed, leading to reprimands from Judge Sooknanan during this week’s trial. “These are games,” Sooknanan told prosecutors at one point.

The prosecutors’ discovery failures ultimately led Sooknanan to issue a curative instruction to the jury:

Before the jury even heard the case, Sooknanan acquitted Reid of the crime against one of the federal agents due to insufficient evidence that she had assaulted him. The officer in question had testified to the grand jury that Reid initiated physical contact, but video of the incident showed that was not true, Sooknanan said in court.

That left the jury to decide whether Reid assaulted the other officer, the prosecution’s only witness. That officer didn’t turn over some of his text messages about the case until the first day of the trial, and even then one was missing. “The missing message was only discovered amid cross-examination,” WUSA reported.

The prosecutor argued that the missing message was the result of an error the police officer made when screenshotting the messages. But Justice Sooknanan was running out of patience. “This seems to be a common theme among all of your witnesses. Did they lie or continually make mistakes?” Sooknanan told the prosecutor.

Reid released a statement after the jury’s verdict:

To summarize, Pirro lost three times:

• three grand juries without bills;
• an acquittal by the judge;
• an acquittal by the petit jury.

Juries do their job, but it should never come to that.

Bolton indictment still twisted

As expected, the federal indictment against John Bolton in Maryland was more robust, evidence-based, and plausible than the false charges against Trump’s other indicted enemies, James Comey and Letitia James. There is no evidence that career prosecutors have balked at the charges, and the acting U.S. attorney in Maryland is a career prosecutor herself.

Additionally, Bolton appears in the indictment to be downright stupid, careless and even reckless in the way he allegedly handled classified information, sharing as Trump’s national security adviser more than 1,000 pages of “diary-like” entries with two members of his family, reported by the WSJ to be his wife and daughter. This alleged exchange is the height of WTF:

But plausible criminal charges alone do not eliminate the stink that Trump has spread in this investigation. I would go further than Joyce Vance, who writes that Trump has “undermined the integrity of the criminal justice system.” John Bolton would not have been charged without his role as a critic of Trump. The investigation, which began under Trump I, was closed under the Biden administration but was revived once Trump returned to office. It is a travesty of justice that this case is being brought in this manner at this time.

The WaPo drops a little information in its article on the indictment:

John Eisenberg, head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, was at the White House on Wednesday, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to discuss it publicly. His division was involved in the Bolton investigation, which is typical of cases involving classified documents.

In Trump I, Eisenberg was deputy White House counsel and legal advisor to the National Security Council, before Bolton arrived, and he was involved in some key moments of the first term. The WaPo story implies, but does not outright say, that Eisenberg was informing the White House of Bolton’s indictment. But at this point, I’m not sure the fleeting accounts of DOJ officials seen at the White House carry the same weight as they once did. As Morning Memo has repeatedly pointed out, the Justice Department is run from the White House.

On the same day that Eisenberg was at the White House, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and FBI Director Kash Patel together made an appearance in the Oval Office with President Trump during which he publicly called on them to target former Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, and former Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco.

Mass deportation: Chicago edition

The Trump administration’s assault on Chicago – which lives in the Republican mind as a post-apocalyptic hellscape rife with urban (read: black) violence and decay – is coming up against federal judges head-on:

• A three-judge panel of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, made up of appointees from Trump, Obama and Bush I, unanimously upheld a district court injunction barring the deployment of the National Guard to Illinois.
• U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis in Chicago said she would order federal immigration enforcement agents to wear and use body cameras.
• U.S. District Judge Georgia Alexakis in Chicago ordered prosecutors to remove from Maine on a flatbed trailer the vehicle of a Border Patrol agent involved in a highly controversial incident in which he shot a woman after their vehicles collided earlier this month. Defense attorneys demanded that it be returned to the Chicago area so they could examine it.

Trump’s misadventure in Venezuela

In the latest developments:

• Admiral Alvin Holsey is stepping down as head of U.S. Southern Command after less than a year, during a typically three-year term. Holsey oversaw the buildup of forces in the Caribbean and illegal U.S. attacks on suspected drug-smuggling boats. Holsey’s impending departure comes after he “raised concerns about the mission and attacks on alleged drug boats,” the New York Times reports.
• Only one of the 27 people killed in US high-seas attacks on suspected drug trafficking boats has been tentatively publicly identified. “[D]despite the rising death toll, no authority has come forward to publicly release the names of the dead,” reports the New York Times.
• WaPo analysis shows the U.S. military’s elite special operations air unit likely operated in Caribbean waters off the coast of Venezuela in recent days.
• Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro pretends to deploy his forces to repel any American attack.

Topic of the week

The federal budgetary apparatus is extremely complicated and byzantine, but one reason for this is the constitutional structure meant to prevent the power of money from becoming a tyrannical tool. Today, President Trump and his OMB are chipping away at the fabric of these constitutional restrictions in new and dramatic ways:

Chief Propagandist

The noise of this stuff coming from the White House is constant and endless, polluting the political atmosphere with a constant stream of propaganda and misinformation: