Americans across the country from Washington to Los Angeles have made it clear that they reject the Trump administration’s notion of “law and order,” with grand jurors refusing to return indictments in a series of cases alleging assaults on law enforcement during protests. Now, as President Donald Trump agitates against Chicago in his Republican administration’s targeting of Democratic-run cities and states, federal grand jurors in Illinois have declined to approve charges against two people who were accused of assaulting agents in the Chicago area.
That led federal prosecutors in the Northern District of Illinois to move to dismiss the charges Wednesday. Immigration officials had touted the arrests in the case last month, writing on social media that the defendants “will be prosecuted and held accountable.”
While the facts of every case are different and grand jury deliberations are secret, the bottom-line pattern of these rejections is impossible to ignore.
While the facts of every case are different and grand jury deliberations are secret, the bottom-line pattern of these rejections is impossible to ignore. It’s difficult to overstate how rare it is for grand juries to reject indictments — yet, these days, it’s not so unusual in the Trump Justice Department. Whether grand jurors are finding that prosecutors are overcharging, or grand jurors are refusing to return indictments despite finding sufficient evidence to proceed — or some combination thereof — this ongoing phenomenon is one of the most remarkable developments of Trump’s second term.
The Illinois dismissal coincided with the arraignment of former FBI Director James Comey on Wednesday morning, whose charges Trump himself had demanded. In that case, led by an inexperienced former Trump personal lawyer over the objection of career prosecutors, Washington-area grand jurors in Northern Virginia rejected one of the three counts proposed by the administration. Comey pleaded not guilty. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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