The Justice Department has taken a series of legal losses in President Donald Trump’s second term, including a shocking streak of failures even to get indictments past grand juries in cases of alleged assaults on Trump-backed law enforcement officers. Yet another data point emerged this week in a case that made it to trial but ended in a not guilty verdict against the U.S. attorney’s office currently led by Trump-installed prosecutor Lindsey Halligan.
Prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia accused Peter Stinson of soliciting a crime of violence with social media posts. Among those listed in the superseding indictment against him are posts that said “One well placed shot would open up a whole new reality” and “He needs to be luigied” — an apparent reference to Luigi Mangione’s alleged shooting of health care executive Brian Thompson. (Mangione pleaded not guilty in New York, where his federal and state cases are pending.)
The government initially indicted Stinson in July, accusing him of criminally threatening the president. The government then sought to dismiss that charge and move forward with the superseding solicitation charge. U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga let the government do so over a defense objection that called the threats charge “hastily” brought in the face of binding precedent establishing that Stinson’s statements didn’t qualify as “true threats.” The defense argued that the case should be fully dismissed, but Trenga let it move forward.
The judge also denied the defense’s pretrial motion to dismiss the case on First Amendment grounds. Stinson’s lawyers argued that the government’s preferred use of the solicitation law “would transform routine political hyperbole into a federal felony.”
But the judge did side with the defense in granting a motion to block the government from using the term “ANTIFA,” over the objection of prosecutors who argued that Stinson’s “repeated statements that he is ANTIFA is direct evidence of his mens rea, an element for which the government carries the burden of proof, and is therefore highly relevant and probative.” (Mens rea refers to criminal intent, which prosecutors must prove.) Stinson’s lawyers argued that letting the jury hear the term would risk finding him guilty “merely by association” — a concern they said was especially potent in light of Trump’s executive order labeling antifa a “domestic terrorist organization.”
Because jury deliberations are secret, we may never know if prosecutors would’ve succeeded had they been allowed to pursue their antifa theory of the case. We do know that on Tuesday, the jury returned a not guilty verdict.
Stinton’s acquittal follows the not guilty verdict earlier this month in the Washington, D.C., case of Sidney Reid, whom prosecutors failed to get a felony indictment against an incredible three times for allegedly assaulting law enforcement. They proceeded to trial on a misdemeanor and lost. Like Stinson in Virginia, Reid was successfully represented by federal public defenders in her district. Halligan didn’t initiate the Stinson case. It was brought during the tenure of Erik Siebert, a Republican whom the administration had appointed to lead the Virginia office and then forced out after he resisted bringing cases against James Comey and Letitia James (which the administration installed Halligan to bring). There are significant issues in the Comey and James cases that could lead to their pretrial dismissal, including whether Halligan is even lawfully serving in her role. But if they get to juries, she might have just gotten a preview of the results. 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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