UPDATE (August 28, 2025, 5:29 p.m. ET): Shortly after this piece was published, federal prosecutors reduced the charges against Sean Dunn from a felony to a misdemeanor.
His name is Sean Charles Dunn, though you might know him better as the “sandwich guy.” As regular readers know, Dunn — a military veteran and former Justice Department paralegal — had a recent confrontation with a Customs and Border Protection agent on a public street in Washington, D.C. There was some shouting, culminating in Dunn, as a recent criminal complaint put it, “forcefully” throwing a “sub-style sandwich” at the agent.
For some reason, Team Trump decided to make an example of Dunn, elevating his case to an unusual degree. Attorney General Pam Bondi, for example, went after him. So did Jeanine Pirro, the former Fox News host who’s now the top federal prosecutor in the nation’s capital, who said, “Assault a law enforcement officer, and you’ll be prosecuted. This guy thought it was funny — well, he doesn’t think it’s funny today, because we charged him with a felony.”
The White House even sent a social media team to accompany a phalanx of law enforcement personnel to Dunn’s home to take him into custody — and then it released dramatic footage of the arrest online.
The high-profile campaign against sandwich guy was going exactly as the administration wanted, until a grand jury got in the way. NBC News reported:
You could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, the saying goes, but, in Washington, a federal grand jury just declined to indict a man for throwing a salami sub. The grand jury did not return an indictment against a former Justice Department employee who was seen on camera throwing a hoagie at the chest of one of the federal officers President Donald Trump has deployed in the nation’s capital, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Prosecutors tend not to fail before grand juries, since the process is one-sided: Members don’t hear from the defense and the legal standard is low (“probable cause” instead of “beyond a reasonable doubt.”)
At least for now, it’s unclear whether prosecutors will once again try to get another grand jury to indict Dunn before his next court appearance, which is scheduled for Sept. 4. They might also consider reducing the charge to a misdemeanor.
But stepping back, this wasn’t the first time federal prosecutors in Pirro’s office struggled with a local grand jury: Federal prosecutors failed — three times — to secure an indictment against Sidney Reid, who allegedly assaulted an FBI special agent at a recent protest. And then, of course, there was the federal magistrate judge who said this week that an arrest in D.C. was preceded by the “most illegal search I’ve seen in my life” and described another arrest as lacking “basic human dignity.” What’s more, when Pirro’s office charged local attorney and West Point grad Paul Bryant with threatening to kill National Guardsmen, a federal magistrate judge released the defendant — and told prosecutors, “This is perhaps one of the weakest requests for detention I have seen and something that, prior to two weeks ago, would have been unthinkable in this courthouse.” As my MSNBC colleague Jordan Rubin summarized, “[S]omething serious and profound is happening in the nation’s capital.”
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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