Last August, I wrote about the resurgence of the grand jury as a formidable force against the administration’s more partisan prosecutions. We saw it in December when grand jurors twice declined to re-indict Letitia James for mortgage fraud. And we witnessed this again yesterday when a DC grand jury flatly declined to indict six Democratic lawmakers. The sound of the gavel hitting the bench echoed far beyond the courtroom. It was a stunning rebuke of US Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s bad-faith attempt to bring felony charges against the group for a 90-second video advising members of the military and intelligence communities of their obligation to refuse illegal orders.
Despite the White House’s public demands for sedition charges, the community stood in the way, proving that the old adage about a grand jury being able to “indict a ham sandwich” is being dismantled in the face of the Trump administration’s insistence on using the coercive power of the state to intimidate its adversaries into submission.
This failure is part of a deepening rift between an administration that views the Justice Department as a weapon and a growing community sense of justice that views its actions as horrific abuses of power. In Washington and across the country, the grand jury is shedding its reputation as a rubber stamp and reclaiming its constitutional role as a shield. These citizens are no longer willing to be the silent partners in a campaign to silence dissent through the threat of criminal sanction.
The momentum began last summer when a DC grand jury twice declined to indict Sean Charles Dunn—a former DOJ employee—on felony charges for allegedly throwing a sandwich at a federal officer. Jurors refused to escalate a messy act of protest into a felony, recognizing that the administration was seeking to destroy a man’s life to set a political example. That same skepticism has since spread to the administration’s most high-stakes initiatives.
Similarly, in the Central District of California, US Attorney Billy Essayli sought to indict 38 protesters for interfering with ICE raids, but grand jurors indicted only seven, rejecting a government narrative that felt less like a pursuit of justice and more like a tool of state-sponsored intimidation. Back in Washington, federal prosecutors failed on three separate occasions to secure a felony indictment against Sidney Reid for allegedly assaulting an FBI agent. In both Dunn’s and Reid’s cases, Pirro ultimately decided to circumvent the grand jury and seek misdemeanor charges instead. Both cases proceeded to trial, resulting in swift acquittals that signaled the public’s refusal to validate these vindictive, targeted prosecutions.
The historical echoes here are unmistakable. The Framers drafted the Fifth Amendment’s Grand Jury Clause because they had seen the British Crown use the law to crush political dissent. In 1734, it was grand jurors who twice refused to indict dissident publisher John Peter Zenger for seditious libel before the Crown ultimately charged Zenger by information. Today, as the administration demands charges against the president’s political opponents and labels victims of its brutal tactics “would-be assassins,” the grand jury is once again standing in the breach.
The Justice Department’s response to this forceful resistance has been one of indignant escalation. Following these no-bills, high-ranking officials have reportedly instructed prosecutors to simply impanel new grand juries until they arrive at the “correct” result. But as evident from the Dunn, Reid, and James cases, even that has failed. In other cases, they are shifting toward charging by information, a tactic that allows prosecutors to initially bypass grand jurors to avoid the “nuisance” of community oversight—a move reminiscent of the authoritarian tactics the British Crown used to charge John Peter Zenger before a trial jury ultimately vindicated him.
This procedural maneuvering reveals a Justice Department that increasingly views the citizenry not as the conscience of the community, as the Framers intended, but as an obstacle to be cleared in the path toward total submission.
Ultimately, jurors and grand jurors alike have increasingly come to view the administration’s selective motivations as the hallmarks of a vengeful executive seeking to criminalize the very act of defiance—a value deeply ingrained in American culture and enshrined in the First Amendment. Nationwide, the intimidation machine is stalling. Americans are bringing their skepticism into the jury room. While the grand jury represents the first line of defense against the weaponization of the law, the trial jury remains the last.
In the face of a Justice Department determined to prosecute its way to total control, the citizens are reclaiming their long-lost voices, one no-bill or conscientious acquittal at a time.
