Jury Acquittal Hands Jeanine Pirro a Big L

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

Three-Time Loser

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

Federal grand juries had declined three times to indict Sydney Reid on felony charges for the incident. Rather than dropping the case, D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro charged it as a misdemeanor and took it to trial. U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan said it may have been the first time any criminal defendant has been charged federally in D.C. with misdemeanor assault on a federal officer, WUSA’s Sophie Rosenthal reports.

While the case has widely been seen as an example of jury nullification, it’s more accurately categorized as on overcharged case. The evidence against Reid was weak, but that didn’t matter. Pirro had ordered her prosecutors to impose the stiffest federal charges possible during Trump’s retaliatory surge of law enforcement into D.C. Some federal judges have balked at some of the cases that have wound up in federal court that might normally have been pursued in D.C. Superior Court — or not pursued at all.

For prosecutors, seeking maximum charges has made winning cases harder. But in Reid’s case, prosecutors did themselves no favors.

Prosecutors — and the two federal officers who were the purported victims in the case — were late in turning over discovery. Some discovery was never turned over at all, leading to admonitions from Judge Sooknanan during trial this week. “These are games,” Sooknanan told prosecutors at one point.

The discovery failures by prosecutors ultimately led Sooknanan to give a curative instruction to the jury:

Before the jury even got the case, Sooknanan acquitted Reid of the misdemeanor as to one of of the federal officers because of insufficient evidence she’d assaulted him. The officer in question had testified to the grand jury that Reid has initiated physical contact, but video of the incident showed that wasn’t true, Sooknanan said in court.

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

The prosecutor argued that the missing message was the result of a mistake the officer made while screenshotting the messages. But Judge Sooknanan was out of patience. “That seems to be a common theme with all your witnesses. Did they lie, or did they continuously make mistakes?” Sooknanan told the prosecutor.

Reid issued a statement after the jury verdict:

To sum it up, Pirro lost three times:

• three grand jury no bills;
• one acquittal by the judge;
• one acquittal by the petit jury.

Juries are doing their jobs, but it should never come to this.

The Bolton Indictment Is Still Crooked

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

In addition, Bolton comes off in the indictment as downright dumb in additional to careless and even reckless in how he allegedly handled classified information, sharing while Trump’s national security adviser more than 1,000 pages of “diary-like” entries with two family members, reported by the WSJ to be his wife and daughter. This alleged exchange is peak WTF:

But plausible criminal charges by themselves do not eliminate the stink that Trump has put all over this investigation. I’d go further than Joyce Vance, who writes that Trump has “undercut the integrity of the criminal justice system.” John Bolton would not have been indicted but for his role as a critic of Trump. The investigation, which began in Trump I, had been closed under the Biden administration, but was revived once Trump took office again. It’s a travesty of justice that this case is being brought at this time in this way.

The WaPo drops a little tidbit in its story 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 has been involved in the Bolton investigation, which is typical for cases involving classified documents.

In Trump I, Eisenberg was a deputy White House counsel and legal advisor to the National Security Council, starting before Bolton arrived, who was involved in some key first term moments. The WaPo story implies but doesn’t outright say that Eisenberg was briefing the White House on the Bolton indictment. But at this point, I’m not sure fleeting accounts of DOJ officials being sighted at the White House carry the same weight as they used to. As Morning Memo has noted repeatedly, the Justice Department is being run out of the White House.

The same day Eisenberg was at the White House, Attorney General Pam Bondi, deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and FBI Director Kash Patel together made an Oval Office appearance with President Trump in which he publicly called for them to target former Special Counsel 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 beset by urban (read: Black) violence and decay — is running hard up against federal judges:

• A three-judge panel of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals consisting of Trump, Obama, and Bush I appointees unanimously upheld a district court injunction barring the deployment of the National Guard in Illinois.
• U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis of Chicago said she will order federal immigration enforcement officers to wear and use body cams.
• U.S. District Judge Georgia Alexakis of Chicago ordered prosecutors to ship back from Maine on a flatbed trailer the vehicle of a Border Patrol agent involved in a hotly contested 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 that they can examine it.

Trump’s Venezuela Misadventure

In the latest developments:

• Adm. Alvin Holsey is stepping down as head of the U.S. Southern Command after less than a year in what is typically a three-year term. Holsey has overseen the buildup of forces in the Caribbean and the unlawful U.S. attacks on alleged drug-smuggling boats. Holsey’s impending departure comes after he “raised concerns about the mission and the attacks on the alleged drug boats,” the NYT reports.
• Only one of the 27 people killed in the U.S. high seas attacks in alleged drug-smuggling boats has been tentatively identified publicly. “[D]espite the mounting death toll, no authority has come forward to publicly release the names of any of the dead,” the NYT reports.
• Analysis by the WaPo shows that the U.S. military’s elite Special Operations aviation unit has likely been operating in Caribbean waters off the coast of Venezuela in recent days.
• Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is making a show of deploying his forces to fend off any U.S. attack.

Thread of the Week

The federal budget apparatus is exceedingly complicated and byzantine, but one of the reasons for that is the constitutional structure that is meant to keep the power of the purse from becoming a tyrannical tool. Now President Trump and his OMB are tearing at the fabric of those constitutional restraints in new and dramatic ways:

Trump's mechanism to pay the troops during the shutdown is by far the most illegal budgetary action he's taken as POTUS, potentially setting the stage to break everything.It's also needless because Congress would easily pass a troop pay bill if Johnson were willing to gavel in.Long thread.

— Bobby Kogan (@bbkogan.bsky.social) 2025-10-15T18:59:02.314Z

Propagandist-in-Chief

The drumbeat of stuff like this out of the White House is constant and never-ending, polluting the political atmosphere with a steady stream of propaganda and disinformation:

Leavitt: "The Democrat Party's main constituency is made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-10-16T17:09:37.030Z

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