Prosecutors charge D.C. sandwich thrower with misdemeanor
Federal prosecutors filed a misdemeanor charge Wednesday against a D.C. man who threw a sandwich at a federal officer in protest of President Donald Trump’s law enforcement surge in the city, shifting tactics after a grand jury declined to indict Sean Charles Dunn on a more serious felony count.
U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office has failed at least four times this month to persuade grand jurors to indict people who have been accused of assaulting, resisting or impeding federal officers, an extraordinary turn given that grand juries almost always approve indictments. The rare resistance from a body of local citizens shows the limits of Pirro’s strategy of seeking the toughest possible charges for all defendants arrested amid Trump’s crime crackdown.
A prosecutor in Pirro’s office filed a one-page criminal information Wednesday charging Dunn, 37, with a misdemeanor count of assaulting, resisting or impeding a federal officer during the Aug. 10 incident, which was captured on a viral social media video.
U.S. officials said in court filings that Dunn, who worked as a paralegal at the Justice Department before being fired over the sandwich-throwing, berated a group of federal law enforcement officers at a popular nightlife area at the intersection of 14th and U streets NW, calling them fascists, chanting “shame,” telling them to leave the city and ultimately pelting an officer from Customs and Border Protection with a sub.
Dunn was arrested days later at his D.C. apartment in what his attorney, Sabrina Shroff, described in court as a 20-person raid. The White House featured the arrest in a sleek social media video. Pirro took to her X account to jab back after the arrest.
“He thought it was funny. Well, he doesn’t think it’s funny today because we charged him with a felony,” Pirro said. “So there. Stick your Subway sandwich somewhere else!”
The U.S. attorney’s office and Dunn’s attorney did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday.
Days before the D.C. grand jury voted Tuesday not to indict Dunn, grand jurors in the same courthouse voted three separate times not to indict Sydney Reid. Prosecutors said an FBI agent injured her hand as Reid rowdily protested a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrest at the doors of the D.C. jail last month. Officials said the man was a gang member.
After the grand jury refused to indict her, Reid was also charged with a misdemeanor violation of assaulting, resisting or impeding a federal officer.
Without the approval of at least 12 grand jurors, prosecutors cannot file felony charges punishable by more than one year in prison. But they are allowed to charge misdemeanor violations, for which the maximum sentence is a year in jail, without grand jury approval.
In the Dunn and Reid cases, a felony conviction would have been punishable by up to eight years in prison, though neither defendant would have been eligible for the maximum.
Asked about Reid’s case at a news conference Tuesday, Pirro declined to speculate about how juries in D.C. might respond to prosecutors requesting indictments as Trump’s intervention continues. “Sometimes a jury will buy it and sometimes they won’t,” she said. “So be it. That’s the way the process works.”