‘They’ve lost the jury pool’: Jeanine Pirro’s office is struggling to win trials this year
By Katelyn Polantz, CNN
(CNN) — The DC US attorney’s office under Jeanine Pirro has had an unusually low win rate in trials in Washington’s federal district court this year, at a moment when the White House has been clamoring for President Donald Trump’s Justice Department to deliver on prosecutions.
In its first eight criminal trials this year, the DC US attorney’s office has won only half of them — far below the national average.
The dicey record appears to stem from several issues in court, including a jury pool that has lost trust in the Trump administration, the FBI and the Justice Department, according to roughly a dozen people who have interacted with juries in the DC District Court in recent months.
Recent jury trial outcomes and grand jury failures in DC also highlight a persistent problem across the department, where any top prosecutor may have a difficult time in a courthouse because of the president’s public desire to pursue political vendettas.
Attorney General Pam Bondi’s failures over the past 14 months to prosecute Trump’s political enemies — which at times were blocked by grand juries or judges — added to Trump’s frustration with her before she was ousted Wednesday, CNN has reported.
Asked about the federal criminal trial record in an interview with CNN this weekend, US Attorney Jeanine Pirro responded multiple times with, “Hogwash!”
Pirro dismissed the idea that the political environment is hurting her office’s results. “If a jury feels that we haven’t met our burden, then so be it,” she said.
She also took issue with only looking at the acquittals and hung juries this year “as indicative of what’s going on in the system,” saying she was “very proud of the conviction rate.”
Yet several former prosecutors in the office say the political situation makes trying cases more difficult than in previous years.
“They’ve lost the jury pool,” one DC white-collar attorney said about his former office.
“It’s the shadow cast by the Department of Justice,” the attorney added, noting the large banners of Trump now hanging from the Justice Department headquarters building downtown and from the Labor Department, which is next to the DC federal courthouse. “None of this is helping.”
In the coming weeks, sources told CNN, it’s possible the department may attempt to secure indictments against Trump political foes from grand juries in heavily Democratic DC, which has proved to be another challenge for Pirro’s office.
Defending her record
DC prosecutors this year have been far below the Justice Department’s typical winning rate in federal criminal trials. About 90% of juries nationwide convicted criminal defendants, while the remaining 10% voted to acquit during each of the last three years, according to trial statistics from the federal judiciary.
Prosecutors in the office are realistic about how their cases may be met by jurors who suspect politics are at play, several people familiar with the office have told CNN.
A Justice Department spokesman commended Pirro’s law enforcement work in a statement provided to CNN after Bondi’s departure. The spokesman, Chad Gilmartin, asserted that “far-left activists” may be trying to “undermine” her office’s efforts.
Not all challenges in court for Pirro’s office can be directly attributed to her decisions as US attorney. And the office has been repeatedly successful in its national security and violent crime cases, with some violent crimes in DC on the decline and many defendants still choosing to plead guilty rather than go to trial, as is typical in the federal justice system.
Pirro on Saturday touted her record of jury convictions combined with guilty pleas, which she said adds up to 84 guilty federal defendants this year, versus just two acquittals. She also touted during her tenure the hundreds of guilty defendants in DC’s Superior Court, where her office also brings local cases.
“Those are guilty pleas because the defendants know that we’re going to convict them at trial,” Pirro said.
Pushback from grand juries
The jury pool issues for Pirro’s office first cropped up last year in several secret grand jury proceedings, where a majority of the grand jurors declined to indict people who may be opposed to Trump or his policies, especially during the president’s law enforcement crackdown in the city.
Pirro’s office was rebuffed by multiple juries in its prosecution of the lawyer who threw a footlong Subway sandwich at a federal immigration officer last summer. A grand jury refused to indict the sandwich thrower, Sean Dunn, and then once the indictment was secured, trial jurors in the DC federal court determined Dunn was not guilty of assault.
In February, Pirro’s office couldn’t get a grand jury’s approval for proposed charges against Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly and five other former military and intelligence officers now serving in Congress.
The surprise attempted case fizzled as another longtime judge in the courthouse, Richard Leon, was finalizing an opinion that said retaliation toward Kelly over the video violated his free speech rights.
The episode, to many in the DC legal community, was a watershed moment signifying Pirro’s attempts to push through the courts even problematic cases.
The grand jury rejections, which are commonly called “no true bills” in court, had happened very infrequently for past Justice Departments. Several people in the DC legal community now say they are part of a trend of jurors opposing Justice Department cases.
Hung juries and split verdicts
In the four of eight criminal jury trials this year that ended without convictions, two were declared to be mistrials because of juries that wouldn’t agree on a verdict. The other two resulted in the defendants walking free.
In January, prosecutors tried Cortney Merritts, the husband of a Democratic former member of Congress, on accusations he fraudulently obtained more than $20,000 in Covid-era government loans for his moving company. Prosecutors pointed out in the trial that Merritts had no employees on a payroll and far less income than he claimed.
Cori Bush, who left Congress last year and is running again, testified on her husband’s behalf, speaking about how she met him during the pandemic and about her service in Washington.
Merritts, testifying in his own defense, maintained he was innocent. Prosecutor Emily Miller told jurors that Merritts was “not on trial here for who he is.”
The jurors deliberated for three days, telling the judge multiple times they were at an impasse.
“Please let us know how to move forward when personal judgements have been clearly expressed and that judgement will not change regardless of any further discussion,” the jurors wrote to the judge on the third day.
The judge, Jia Cobb, declared a mistrial.
Mistrust and anger with the federal government appears to have contributed to a willingness of some of the jurors to nullify, meaning they refused to side with prosecutors to send a larger message, people familiar with the jury’s deliberations told CNN.
Yet Merritts’ defense attorney, Justin Gelfand, told CNN last week the defense strategy wasn’t aiming for jury nullification. He believed the prosecutors’ case simply wasn’t strong.
“I believe a jury wouldn’t have convicted no matter the administration,” Gelfand said.
After the verdict, the US attorney’s office asked to have the case against Merritts dismissed.
A DC federal jury also hung in December on a years-old case against Salvadoran gang members. The case is being retried by Pirro’s office beginning this week.
Then in January, a different jury couldn’t agree on a verdict in a federal narcotics- and drug-possession trial. Pirro’s office is set to retry that case in August.
At yet another trial this February, prosecutors in DC secured a partial conviction that fell short of their hopes.
The defendant, former Federal Reserve adviser John Harold Rogers, was alleged to have sent secrets from the Federal Reserve to China.
The jury, after hearing from 11 witnesses and deliberating for a day, ultimately acquitted Rogers on the more serious charge he faced, of economic espionage. Prosecutors said Rogers sent economic trade secrets over a 12-year period to contacts posing as Chinese graduate students. In reality, prosecutors say Rogers’ contacts worked for “the intelligence and security apparatus of China,” according to the indictment.
The jury still found Rogers guilty of lying in a 2020 inspector general interview when asked whether he had shared private information from the Federal Reserve. He is set to be sentenced in May.
‘Protect the king’
In one of the two full acquittal verdicts this year, the politics of Trump hovered over the trial.
A Secret Service agent testified in January that a man had pointed a cat toy laser toward the president’s helicopter as it took off in September from the White House lawn, an alleged felony. A defense lawyer for the man, Jacob Winkler, argued he didn’t do it knowingly.
Federal public defender Alexis Gardner invoked the federal government’s fealty to Trump. She argued to the jury that a rookie Secret Service agent overreacted when he encountered Winkler on the street, and neither man knew where Marine One was in the air.
“[The agent] testified to being hyperaware that there had been an increase in political violence, that Charlie Kirk’s funeral was the next day, that it’s his job to protect Trump. In his mind, it is all things Trump. Trump is somewhere overhead. Oh, God, protect the king from this peon and this cat toy,” Gardner said in her closing argument to the DC jury.
“What the government has proven to you is that you don’t get no justice from the Department of Justice,” Gardner said.
The jury reached a unanimous verdict in under two hours. Winkler was acquitted.
Big trials ahead
The jury refusals, several legal experts in Washington told CNN, could begin to harm law enforcement’s ability to bring legitimate cases against defendants who are serious public safety threats.
“Now when prosecutors walk before a jury, this DOJ’s credibility has so eroded, the trust is so thin — and everyday cases concerning public safety are the casualties,” said JP Cooney, a longtime prosecutor in the US attorney’s office. Cooney, who is now running for Congress, was fired from the Justice Department last January following a stint as the top deputy to special counsel Jack Smith in criminal investigations of Trump.
Pirro’s office is still working on significant possible and upcoming trials.
The man accused of a hate crime for killing a young couple leaving a Jewish community event in the city last May is awaiting the Justice Department’s decision on whether it will seek the death penalty against him in DC District Court, a notoriously difficult city for federal capital trials.
The alleged shooter of two National Guard members, one of whom died, outside a busy Metro station in November is also awaiting trial in DC District Court, with prosecutors similarly seeking the death penalty.
In August, the Libyan man accused of being involved in making the bomb that destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 is set to go to trial after a decadeslong pursuit by US authorities.
Pirro’s office also has an upcoming bribery trial against DC City Councilmember Trayon White. The case is now set to be tried by one of the longest-tenured white-collar prosecutors in the office.
“Oh, I can’t wait,” Pirro said to local DC TV station NBC4 in January about the impending White trial. “I expect a conviction.”
Turnover and tough cases
Some of the difficulty Pirro’s office has faced in court recently, sources say, has been compounded by a mass exodus of experienced prosecutors in the US attorney’s office.
Many were fired under Pirro’s predecessor Ed Martin, because they had worked on criminal cases against Trump supporters who took part in the US Capitol riot on January 6, 2021 — one of the largest federal law enforcement efforts in recent memory and one that consumed the prosecutors’ office.
The environment in the US attorney’s office appears to be in flux enough that Pirro, a former New York county judge herself, recently wrote to the federal district court seeking feedback on how her line attorneys were doing. She told CNN she had done so because, “any effective leader should seek feedback on how their team is performing so we can continually improve.”
Not all judges responded constructively, CNN was told by multiple sources.
Defense attorneys, however, have quietly shifted their approach because of Pirro’s middling success with trials.
“We want people to try hard cases. If the case is rock solid, the person usually pleads” and doesn’t go to trial, one US attorney’s office prosecutor who left the office last year told CNN recently. “But if I’m a defense attorney in this district, I would recommend to my client, this is an opportunity to be comfortable with losing. Because you might win.”
The story headline has been updated.
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CNN’s Evan Perez and Holmes Lybrand contributed to this report.
