Federal prosecutors on Thursday reduced the charges they filed two weeks ago against a man who threw a sandwich at a federal officer on the streets of Washington, refiling his case as a misdemeanor after they failed to indict him this week on a felony assault count.
The decision to lower the charges against the man, Sean C. Dunn, was the latest courtroom stumble for the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, which has struggled to convince judges and grand jurors of the viability of several cases arising from President Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops and federal agents to fight crime in the city.
The case of Mr. Dunn, who is 37 and a former Justice Department paralegal, captured the attention of much of Washington this month after a video of him hurling a submarine sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection officer on patrol with other federal agents near the corner of 14th and U Streets went viral. In the video, Mr. Dunn can be seen standing inches from the officer, calling him and his colleagues “fascists” and shouting, “I don’t want you in my city!”
The Trump administration brought its own sort of attention to the case after officials posted their own video of a large group of heavily armed law enforcement officers showing up at Mr. Dunn’s apartment to arrest him.
Prosecutors filed the misdemeanor charges in Federal District Court in Washington in a document known as an information, which was signed by one of the highest-ranking officials in the prosecutors’ office. The decision to back off on the more serious felony count came two days after they had gone into a grand jury seeking to indict Mr. Dunn on charges of felony assault and came out empty-handed.
It is all but unheard-of for prosecutors to fail to secure indictments, because they have almost complete control over the grand jury process. They are in charge of what evidence grand jurors hear, and defendants are not allowed to have their lawyers in the room as the evidence is presented.
Given the secrecy that typically surrounds grand juries, it was not immediately clear whether prosecutors had gone into a second grand jury and failed again to obtain an indictment. Under the law, prosecutors generally have 30 days from the moment a defendant is arrested to secure an indictment or file an information — a deadline that would have come in Mr. Dunn’s case in about two weeks.
His lawyer, Sabrina Shroff, declined to comment on charges being reduced.
Something similar took place in a separate case on Monday when prosecutors reduced to a misdemeanor the felony charge they had initially brought against a woman accused of assaulting an F.B.I. agent during a protest against immigration officials at the Washington jail last month.
In that case, prosecutors failed not just once, but three times, to obtain an indictment from grand jurors.
All of these developments were an indication that the residents of Washington who sit on grand juries have been looking with a measure of skepticism on efforts by federal prosecutors to bring harsh charges against people caught up in Mr. Trump’s surge of federal agents and National Guard troops onto the streets. Those efforts have resulted in a flurry of defendants being charged with federal crimes that would typically be handled at the local-court level, if they were filed at all.
Not long before the information was filed against Mr. Dunn, a federal magistrate judge sitting in a different case released from custody a man named Paul Bryant, a lawyer and West Point graduate, who had been arrested on Tuesday on charges of assaulting, resisting or impeding the police and threatening a federal official.
At a court hearing, the magistrate judge, Zia M. Faruqui, assailed prosecutors for having held Mr. Bryant behind bars in the first place as he awaited trial, saying that the government had a “close to zero” chance of proving that he was a danger to the community, according to WUSA9 News.
“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,” Judge Faruqui said.
Prosecutors say that on Sunday evening Mr. Bryant approached a group of National Guard members from Delaware and Ohio who were patrolling 14th Street and threatened to kill them. Before turning away, the prosecutors said, Mr. Bryant “threw his left shoulder” into the shoulder of one of the Guard members.
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.
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