A federal judge ruled that a Harvard researcher showed evidence she was in the White House’s crosshairs, clearing her to probe whether her prosecution was retaliation. It is one of a growing number of successes in the mounting claims that accuse President Donald Trump’s government of carrying out vindictive prosecutions.
U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin denied the Justice Department’s appeal Thursday in the criminal case against Kseniia Petrova, a Russian researcher at Harvard Medical School, according to his ruling.
Sorokin upheld an April order by U.S. Magistrate Judge Judith Dein that requires prosecutors to turn over records tied to Petrova’s claim that she was singled out and charged as punishment for fighting her detention.
Customs officers found frog embryo samples that Petrova had not declared when she arrived at Boston’s Logan International Airport in February 2025, according to the indictment. It charges her with smuggling, concealing the samples, and lying to a customs official.
Officers canceled Petrova’s visa, and the government first tried to deport her instead of imposing the normal $50 fine for a first offense of filling out a customs form incorrectly.
After saying that she feared she would be killed if deported to Russia, Petrova spent more than three months in immigration detention while challenging it in federal court, her lawyers wrote in a motion. She has pleaded not guilty.
Her lawyers cited a former U.S. Customs attorney who said that in 35 years he had never prosecuted anyone for smuggling without first processing them for failing to declare an item, Sorokin wrote.
“The cited declaration comprises a credible showing that Petrova was prosecuted due to her status as a Harvard-affiliated researcher and J-1 visa holder—facts which ‘some evidence’ before the Court also shows placed her in the crosshairs of those presently controlling the Executive Branch,” Sorokin wrote.
“[Dein’s] determination does not preclude a future criminal conviction for any or all of the charged offenses, nor does it preclude the conclusion that the present prosecution is legitimate,” Sorokin added.
Sorokin also pointed to a video Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Leah Foley posted on X in May 2025, the day Petrova’s charges became public.
“[T]he public posting of a videotaped statement by the United States Attorney … can itself reasonably be viewed (and Judge Dein did view it) as a meaningful piece of objective evidence tending to show the requisite vindictiveness,” Sorokin wrote.
The ruling said the Justice Department argued that the motives of its Massachusetts prosecutors should be judged apart from those of immigration officers and other executive branch officials.
Sorokin rejected that distinction for now, writing that prosecutors filed charges two days before a hearing on the government’s bid to throw out Petrova’s detention challenge and made them public within hours of it.
In a footnote, Sorokin wrote that recent Supreme Court decisions treating the executive branch as a single unit under the president “potentially called into question” legal rules that treat agencies as independent decision-makers.
Dein’s April order relied in part on an earlier ruling in the case against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man Trump’s administration wrongly deported to El Salvador and then charged with human smuggling.
In May 2026, U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw dismissed that case as vindictive, in what MS NOW described as a rare grant of such a motion.
“The objective evidence here shows that, absent Abrego’s successful lawsuit challenging his removal to El Salvador, the Government would not have brought this prosecution,” Crenshaw wrote.
The Justice Department has appealed, according to a tracker kept by Protect Democracy, an advocacy group that has filed briefs supporting several defendants raising these claims.
The tracker also shows that Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg let an Army veteran charged after burning an American flag pursue a similar claim. The Justice Department dropped that case in March, the day before it was due to turn over evidence about its motives.
Former FBI Director James Comey also argued vindictive prosecution in his first criminal case, which the tracker says was dismissed in November 2025 because the prosecutor who brought it was unlawfully appointed.
Comey now faces charges in North Carolina that he threatened Trump with a social media post of seashells arranged as “8647,” according to the tracker. In July, he asked the court to dismiss that case as vindictive, Bloomberg Government reported.
“[T]he government has singled out Mr. Comey for prosecution because President Trump harbors animus toward Mr. Comey and his protected speech, and it has done so in direct response to the President’s urgings and Mr. Comey’s successful motion to dismiss a prior indictment,” his lawyers wrote.
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