A D.C. grand jury has refused to return an indictment against a man accused of assaulting federal law enforcement during a confrontation in Washington, D.C.
The story starts on August 10, when Sean Charles Dunn, 37, at the time a paralegal at the Department of Justice, hurled a sandwich at a Customs and Border Patrol agent on duty at 14th and U in Northwest Washington, D.C.
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In fairness, the throw was lame, and the CBP officer treated it with the seriousness of any threat coming from a man approaching middle age wearing tight shorts and a pink shirt.
Dunn can be heard screaming, “F**k you! You f**king fascists! Why are you here? I don’t want you in my city!” He was arrested at the scene and charged with assaulting an officer by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C. About the time he was being charged, it came to light that he was a Department of Justice employee, and he was promptly fired.
Problems emerged when the case was presented to a D.C. grand jury.
A grand jury declined to indict a man accused of throwing a sandwich at a federal agent in Washington, D.C., in a blow to the Trump administration’s attempts to prosecute crime in the city to the maximum extent, according to people familiar with the matter.
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Dunn was charged by complaint with one felony count of assaulting, resisting or impeding certain officers and employees of the U.S., because he had forcefully thrown the sandwich and struck the officer in the chest. The crime carries a maximum prison sentence of eight years when it includes physical contact.
Prosecutors have to secure a formal indictment from a grand jury within 30 days of an arrest in order to sustain a federal felony charge. It is unclear whether prosecutors will try again to indict Dunn. They could instead opt against pursuing felony charges and file a misdemeanor case, which doesn’t require an indictment from a grand jury.
The rejection of the felony charge is unusual, especially in a well-documented case, and is seen by some as a sign of skepticism by Washington residents on the grand jury toward the aggressive posture from the Trump administration in the city. The administration says that its efforts have been welcomed by locals upset about crime.
This case appears to be the beginning of a trend rather than a standalone incident. On Monday, federal prosecutors dropped felony assault charges against Sidney Lori Reid on charges that she “forcibly assaulted, impeded or interfered with federal agents” as they sought to transfer two alleged gang members into FBI custody at the local jail in Washington. This included scuffling with an agent. The felony charges were dropped after three separate grand juries voted against indicting her.
Prosecutors almost never go in front of grand juries without obtaining indictments because they are in control of the information grand jurors hear and defendants are not allowed to have their lawyers in the room as evidence is presented.
But in a brief submission filed to Magistrate Judge G. Michael Harvey in Federal District Court in Washington, the prosecutors in Ms. Reid’s case acknowledged the extraordinary: that they had failed three times to secure an indictment within the 30 days given to them to do so after Ms. Reid’s arrest.
Compare and contrast this with the alacrity with which D.C. grand juries handed out felony indictments for people merely walking into the Capitol on January 6. Had either Dunn or Reid committed those acts on January 6, 2021, they would have been facing a decade or more in prison.
When law enforcement stopped Torez Riley, a Black man with two illegal firearms in a shopping bag, the federal magistrate hearing the case lambasted the arresting officer for stopping and detaining Riley.
Judge Faruqui called the search so obviously unconstitutional that a “high school student” would know it’s illegal. And it’s “irrelevant” that the search turned up a gun when the search itself is unconstitutional.
“The police are out there looking for everybody, and it seems they’re looking for people that look like you,” Faruqui said. “You can’t go into a grocery store without getting stopped and illegally searched.”
Whether the search was legal, I can’t say. But I can say that two illegal weapons were taken off the street, and a potential murderer was given a valuable life lesson. Instead, the magistrate took it upon him self to apologize on behalf of the government.
“This is on your record forever,” he said of the arrest. “The seven days you spent in jail, nothing can undo that.”
The reluctance of DC judges and juries to support President Trump in tamping down violence in D.C. Former RedStater Bill Shipley, who goes by the handle @shipwreckedcrew on X, has a solid idea.
The case is building for eliminating the District Court for DC, and making it part of the District of Maryland.
You cannot have a District Court that has a juror pool so extremely partisan that objective evidence is simply disregarded based on politics. https://t.co/UiaGZovbNQ
— Shipwreckedcrew (@shipwreckedcrew) August 27, 2025
Hopefully, someone in the Department of Justice and on Capitol Hill is considering that possibility. Right now, it is nearly impossible for a conservative to get a fair trial in D.C. or for a violent Democrat to be indicted.
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