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Jeanine Pirro can't indict a ham sandwich, and Harvard gets a win [1]

['Daily Kos Staff']

Date: 2025-09-06

Injustice for All is a weekly series about how the Trump administration is trying to weaponize the justice system—and the people who are fighting back.

Fox News veteran continues to be unable to indict ham sandwiches or anything else

It has to be clear by now that Jeanine Pirro is not having a good time in her new-ish role as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. While the former Fox News talking head is supposed to be at the helm of a glorious crime crackdown, putting those elite D.C. residents in their place, grand juries are simply not cooperating. She wasn’t even able to secure an indictment against someone she claimed was threatening to kill Donald Trump, probably because it was clear the person was just intoxicated and rambling.

This is at least the seventh time a grand jury has refused to return indictments brought by Pirro’s office. This is a truly astonishing figure when you learn that from 2009-2010, for example, there were over 160,000 cases brought by federal prosecutors nationwide, and grand juries only voted not to indict in 11 cases. Even when Pirro manages to get a defendant in the courtroom, it isn’t going well, with a federal magistrate judge saying one of the searches Pirro thought was dandy was “without a doubt the most illegal search I've ever seen in my life.” Maybe Pirro should just go back to fighting with five-gallon bottles of water. Might be more her speed.

“Defendants used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.”

Those are the words of U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs, in her extremely fire 84-page opinion ordering the Trump administration to unfreeze $2.6 billion in research funds it was illegally withholding from Harvard. Burroughs pulled no punches, holding that the research cuts were retaliatory, imposed not because of any alleged antisemitism but because Harvard wouldn’t buckle to the administration.

While it is pleasing to see Burroughs smack the administration down, it’s less pleasing to realize that she needed to explain that she also knows the danger plaintiffs face in standing up to the administration and how the lower courts are obliged to stand firm:

Now it is the job of the courts to similarly step up, to act to safeguard academic freedom and freedom of speech as required by the Constitution, and to ensure that important research is not improperly subjected to arbitrary and procedurally infirm grant terminations, even if doing so risks the wrath of a government committed to its agenda no matter the cost.

Genuinely stirring words that a judge should never have to write.

Is it time for Alina Habba 2.0?

Just two short weeks ago, a federal judge ruled that Alina Habba was not legally in her job as acting U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey and hasn’t been since July 1. It turned out that the complicated series of temporary appointments and resignations that the Trump administration had strung together wasn’t, well, legal.

Now it’s Sigal Chattah’s turn. Like Habba, Chattah is only hanging on to her U.S. attorney job in Nevada thanks to the administration’s patented “What on earth can we do to avoid having this person confirmed by the Senate?” method. Chattah now faces the same challenge that Habba did, with criminal defendants asking the court to dismiss their indictments. Because if you’re not actually the U.S. attorney, you can’t indict someone. To determine whether Chattah is legally in her role requires the same analysis the court applied to Habba, and that didn’t go so well for Habba, now did it?

Chattah says she is being targeted because she knows “where all the bodies are buried,” but perhaps it is really because she says things like any judicial decisions she disagrees with are part of a deep state conspiracy. While such a stance no doubt made her very appealing to President Donald Trump, it generally doesn’t count as meaningful experience for the top federal prosecutor in a state.

Trump appointee so mad that fellow judges won’t ignore Supreme Court precedent to give Trump what he wants

On Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that Trump wrongly fired Rebecca Slaughter, a Federal Trade Committee commissioner, and reinstated her to the position. The court of appeals didn’t really have a choice, because the Supreme Court has not overturned Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, a 90-year-old ruling that literally says the president can’t fire an FTC commissioner without cause.

With that, it should be entirely noncontroversial that an intermediate court subject to the rulings of the Supreme Court would follow that ruling. However, conservatives on the highest court have been playing a game on the shadow docket where they basically let Trump fire whoever he wants without saying that they are overruling Humphrey’s. This puts lower courts in somewhat of a bind—unless you are Trump appointee Neomi Rao, who is furious with her colleagues because they should just pretend that the case no longer exists and just go with the vibes from the shadow docket.

Sure, Rao admits that “the removed officer here is a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, and the Supreme Court upheld the removal restriction for such commissioners in Humphrey's Executor,” but the government should get its way nonetheless for … reasons. Rao is supposed to be a leading light of conservative thought, but she’s really just on the court to make sure Trump gets his way, and she doesn’t believe that requires any justification.

You know what is real presidential overreach? Giving kids better wi-fi access.

Federal Communications Commission head Brendan Carr is trying to kill two Biden-era programs that put Wi-Fi on school buses and hotspots in community locations like libraries. Why? Because those programs are “in plain violation of the limits Congress imposed on the FCC’s authority.”

Ah, got it. So when Trump, say, fires independent commissioners and shutters agencies, that is a totally necessary and normal and permissible exercise of presidential power.

Better Wi-Fi access for students, particularly those who may have subpar or no access at home, is monstrous overreach. Oh, and also, making it easier for kids to have Wi-Fi to do their homework does not “advance legitimate classroom or library purposes.”

Neat.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/9/6/2341815/-Jeanine-Pirro-can-t-indict-a-ham-sandwich-and-Harvard-gets-a-win?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=top_news_slot_4&pm_medium=web

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