After another United States Attorney appointee, wholly lacking in any qualification other than loyalty, failed to get Senate confirmation, she was flipped from “interim” to “acting” in an effort to circumvent the law and give the president what he wanted. Another judge ruled against her.

The A problem is that this administration isn’t like the old one. One of the hallmarks of Trump 1.0 was his stunning ignorance of law and governance was somewhat constrained by others in the administration who told him he couldn’t do some of the things that popped into his head because they were unlawful. In Trump 2.0 (or 3.0, as he informed a clearly impressionable group of generals who flew into Quantico at great expense and disruption, too rapt by the gravitas of Pete Hegseth’s warnings about “beardos” and fatties to utter a sound), he is surrounded by others bent on overcoming the limits of law and governance to accomplish Trump’s and Stephen Miller’s goals of hegemony.

After replacing a nominee so disqualified, Ed Martin, with one of the few remaining Fox News talking heads, Jeanine Pirro, as United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, Pirro managed to fail to get federal grand juries to indict at a pace that exceeded all United States Attorneys in the history of the nation combined. The humiliation of such abject failure was apparently more than a sober Pirro could take, and so a new scheme was devised. If a federal grand jury refused to indict, why not take the case before a local grand jury instead?

Imagine putting together 24 of your friends and neighbors, swearing them in and calling them a grand jury? Why not? What’s so special about the grand jury being in one room rather than another, even if the first room is in a federal courthouse and bears the imprimatur of the law? Sure, the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution requires a grand jury indictment, but it doesn’t say anything about whose grand jury is has to be, right?

Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui was presented with an indictment that no magistrate before him had to address because it was returned not by a federal grand jury, which had already returned no true bill, but by a local grand jury. What’s a mag to do?

A federal grand jury refused to return an indictment in this case. This was once unheard of, but has become common as of late.

Typically, when a federal grand jury refuses to return an indictment in a case, either the government takes the message as a warning to go no further or, hopefully in only the rarest of cases, presents the indictment again to another federal grand jury.

To this judge’s knowledge, what has never happened before is doing an end run around the federal grand jury completely. Yet that is what has happened today.

Novel issues in the law do arise on occasion, but they are extremely rare and generally tend to be frowned upon. After all, stability is the cornerstone to law, as reflected in the doctrine of stare decisis, such that we can know what the law requires and can govern ourselves accordingly. If the law, whether procedural or substantive, is in a constant state of flux, we become incapable of conforming our conduct and process to existing law, if law today isn’t law tomorrow. Magistrate Faruqui decided that applied to the procedure of grand jury indictments.

Today, prosecutors again presented a single count federal indictment against the defendant,
but this time before a Superior Court grand jury. After receiving a true bill from that local grand jury, prosecutors sought to return the federal indictment in federal court. At a minimum, this is very unseemly; more than likely, it is unlawful. Not to mention, this only deepens the growing mistrust of the actions of prosecutors. That is a sentiment that was once unthinkable, but the irregular is now the regular. See Fed. Educ. Ass’n v. Trump, No. 25-1362, 2025 WL 2355747, at *11 (D.D.C. Aug. 14, 2025) (Judge Friedman, a renowned former prosecutor and judge, recently collected cases addressing this topic, and concluded that “[i]n just six months, the President of the United States may have forfeited the right to [] a presumption of regularity.”). Prosecutors used to not look for loopholes. They sought justice and respected the decisions of juries, favorable or not.

Among the many running grievances of Trump 2.0 is that his rule by Executive Order has been successfully challenged and enjoined far more than any president before him. And indeed, that is true. According to Trump, “radical judges” appointed by such well-known “lefties” as Reagan and Bush (H.W. and W.), and even Trump himself, have found themselves in the awkward position of ruling on novel efforts to circumvent the law and Constitution. The further one strays from the law and Constitution, the greater the likelihood that a federal judge finds fault with one’s actions. Magistrate Judge Faruqui refused to accept the indictment.

“Historically, [the grand jury] has been regarded as the primary security to the innocent
against hasty, malicious and oppressive persecution; it serves the invaluable function in our society of standing between the accuser and the accused, whether the latter be an individual, minority group, or other, to determine whether a charge is founded upon reason or was dictated by an intimidating power or by malice and personal ill will.” Wood v. Georgia, 370 U.S. 375, 390 (1962). These words from the Supreme Court are haunting given what is before the Court today. The undersigned will not rubberstamp the breaking of decades-long norms and the rule of law. As such, the Court refused to take the grand jury return—another first in this District.

United States Attorney Jeanine Pirro, who remains unlicensed to practice law in the District of Columbia, and whose New York license has failed to comply with the requirement that it be updated with her current place of service as it still shows her employer to be Fox News, was displeased with the decision.

Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney, pushed back in a statement. “Instead of being an activist judge, Judge Faruqui should spend more time focused on his cases, so that he doesn’t get overruled so often,” she said. “The submission of an indictment to the court is a ministerial act over which Judge Faruqui has no additional powers of judicial review.”

If only Pirro could manage to get a federal grand jury to indict her cases. You know, the regular way.