Prosecutors in U.S. attorney Jeannine Pirro's office are unnerved by their failures to indict targets of President Donald Trump's ire, and they reportedly believe the system is rigged against them.
The president accused six Democratic lawmakers of sedition for producing a video urging military service members to disobey unlawful orders, but their lawyers said federal prosecutors looking into those allegations were genial in their inquiry and indicated an investigation was in its earliest stages – until suddenly something charged, reported the New York Times.
"For reasons that remain unclear, Jeanine Pirro, a longtime ally of Mr. Trump, abruptly instructed her team to seek an indictment of the lawmakers, all of whom had served in the armed forces or the intelligence community," the Times reported. "Her prosecutors then faced a decision that many in the department under Mr. Trump have confronted: Comply or resist. They chose the first."
However, their case was unanimously rejected by grand jurors, who did not believe prosecutors had shown probably cause that a crime had been committed by Sens. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) or Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) or four House members.
"But the unsuccessful effort to prosecute Mr. Kelly, Ms. Slotkin and their colleagues in the House — Representatives Jason Crow of Colorado, Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire, Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania and Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania — has rattled some people in Ms. Pirro’s office who have come to the conclusion that it reflects a broader problem with Washington grand jurors, according to three people familiar with the matter," the Times reported.
Pirro's office failed to secure indictments last summer related to Trump's law enforcement surge in Washington, D.C., and those people are worried that they may not be able to successfully prosecute the cases the 79-year-old president has demanded be brought.
"Typically, an inquiry of such gravity, one that could potentially result in charges being filed against six sitting members of Congress, would have taken months of painstaking work and received intense scrutiny from every level of the Justice Department, including the solicitor general and the attorney general," the Times reported.
"But the case against the Democratic lawmakers did not appear to receive that sort of close examination, according to the people familiar with it," the report added. "They said that as recently as last month, the prosecutors working on the case had not determined what statutes had been broken and left the impression with defense lawyers that the effort fell short of a formal investigation."
The pace suddenly picked up around the start of this month, but when asked directly, prosecutors were unable to tell defense lawyers what statute the members of Congress had violated.
"Ultimately, the prosecutors asked the grand jury to approve an indictment on charges that the lawmakers had violated a law that forbids interfering with the loyalty, morale or discipline of the U.S. armed forces," the Times reported. "But the grand jurors refused to go along."