President Donald Trump's federal takeover of D.C. has the local courts stretched to breaking point, CNN reported on Wednesday.
Trump's D.C. U.S. Attorney, former Fox News commentator Jeanine Pirro, "has encouraged its prosecutors to bring more cases to federal court with the most serious charges they can pursue. Defense attorneys across the city believe weaker cases are now being brought into the system as smaller infractions are bumped up to more serious charges," reported Katelyn Polantz, Marshall Cohen, Holmes Lybrand, and Casey Gannon.
“It’s a real mess right now,” AJ Kramer, the federal public defender for DC, told CNN of the overwhelmed judicial process.
Complicating the issue, Trump's prosecutors have been instructed to leave as many people in jail pending trial as possible, "despite a longstanding approach of courts keeping people accused of non-violent or petty crimes out of jail unless they’re convicted" — a move further cemented by Trump's order instructing D.C. courts to end cashless bail policies.
The result, according to the report, is that "Trump’s federal takeover of DC law enforcement is straining the city’s jail, federal court and its local Superior Court, which is already down 13 judges – vacancies the president is in charge of filling because of Washington’s status as the seat of the federal government."
All of this comes at a moment when the Trump administration's prosecutors have suffered embarrassing failures to win indictments.
Jeanine Pirro's office was forced to downgrade assault charges against a woman who allegedly interfered with an ICE arrest to a misdemeanor, after three consecutive grand juries refused to return an indictment. And on Wednesday morning, the office failed to secure an indictment against Sean Dunn, the man who threw a sandwich at agents patrolling D.C.