Judge 'floored' after Trump DOJ levies charges he had 'never seen in federal court'

A magistrate judge in Washington, D.C. was completely gobsmacked by yet another poorly-conceived prosecution brought by President Donald Trump's Justice Department in the district, and tore them to pieces in a response on Thursday.

Trump's U.S. attorney for D.C., former Fox News personality Jeanine Pirro, has spent the last several weeks flooding the courts with a massive string of prosecutions for low-level offenses that would not normally be charged so aggressively, drowning magistrates and court officers in an unprecedented workload. Many of these cases, including those in which the administration sought to throw the book at protesters who used force against immigration agents, had to be downgraded to misdemeanors after grand juries refused to indict.

In this particular case, Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui had nothing but scorn for the way prosecutors handled it from start to end.

"Magistrate judge Faruqui, who has been on a tear over DOJ's flimsy prosecutions in recent weeks, was floored by the Trump administration's decision to level a federal marijuana possession charge against a recently arrested defendant. But that's not all," wrote Politico's Kyle Cheney. "He says DOJ held the man in detention for *three days* on this misdemeanor charge even though prosecutors later agreed he shouldn't be detained at all."

A misdemeanor simple possession charge, let alone one brought on its own, Faruqui wrote, is "a charge the undersigned has never seen in federal court."

Infuriating the judge further, wrote Cheney, "Prosecutors seized the indigent man's phone, leaving him without a means to contact his lawyer or access his personal information."

Faruqui concluded the response by saying, "This case does not seemingly belong in federal court. And this phone certainly does not belong with federal agents."