By Sarah N. Lynch and Andrew Goudsward
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Federal prosecutors on Thursday dropped their effort to bring a felony charge against a man who was arrested for throwing a sub sandwich at a federal law enforcement agent carrying out President Donald Trump’s crackdown on Washington, D.C., after a grand jury declined to indict him.
Prosecutors charged former Justice Department employee Sean Dunn with a misdemeanor assault against a federal law enforcement officer. Misdemeanors are lesser charges than felonies and do not require grand jury approval.
It marked the second time this week that a Washington, D.C., grand jury had rebuffed the Justice Department’s attempt to bring felony charges against people protesting Trump’s crackdown, following a separate case in which federal prosecutors three times failed to persuade a grand jury to indict a woman on charges of assaulting an FBI agent whose hand was injured while trying to subdue her.
It is rare for a grand jury to reject a request for an indictment, given that the legal standard is lower than to secure a conviction at trial, and prosecutors alone control the presentation of evidence.
Attorney General Pam Bondi fired Dunn, who worked on international affairs in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, after he was caught on camera throwing a sub sandwich at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent on August 10 in a bustling Washington neighborhood.
A lawyer for Dunn, Sabrina Shroff, declined to comment.
Prosecutors in Washington were ordered earlier this month to try to charge as many cases as they can federally, as part of Trump’s crackdown on crime and efforts to flood the streets with federal agents and National Guard troops.
The Trump administration has deployed federal agents and National Guard troops to curb what Trump has portrayed as an out-of-control crime problem in the nation’s capital, despite police statistics showing a decline in violent crime following an earlier surge.
(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch in Washington; Additional reporting by Andrew Goudsward in Washington; Editing by Scott Malone and Matthew Lewis)
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