Defiant Grand Juries Emerge as Zones of Resistance to Trump Administration’s High-Profile Prosecutions

A grand jury at the District of Columbia declined Tuesday to indict the former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, adding to a growing pattern of grand juries refusing to accede to the wishes of prosecutors at President Trump’s Department of Justice.While the details of the charges against Ms. Hutchinson sought by prosecutors are not immediately clear, Republicans have long accused her of lying under oath in testimony she delivered to Congress in 2022. Ms. Hutchinson, who served as a special assistant to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, regaled lawmakers with her account of Mr. Trump’s behavior on January 6, 2021.Mr. Trump has called Ms. Hutchinson a “total phony” and “bad news.” Ms. Hutchinson testified that she heard an account of Mr. Trump lunging at the Secret Service agent driving “The Beast” — the armored Cadillac presidential limousine — and demanding to be brought to the Capitol on January 6 after his speech at the Ellipse. The driver testified that Mr. Trump never grabbed the steering wheel” and added that “I didn’t see him, you know, lunge to try to get into the front seat at all.”Ms. Hutchinson also testified that a former lawyer of hers who also served as a White House counsel for Mr. Trump advised her that “the less you remember, the better.” She told lawmakers that advice struck her as “ridiculous, because in my heart I knew where my loyalties lied, and my loyalties lied with the truth. And I never wanted to diverge from that.” In 2023 Ms. Hutchinson published a memoir, “Enough.”The Constitution ordains that “No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury.” Courts have interpreted that injunction to mean that grand juries are required whenever prosecutors seek felony charges. Grand juries are usually extraordinarily accommodating to prosecutors — most analyses put indictment rates at more than 90 percent. Grand jurors are drawn from surrounding federal districts, making them reflective of local partisan politics. The success of prosecutors before grand juries is so well attested that it gave rise to one of the law’s most well-known chestnuts — Judge Sol Wachtler’s quip that “any good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.” That run of success is largely structural — prosecutors present their cases to grand juries without the presence of defense attorneys. The defendant’s constitutional right to a lawyer attaches later in the litigation process.The refusal of a grand jury to hand up a “true bill” against Ms. Hutchinson came just a day after the unsealing of a new set of criminal charges against the former director of the FBI, James Comey. Those charges, though, were obtained not through an indictment — which requires a grand jury — but through a different charging tool called an “information.” An information is issued solely by prosecutors, and its use generally requires a defendant’s consent. Mr. Comey is challenging the one levied against him as unlawful. The failure to indict Ms. Hutchinson is hardly the first time the Trump administration has faced resistance from grand juries. In December of last year two consecutively convened grand juries in Virginia refused to hand up bank fraud charges against New York’s attorney general, Letitia James. Those demurrals came after the charges against Ms. James were dismissed following a ruling that the acting United States attorney, Lindsey Halligan, was unlawfully appointed by Attorney General Pam Bondi.In February, a grand jury at the District of Columbia refused to indict six Democratic lawmakers — including Senators Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin — following videos in which the solons reminded intelligence and military personnel that they were obligated to refuse illegal orders. Last year, another grand jury at the District of Columbia declined to indict a former DOJ paralegal, Sean Charles Dunn, on felony assault charges after he threw a Subway footlong sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection agent.

Defiant Grand Juries Emerge as Zones of Resistance to Trump Administration’s High-Profile Prosecutions

Defiant Grand Juries Emerge as Zones of Resistance to Trump Administration’s High-Profile Prosecutions

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