U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s former colleagues at Fox News cheered her August 13 announcement that she was charging a D.C. resident who threw a sandwich at a federal law enforcement officer with felony assault. The network’s hosts claimed that thanks to the “new sheriff in town,” the man “will be held accountable in a court of law.”

But two weeks later, Pirro’s office has reportedly been unable to secure an indictment against the man, a glaring failure which highlights the weaknesses inherent in appointing a Fox commentator to oversee D.C.’s prosecutorial system.

On the evening of August 10 — two days after President Donald Trump announced he was deploying federal law enforcement officers in the nation’s capital to “make D.C. safe again” — police allege local resident Sean C. Dunn called a group of federal agents on patrol “fascists” and threw a wrapped “sub-style” sandwich which struck a Customs and Border Protection officer. The incident was captured in a viral video.

Pirro, a longtime Fox host who has served as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia since Trump appointed her in May, announced in a video posted to social media on August 13 that she had charged the man with “a felony: assault on a police officer.” She added, “We’re going to back the police to the hilt! So there, stick your Subway sandwich somewhere else!”

Dunn’s arrest came less than seven months after the president, in one of his first acts in office, issued clemency “to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the” January 6 insurrection, including “violent offenders who went after the police on Jan. 6 with baseball bats, two-by-fours and bear spray and are serving prison terms, in some cases of more than a decade.”

(Dunn had reportedly tried to turn himself in but the White House apparently really wanted to make a hype video it could post of armed and armored U.S. Marshals apprehending him at his apartment.)

Pirro‘s former Fox colleagues were quick to tout her action.

Fox host Sean Hannity promised on his August 14 broadcast that Dunn “will be held accountable in a court of law by the U.S. attorney, our former colleague, our friend, Judge Jeanine Pirro,” adding that “the subway sandwich assault is just the beginning of what will be weeks of temper tantrums from elites.”

The failed indictment of sandwich guy shows the limits of Fox's propaganda www.mediamatters.org

Hannity later claimed that a sandwich “may not sound like a big threat,” but “what a lot of people may not be thinking of, an agent being assaulted like that, they have no idea what is being hurled at them.”

The Five’s Greg Gutfeld likewise touted that the “new hero” of “the left” is “facing a felony assault charge after hurling his hoagie at a federal agent in D.C.” When Democratic co-host Jessica Tarlov noted that Trump “pardoned all these January Sixers who beat the crap out of police,” he responded, “They didn't beat the crap out of police.”

On Outnumbered, Emily Compagno said Dunn “could dish it, but he couldn't take it. So now he's going to take it after the felony assault conviction.” And Rachel Campos-Duffy, guest-hosting Jesse Watters Primetime, claimed, “There's a new sheriff in town and the judge already hit him with something worse than a sandwich: a felony assault charge.”

But Pirro’s strategy played better in a Fox News greenroom than in a D.C. courtroom. The New York Times reported Wednesday that a grand jury had rejected the felony assault charge, which it described as “a remarkable failure by the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington” and “a sharp rebuke by a panel of ordinary citizens against the prosecutors assigned to bring charges against people arrested after President Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops and federal agents to fight crime and patrol the city’s streets.”

“It is extremely unusual for prosecutors to come out of a grand jury without obtaining an indictment because they are in control of the information that grand jurors hear about a case and defendants are not allowed to have their lawyers in the room as evidence is presented,” the Times noted.

But such failures are becoming more common in D.C. under Pirro’s leadership of the U.S. attorney’s office. “Before prosecutors failed to indict Dunn, a grand jury on three separate occasions this month refused to indict a D.C. woman who was accused of assaulting an FBI agent, another extraordinary rejection of the prosecution’s case,” The Washington Post reported.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters