WASHINGTON, DC – SEPTEMBER 05: U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro speaks at a press conference announc…
WASHINGTON, DC – SEPTEMBER 05: U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro speaks at a press conference announcing arrests in the murder of Congressional intern Eric Tarpinian-Jachym, at the U.S. Attorney’s Office on September 05, 2025 in Washington, DC. Pirro announced that two 17-year-olds have been arrested and a third arrest is pending. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
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A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
Three-Time Loser
In a closely watched case, a federal jury acquitted a woman Thursday on charges of assaulting a federal law enforcement officer over the summer during a transfer of detainees to ICE outside of the D.C. jail.
Federal grand juries had declined three times to indict Sydney Reid on felony charges for the incident. Rather than dropping the case, D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro charged it as a misdemeanor and took it to trial. U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan said it may have been the first time any criminal defendant has been charged federally in D.C. with misdemeanor assault on a federal officer, WUSA’s Sophie Rosenthal reports.
While the case has widely been seen as an example of jury nullification, it’s more accurately categorized as on overcharged case. The evidence against Reid was weak, but that didn’t matter. Pirro had ordered her prosecutors to impose the stiffest federal charges possible during Trump’s retaliatory surge of law enforcement into D.C. Some federal judges have balked at some of the cases that have wound up in federal court that might normally have been pursued in D.C. Superior Court — or not pursued at all.
For prosecutors, seeking maximum charges has made winning cases harder. But in Reid’s case, prosecutors did themselves no favors.
Prosecutors — and the two federal officers who were the purported victims in the case — were late in turning over discovery. Some discovery was never turned over at all, leading to admonitions from Judge Sooknanan during trial this week. “These are games,” Sooknanan told prosecutors at one point.
The discovery failures by prosecutors ultimately led Sooknanan to give a curative instruction to the jury:
Before the jury even got the case, Sooknanan acquitted Reid of the misdemeanor as to one of of the federal officers because of insufficient evidence she’d assaulted him. The officer in question had testified to the grand jury that Reid has initiated physical contact, but video of the incident showed that wasn’t true, Sooknanan said in court.
That left the jury to decide whether Reid had assaulted the other officer, the sole witness for the prosecution. That officer didn’t turn over some of her text messages about the case until the first day of trial, and even then one was missing.