A man captured on camera hurling a sandwich at a federal agent in D.C. has been charged with a misdemeanor offense after prosecutors failed to convince a grand jury to return a more serious felony indictment, according to court papers filed Thursday.
The move is a blow to the Trump administration, which had highlighted the felony assault case against Sean Charles Dunn to show it would aggressively prosecute violence against law enforcement — even after Trump pardoned Jan. 6 rioters who brutally attacked officers with poles and other makeshift weapons.
The White House had spotlighted Dunn’s case with a dramatic social media video of his arrest by federal agents. And Washington’s top federal prosecutor, Jeanine Pirro, also touted the felony charge in another social media video, saying into the camera: “So there, stick your subway sandwich somewhere else.”
Dunn is now charged with simple assault, which carries up to one year behind bars. Misdemeanor charges don’t require prosecutors to go to a grand jury. The felony assault charge calls for up to eight years behind bars. Dunn’s attorney didn’t immediately return an email seeking comment.
It’s so rare for a grand jury not to return an indictment that there’s an old saying that prosecutors could convince a grand jury to “indict a ham sandwich.” But grand juries have declined to return indictments a handful of times in recent weeks in Washington — a potential sign of residents’ frustration with the ongoing law enforcement operation that has led to federal charges in many cases that would typically be handled in local court.
A video of Dunn throwing the sandwich at the chest of the agent who was patrolling the nation’s capital went viral in the first days after Trump’s Aug. 11 order for federal agents and troops to flood Washington. Authorities say he also pointed a finger in an agent’s face and swore at him, calling him a “fascist.”
“Why are you here? I don’t want you in my city!” Dunn shouted, according to police.
Dunn tried to run away but was apprehended, police said. He was initially released and later arrested by federal agents on the felony assault charge. It was later revealed that he had been working as an international affairs specialist in the Justice Department’s criminal division, though he was swiftly fired by Attorney General Pam Bondi.
In another recent case, prosecutors in Washington acknowledged that three grand juries had voted separately against indicting a woman accused of assaulting an FBI agent outside the city’s jail in July, where she was recording video of the transfer of inmates into the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Rebuffed by the grand juries, Pirro’s office is pursuing a misdemeanor assault charge against Sydney Lori Reid instead.
Jeffrey Epstein’s imprisoned former girlfriend repeatedly denied to the Justice Department witnessing any sexually inappropriate interactions with Donald Trump, according to records released Friday meant to distance the Republican president from the disgraced financer.
The records show Maxwell repeatedly showering Trump with praise and denying under questioning from Blanche that she had observed Trump engaged in any form of sexual behavior. The administration was presumably eager to make such denials public at a time when the president has faced questions about a long-ago friendship with Epstein and as his administration has endured continued scrutiny over its handling of evidence from the case.
The transcript release represents the latest Trump administration effort to repair self-inflicted political wounds after failing to deliver on expectations that its own officials had created through conspiracy theories and bold pronouncements that never came to pass. By making public two days worth of interviews, officials appear to be hoping to at least temporarily keep at bay sustained anger from Trump’s base as they send Congress evidence they had previously kept from view.
After her interview with Blanche, Maxwell was moved from the low-security federal prison in Florida to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas to continue serving a 20-year sentence for her 2021 conviction on allegations that she lured teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein. Her trial featured sordid accounts of the sexual exploitation of girls as young as 14 told by four women who described being abused as teens in the 1990s and early 2000s at Epstein’s homes.
Neither Maxwell’s lawyers nor the federal Bureau of Prisons have explained the reason for the move, but one of her lawyers, David Oscar Markus, said in a social media post Friday that Maxwell was “innocent and never should have been tried, much less convicted.”
‘Never inappropriate’
“I actually never saw the President in any type of massage setting,” Maxwell said, according to the transcript. “I never witnessed the President in any inappropriate setting in any way. The President was never inappropriate with anybody. In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects.”
Maxwell recalled knowing about Trump and possibly meeting him for the first time in 1990, when her newspaper magnate father, Robert Maxwell, was the owner of the New York Daily News. She said she had been to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, sometimes alone, but hadn’t seen Trump since the mid-2000s.
Asked if she ever heard Epstein or anyone else say Trump “had done anything inappropriate with masseuses” or anyone else in their orbit, Maxwell replied, “Absolutely never, in any context.”
Maxwell was interviewed over the course of two days last month by Blanche at a Florida courthouse. She was given limited immunity, allowing her to speak freely without fear of prosecution for anything she said except for in the event of a false statement.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department on Friday began sending to the House Oversight Committee records from the investigation that the panel says it intends to make public after removing victim’s information.
High-profile contacts
The case had long captured public attention in part because of the wealthy financer’s social connections over the years to prominent figures, including Prince Andrew, former President Bill Clinton and Trump, who has said he had a falling-out with Epstein years ago and well before Epstein came under investigation.
Maxwell told Blanche that Clinton was initially her friend, not Epstein’s, and that she never saw him receive a massage — nor did she believe he ever did. The only times they were together, she said, were the two dozen or so times they traveled on Epstein’s plane.
“That would’ve been the only time that I think that President Clinton could have even received a massage,” Maxwell said. “And he didn’t, because I was there.”
She also spoke glowingly of Britain’s Prince Andrew and dismissed as “rubbish” the late Virginia Giuffre’s claim that she was paid to have a relationship with Andrew and that he had sex with her at Maxwell’s London home.
Maxwell sought to distance herself from Epstein’s conduct, repeatedly denying allegations made during her trial about her role. Though she acknowledged that at one point Epstein began preferring younger women, she insisted she never understood that to “encompass children.”
“I did see from when I met him, he was involved or — involved or friends with or whatever, however you want to characterize it, with women who were in their 20s,” she told Blanche. “And then the slide to, you know, 18 or younger looking women. But I never considered that this would encompass criminal behavior.”
The saga has consumed the Trump administration following a two-page announcement from the FBI and Justice Department last month that Epstein had killed himself despite conspiracy theories to the contrary, that a “client list” that Attorney General Pam Bondi had intimated was on her desk did not actually exist, and that no additional documents from the high-profile investigation were suitable to be released.
The announcement produced outrage from conspiracy theorists, online sleuths and Trump supporters who had been hoping to see proof of a government coverup. That expectation was driven in part by comments from officials, including FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino, who on podcasts before taking their current positions had repeatedly promoted the idea that damaging details about prominent people were being withheld.
Patel, for instance, said in at least one podcast interview before becoming director that Epstein’s “black book” was under the “direct control of the director of the FBI.”
The administration had an early stumble in February when far-right influencers were invited to the White House in February and provided by Bondi with binders marked “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” and “Declassified” that contained documents that had largely already been in the public domain.
After the first release fell flat, Bondi said officials were poring over a “truckload” of previously withheld evidence she said had been handed over by the FBI and raised expectations of forthcoming releases.
But after a weekslong review of evidence in the government’s possession, the Justice Department determined that no “further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.” The department noted that much of the material was placed under seal by a court to protect victims and “only a fraction” of it “would have been aired publicly had Epstein gone to trial.”
Faced with fury from his base, Trump sought to quickly turn the page, shutting down questioning of Bondi about Epstein at a White House Cabinet meeting and deriding as “weaklings” supporters who he said were falling for the “Jeffrey Epstein Hoax.”
The Justice Department has responded to a subpoena from House lawmakers by pledging to turn over information.
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Associated Press writer Adriana Gomez Licon contributed to this report.
Audrey Strauss, acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, points to a photo of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, during a news conference in New York on July 2, 2020.
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