US President Donald Trump views items on display during a visit to the Royal Collection exhibition, in the Green Drawing Room at Windsor Castle, Berkshire, on day one of the president's second state visit to the UK. (Reuters)
President Donald Trump has failed to prosecute individuals from Olympic canoeist David Hearn to a bevy of Democratic lawmakers (including Sens. Mark Kelly of Arizona and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan; Reps. Jason Crow of Colorado, Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania, Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire and Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania). Trump’s US attorney in Washington DC, Jeanine Pirro, is reportedly in the hot seat with the president over her prosecutorial setbacks.
Now a new report reveals that activists are utilizing a “superpower,” their right to nullify attempted grand jury indictments, to stop Trump from engaging in what they argue are politically-motivated prosecutions.
“You have this superpower, and that superpower is you are able to nullify that godd—— jury,” Qiana Johnson, a co-founder of the prison abolitionist group Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, told a group of potential nullifiers, as reported by Washington Examiner's Hudson Crozier and Kaelan Deese on Monday.
The report detailed how potential jurors are instructed to present themselves as unbiased to the greatest extent they can honestly appear that way, from avoiding politically identifying clothing to covering up political tattoos. Their goal is to not be screened out from being selected for a jury.
“The investigation revealed a leftist network intent on derailing Justice Department prosecutions in Washington without crossing legal lines,” Crozier and Deese reported. “Groups leading the push seek to use jury nullification, a tactic as old as the American colonies, for a radically anti-incarceration agenda. They already see Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro‘s repeated failures to secure grand jury indictments as signs of success.”
"That is what Jeanine Pirro is absolutely afraid of,” Johnson said during the training, according to Crozier and Deese. “That is what the lawyers in Luigi [Mangione’s] case is absolutely afraid of, because that power belongs to the people.”
Describing how the potential jurors navigate potential selection questions, and how Pirro is already concerned that they are harming her prosecutions, the Washington Examiner posed a question which tipped the hand to its own bias, “Can they get away with it?”
It then quoted Josh Blackman, a constitutional law professor at South Texas College of Law Houston, arguing that while attending a nullification workshop is not in itself illegal, they could get in hot water if they are proved to have lied about their activist links or political biases while talking to the judge and attorneys.
“There’s a difference between saying, ‘Don’t lie,’ versus, ‘Don’t tell everything,’” Blackman explained to the Washington Examiner. “That would also be a problem.”
Despite subtly throwing shade on jury nullifiers in its recent piece, the Washington Examiner occasionally criticizes Trump. In April it ran an editorial by a former conservative Member of the European Parliament, Dan Hannan, who blasted the president for seeming to be “losing his mind.”
“Imagine it was someone other than President Donald Trump,” Hannon argued. “Suppose a different leader were posting deranged rants in the small hours, insulting the spiritual leader of 1.3 billion Catholics, threatening entire civilizations with annihilation, and comparing himself to God. What would be the reaction? We all know the answer. Both parties would be rushing to bundle him out of office before he did irreversible harm to the republic.”