Americans take an astounding step to reprimand Trump: experts

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to members of the media aboard Air Force One en route to the United States, October 30, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

Legal experts have good news for Americans concerned about President Donald Trump’s targeted prosecutions: Grand juries are assuming their Constitutional role as “primary security” against tyrannical prosecution.

“This is how grand juries were meant to work,” wrote UC Berkeley Criminal Justice Center Director Chesa Boudin and UC Davis Law Professor Eric S. Fish in The New York Times on Friday. Quoting Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren’s statement that grand juries are “a primary security to the innocent against hasty, malicious and oppressive persecution,” Boudin and Fish listed a number of recent occasions when Trump’s Justice Department targeted political enemies only to be rebuffed by grand juries.

Boudin and Fish mentioned a Washington DC grand jury that refused to felony indict a protester who threw a sandwich at a Customers and Border Protection officer; two federal grand juries in Virginia rejected Trump’s attempts to prosecute New York attorney general Letitia James, who has successfully prosecuted Trump, while a third refused to indict Trump critic former FBI director James Comey; and a Chicago grand jury passed on felony indicting various anti-Trump protesters, likely prompting Minnesota prosecutors to charge similar protesters with misdemeanors to avoid similar outcomes.

Most recently, they note, a grand jury declined to felony indict the six Democratic members of Congress who last year appeared in a video reminding armed service members to refuse illegal orders. The six members included Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, Rep. Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, Rep. Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire, Rep. Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania and Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado.

“Why do grand juries today nearly always bless whatever prosecutors place before them?” Boudin and Fish asked, in order to illuminate how “rare,” “remarkable” and “extraordinary” it is for them to reject indictment requests. “The answer lies in procedure. As we wrote in a recent law review article, many jurisdictions deny grand juries the tools they need for meaningful review.”

Other pundits are also noting that it is very unusual for grand juries to refuse to indict at a prosecutors’ behest — and that this bodes well for those resisting Trump.

“It’s an amazing spectacle,” former Treasury Secretary Robert Reich wrote for AlterNet on Friday. “Ordinary people serving on grand juries are refusing to indict people who have become entangled in Trump’s viciousness. A citizens’ revolt.”

He added, “Because of the secretive nature of grand juries, it’s impossible to know for sure why this has been happening. But the rejections suggest that grand jurors may have had enough of prosecutors seeking harsh charges in a highly politicized environment.”

Even some of Trump’s fellow Republicans oppose his targeted prosecutions, with one Republican senator telling The Hill that it is “lawfare” which is “not acceptable and needs to stop.”

“Political lawfare waged by either side undermines America’s criminal justice system, which is the gold standard of the world. Thankfully in this instance a jury saw the attempted indictments for what they really were,” Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina said on social media. “Political lawfare is not normal, not acceptable, and needs to stop."

Because grand juries do not hear from anyone representing the defense, a rejection means that even when only hearing the prosecution’s point-of-view, they decide that it would be unjust to pursue criminal charges on the basis of the evidence.

"The grand jury would have to totally reject the whole premise of the case that’s being presented to them by the United States attorney because, remember, there are typically no witnesses appearing before the grand jury to dispute the facts," Dickinson College President John E. Jones III, a former federal judge, told The Conversation's politics editor Naomi Schalit. "The grand jury is clearly saying, 'Even accepting the facts you’re putting before us as true, we don’t think under these circumstances this case is worthy of a federal indictment.'"

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