‘Sandwich Guy’ Pleads Not Guilty To Misdemeanor Assault Charge | EUROtoday

The D.C. man who went viral for allegedly throwing a sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection officer final month was arraigned in federal court docket Wednesday on a misdemeanor cost of assaulting a federal agent.

Sean Charles Dunn, who’s accused of hurling the hoagie amidst President Donald Trump’s federal takeover of regulation enforcement in Washington, now faces a jury trial set for early November.

The cost carries as much as a yr of jail time.

The case is certainly one of a number of wherein prosecutors allege D.C. residents “assaulted” or “impeded” federal brokers in the middle of their duties throughout Trump’s crime and immigration crackdown within the nation’s capital. Defense attorneys have mentioned many of those circumstances are overblown and never well worth the court docket’s time and assets.

A grand jury already declined to indict Dunn on a federal cost of assaulting a federal officer — certainly one of many embarrassing rejections grand juries have delivered to Jeanine Pirro, the previous Fox News persona who’s now Trump’s U.S. Attorney for D.C. The failure to safe an indictment led Pirro’s workplace to file the misdemeanor cost, which doesn’t want a grand jury’s overview.

A lawyer for Dunn declined to remark after a brief listening to earlier than a choose in federal court docket Wednesday.

Trump has tried to forged D.C. as a hellscape crammed with criminals and in want of a federal takeover, regardless of violent crime just lately dropping to a 30-year low. While loads of residents do have considerations about crime, an amazing majority oppose the way in which he has federalized native regulation enforcement and flooded the streets with brokers from the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and different companies.

Dunn, a former Justice Department worker, grew to become one thing of a folks hero for the alleged sandwich toss, with pictures popping up round city portraying a person tossing a hoagie as an act of resistance.

Pirro’s workplace appears to be charging as many D.C. arrestees as attainable on the stiffest fees they will discover, even in apparently minor circumstances. The metropolis’s courts have been buckling below a heavier caseload.

Grand juries have declined to indict at the least seven instances in 5 circumstances involving run-ins between defendants and federal officers in D.C. over the previous two months – a certain signal that residents usually are not shopping for Pirro’s allegations.

After his listening to Wednesday, Dunn left the courtroom and, earlier than hopping in an elevator, briefly thanked an obvious supporter who was ready within the hallway.

“You got this,” the supporter advised him.