A D.C. grand jury speaks for all of us | Will Bunch Newsletter

Last week’s newsletter included a simple question: “WHAT IS GOING ON?”...with President Donald Trump’s health. I mention this because we still don’t know the answer. It’s been six days since Trump has spoken in public — unprecedented (although an event appears to be scheduled for Tuesday afternoon). There were grainy photos of the president leaving the White House with his head looking like a watermelon, and a bizarre episode of Trump posting a photo with football coach Jon Gruden that had actually happened the week before. He’s stopped going to his summer retreat in Bedminster. WHAT IS GOING ON?

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It’s a well-worn cliche in the legal world that prosecutors have so much clout in the grand jury room that they could indict a ham sandwich. The currency of this quote only soared in value when the man who first uttered it, a New York State top judge named Sol Wachtler, was subsequently indicted himself.

And maybe the U.S. Justice Department still could indict a ham sandwich. But a salami hoagie from Subway is apparently a bridge too far.

I am talking, of course, about the now notorious Washington, D.C. case against the man commonly known as “Sandwich Guy” — a now-former Justice Department paralegal (yes, the irony) named Sean Dunn whose anger at the federal surge of law-enforcement officers backed by National Guard troops in the nation’s capital boiled over last month. Dunn verbally quarreled with agents and called them “fascists” before hurling that infamous hoagie at a Customs and Border Protection officer and then getting chased down, with all of it captured on video.

To many in D.C. and around the country who think the Trump regime’s ostensibly crime-fighting military operation in Washington is a dictatorial overreach, “Sandwich Guy” quickly became a resistance icon, his action celebrated in pop-up posters plastered around Washington like the one at the top of this newsletter.

To Trump’s Justice Department, Dunn’s sub attack and its disrespect for the authority of an authoritarian regime demanded the full hammer of the law. Federal prosecutors went before the D.C. grand jury seeking a felony indictment against their ex-co-worker — a stiff penalty for an attack with a soft roll.

But then something remarkable — or it least it used to be remarkable before January or so — took place. The D.C. grand jury returned “no bill,” meaning that a majority of the panel (typically between 16 and 23 people) who listened to the Justice Department’s case against Dunn voted against indicting him. Prosecutors later conceded the defeat and said they are instead charging Dunn with a misdemeanor.

We don’t know why the grand jurors rejected a felony charge against Dunn, but we do know that this kind of stand by a grand jury wasn’t an isolated incident. Days earlier, the Justice Department had sought felony charges against a D.C. woman named Sidney Lori Reid, accused with interfering with federal agents’ arrest of two alleged gang members. Prosecutors claimed Reid, while filming the bust, got in the way of agents and then fought back aggressively when an immigration agent pushed her against a wall, and that an FBI agent suffered a hand bruise in the ensuing scuffle.

In this case, prosecutors tried not once but three separate times to secure a felony indictment of Reid — each time rebuffed by the grand jury — before finally settling on a misdemeanor charge instead. “The U.S. attorney can try to concoct crimes to quiet the people, but in our criminal justice system, the citizens have the last word,” Reid’s two lawyers said in a statement.

OK, you can blame the “woke,” left-leaning citizens of D.C. — Trump got just 6.5% of the vote there in 2024 — except that something similar reportedly happened some 3,000 miles away in Los Angeles earlier this year. There, the U.S. Attorney’s office initially sought felony charges against 38 people related to unrest over stepped-up federal immigration raids, but the Los Angeles Times reported that only seven of the criminal complaints resulted in indictments, with the rest ending in dismissals or misdemeanors. The paper said the U.S. attorney, Bill Essayli, was caught screaming at his subordinates after one felony case collapsed.

To borrow what Stephen Stills wrote after youth riots on L.A.’s Sunset Strip in 1966, there’s something happening here...

But what it is, ain’t exactly clear. Grand jury proceedings are secret — so much so that even Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein at the height of their Watergate glory days struggled to lift that veil. In some of these cases, it’s possible — perhaps likely, given the inflated nature of some of the government’s allegations — that the jurors simply felt that the feds lacked evidence to make their case.

Or, it’s also possible that these everyday citizens engaged in a highly unique form of protest that a law professor might call “jury nullification.” This is essentially when a jury elects to clear a defendant not because of a lack of evidence that they did what the government accused them of doing, but because they believed the underlying law is unjust, or that the entire system is thoroughly corrupted.

As Paul Butler, Georgetown University law professor and now frequent MSNBC commentator, argued in a 2016 Washington Post op-ed, the notion of a jury nullification in America carries a rich history that includes the American Revolution, the Fugitive Slave Act and the movement for LGBTQ rights. Citing aggressive prosecutions of Black Americans for minor offenses, Butler wrote then: “I encourage any juror who thinks the police or prosecutors have crossed the line in a particular case to refuse to convict.”

Nine years later, in jurisdictions that voted heavily against Trump in 2024 — and which face armed troops and masked, unbadged federal agents in 2025 — jurors seems to be engaged in a quiet, behind-closed-doors revolution against the regime.

Think about this. The right to justice by a jury of your peers — everyday citizens from your own community — is in essence the foundational building block of what over centuries would slowly become democracy. Britain’s Magna Carta — written in 1215 (!) — codified this notion as a defense against its overbearing lords more than 800 years ago, and the idea proved so powerful it has managed to survive the creation of our large institutions that provide Big Government but too often seem removed from the people.

The Trump regime’s push for an authoritarian United States might be the biggest story right now, but rivaling that is the growing gap between our cowardly and failing big institutions — Congress, the Supreme Court, Big Media, university administrations, etc., etc. — and the wisdom of regular folks.

For sure, there’s an unshakable cult of Trump supporters, but one of the many underreported stories of 2025 is the lingering faith in democratic ideals, fairness, equity, and diversity that still holds with the majority of the American people — despite everything that’s happened. We’ve seen it in Trump’s sky-high disapproval rating, and the public rejection of individual policies, and in protests like June’s “No Kings” event that brought a record-setting 5 million folks into the streets.

Yet feckless opposition from Beltway Democrats and an increasingly compromised news media also has the masses realizing they are on their own, still in search of workable outlets to challenge an increasingly repressive regime. Protests can be ignored or put down, while economic boycotts are promising but hard to organize. It’s the jury system, with eight centuries of tradition behind it, that has given the American people a last-chance outlet to say “no” to fascism.

We should be inspired by these grand jurors in D.C. and Los Angeles to get more creative in our own daily lives in resisting American autocracy. That would be a modern-day miracle, turning a loaf and some salami slices into a feast of democratic resistance.

Question: Why is the media burying/largely ignoring Trump’s disappearance? — Eric (@itus.bsky.social) via Bluesky

Answer: Eric, this question may be part of a near-future column about the bigger failings of the modern journalism, but you raise an issue that is just getting harder to ignore. For good reasons, the larger mainstream outlets are loathe to speculate about a public figure’s health without concrete evidence, like a confirmed hospital visit. Many conservatives charged during the middle years of Joe Biden’s presidency that the same White House reporters also ignored or downplayed the 46th president’s frailty, at least until his stumbling debate performance in the summer of 2024. But even then there was more journalism — including a probably off-base New York Times story speculating about Parkinson’s disease — about Biden’s health and his stumbles than about Trump’s struggles at the same age. There are a number of hard facts — Trump’s failure to speak in public for nearly a week, his suddenly curtailed travel, changes in medication and in doctor’s notes in his 2025 physical — that could form the basis of a Page 1 story. The timidity, and a new breed of journalists plagued by what I’d call “ambitious conformity” — it’s all gobsmacking.

Last week’s question about California Gov. Gavin Newsom as a 2028 Democratic presidential candidate drew answers that were all over the map, but leaned toward favorable views of him (more so than mine) and his likely White House bid. “He’s smart, he comes off as personable, and he’s handsome, which shouldn’t count but it does,” Christopher Downing wrote. “Is he my perfect candidate? Heck no but then no one is.” But naysayer Anne Brock countered: “I hope there are better choices. But yes, glad for his redistricting push and his team’s trolling of Trump.”

📮 This week’s question: Social media was dominated over Labor Day weekend by speculation about Donald Trump’s health and his long absence. Do you believe that the president is ailing, and are you happy with the media’s mostly non-coverage so far? Or are conspiracy theories detracting from what’s really important. Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Trump health” in the subject line.

Arguably the most important storyline of the Trump presidency remains hiding in plain sight: Corruption and personal enrichment on a scale that is unfathomable when compared to anything in the previous 249 years of American history. The brilliant writer Garrett M. Graff, who literally wrote the book (well, the most recent one) on the scandal that took down Richard Nixon, described it as “a Watergate every day.” And no part of this is more appalling than the Trump family’s big-time move into cryptocurrency while President Donald Trump continues to sign legislation and oversee regulators with a huge impact on that industry.

It was just in late May that I published a guide to what I called “Cryptogate,” the wide scope of Trump White House corruption scandals. In that piece, I noted that maybe the biggest building block of Trump family wealth — which had already grown by an additional $2.9 billion and probably more at that time — was the cryptocurrency venture called World Liberty Financial that included the president and his three sons, Don Jr., Eric, and Barron. The firm had just reaped a $2 billion investment in its stablecoins from an entity tied to the Saudi government. That seemed like the possible tip of the iceberg, and it was.

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that — on paper, anyway — the Trump family just netted a $5 billion (with a “b”) windfall from the first day of trading in World Liberty Financial’s digital currency, known as WLFI. The coins are not new, but launching WFLI on the crypto trading markets sharply boosted the value of the coins, as new investors flooded in — arguably lured by the presidential seal of approval for the venture. The WSJ noted that the Trump family, including the president himself, own roughly a quarter of these tokens. The rules block the Trumps from cashing in their coins for now — and doing so would presumably sharply lower the price — but the current high valuation provides that $5 billion figure on paper. This, by the way, is separate from the president’s memecoin that he launched on his inauguration weekend, $TRUMP — also worth a couple of billion dollars, on paper.

This has to be the most brazen corruption in U.S. history, and that fact that an American president can generate billions in personal wealth on the job should shock us to our core. Remember, a vice president, Spiro Agnew, was brought up on felony charges and forced to resign for accepting low-level bribes, including an envelope with $10,000 in cash from a contractor in the White House. That’s a micro fraction of the Trumps’ haul. Crypto, of course, is incredibly dodgy but legal; what pushes the borders of criminality is Donald Trump abusing his bill-signing and regulatory powers to aggressively promote and boost the value of digital assets at the same time he’s investing in them. America isn’t a functioning democracy until we can get back to the place where we can treat a corrupted billion-dollar payday in 2025 with the same vigor as an envelope stuffed with cash got in 1973.

Remember that time when Barack Obama was going to bomb Syria as punishment for using chemical weapons against its own people — something he’d earlier defined as a “red line” — and then decided at the last possible moment that bombing some country without congressional approval was a bad idea. He was right, of course — even as his decision still continues to animate conservatives who say we need a “tougher” president, as if bombing Syria would have made some big positive difference. On Sept. 2, 2013 I wrote: “Like a lot of U.S. interventions, this one — if it even passes Congress — is less about achieving a sensible outcome than it is about projecting U.S, power in the world.” Read the rest: “The night Obama went all Sorkin on us.”

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