Donald Trump’s most high-profile prosecutors were humiliated by a jury Thursday as it cleared a man who hurled a hoagie at a federal agent of assault.
The jury in Washington D.C. took almost 24 hours to return a not guilty verdict on Sean Dunn, who threw a footlong sandwich at Border Patrol agent Gregory Lairmore in the first days of Trump’s troop surge in the capital.
The verdict marked an embarrassing end to a months-long drive by Trump’s Attorney General, Pam Bondi, and his U.S. district attorney in D.C., ex-Fox News personality “Judge” Jeanine Pirro, to convict Dunn.
The duo had first been refused a felony indictment by a grand jury—a vanishingly rare occurrence—then pressed ahead with misdemeanor charges of assault and obstructing a federal agent by “throwing a sandwich at a federal officer at point-blank range,” which could have put Dunn behind bars for six months. Instead they suffered a stinging rebuke.
Outside court Dunn—who was fired as a Department of Justice paralegal after his arrest—said, “I am so happy that justice prevailed.”
Dunn’s attorneys had told the jury that the paralegal agreed he had thrown the sandwich after a verbal altercation with Border Patrol and FBI agents who he believed were about to mount an immigration raid—but that not constitute an assault.
And the “victim” himself revealed that his colleagues thought the incident was a joke. Lairmore, a 29-year veteran, testified that he had been given a plush toy version of a footlong, which he had put on display in his office, and a patch saying “Footlong Felony” which he had put on his own lunchbox. Lairmore had claimed the sandwich “exploded all over my uniform,” but was confronted as he testified with a picture of the thrown sandwich still largely in its wrapping.
“I had mustard and condiments on my uniform, and an onion hanging from my radio antenna that night,” he said.
Judge Carl J. Nichols instructed the jury to consider if Dunn’s throw of the sandiwch constituted a “reasonable apprehension of immediate bodily harm."
In the immediate aftermath of the incident, on 14th Street N.W. in D.C. on August 10, Pirro had crowed she would hit Dunn with felony charges.
“This guy thought it was funny—well, he doesn’t think it’s funny today, because we charged him with a felony," she said in a video posted to X on August 13.
Bondi also made a show of talking tough against Dunn, firing Dunn from his DOJ job and claiming he was a “deep state” operative.
“Not only is he FIRED, he has been charged with a felony. This is an example of the Deep State we have been up against for seven months as we work to refocus DOJ,” she bragged after he was arrested in a SWAT raid recorded by a video team and tweeted by the DOJ.
The DOJ declined to comment on the acquittal. Pirro’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
The case left Pirro widely mocked, with graffiti showing a sandwich on her head springing up around D.C. Dunn, meanwhile, was immortalized in a Banksy-style mural which has appeared widely in the capital.
After being cleared, Dunn hinted at the toll the prosecution had taken on him, thanking people for financial help and “opening their homes” to him.
“I believe I was protecting the rights of immigrants and let us not forget that the great seal of the United States says ‘E Pluribus Unum,’” he said. “That means ‘From many, one.’ You have the right to live a life that is free.”
