President Donald Trump, left, listens as then-Interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro, right, speaks during her swearing-in ceremony, Wednesday, May 28, 2025, in Washington (AP Photo/Evan Vucci).
A man who was detained for a week after being accused of threatening President Donald Trump during a property damage arrest in Washington, D.C., only to see U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro”s office drop the felony charge, is now using Pirro’s words against her in an attempt to formally dismiss the case and expunge the arrest once and for all.
Edward Alexander Dana was federally charged by complaint on Aug. 19 after the feds alleged he made a true threat to kill Trump. In the U.S. Secret Service’s affidavit, a special agent alleged that a an intoxicated Dana “was seen damaging a light fixture by pulling it off the exterior wall of the restaurant” and, when confronted by patrolling feds, “described himself as a ‘person with intellectual disabilities.'”
“This is Donald Trump’s way of saying, hey, I can look like Putin,” he allegedly remarked, before adding “I’m not going to tolerate fascism” and “You see, I was adopted [inaudible] to protect the Constitution by any means necessary. And that means killing you, officer, killing the President, killing anyone who stands in the way of our Constitution … You want to stand in the way of our Constitution, I will f—ing kill you.”
As CBS News reported in early September, U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui tore into the DOJ over the Dana case and highlighted the rising number of instances where grand juries refused to indict.
Pirro’s office, for instance, failed to secure a felony indictment against a fired DOJ paralegal who “threw a sandwich” at a federal agent; failed multiple times to indict a woman accused of “inflict[ing] bodily injury” on an FBI agent while that agent and another officer attempted to “transfer […] two known gang members” into FBI and ICE custody outside of the D.C. Central Detention Facility; and also failed to indict Dana, which the government acknowledged in a Sept. 8 filing as it simultaneously announced its intention to charge the defendant in D.C. Superior Court instead with local misdemeanors for “destruction of property and spewing threats directed at the [restaurant] property owner, the [arresting] police officer, and the officer’s family[.]”
Faruqui reportedly remarked days earlier that the exceedingly rare series of DOJ indictment failures — and the move to drop the threat against Trump charge that could have put Dana in prison for up to five years — was an “embarrassment” that showed the government couldn’t back up its charges with evidence even to meet the probable cause standard.
Love true crime? Sign up for our newsletter, The Law&Crime Docket, to get the latest real-life crime stories delivered right to your inbox.
Musing that the country is “past the point of constitutional crisis,” the magistrate judge reportedly added that “too many misfires” suggested the government was more concerned with arrest numbers than anything else during Trump’s crackdown on “violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people.”
“Why is the government not out of sheer embarrassment and shame seeking to dismiss with prejudice and expunge the record?” Faruqui wondered, according to local CBS affiliate WUSA.
That is the result Dana’s defense lawyer is now attempting to force, including stern words for U.S. Attorney Pirro along the way on Sunday.
The DOJ, mentioning in a footnote that Dana “has 23 prior arrests and 9 prior convictions,” argued against dismissing the case with prejudice — which would prevent the case from ever being brought again — while expressing it had no intention to “re-bring charges arising from these events in federal court against this defendant.”
Federal Public Defender A.J. Kramer has since countered that dismissal with prejudice is appropriate considering that “any attorney or law student” would know from a “brief perusal of Westlaw” that U.S. Supreme Court precedent is clear about what “true threats” entail, and that the alleged facts against Dana were nowhere close.
“An objective review of the evidence and a basic understanding of the law should have led the government to the conclusion that this was not a case to prosecute in federal court under Section 871,” the filing said. “But, apparently ignoring its own Manual and the law and the facts, the government elected to charge Mr. Dana by complaint with Threats to the President and requested his pre-trial detention under the Bail Reform Act.”
Worse yet, the government’s stated intention not to bring the threat against Trump charge again ignores that Pirro’s office could still try other federal charges related to this incident, the filing said.
“The complaint in this matter charges Mr. Dana with Threats against the President. The complaint filed in Superior Court, however, charges misdemeanor destruction of property and misdemeanor attempted threats,” Kramer argued. “The government is seeking leave to keep open the option of refiling felony threat charges for the remaining allegations in the federal complaint at some later time—perhaps when a new grand jury is empaneled.”
“Doing so ‘would objectively amount to harassment’ by allowing ‘the prosecutor to dismiss charges but nevertheless keep them in abeyance for an indefinite period of time in the hope of expectation that something will turn up to remove the complications’ of the initial prosecution,” the defense added.
The defense said that among the “unusual circumstances” that make this case prime for expungement and dismissal with prejudice was, like in other cases, the “excessive” charge failing before a grand jury. But Pirro’s public disparagement of the grand jury is a reason all on its own:
The grand jury is an important constitutional protection against trumped up charges and a feature of our criminal justice system, not a bug. The Fifth Amendment guarantees that no American will be subject to a felony prosecution without the government first proving to a grand jury of the defendant’s peers that it has probable cause to initiate the prosecution. U.S. Const. amend. V. Current events are proving in real time why the Founders put this protection in place. The U.S. Attorney’s statements publicly disparaging the work of the grand jury is yet another unusual circumstance justifying dismissal with prejudice.
The line appears to refer to Pirro’s remarks on the grand jury “no bills” in Dana’s case and one against Nathalie Rose Jones as the “essence of a politicized jury.”
“The system here is broken on many levels,” Pirro reportedly said. “Instead of the outrage that should be engendered by a specific threat to kill the president, the grand jury in DC refuses to even let the judicial process begin. Justice should not depend on politics.”
Read the filing in full here.
