A person walks past Banksy-style posters of a protester throwing a sandwich on August 21, 2025 in Washington, DC.
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Federal prosecutors failed to secure a grand jury indictment against a former Department of Justice employee who allegedly hurled a Subway sandwich at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer in Washington, D.C., The New York Times reported Wednesday.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C. sought to charge the man, Sean Charles Dunn, with felony assault of an officer for the Aug. 10 sub-chucking incident, which was caught on video.
The DOJ fired Dunn after his arrest.
It is not clear if prosecutors will try again to obtain an indictment of Dunn. The DOJ and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C. did not immediately respond to CNBC’s requests for comment.
Dunn’s lawyer, Sabrina Shroff, declined to comment on the record.
It’s rare for a grand jury to decline to return an indictment. And it’s rarer still in a high-profile case that the government has aggressively promoted in the media, as the DOJ did after Dunn’s arrest.
The sub-par outcome for the DOJ is the second time in three days that a grand jury has rejected an indictment effort by the office currently led by former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro.
On Monday, Pirro told a judge in a separate federal criminal case in D.C. that “an Indictment has not been returned” after “a third grand jury returned a no true bill.” A no true bill is when a grand jury finds it lacks probable cause to formally charge a defendant.
The sandwich stand-off took place as President Donald Trump has clamped down on the nation’s capital in order to quickly eradicate what he claims is out-of-control crime there.
He has invoked a never-before-used legal power to temporarily take over the D.C. police department and ordered a deployment of 800 National Guard members to the city, while the presence of other federal agents has ramped up.
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