Another Grand Jury Refuses to Indict Letitia James

I’m no fan of Letitia James, but it’s looking increasingly clear she will not be put on trial. Today, for the second time this month, a grand jury was presented with evidence and declined to indict her.

A federal grand jury here refused to indict New York Attorney General Letitia James on Thursday, one federal law enforcement source and another person familiar with the matter told NBC News.

This was the Justice Department’s third attempt to prosecute James following a monthslong pressure campaign from President Donald Trump…

It’s rare for a federal grand jury to reject charges because the process is stacked in the government’s favor. At the grand jury stage, prosecutors need only to convince 12 of at least 16 grand jurors that they met the probable cause threshold, a much lower standard than the unanimous “beyond a reasonable doubt” requirement for securing a conviction before a jury during a trial.

The initial indictment of James was successful. However, last month a judge ruled that Lindsey Halligan, the prosecutor who presented the cases against James and former FBI Director James Comey, was unlawfully appointed to her position as US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. That meant that the indictments she had secured against both James and Comey were also tossed out.

Last week, the DOJ tried to re-indict James with someone besides Halligan presenting the case to the grand jury. But that effort was a failure:

A grand jury in Virginia on Thursday rejected Justice Department efforts to charge New York Attorney General Letitia James with mortgage fraud, declining to indict her again after a judge dismissed the charges last week, according to two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the proceedings…

It is extremely rare for a grand jury to refuse to indict a case. In 2016, for example, the Justice Department brought charges against 130,000 suspects. Grand juries rejected indictments only six times, according to agency statistics compiled by Niki Kuckes, a professor at Roger Williams University with expertise in the grand jury process.

It’s not clear (to me at least) if today’s effort was presented to the same Virginia grand jury that rejected the attempt last week.

At this point there are only two options to explain what is happening. The first is that the case against James is a real dog. Not having been on the grand jury, we can’t know what they were told but it obviously didn’t win over 12 out of 16 of them.

Alternatively, this is a bit of resistance politics. Even the NY Times is suggesting today that may be a possibility.

The rejection on Thursday was particularly remarkable given that it was the third time in just over two months that prosecutors had sought to lodge charges against Ms. James. It is vanishingly rare for grand juries to decline to indict a case, but in cases involving Mr. Trump’s broader immigration crackdown, grand jurors have repeatedly refused to do so.

In an earlier story, the Times reported that grand jurors seemed to be refusing to indict people connected to Trump’s immigration crackdown:

In the three weeks since President Trump flooded the streets of Washington with hundreds of troops and federal agents, there have been only a few scattered protests and scarcely a word from Congress, which has quietly gone along with the deployment.

But one show of resistance has come from an extraordinary source: federal grand jurors.

In what could be read as a citizens’ revolt, ordinary people serving on grand juries have repeatedly refused in recent days to indict their fellow residents who became entangled in either the president’s immigration crackdown or his more recent show of force. It has happened in at least seven cases — including three times for the same defendant…

Many of these cases have recently been downgraded or dismissed altogether after failing in grand juries, a tacit acknowledgment by the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington that they were overcharged to begin with. The most prominent example is the case of Sean C. Dunn, a former Justice Department paralegal who was charged with felony assault after he threw a sub-style salami sandwich at a federal agent on patrol near the corner of 14th and U Streets. His charges were knocked down to a misdemeanor last week after prosecutors were unable to indict him.

Charging this as a felony always seemed like a stretch. He eventually went to trial on the misdemeanor charge and was acquitted by the jury.

DC man charged with felony assault charges after assaulting a federal agent with a Subway sandwich
pic.twitter.com/0ZOyfkEQgF

— Daily Loud (@DailyLoud) August 14, 2025

So there may be a combination of things here. We may have instances of prosecutors overcharging a weak case and also some resistance politics among grand juries. 

Everyone in the country knows who Letitia James is at this point. A grand jury in Virginia is going to be at least 50% liberals, so it seems entirely plausible that they could band together and refuse to issue indictments against anyone seen as opposing Trump. That would not surprise me at all.

We’ll have to wait and see if the DOJ decides to try again or if they now realize what they are dealing with.

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