D.C. juries have declined to convict defendants accused of bribing a top Navy admiral and funding North Korea’s nuclear program.
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Days after Jeanine Pirro took office last year as the top federal prosecutor in D.C., a jury convicted four-star Navy Admiral Robert P. Burke of awarding a contract in exchange for a bribe. He remains the highest-ranking military officer in U.S. history to be imprisoned.
But in a head-scratching twist, the executives who were accused of bribing Burke — with a postretirement job that paid $500,000 a year — walked free last month after another D.C. jury found them not guilty.
The acquittals of Charlie Kim and Meghan Messenger, co-chief executives of the New York-based company Next Jump, defied historical trends. Their attorneys said it was the only known case in which a public official was behind bars for collecting a bribe that no one was guilty of paying. An earlier trial for the same two executives ended last year with a hung jury.
Of the 51 bribery defendants nationwide who faced jury trials in the decade that ended last year, only four were acquitted, according to statistics from the federal judiciary. Veteran defense lawyers and former prosecutors said acquittals and mistrials, while still a rarity, have become more frequent in D.C. in the year since President Donald Trump recruited Pirro from Fox News to lead the U.S. attorney’s office in the nation’s capital.
Kim and Messenger are among at least six defendants whom juries have declined to convict in headline-grabbing cases in D.C. federal court since Pirro took office in May 2025.
Throughout their trials, the executives argued they were misled by Burke, whom they trusted as a respected military commander who would not stray from ethical standards.
“In less than six hours, a jury of 12 unanimously said we were innocent,” Messenger said.
“Admiral Burke was the trophy, and we were collateral damage,” Kim said, criticizing prosecutors for tarnishing “our brand and reputation.”
Pirro has embraced a tough-on-crime persona she says is needed to “clean up” D.C. and solve cases involving drug rings, financial scams and national security threats, regularly holding news conferences to talk about arrests and indictments and directing her staff to prosecute the most serious charges for each offense. She points to statistics showing that violent crime has decreased in D.C. under her watch and has been praised by city leaders including Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) for her efforts.
In a statement to The Washington Post, Pirro said that despite occasional snags in court, the criminal justice system is working “exactly as designed.”
“D.C. juries have always been discerning in evaluating cases and we respect our juries’ verdicts,” Pirro said. “While we may be disappointed with the outcomes of certain cases, we welcome the fact that our justice system requires we meet our burden before a person’s liberty may be taken.”
Jurors rarely speak publicly about verdicts, and attorneys trying federal cases in D.C. can approach them posttrial only with the court’s permission, making the precise reasons for the mistrials and acquittals difficult to pinpoint. But legal experts, defense lawyers who practice in the nation’s capital and former prosecutors who have left the U.S. attorney’s office said Trump’s fixation with using the Justice Department to punish critics and reward allies is one probable reason the D.C. jury pool now seems more inclined to side with those accused of crimes.
Since taking office, Pirro has pursued Trump’s perceived political foes with allegations of misconduct that have not led to criminal charges, including then-Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell and six Democratic lawmakers who angered the president by posting a social media video reminding U.S. service members that they could refuse illegal military commands. A grand jury refused to indict the six Democrats, and Pirro closed the investigation into Powell after a judge blocked subpoenas in the case.
Pirro also has been asking judges to throw out the most serious convictions from the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. A federal appeals court, acting on her request, has dissolved the convictions of members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers extremist groups, who had been found guilty of carrying out a seditious conspiracy against the United States.
A former Fox News personality who served for decades as a district attorney and judge in the New York City suburbs, Pirro also emerged as a key figure in Trump’s move last summer to take over D.C. police and flood the city with federal law enforcement officers — an effort the administration said made the city safer but which was seen by many residents as unnecessary overreach.
Veteran defense attorney Eugene Gorokhov said he has seen a shift in how D.C. residents disclose their biases when called for jury duty.
“I’d never had a case with so many people coming in the door saying, ‘I’m going have a hard time believing the feds,’” Gorokhov said, describing the jury-selection process at a recent trial in which jurors ultimately deadlocked on all counts.
His client, Guanghua Jin, a Chinese man living in Australia, was extradited in 2024 to face trial in D.C. federal court on charges that he and others conspired to run an international tobacco-purchasing scheme that funded North Korea’s nuclear program, in violation of U.S. sanctions.
After his first trial ended with a hung jury last fall, Jin faced another jury this spring. He was acquitted of the conspiracy charge, and jurors deadlocked on all other counts. Rather than face a third trial, Jin pleaded guilty to a lesser fraud conspiracy and successfully petitioned the court to be deported to China, Gorokhov said.
“In the first trial … there was a very strong reaction from the D.C. pool that they were mad at the executive branch in general,” he said. The jury-selection process for that trial coincided with Trump’s law enforcement surge in D.C., Gorokhov said. Prospective jurors who were being screened for bias made statements such as, “I’m going to be skeptical of anything DOJ does,” he recalled.
“That number went down in the second jury pool, although that could be random chance,” Gorokhov said, adding that Jin forcefully contested the prosecution’s evidence and the testimony of the lead agent on the case.
Federal prosecutors in D.C. and nationwide continue to win roughly 90 percent of cases they take to trial, a conviction rate that holds when measuring all cases, including plea agreements used to resolve most federal charges. The statistics do not include D.C. Superior Court, where many violent crimes are prosecuted. Pirro’s office has gotten federal juries to convict defendants of fraud, felony murder and drug-related offenses in recent months.
Still, the U.S. attorney’s office under Pirro also has run into other notable setbacks over the past year.
Jacob Winkler, who was indicted on a felony charge after allegedly shining a red laser pointer at a helicopter transporting Trump, was acquitted in January after jurors deliberated for less than a day. A Secret Service officer said in a court submission that the red light could have disoriented the pilot and caused an “airborne collision.”
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Another jury deadlocked the same month when Cortney Merritts, the husband of former Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri), went on trial over allegations that he defrauded coronavirus pandemic relief programs by taking more than $20,000 in loans for his moving company.
In that case, U.S. District Judge Jia M. Cobb ruled that Merritts’s defense could not “make arguments that amount to veiled attempts at jury nullification, such as asking jurors to decide the case based on sentiments about politically motivated prosecutions.”
The jury could not reach a unanimous verdict. After the judge declared a mistrial, Pirro dropped the case.
A jury also acquitted a D.C. man, Sean C. Dunn, who was accused of assaulting a federal officer — by hurling a sandwich at him — during Trump’s law enforcement surge last year.
In all of those trials, as well as Kim and Messenger’s, judges did not grant requests from defense attorneys to dismiss the charges or acquit the defendants for lack of evidence. That signals that those judges thought jurors plausibly could convict the defendants based on the government’s case.
Abbe Smith, a Georgetown University law professor who has been practicing criminal defense law in D.C. for decades, said Pirro is encountering the limits of what she can do in a jurisdiction disproportionately filled with lawyers, highly educated professionals and “news and politics junkies,” as well as lifelong residents who have experienced the push and pull between home rule and the federal government’s authority over the city — and may remember those struggles as the Trump administration surges law enforcement resources and deploys National Guard troops to patrol D.C. streets.
Smith said Pirro’s policy of maximizing charges for each alleged offense, coupled with headlines about investigations that Trump has publicly demanded, may have some jurors wondering: “Might there be more pressing cases? Might there be more serious cases? Might there be cases more in the public interest?”
Valerie Hans, a Cornell University law professor who has written extensively about the American jury system, said that “the pursuit of individuals who are targets of the Trump administration … has certainly raised questions about the credibility of the prosecutors pursuing them.”
But, she added, most people called for jury duty may not be aware of “political prosecutions.”
The Navy bribery investigation into Burke’s dealings with Next Jump began under Pirro’s predecessor, then-U.S. Attorney Matthew M. Graves, and was conducted alongside prosecutors in the Public Integrity Section at Justice Department headquarters. That unit has since been disbanded by the Trump administration.
Federal prosecutors said Burke capped his distinguished naval career with “a stunning abuse of power,” ordering his subordinates to award Next Jump a no-bid contract worth $355,000 in the waning days of 2021 for a leadership training course.
Attorneys for Kim and Messenger said the admiral had built up a sterling reputation within the Navy, rising to become its second-in-command and chief ethics officer after numerous postings around the world and more than 17 years at sea. On the witness stand at her second trial, Messenger testified that Burke was revered “like the pope” for being a stickler for rules.
The executives’ defense attorneys said Burke deceived them into thinking they could discuss the Navy contract at the same time they were negotiating the admiral’s postretirement job at Next Jump for a $500,000 salary, along with bonuses and stock options.
“A four-star admiral with a fleet of people around him, with enormous power, who commanded fear and respect, who everyone believed was the epitome of integrity, lied and deceived Meghan Messenger and Charlie Kim,” Reed Brodsky, the attorney for Messenger, said during closing arguments.
A federal prosecutor in Pirro’s office, Rebecca Ross, said the two Next Jump executives knew they were breaking the rules but were driven by greed.
“It is the oldest story in the book: Blame the other guy,” Ross said in her closing remarks to the jury.
The defense team also questioned what benefit Kim and Messenger stood to gain from the alleged bribe. The company already had obtained multimillion-dollar Navy contracts in previous years, and those were not alleged to be corrupt. Of the $355,000 total value for the 2022 contract, Next Jump’s share as a subcontractor was $257,000, according to the trial evidence. The lead contractor was not accused of wrongdoing.
Burke retired in 2022 as the Navy’s commander for Europe and Africa. He was convicted last year of bribery, conspiracy, conflict-of-interest acts and concealing material facts.
Burke is appealing his case as he serves a six-year sentence at a prison camp in West Virginia. His attorney has filed court papers arguing that the acquittal of Kim and Messenger has thrown the admiral’s conviction into question.
“Two juries that heard the full evidence could not convict the alleged bribe payers, yet Admiral Burke remains in prison,” Burke’s attorney, Timothy Parlatore, said. “This incoherent result speaks for itself.”
A spokesman for Pirro, Tim Lauer, said in a statement: “Admiral Burke was convicted because the jury found beyond a reasonable doubt that he abused his position to steer government contracts in exchange for future employment. Jury outcomes in related cases don’t alter the facts or the verdict. We remain confident that the conviction stands on the strength of the evidence and the law.”
After the Next Jump executives were found not guilty May 18, Parlatore asked U.S. District Judge Trevor N. McFadden to release Burke from prison pending the outcome of his appeal because “the remaining evidence cannot independently sustain a conviction.”
McFadden denied that request.
“Kim and Messenger’s acquittals in no way call into question Burke’s conviction,” McFadden said in a written order, adding, “If anything, their focus on Burke’s lies and subsequent acquittal reinforces Burke’s wrongdoing.”
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