Joseph Sabino Mistick: Taking a bite out of justice

When Sean Charles Dunn cursed and threw his foot-long Subway salami sandwich at a federal agent in Washington, D.C. on Aug. 10 — protesting President Trump’s deployment of federal law enforcement officers to patrol the streets there — it normally would not have been a big deal. But the MAGA “snowflakes” made it a big deal when they announced Aug. 14 that Dunn would be charged with felony assault for what one pundit has called “assault with a deli weapon.”

Maybe Dunn is lucky. If Dunn had thrown a fully loaded Pittsburgh Primanti’s sandwich at the officer, Trump’s Justice Department officials probably would have charged him with a capital offense.

Every Pittsburgh cop I know would have grabbed Dunn by the scruff of the neck, called him a jagoff and maybe charged him with disorderly conduct if he didn’t apologize. And that would have been the end of it right there.

But now, the video of the event has gone viral, and the absurdity of the administration’s knee-jerk reaction has spawned a cottage industry of T-shirts and other gewgaws. One poster depicts “sandwich man” and his hoagie — held aloft, ready to be launched.

Jeffrey Ian Ross, a University of Baltimore criminologist who specializes in street art, told The Washington Post it will be an iconic image “when somebody writes the history of this period.”

It’s funny, but not funny.

Twenty officers showed up at Dunn’s home to arrest him days after the incident. He has been fired from his job with the Department of Justice. A hearing is scheduled for September.

U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, whose public statements often start with bombast and ascend from there, said, “We’re going to back the police to the hilt. So there, stick your Subway sandwich somewhere else.”

She told CNN, “The police are not out there to get pushed around or beat up. They have a job to do, and they shouldn’t be abused in the process. Count on me to back the blue.”

Pirro has a different view of the Jan. 6 rioters who savagely beat police officers with deadly weapons, blinded them with bear spray, trampled them and crushed them in doorways. More than 140 police officers were injured by the rioters who tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power and derail our democracy.

When asked to comment on Trump’s sweeping pardons for some 1,500 insurrectionists, Pirro called them “hostages,” a term Trump has used when talking about the forces he summoned to the Capitol. She has said they were prosecuted “based upon their political beliefs.” And she continues to dodge any questions about the glaring hypocrisy of her positions on treasonous behavior and the “sandwich man.”

According to Attorney General Pam Bondi, “sandwich man” is an example “of the Deep State we have been up against for seven months as we work to refocus DOJ.” One indicator of Bondi’s idea of justice is that she has launched investigations of those U.S. attorneys who prosecuted the rioters who attacked the police Jan. 6.

Justice can be hard to define, but the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg pointed us in the right direction when she said, “The simplest and most basic component of justice is consistency.”

Because of “sandwich man” and the somewhat laughable but outsized and deadly serious response of federal Justice Department officials, we now have this most vivid example of how the Trump administration misses the meaning of justice by a mile.