The thrown sandwich
===================

The incident took place at 14th and U, a corner Kiriakou pauses to place, noting that U Street was the centre of the Washington jazz scene a century ago, where Duke Ellington lived and performed and where the Duke Ellington school now stands. He describes it as a hipster area of good restaurants and bars, "a little bit seedy but in a cool way." 

The incident

As Kiriakou relates the Washington Post's account, a 38-year-old white man came out of a Subway sandwich shop, saw a group of National Guard personnel, and called them fascist pigs. Words were exchanged. He threw his sandwich, and it hit a National Guardsman in the shoulder. He was promptly tackled and arrested. 

The charge

Jeanine Pirro, newly the US attorney for the District of Columbia, called a late-night press conference to announce the arrest of what Kiriakou renders as "this deranged criminal." The charge was a felony count of assaulting a police officer, and her office said it would be asking for ten years in prison.  Kiriakou also reports Pirro's later remark that the man had thought it was funny and did not any more, a line he and his co-host treat as having made it funnier. 

Kiriakou's assessment of the case is categorical: "there's no jury anywhere in Washington that is going to convict this guy of assault on a police officer for throwing a sandwich."  He notes the memes the episode generated the same day, and calls the moment "the silly period." 

What the overcharge is for

Both men treat the severity as the point rather than a miscalculation. Rall's question, whether the radical overcharge is simply a "don't mess with us" move, given that everyone would mock it and the mockery would only draw more attention, draws Kiriakou's flat agreement: "That's exactly what it is." 

He attaches it directly to what the deployment was otherwise doing: not policing the two highest-crime areas of the city but manning roadblocks and issuing seat-belt tickets. 

Kiriakou also relays, from his producer mid-broadcast, that the man had additionally been fired from his job, and identifies him as a Department of Justice employee.  He does not dispute Rall's summary of the asymmetry, a heavily armed man in Kevlar so angered by a thrown sandwich that the thrower must be pursued. 

See also

- The seat-belt roadblocks
- The National Guard in Washington
- The hierarchy of charges
