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.” [1]
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. [2]
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. [2] 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. [3]
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.” [3] He notes the memes the episode generated the same day, and calls the moment “the silly period.” [3]
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.” [4]
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. [4]
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. [4] 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. [4]