Washington’s power corridors just grew darker. The Trump administration has quietly instructed federal prosecutors in the capital to push harder—and higher—when it comes to charging those swept up in recent mass arrests.
Behind closed doors, Jonathan Hornok, the chief of the criminal division in the U.S. Attorney’s office, told his team to load cases with federal charges wherever possible. That means longer sentences, stiffer consequences, and a court system bracing for impact.
The directive is part of President Trump’s larger campaign to bring Washington under his law-and-order vision. Already, hundreds of National Guard troops patrol the streets. The Metropolitan Police Department—normally under the city’s Democratic leadership—is under federal control. The results so far: 465 arrests for crimes ranging from homicide to drugs to firearms.
Attorney General Pam Bondi praised the numbers, but the scale of what comes next is murkier. Federal crimes carry more weight than local ones, and shifting the balance risks overwhelming prosecutors, judges, and investigators alike.
Jeanine Pirro, now U.S. Attorney for D.C., has made her marching orders blunt: go after the highest charges the law allows. But as dozens of prosecutors have resigned or been fired since Trump entered office, the remaining staff are stretched thin. Even FBI agents are being pulled from their desks to pound the streets in nightly rotations, leaving little bandwidth for the painstaking legwork—witness interviews, CCTV checks, DNA evidence—that can make or break a case.
To plug the holes, the administration is even drafting help from the Pentagon: about 20 Department of Defense personnel will soon serve as temporary prosecutors for low-level cases.
What began as a local police sweep is fast turning into a federal experiment—one where D.C. itself has little say, and where the true cost may not be known until the courtrooms overflow.
