A man who spent a week in detention after being accused of threatening President Donald Trump during an incident involving property damage in Washington, D.C., is now using the statements made by U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro to push for a formal dismissal of his case and to have the arrest expunged.

Edward Alexander Dana faced federal charges on August 19 when officials claimed he made a genuine threat to harm Trump. According to an affidavit from a U.S. Secret Service special agent, Dana, allegedly intoxicated, was seen damaging a restaurant’s light fixture. When accosted by federal patrol officers, he described himself as a “person with intellectual disabilities.”

He reportedly stated, “This is Donald Trump trying to emulate Putin,” and further commented, “I won’t stand for fascism.” Dana also claimed, “I was adopted… to defend the Constitution by any necessary means, which includes killing you, officer, killing the President, killing anyone opposing our Constitution… If you oppose our Constitution, I will f—ing end you.”

CBS News reported that in early September, U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui criticized the DOJ regarding the Dana case, emphasizing the increasing frequency of grand juries refusing to issue indictments.

For example, Pirro’s office did not succeed in securing a felony indictment against a dismissed DOJ paralegal who “threw a sandwich” at a federal agent. They also faced multiple failures to indict a woman who allegedly caused “bodily injury” to an FBI agent while attempting to “transfer […] two known gang members” into custody outside the D.C. Central Detention Facility. Similarly, Dana wasn’t indicted, a fact that the government acknowledged in a filing dated Sept. 8. At the same time, they announced plans to charge Dana in the D.C. Superior Court instead with local misdemeanors for “property destruction and issuing threats against the [restaurant] property owner, the [arresting] officer, and the officer’s family[.]”

Faruqui reportedly remarked days earlier that the exceedingly rare series of DOJ indictment failures — and the move to drop the threat against Trump charge that could have put Dana in prison for up to five years — was an “embarrassment” that showed the government couldn’t back up its charges with evidence even to meet the probable cause standard.

Musing that the country is “past the point of constitutional crisis,” the magistrate judge reportedly added that “too many misfires” suggested the government was more concerned with arrest numbers than anything else during Trump’s crackdown on “violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people.”

“Why is the government not out of sheer embarrassment and shame seeking to dismiss with prejudice and expunge the record?” Faruqui wondered, according to local CBS affiliate WUSA.

That is the result Dana’s defense lawyer is now attempting to force, including stern words for U.S. Attorney Pirro along the way on Sunday.

The DOJ, mentioning in a footnote that Dana “has 23 prior arrests and 9 prior convictions,” argued against dismissing the case with prejudice — which would prevent the case from ever being brought again — while expressing it had no intention to “re-bring charges arising from these events in federal court against this defendant.”

Federal Public Defender A.J. Kramer has since countered that dismissal with prejudice is appropriate considering that “any attorney or law student” would know from a “brief perusal of Westlaw” that U.S. Supreme Court precedent is clear about what “true threats” entail, and that the alleged facts against Dana were nowhere close.

“An objective review of the evidence and a basic understanding of the law should have led the government to the conclusion that this was not a case to prosecute in federal court under Section 871,” the filing said. “But, apparently ignoring its own Manual and the law and the facts, the government elected to charge Mr. Dana by complaint with Threats to the President and requested his pre-trial detention under the Bail Reform Act.”

Worse yet, the government’s stated intention not to bring the threat against Trump charge again ignores that Pirro’s office could still try other federal charges related to this incident, the filing said.

“The complaint in this matter charges Mr. Dana with Threats against the President. The complaint filed in Superior Court, however, charges misdemeanor destruction of property and misdemeanor attempted threats,” Kramer argued. “The government is seeking leave to keep open the option of refiling felony threat charges for the remaining allegations in the federal complaint at some later time—perhaps when a new grand jury is empaneled.”

“Doing so ‘would objectively amount to harassment’ by allowing ‘the prosecutor to dismiss charges but nevertheless keep them in abeyance for an indefinite period of time in the hope of expectation that something will turn up to remove the complications’ of the initial prosecution,” the defense added.

The defense said that among the “unusual circumstances” that make this case prime for expungement and dismissal with prejudice was, like in other cases, the “excessive” charge failing before a grand jury. But Pirro’s public disparagement of the grand jury is a reason all on its own:

The grand jury is an important constitutional protection against trumped up charges and a feature of our criminal justice system, not a bug. The Fifth Amendment guarantees that no American will be subject to a felony prosecution without the government first proving to a grand jury of the defendant’s peers that it has probable cause to initiate the prosecution. U.S. Const. amend. V. Current events are proving in real time why the Founders put this protection in place. The U.S. Attorney’s statements publicly disparaging the work of the grand jury is yet another unusual circumstance justifying dismissal with prejudice.

The line appears to refer to Pirro’s remarks on the grand jury “no bills” in Dana’s case and one against Nathalie Rose Jones as the “essence of a politicized jury.”

“The system here is broken on many levels,” Pirro reportedly said. “Instead of the outrage that should be engendered by a specific threat to kill the president, the grand jury in DC refuses to even let the judicial process begin. Justice should not depend on politics.”

Read the filing in full here.