I can take a hint

The old line about how a prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich assumes the can opener of a not completely corrupt legal system. Tragically for the Trump administration, that can opener continues to exist, at least for now:

A grand jury in Alexandria, Va., on Thursday rejected the Trump administration’s effort to bring new charges against Letitia James, the New York attorney general, according to people familiar with the matter, exactly one week after another set of jurors did the same.

The back-to-back failures by prosecutors to secure an indictment amounted to a striking rejection of the administration’s retribution campaign. It highlighted the Justice Department’s unusual strategy of pursuing second indictments despite earlier failures in court and suggested the department would face major hurdles in bringing charges against President Trump’s foes.

Nothing bars the U.S. attorney’s office in Eastern Virginia from trying again to indict Ms. James, though a judge might look askance at multiple juries’ having rejected the charges.

Bruce Green, who teaches legal ethics at Fordham Law School in New York, said there was no constitutional provision forbidding the repeated presentation of the same case to different grand juries, though he added that most prosecutors “would take a hint” after being rejected once or twice.

After making many generationally inappropriate allusions this past semester in my Crisis of the American Legal System class, I promised my students a list of ten essential films from the mid-60s through the mid-80s, in regard to the content of the course. I’m currently curating it so suggestions are welcome.

One that will be on it is this under-appreciated masterpiece (Donald Trump is Rupert Pupkin with a $400 million inheritance):