A man who was charged with a felony for allegedly pointing a laser beam at Marine One while it was transporting President Donald Trump was found not guilty by a Washington, D.C., jury in less than an hour on Tuesday.

Jacob Winkler’s acquittal marks another embarrassing setback for Jeanine Pirro, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, who has struggled to set an example for people her office says assaulted federal agents or threatened the president.

Winkler, 33, was arrested in September when a U.S. Secret Service agent allegedly saw him aim the red beam at the low-flying helicopter shortly after it took off from the White House grounds. The felony charge for pointing a laser at an airplane carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

At the time, Pirro, a former News personality, vowed to prosecute Winkler “to the fullest extent of the law.”

“Every hour spent on this case was an hour not spent addressing real threats to our community.”

– Winkler’s attorneys, Alexis Gardner and Ubong Akpan

After his trial concluded earlier this week, the jury deliberated for just 35 minutes before finding Winkler not guilty, according to his public defenders, Alexis Gardner and Ubong Akpan.

Gardner and Akpan told News themezone in a statement that the verdict exposed “a disturbing reality: In the most powerful city in the world, the federal government spent scarce resources to turn a homeless man who had nothing but a cat toy keychain into a criminal.”

“Every hour spent on this case was an hour not spent addressing real threats to our community,” they said. “We need to stop policing poverty and start investing in dignity.”

The U.S. Attorney’s Office did not respond to a request for comment on the case Friday.

U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro announces a Scam Center strike force to go after cryptocurrency investment scammers targeting Americans to the tune of $10 billion a year, Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)
U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro announces a Scam Center strike force to go after cryptocurrency investment scammers targeting Americans to the tune of $10 billion a year, Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)

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After Trump declared a criminal emergency and deployed the National Guard to D.C. last summer, Pirro filed a series of charges in federal court alleging that residents assaulted federal agents or threatened Trump. At the time, agents from agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were swarming the city on neighborhood patrols.

The avalanche of cases seemed designed to hype Trump’s urban crime fight and make Pirro’s office look tough, but many of them quickly fell apart or resulted in acquittals after absorbing judicial resources and causing defendants mental anguish and jail terms.

In some cases, prosecutors couldn’t even clear the famously low bar of getting a grand jury to return an indictment. That includes a case in which Pirro’s office charged a D.C. man with threatening to kill Trump after he was arrested for damaging a light fixture outside a restaurant; Affidavits suggested the man was drunk and talking nonsense while in police custody.

A defense attorney told News themezone that these cases were “horse shit” and served nothing more than to inflate Pirro’s office’s numbers and make crime in DC look worse than it really is.

In the most high-profile case, a D.C. man was accused of assaulting a U.S. Border Patrol agent after hitting him in the chest with a Subway turkey sandwich. A grand jury declined to return a felony indictment in the case, so Pirro’s office filed a misdemeanor assault charge against him. A DC jury also found him not guilty.