US still pursuing ex-BigLaw associate after grand jury declines to indict in alleged National Guard confrontation
Updated: The federal government filed a trimmed criminal complaint against a fired Covington & Burling associate Tuesday, the same day that a federal grand jury declined to indict him on three charges for a confrontation with National Guard members.
The fired associate is Paul Anthony Bryant, a graduate of West Point and Columbia Law School. Grand jurors declined to indict him on initial federal charges of assaulting, resisting or impeding officers; impeding a federal official by a threat; and threatening to kidnap or injure a person, report Newsweek (via Bloomberg Law’s Wake Up Call) and WUSA.
The new Sept. 9 criminal information keeps the federal charge of assaulting, resisting or impeding officers and adds a new charge of threats to do bodily harm under the District of Columbia code. The other two federal charges have been dropped.
Both of the new charges are misdemeanors and don’t require an indictment, explains Bryant’s lawyer, trial attorney Alexis Morgan Gardner of the Office of the Federal Public Defender for the District of Columbia.
Bryant remains released on personal recognizance. The federal government is no longer appealing a federal magistrate judge’s decision to release him.
Bryant approached a group of National Guard members Aug. 24, according to the initial federal complaint and other court documents. He allegedly made statements to the effect that he was “strapped,” “these are our streets” and “I’ll kill you.” The National Guard members understood “strapped” to mean that Bryant was armed.
Bryant then approached additional National Guard members and “threw his left shoulder” into the left shoulder of one of them, making physical contact, prosecutors alleged.
When Washington, D.C., police officers stopped Bryant, he had a handgun in his rear waistband. It was lawfully purchased and carried under a valid license.
Bryant’s lawyers said in a court filing at most, “the allegations amount to words—‘I’ll kill you’—followed by a shoulder check.”
“The DOJ’s handling of this case is deeply troubling,” Gardner told the ABA Journal in a statement. “Paul Bryant, a lawyer and Army lieutenant, spent several nights in a notoriously dangerous D.C. jail—currently under legal scrutiny for its horrific conditions—based on charges a grand jury ultimately rejected. While the government now pursues lesser misdemeanors, the damage is done. Arrests stay on a person’s record forever. This kind of prosecutorial overreach—jailing someone without sufficient evidence for a felony—is not just reckless; it’s an affront to the principles of due process and individual liberty.”
Before he was fired, Bryant used LinkedIn to accuse a Covington & Burling partner of calling him a racial slur. A spokesperson for the law firm previously denied the accusations, calling them “false and repugnant.”
Updated Sept. 11 at 10:55 a.m. with comments from trial attorney Alexis Morgan Gardner.
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