Trump ramped up federal law enforcement presence in DC following assault on Edward Coristine
A judge on Tuesday sentenced two teenagers to probation but no jail time after they brutally assaulted Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old former Department of Government Efficiency employee.
One assailant, a 15-year-old boy, received a year’s probation after he pleaded guilty to four charges—attempted robbery and simple assault on Coristine and felony assault and robbery at a nearby gas station—according to the Washington Post. The other, a 15-year-old girl, received nine months of probation after pleading guilty to simple assault for pepper-spraying someone at the gas station. Prosecutors dropped the girl’s assault charge related to the attack on Coristine in exchange for her guilty plea to the pepper-spray charges.
The judge allowed the boy to return home under house arrest and remanded the girl to a local youth shelter, the New York Post reported. The teenagers’ accomplices in the attack remain at large. The Metropolitan Police Department said the incident involved at least 10 juveniles, according to ABC7 News.
The Tuesday sentencing comes as D.C. has long faced scrutiny for soft-on-crime policies, particularly its lack of prosecutions. In 2023, members of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability condemned then-U.S. attorney Matthew Graves, a Joe Biden appointee, for failing to prosecute 67 percent of arrests in the district in fiscal year 2022. The D.C. police department has also come under congressional investigation for allegedly manipulating violent crime data for years to make the city appear safer.
Coristine suffered a concussion and a broken nose after a mob jumped him and his girlfriend at a D.C. parking garage in the early hours of August 3. Coristine “saw the suspects approach and make a comment about taking the vehicle,” according to a police report obtained by Wired. The ex-DOGE staffer “pushed” his girlfriend into the car and “turned to deal with the suspects,” who then assaulted him.
Two days later, Trump posted a picture of a bloodied Coristine on Truth Social. A few days after that, the president announced that he was placing D.C. police under federal control and deploying the National Guard to the nation’s capital. The move will “rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor,” Trump said at the time.
D.C. crime rates have since plummeted, the Post reported in late August. The nation’s capital long battled high rates of violent crime and saw sharp spikes as recently as 2023, with homicides that year up 35 percent, robberies up 67 percent, and carjackings up 82 percent that year.
Trump’s crime crackdown “has worked,” Democratic D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser admitted in late August, saying, “We know that we have had fewer gun crimes, fewer homicides, and we have experienced an extreme reduction in carjackings.”
