Jury Acquits Man Accused of Soliciting Trump’s Murder on Bluesky

A jury took about two hours Tuesday to acquit a man accused of soliciting President Donald Trump’s assassination on social media, a setback for the Justice Department office led by Trump’s newly-installed loyalist Lindsey Halligan.

Halligan, flanked by a security detail, attended arguments during both of the trial days, said two people present in the Alexandria, Va., courthouse.

Her team of prosecutors at the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia suffered the loss as they prepare for trials in two other criminal cases with appeal to the president: a mortgage fraud allegation against New York Attorney General Letitia James and a false statements case against former FBI Director James Comey.

Prosecutors tried to establish that Peter Stinson’s Feb. 18 post on Bluesky—"Take the shot” and “We’ll deal with the fallout"—along with dozens of other anti-Trump posts going back several years amounted to evidence that he was inducing others to commit violence. But his defense lawyers argued that Stinson’s comments were protected by the First Amendment and that he never took actual steps to carry out an assassination. Stinson is a former Coast Guard officer, according to prosecutors.

The government pointed to Stinson’s history of incendiary posts on X, formerly Twitter, and Bluesky, including his reaction to the attempted assassination of Trump on the campaign trail in Butler, Pa., last year. One of them read, “Three inches to the right, and the shot woulda gone through the eyeball. Practice. Practice. Practice.”

But the primary expert witness for the defense, a psychologist specializing in online radicalization and social media violence, argued that prosecutors targeted Stinson, without charging the countless people who post similar sentiments about the president without ever acting on them.

“That’s just incredible to me that anyone in good faith would say that the fact he posted a bunch of times he wished the president were dead is a solicitation of murder,” the witness, University of Maryland professor Jen Goldbeck, said in a subsequent interview.

DOJ representatives didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Goldbeck and an attorney who also attended the trial said Halligan observed both sides’ closing arguments Tuesday, exiting the courthouse before the jury returned its unanimous verdict of not guilty. Halligan, a former insurance attorney and personal defense lawyer to Trump who’s never previously been a prosecutor, was installed by the president as US attorney in Eastern Virginia after her predecessor resisted pressure to seek indictments of Comey and James. Halligan presented grand jury arguments herself in both of those matters.

Stinson, who was indicted before Halligan’s arrival, faced a charge under a solicitation statute that requires the government to prove his advocacy for the violence is strongly corroborated.

“The solicitation statute requires that kind of proof to distinguish idle chatter and protected speech from communications strongly corroborating the speaker’s intent to have the president killed,” said Jon Jeffress, a criminal defense attorney with Kaiser PLLC, who wasn’t involved in the case. “Here, the jury concluded that the tweets did not corroborate criminal intent.”

In Stinson’s case, such evidence would’ve included the defendant communicating with someone he felt was “capable and willing” to assassinate Trump, Jeffress added.

The case is USA v. Stinson, E.D. Va., No. 1:25-cr-00209, verdict 10/28/25.