DOGE poster boy Edward “Big Balls” Coristine has shared details of the D.C. carjacking that made headlines in August; however, one key detail in his story differs from police reports.
The 19-year-old was left with a broken nose and a concussion over the incident, which helped give President Donald Trump a pretext for his crime crackdown in D.C.
Speaking on Jesse Watters Primetime on Monday, Coristine recalled being with a group of friends in D.C. at around 3 a.m. when the attack that the Fox News host labeled a “bloody beatdown” took place.
“I was walking one of my friends back to her car and as we were walking to the car, there’s a group of 10 guys right across the street,” Coristine said. “And as we get to the car and she begins to fumble for the keys, they start shouting at us and really quickly I knew something was really off about the situation.”
However, Coristine’s recollection of a male gang clashed with the initial crime report from Washington D.C.’s Metropolitan Police.
In a statement released on Aug. 5, two days after the incident, authorities announced the arrests of two 15-year-olds, one male and one female, both from Hyattsville, Maryland. Both were charged with carjacking.
The two teens were later ordered out of detention by Joe Biden-appointed Judge Kendra Briggs in August, who sent them back to their caretakers with conditions including electronic monitoring, a 24-hour curfew, and no contact with each other.
The 15-year-old boy pleaded guilty to felony assault, simple assault, robbery and attempted robbery in a D.C. juvenile court last week. He will be sentenced next month, while his alleged accomplice will attend juvenile court next month.
The Metropolitan Police confirmed to the Daily Beast on Monday that the two arrests are the only ones made in the carjacking case, and no additional information was available.
Coristine, who now works for the Social Security Administration, detailed to Watters how his female friend was able to quickly lock herself in her car for protection as he was attacked.
“Right as I turn around, they are right up on me, just a few feet away,” he said. “They slammed me against the car, they started throwing a bunch of punches. I keep my hands up. I’m getting a lot of punches here, I’m just trying to protect my head the best way I can.”
The teenager said the incident was swift and the police arrived “pretty quickly” on the scene.
“I was fortunate I only came out with a broken nose and a concussion,” he said. “It could have been a lot worse. I knew if I got down on the ground it would get way worse so I was, like, all right, no matter what I have to stay on my feet.”
Coristine also questioned why he and his friends were targeted in the attack.
“It was a really bad situation and the carjacking did not make a lot of sense because it was like the cheapest car on the block. So it felt like there might have been something else going on there,” he said, without elaborating.
Two days after the carjacking, Trump posted a bloodied photo of Coristine on his Truth Social account, claiming that he was “beaten mercilessly by local thugs.”
“We just almost lost a young man, beautiful, handsome guy that got the hell knocked out of him,” Trump wrote.
The president also threatened to take “federal control of the city and run this city how it should be run” and said juvenile offenders should be charged as adults.
That prompted U.S Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro to call for the age of legal accountability in Washington to be lowered to 14.
“Number one, we’ve got to lower the age of responsibility to 14. I’m tired of having these kids commit crimes—and they are crews, not gangs, in D.C.,” Pirro said while appearing on Fox’s The Ingraham Angle in August.
During a White House press briefing in August, conservative podcaster Benny Johnson even suggested Trump could bestow the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Coristine in view of his “heroic actions just a few blocks from this building.”
“Perhaps it’s something he would consider,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt replied.
During his brief Fox News interview on Monday, Coristine also revealed he moved to D.C. after being inspired by his grandfather, who he said was a double agent for the KGB and had “died so that I could come here and live in this free country.”
“I feel this great responsibility to serve my country,” Coristine added, before switching to MAGA mode to note of his DOGE era, “When I started seeing these problems that we’ve got as a government, this $37 trillion national debt and counting... I was like ‘This is insane, is there any way I can help solve this?’”
“In this administration there was a chance,” he said. “So of course when I saw the opportunity, I signed right up.”
He also said he hoped his former DOGE boss, Elon Musk, would reconcile with Trump, after the pair were photographed shaking hands at Charlie Kirk’s funeral earlier this month.
“I think Elon Musk and President Trump have a lot of things in common and I think they both really want to help society, I think they are both great individuals and I would love it if they can reconcile their problems and get back together.”
