Trump’s Reflecting Pool vendetta became too ridiculous for Jeanine Pirro
The Justice Department's dismissal of laughable charges against a former Olympic athlete shouldn't obscure the basic fact of the president's abuse of power against an innocent man
This piece was previously published at The Hot Screen.
Four weeks after charging former Olympic canoeist David Hearn with vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, the Justice Department has moved to withdraw its indictment, pointing instead to botched work by a contractor as the cause of peeled lining. As I discussed previously, the targeting of Hearn was the culmination of increasingly frantic efforts by President Trump to deflect blame for a botched refurbishment of the pool, and constituted the sort of abuse of power associated with tinpot dictators. In order to evade his clear responsibility for the incompetent renovation — in which not only the pool’s waterproofing did not take but the water itself became discolored with green algae — the president concocted an alternate reality both absurd and ominous. In his telling, numerous vandals had attacked the pool in an effort to undermine both the president and the nation itself. To instantiate his tale of a country besieged, he dispatched troops and other security forces to the Reflecting Pool, militarizing a tourist site that draws some 20 million visitors every year.
If it had ended there, such an abuse of power would have been sufficient to torpedo the presidency of previous chief executives — an unstable concoction of menace and stupidity, with the president blaming the algae growth on unseen vandals who had supposedly dumped fertilizer in the water, and ranting about a 350-foot-long “gash” that invisible assailants had cut into the pool lining. But a deeper corruption lay in how the president was able to conscript willing accomplices into his fantasia of D.C. bedlam. Notably, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt repeated the lies about vandals, as if through repetition they could overcome the lack of actual evidence. Even worse, the Justice Department — through the initiative of the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Jean Pirro— indicted Hearn on a felony vandalism charge that could carry a ten-year prison sentence, attempting through the abuse of the justice system to turn Trump’s self-serving fantasy of anti-American vandals into reality.
It is heartening to see that the withdrawal of charges against Hearn has garnered fairly extensive news coverage. Given the president’s stance of never admitting error, the Justice Department’s admission that it has no actual case against Hearn carries the whiff of novelty. More broadly, it offers a glimpse of the possibility that Trump has hit a barrier to his various abuses of power, in this case as his own lackeys appear unwilling to carry out an impossible prosecution. And here, we should take note of speculation that Pirro fears real consequences, such as disbarment, for pursuing a fact-free case. She previously claimed to have “tremendous evidence” of Hearn’s guilt, yet in her remarks about withdrawing the indictment claimed that the Interior Department had not provided her previously with information about the shoddy repair work. At a minimum, this suggests she had failed to do the minimum due diligence in filing the charges against Hearn. There is a real air of public servants caught red-handed abetting a presidential vendetta.
But the larger story remains Trump’s own abuse of power; most specifically, his willingness to mobilize resources of the federal government to target a single innocent American in order to distract from his own incompetence. I will be the first to admit that Donald Trump has done many worse things than this: attempting to overthrow American democracy following his 2020 election loss and his recent decision to make war on Iran come immediately to mind. Yet, in the escalation from a botched Reflecting Pool restoration to the deployment of the U.S. government to prosecute a single citizen, the cruelty and incompetence of Trump have congealed in a novel way. I am struck by how the president conjured this whole supposed “crisis” of a besieged Reflecting Pool completely out of the whole cloth of his own delusions, and then sought to send a fellow American to prison for a decade to cover up his own failed, self-initiated effort to. . . refurbish an ornamental body of water.
Incredibly but predictably, Trump’s lies and desire for retribution have continued in the days following Pirro’s nixing of the indictment. He has voiced his strong disagreement with her decision, saying that she “made a mistake,” “choked,” and “folded like an umbrella.” (Pirro apparently attempted to bolster her case that the president not fire her, and that vandalism was not to blame, by literally bringing a box of evidence to the White House on Tuesday). He has continued to broadcast the lie that vandals, not a botched repair job, have caused the problems with the pool, writing on social media that “To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM,” and referencing a video supposedly providing corroborating evidence.
News reports have tended to emphasize Trump’s critique of Pirro and the question of whether she is safe in her job — for example, this New York Times piece plays up the reality TV-style drama of the tension between Pirro and Trump. But the focus on the U.S. attorney’s fate obscures the president’s continued efforts to conjure a phantasmagoria of “box-cutter”-wielding vandals (the box-cutter reference more or less obviously meant to evoke the attacks of September 11). Most damningly, Trump’s opposition to the case’s dismissal and his ongoing lies about vandalism mean that he effectively continues to marshal the power of the presidency, however ham-handedly, to target and defame David Hearn. Impugning an innocent man via the presidential megaphone is itself a blatant abuse of power, and the Justice Department’s attempt to dismiss the case “without prejudice” — a legal term meaning they could re-file charges at a later date — is another sign that the abuses are ongoing (Hearn’s legal team has countered this by filing a motion to ensure the charges cannot be revived).
Whether Donald Trump is delusional or simply sticking to his own self-absolving script of an antifa anti-Reflecting Pool jihad, this single incident of vindictive and bullying behavior would likely have been a crippling scandal for any previous presidency. The breadth of his lies and his obsessive behavior should not blind us to the underlying menace of a president who would imprison an innocent man to cover up his own incompetence.