The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 29 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
The saga involving Donald Trump’s Reflecting Pool renovation is getting stranger and darker. Federal prosecutors are now saying they’re aware of citations that have been issued to the supposed vandals that, according to Trump, have sabotaged the renovation, but no details and no records of any kind are being released.
Meanwhile, Trump is rambling in a truly crazed way about this, describing the people who have received citations or have even been arrested as enemies of our country. This is really taking on the cast of an unhinged tyrant, and while it’s tempting to laugh at the story, there’s something about it that signals a profound degradation that’s underway.
Former federal prosecutor Ankush Khardori has been writing well about how Trump has been degrading the rule of law and arguing that we need to be thinking now about how to address that down the line. So we’re working through all this with him. Ankush, thanks for coming on.
Ankush Khardori: Thanks for having me.
Sargent: So we know very little about this right now. Trump is very angry that the Reflecting Pool has gone off the rails. There’s been the algae and the peeling paint. Trump has posted on Truth Social that six people have been arrested and seven others have gotten citations, some he says for cutting a 350-foot gash in the pool’s sealant with a knife or with razors.
But there doesn’t seem to be any clear evidence of these arrests. Ankush, this has gotten truly weird, hasn’t it?
Khardori: Yes, this is quite strange. Ordinarily you would expect a little bit more clarity from the federal government in a situation like this.
Sargent: You sure would. And there’s one guy we know of who says he’s gotten a citation—the former Olympic canoeist David Carter Hearn. He’s 67. I believe there’s another woman who’s been quoted saying something similar, that she got a citation or was temporarily detained.
I mean, a 67-year-old former Olympian who was biking in on the National Mall doesn’t seem like an Antifa vandal, does he?
Khardori: No. This thing seems like it’s gotten quite out of hand and that federal law enforcement, the Park Police in particular, seem to have been dispatched to preserve the president’s ego, I guess.
Sargent: Can you talk about that a little? In other words, you think that maybe the park police were in some sense directed to find something wrong out there?
Khardori: It kind of seems like they were directed to watch things very, very closely and to behave in a way that they ordinarily wouldn’t.
Sargent: Right. And we should just clarify for people that the Reflecting Pool is on the National Mall. It’s in front of the Lincoln Memorial. And that’s why the Park Police, I guess, have jurisdiction or something. But here’s where it gets murky. It gets really murky here.
The New York Times just got a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington, which handles prosecutions in D.C. And all they said was, we are aware of citations being issued, meaning by the park police. But the U.S. Attorney’s office provided no specifics, no number of people given citations. Here’s how the Times put it: “No records of arrests or citations have been produced by the administration or law enforcement officials to support the president’s claims.”
Ankush, he said six people were arrested and seven people were given citations for serious vandalism. And they’re not putting out anything about this, the Washington office of the U.S. Attorney’s office. What on earth could this possibly mean?
Khardori: Look, my first suspicion is that they don’t want to put out information that would contradict the president’s claims about what’s happening there. Because bear in mind that the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., under Jeanine Pirro, has been more than happy to speak publicly on pending matters when it serves the administration’s preferred narrative.
I think the most prominent example that comes to my mind is when they arrested the sandwich guy. Jeanine Pirro put out a video taunting him. Now, that video is deeply hilarious for the wrong reasons for her in hindsight, since they totally flopped on that case—they couldn’t even get a misdemeanor conviction on the guy.
But of course, that’s just to say that when there’s a thing of public interest to them where they want to produce information and make a show to the public, they will absolutely do it. So we should infer that the facts would not reflect well upon them if they were being forthright about them.
Sargent: It’s such a good point. The U.S. attorneys have been willing to bend over backwards to support even the most tenuous and ridiculous things that Trump wants to make true. And here he is out there saying there have been six arrests, seven citations or whatever, and now they’ve just gone completely quiet.
I guess, if I understand you correctly, you think that if they were to say in some form on the record, here’s what’s actually happening, all of a sudden the Trump claims about these arrests would fall apart, right? In other words, Trump got it into his head somehow that there were six arrests and now nobody wants to contradict the despot. Is that the basic likelihood here?
Khardori: Well, I think more than about the numbers, it’s about what the arrests would have been for, right? Because Trump has been claiming that there’s been this serious vandalism, the gashes through this covering or whatever, and that should be readily provable—whether there were arrests or citations for that.
So just to give you and your listeners a sense of what should be at hand for the government to produce if they want to: the citations are just tickets usually, right? So they’re in the possession of the park police, who maintain their half of the ticket. They have to be provided to the federal government eventually, when the people show up in federal court, and they can be provided or summarized at any point in time after the citations have been issued.
So the park police can give this information to the U.S. Attorney’s office. The U.S. Attorney’s office can ask for it at any moment and provide it to the public—when the citations are for, what the citations were issued for. All readily available information if they wanted to make it public.
An arrest connotes something different, right? Now, I don’t know if they’re actually properly dividing these things up, whether they have the numbers right, the buckets right. An arrest, however, connotes an actual physical detention of some sort—whether it’s an arrest on a complaint, an arrest just in plain view, and that they have to show up at a later date on something like a criminal complaint. An arrest could happen if there’s an indictment, but it doesn’t seem like anything like that has happened in this context.
Now, in either of those contexts that I’ve just described—whether it’s complaint or indictment—there’s paper that is produced for the public and for the defendant about what the arrest was for and about, right? We don’t have secret court proceedings. We’re supposed to have court proceedings that make these things available to the public.
So none of this needs to be a secret. The government could produce this information easily if they wanted to.
Sargent: And I think reporters have been beating down the doors of both the Washington office, the U.S. Attorney’s office, and of the park police saying, provide us with evidence, tell us what is happening here. And they’re getting little to nothing back.
I’m really taken with your point about these secret arrests. We don’t know that anything like that happened here. In fact, there may not have been any arrests at all. But it’s really got that vibe, the situation, where all of a sudden stuff is really proceeding under cover of darkness in some sense. I mean, it’s literally proceeding under cover of darkness, right?
Khardori: Yeah. Well, look, we know very little. And I think broadly speaking, there are two possibilities. One is the worst-case scenario, which would be, to your point, the secret arrests—arrests where the details are not being processed in the courts correctly or made public correctly, in the ordinary fashion.
The other, which is my suspicion candidly, is that they’re withholding this information because if they were to make it public, it would contradict the president’s claims about what’s actually been happening at the pool. He’s got this theory that there was this vandalism, and now he’s trying to sort of hang all of the messiness around the pool around this vandalism.
There’s just not—I haven’t seen any evidence that this actually happened. And the most readily available evidence would be to produce arrest records for it—a criminal complaint, a citation, whatever. And my operating hypothesis is that this information is not being produced to the public because it would not support the president’s claims about what’s been happening.
Sargent: And Trump is very visibly invested in these claims. Let’s listen to something Trump said about the situation. Here he’s talking about this 350-foot gash that he says the vandals cut in the sealant of the pool. Listen.
Donald Trump (voiceover): They tried to destroy it. They cut it up with a box knife and tried to destroy it. And it’s in great shape now. They’re terrible. They’re vandals. They’ve caught six, I guess, maybe more. They’ve got others in line to be caught. But we just inspected it. We’ll fix it right after the Fourth of July. Got to let the water out, just fix it. But we caught—they would cut it and they would grab this very expensive and very good material, totally waterproof, and they rip it. These people are sick. They ripped a scar 350 feet long through the side of the reflecting pool. These are the people we’re dealing with. These are the people that want to destroy our country.
Sargent: Now, someone with the National Park Service has said in a court filing that there was some kind of cut to the sealant, but it’s not clear what evidence the Park Service has, according to CBS. And critically, I think Trump is saying here that the vandals who have been arrested are basically enemies of the state.
What do you make of what you heard there, and this business of there being a filing that the National Park Service put in saying there was some kind of cut?
Khardori: Look, maybe there was some kind of cut. But—by the way, I think the number of feet he’s been using has also grown as he’s been telling this story more and more. I think it was like 200, then 250, now I guess we’re up to 350.
Look, I don’t believe him. I’ll just be honest, I don’t believe him. And at a minimum I’m unwilling to take his word for it. And I will not take his word for it unless and until the government produces records from the criminal system that would back it up. And thus far they’re not doing that.
And what I infer from that, as I just said, is that if they were to produce it, it wouldn’t corroborate the president’s claims. It would be extraordinarily embarrassing. And it would reflect very, very poorly on him, because either he has fabricated this claim or he’s incapable of sorting truth from fiction. Maybe he was told this and doesn’t know it’s false. All of the possibilities are just different forms of bad.
Sargent: Yes, I think that’s an essential point about this, because if you listen to Trump talk about this topic, it’s now clear that he’s grown quite obsessed with it. And he has turned it into a matter of intense public interest by talking about it all the time.
This is the president of the United States who’s kind of toggling back and forth between talking about war in the Middle East and talking about deep 350-foot gashes that he thinks were cut in his reflecting pool. And so this is what I find troubling here, given that we really need to know what the hell he’s talking about—whether there’s any kind of reality to this at all. You’d think the government would be forthcoming, but they’re not. That’s what I don’t get about the situation.
Khardori: I agree with you. Right. And that’s why I draw the inference that I do about it.
Sargent: Well, let’s step back and talk about the big picture. You did this very good piece for Politico laying out the extent of the degradation we’re seeing to the Justice Department and to the rule of law. Can you just recap that big picture case for us?
Khardori: Gosh. Yeah, I think in some ways the degradation of the Justice Department has been underappreciated. We have seen this administration really aggressively shift law enforcement priorities away from what we typically associate with high-operating federal law enforcement to what they basically call street crimes in many respects. That’s been a massive shift.
So that means there’s less prosecuting of public corruption, less prosecuting of financial fraud, white-collar crime, all that sort of thing. All that is being borne out from data and reporting.
But what has happened also within that framework is that the professionalism and the comportment of the prosecutors in the department has just dramatically declined. A lot more people have left than I anticipated would leave voluntarily, right? There were a lot of firings, but most of these people left voluntarily, the prosecutors.
And the staffing at these offices—the U.S. attorneys are unqualified often, and they’re making major mistakes. And you’re seeing prosecutors in these cases, some of the more high-profile ones, like the Broadview Six case out of Chicago, making extraordinary missteps in their cases, engaging in what we would ordinarily describe as intentional or unintentional prosecutorial misconduct.
And I’ve spent—at least I’ve been thinking about this the last year—a fair amount of time thinking about, well, what’s happening in Washington, D.C. But I think we have underappreciated what’s going on in the U.S. attorneys’ offices, which is, these major metropolitan jurisdictions where the U.S. attorneys’ offices are vitally important. Manhattan, Northern Virginia, Chicago, LA, Miami, all of them.
In these you’re seeing really, really bad conduct on the part of prosecutors, shoddy cases, grand jurors refusing to indict cases at a level we have not seen before. And critically, we’ve seen a fair number of judges in these jurisdictions saying to line prosecutors, what you’ve done here is inappropriate, and you’ve totally cratered the credibility that your office has earned over the decades.
Sargent: Well, a big part of the story, of course, is Donald Trump essentially turning DOJ into an instrument to go after his critics.
Khardori: This is very much a department that is operating under Trump’s thumb. And what we have seen, as you alluded to, is a series of politicized investigations and prosecutions, including the indictments against Letitia James and James Comey that got thrown out because the prosecutor, Lindsay Halligan, another Trump sort of private lawyer, was improperly appointed to the position. And she was improperly appointed to the position because the actual prosecutor who held the position was unwilling to indict the cases, and the career prosecutors were unwilling to indict the case.
So they indict cases, the cases are silly, then they get thrown out. They have since come back with a new indictment against James Comey for his seashells, in the “86 47” business. So, you know, James Comey the seashell scoundrel or whatever. I mean, that seems like a ridiculous case.
There was an effort to prosecute six members of Congress who put out a video telling members of the military—reminding them, in their words—that they should be disobeying illegal orders. Now, setting aside the wisdom of that video, there is nothing illegal about it.
And prosecutors, again under Pirro—the same office that is now not giving us the information on these arrests at the mall—took a case to the grand jury and got zero votes to return that indictment against those six members. I cannot even begin to tell you how remarkable that is.
A high-profile case involving high-profile defendants, which presumably is attracting the highest level of attention within the U.S. Attorney’s office—getting zero votes from a grand jury. I’ve actually never heard of an indictment of any kind getting zero votes in a grand jury. Any kind. And so for it to have—I mean, it’s just remarkable. And it tells you that this was an absolute piece of junk. I use a different word in another setting, but an absolute piece of junk.
And so there’s that case, but just to a slightly broader picture as we’re talking here today, John Bolton has pled guilty to mishandling classified information. A lot of people put that under the rubric of a revenge prosecution, because the motive of resurrecting that case does appear to have been because Trump hates John Bolton. But it also appears to have been the case that John Bolton did the thing he’s accused of. So we do have to keep that possibility in our mind.
But I kind of suspected Bolton did it, actually, when the first reporting came out, you know what I mean? I was like, I kind of think that of the cases, this is the one that maybe they’re going to get a conviction on.
But no, for the most part, it’s been a series of very, very aggressive politicized prosecutions. I was just talking about the big names, but I would place the Broadview Six case, the Chicago case involving protesters, as also a politicized prosecution, right? Political motives, political interests, and a deeply politicized process that produced a wildly embarrassing outcome. The government had to dismiss the case itself.
Sargent: Is it fair of me to say that in some basic sense, what we’re seeing from these prosecutors right now—their refusal to level with the public about this, their willingness to, I guess, keep a sham going in order to protect the despot from embarrassment—is that in some sense another form of corruption and degradation?
Khardori: Yeah. Yes. Yes. I think when you have the president going out saying that criminal conduct has occurred, and you’re not producing readily available information either to back it up or information that you believe would contradict it—yes, this is not appropriate and it’s not leveling with the public. That’s not how cases ordinarily proceed. You don’t normally have the president talking about that.
Once that has happened, you’ve hit a very, very tiny subset of criminal cases where, yes, the public expects and deserves an accounting of what has happened. And there’s this too-oft-repeated notion that the government only speaks through its filings—it’s not really true.
When there are public cases, cases that are of significance to the sitting administration, the Justice Department is more forthright. They produce more material. They make themselves available to answer questions, they provide documents. That is what the government does when there is a criminal prosecutorial effort that they want the public to know about and pay attention to. And this seems like, if Trump had the facts to back him up, this would be one of those.
Sargent: Well, there you have it. Where do you think this is going to end up? I gather that in your interpretation of events, at some point, because people will have to have their moment in court—because we still have that as part of our legal system—when that happens, maybe we’ll see that there were no actual arrests, or we’ll see that these 350-foot cuts maybe didn’t exist or were something made by construction workers. I don’t know. How do you anticipate it unfolding in a practical sense at this point?
Khardori: I think it’ll kind of fizzle out, actually, is what I suspect. I mean, of course people like you and me will want to see how this actually unfolds, just to complete the record, so to speak. But I think the government’s move here is kind of just to hope that people stop paying attention. Trump will be the biggest obstacle to that. You just kind of go away quiet, hope it just kind of fizzles out. Because eventually, if they’ve issued citations, people will have to show up.
But usually this is just money. We’re talking about tickets, right? Like a hundred bucks, whatever, it was 75 bucks, I don’t know. And assuming that there were actual arrests of any consequence, that will become public at some point too. Thus far, that has not happened.
So I expect that one way or another, we will get clarity, even if it’s by omission. And I remain very skeptical. I just—I don’t believe the president. I’ll just say it forthrightly. I don’t believe the president about this gigantic gash. Maybe there was some small little thing. He’s blown it out of proportion, or someone else has lied to him and he’s just running with it. I don’t know.
I don’t have to tell you—after the 2020 election, we all learned the man is capable of zeroing in on a lie, hewing to it tightly, and then persuading a large number of his supporters that it’s actually true. And it seems like he’s kind of trying to run the same play here, except it’s lower stakes, so to speak, but the same modus operandi.
Sargent: And by the way, he persuades himself that something’s true and then all bets are off and it just stays true no matter what. And the entire world needs to sort of bend itself around that.
Khardori: I think there’s a point at which—and I think we’re maybe there on the 2020 election—he loses the ability to tell the difference himself, which is very disturbing.
Sargent: I think that’s exactly right. And I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that no matter how hard the Justice Department tries, it’s not going to be able to protect Donald Trump from embarrassment at the end of the day here. Ankush Khardori, great stuff. Thanks so much. Really appreciate it.
Khardori: Thanks for having me.