You’d be forgiven for thinking the saga involving Donald Trump’s vile prosecutions of innocent people over his Reflecting Pool fiasco has finally come to an ignominious end. On Thursday, a judge officially threw out felony charges against former Olympic canoeist David Hearn, who’d been falsely accused by Trump of vandalizing his disastrous renovation of the landmark.
Not long after, Hearn projected an air of resolution by going on CNN. Asked if he had any “final message” for the president. Hearn criticized Trump for wrongly accusing him and added: “Leaders don’t do that.”
But this is not the final chapter in this story—not by a long shot. And what happens next will help settle whether we are capable of dispensing real justice to all those Trump accomplices who are helping make our slide into authoritarianism possible.
Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee are set to launch an investigation into the decision to criminally charge Hearn and others over the Reflecting Pool fiasco, I’m told. Although Democrats are in the minority, their probe offers a blueprint for what they’ll pursue with subpoena power if they control the House in six months.
This week, Representative Jamie Raskin—the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee and potentially its future chair—will formally demand that the Justice and Interior Departments turn over a wealth of documents related to the charging decisions made in this case.
“Judiciary Democrats will investigate who lied, who buried the evidence, and who decided to threaten an American citizen with prison simply to protect Trump’s wounded feelings and continuing corruption,” Raskin said in a statement to me. “Participants in this frame-up will be held to account.”
At the center of this saga is Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for Washington, DC, a longtime Trump confidante. Pirro’s office eagerly indicted an innocent man after the ailing despot in the Oval Office, embarrassed over reports of algae and other problems plaguing his Reflecting Pool renovation, raged that his underlings must produce a scapegoat to spare him humiliation. Pirro did subsequently move to dismiss the case. But there’s a ton we still don’t know about all these corrupt machinations.
The more we learn, the worse it will likely get. Hearn, 67, had claimed he’d merely stopped to observe the already-widely-discussed failures at the Reflecting Pool and dipped his hand in the water. Yet despite the plausibility of this account, when Pirro charged him July with felony property destruction (several others received lesser charges), she declared she had “tremendous evidence” of his guilt.
But only weeks later, when Pirro moved to drop the case in late July, her office admitted that a wealth of information provided to prosecutors by the Department of the Interior—which oversees management of the Reflecting Pool—showed that the damage had been caused by a “botched installation and not vandalism.”
What remains to be answered fully is this: How did Pirro’s office secure the July 2 indictment of Hearn for a felony, and what happened inside the Trump administration leading up to it?
Pirro’s office has defended itself by insisting that at the time of this indictment, the Interior Department misled prosecutors by initially failing to provide them info indicating that bad contracting caused the damage. Pirro’s office has also argued that the Interior Department provided limited evidence that Hearn had tampered with the project. But even that evidence looks awfully thin for felony charges.
Making the Keystone Kops nature of this even more buffoonish, Pirro has now angrily accused Interior Secretary Doug Burgum of deliberately misleading her office by persuading prosecutors of Hearn’s guilt. But under ethics guidelines, prosecutors aren’t supposed to bring indictments unless they really think the charges are supported. Shouldn’t Pirro have looked more skeptically at this “evidence” before throwing the book at Hearn?
Indeed, none of Pirro’s excuses explain why her office brought the indictment when it did. After all, her office hadn’t yet gotten a full accounting from the Interior Department of how the damage had been caused. Heck, the government’s own sole witness testified to the grand jury that this damage was visible before Hearn ever touched it, and it was obvious to the naked eye that something far more than vandalism had marred the project.
“The notion that they did not know that there was a botched, rushed renovation of the Reflecting Pool does not hold water,” Norm Eisen, a lawyer for Hearn, told me.
Eisen and Hearn’s other lawyers are not letting this drop. For some time now, they’ve been seeking access to full transcripts of the grand jury proceedings—including instructions that prosecutors gave jurors on charging guidelines—to determine whether prosecutors misled them to secure Hearn’s indictment.
Eisen confirmed to me that the push for those grand jury materials will now continue, despite Hearn’s exoneration. That’s because the court dismissed the case without prejudice—so prosecutors can theoretically revive the charges later. Getting those materials will hopefully persuade the court to rule that prosecutors cannot bring back this case, Eisen said, because they will “reflect on whether prosecutors were candid with the grand jury.”
True, success on that front will be difficult; for many good reasons, defense lawyers rarely are permitted to view grand jury materials. But it’s not unheard of. “Courts are generally very reluctant to grant access to grand jury transcripts,” Daniel R. Alonso, a former prosecutor and law professor at Cornell, told me. But here, Alonso said, the defense has “more than a colorable argument.”
Recall that well before the indictment, Trump was already publicly stating as fact that the project had been vandalized. This was surely understood by Pirro and Burgum as a command to make it true that vandalism caused the renovation’s failure. And that provides more grounds for transparency on grand jury materials, as Alonso noted: “If anything, the president’s involvement strengthens the defense’s position.”
The stakes here are very high. The Justice Department has become the site of an epic struggle over Trump’s lawless efforts to unleash law enforcement on his critics. Hearteningly, many of these gambits have imploded on contact with facts and law. Many prosecutors have resisted, leading to resignations and firings.
Yet the authoritarian abuses continue, relying on underlings who are willing to carry them out—some eagerly, and others no doubt because going along is easier than resisting, as there’s no perceived accountability in the offing. That’s why it’s critical to seek all manner of censure and redress. In the Hearn affair, this will likely include civil lawsuits against the government, asking the courts to impose professional sanctions on key actors, and seeking their disbarment—possibly up to Pirro herself.
“You can’t just limit this to the lowest person on the totem pole or the highest,” prominent legal commentator Katie Phang told me. She argued that “each and every lawyer who’s had their fingerprints on this illegal indictment” are complicit in “the collective destruction of the rule of law.”
Raskin’s committee, then, will demand documents relating to the decision to prosecute Hearn; inter-agency communications relating to the decision, including with the White House; and evidence presented to the grand jury leading up to Hearn’s indictment.
Subpoena power would help fumigate all this. Were there internal objections to this prosecution based on lack of evidence? Were they overridden? What communications about this went on with the White House? Why did Burgum look away as the prosecution proceeded—and why did he continue to allege vandalism—even as his own agency knew what really caused the damage? Democrats should put Pirro and Burgum under oath and take them apart. Impeaching Pirro should be on the table, too.
On this affair and so many others, Democrats should proceed in the following spirit: Any and all insiders and whistleblowers who want to come forward can be confident Democrats will have their back. But those who corruptly enable Trump’s vile lawlessness should know that on the other side, accountability is waiting.
