Trump and Pirro BOTH Screwed Up by Rushing to Beat July 4

As noted in this post, WaPo has a worthwhile piece on Trump’s pressure on Jeanine Pirro regarding the reflecting pool.

It confirms that Pirro not only knew about but reviewed the motion to dismiss against Davey Hearn before it was filed; I had my doubts.

Pirro reviewed and signed off on the motion after speaking with Michael Spence, the chief of the unit handling Superior Court cases in the U.S. attorney’s office, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

It reveals that Trump lashed out at Pirro, in part, because she did not warn him prosecutors were going to drop the case, something that would have been done by a memo to Blanche who could then inform Trump in a DOJ that was not hopelessly corrupt.

[T]he president soon grew angry for another reason: Pirro did not give the White House a heads-up about dropping the charges, a White House official said. The president spoke with her by phone Saturday to discuss the decision, a call first reported by CNN.

Both revelations may be of use for Hearn’s lawyers as they try to get some accountability for the false charges.

On that note, the piece even includes Norm Eisen’s comments, contesting Pirro’s insinuation that they didn’t already know their case was shit, more prominently than most stories on this.

Norm Eisen, a lawyer for Hearn, said he did not accept the claim that the Justice Department was unaware of evidence indicating Hearn’s innocence. Eisen cited public photographs and reports demonstrating that the damage probably stemmed from contractor errors.

“The idea that Jeanine Pirro and her office were somehow hornswoggled by Interior is not credible,” Eisen said.

Where the story goes awry is in holding either Pirro or Trump accountable for their own corruption.

To be sure, WaPo lays out the evidence of Trump’s failures. It starts its story with four paragraphs describing Trump’s boasts about being able to repair the reflecting pool when others could not.

Standing on the basin of the Lincoln Memorial’s Reflecting Pool in early May, President Donald Trump promised to fix the leaks and other problems that had long plagued one of the capital’s most recognizable landmarks.

“It’s going to last, I would say 50 years,” he said. “It’ll last, it’s going to last a long time.”

Trump vowed to finish the job in time for July Fourth celebrations on the National Mall. He and his aides cast the project, launched with a multimillion-dollar no-bid contract and without the normal review process, as a demonstration of how quickly the longtime real estate magnate could transform Washington.

Trump’s changes instead lasted a few days.

But when it quotes Trump expressing displeasure with the contractor who, Trump said, was rushing, it doesn’t circle back and remind readers that the contractor was rushing — and had been picked via a no-bid process that excluded better qualified contractors — because “Trump vowed to finish the job in time for July Fourth celebrations on the National Mall.”

“I’m not saying I was 100 percent thrilled with the contractor, but the contractor was rushing,” he said in the Oval Office, noting that workers had a tight deadline.

The contractor whose rush job resulted in a failed renovation was rushing because Trump demanded and paid him extra to do so.

The rest of the story — describing how Trump, “believed he could personally drive the project, having transformed the relationship between the White House and National Park Service staff,” and also describing how that was possible because DOGE cuts left “fewer experienced officials between junior staff and political appointees” — provides abundant reason to blame Trump for everything:

• The DOGE decision to fire qualified people
• The determination to get the pool done by July 4
• The choice of the unqualified contractor
• The exclusion of people with knowledge on historic preservation from the project

It shows all the things Trump did wrong (and WaPo has led on this story from the start) and contrasts them with Trump’s promise he could do no wrong. It even notes that Hearn’s “charges gave administration officials cover for their claim that the pool’s problems stemmed from deliberate damage,” something I noted in real time.

But it doesn’t quite say that Trump is angry because he himself failed. It doesn’t call out Trump for blaming the contractor for the rush he himself demanded.

There’s great reporting on Trump’s failures in here, but it ultimately lands its punch only through subtle irony that will be widely missed in this day and age.

And by treating the MTD uncritically, the piece pulls even more punches against Jeanine Pirro.

Its coverage of Pirro’s role focuses on what the MTD claims she could have seen, even while noting it took Hearn’s expert visit on July 16 (WaPo doesn’t correct what appears, based on a Hearn filing submitted the same day as the visit, to be an incorrect date) before any prosecutors — it says Pirro did so herself — visited the pool that had been drained almost a week earlier, on July 10.

The pool was drained again July 10 for more repairs.

[snip]

She visited the pool on July 1 to inspect the damage, according to court records. When a grand jury indicted Hearn the next day on a felony charge of destruction of property — the sole felony vandalism charge pursued in connection with the pool — Pirro gave a news conference and later a Fox News interview in which she described him “forcefully and violently” tugging at the liner with both hands and shouting at a Park Service employee who told him to stop.

“I didn’t charge anything harshly,” she told reporters at the time, adding that “there was tremendous damage.”

But inside the U.S. attorney’s office, frustration was building with Interior officials, who had yet to furnish the information prosecutors were requesting about the damage to the pool. All the prosecutors had were a set of “bare-bones” police reports from the Park Service officers who had arrested Hearn and three other defendants who were charged with misdemeanor offenses, according to a Justice Department filing.

When Hearn’s defense team toured the site on July 17 [sic], Pirro visited again. With the pool drained, prosecutors could see the damage more clearly, according to her office’s court filing.

And that’s Pirro’s excuse for charging Hearn, on July 2, even though the public (and, as WaPo links, the WaPo itself) had recorded abundant damage before Hearn came along. The full paragraph complaining that Interior didn’t hand over all its records — paraphrased in WaPo’s timeline — really lays it on thick. Prosecutors [made] dozens and dozens of attempts [were made] to get responsive information from the Park Police.

At the outset of the investigation into the damage at the Reflecting Pool, USAO-DC received barebones police reports from the United States Park Police (“USPP”) which is an agency within the DOL and under the jurisdiction of the DOI. The government requested “everything,” including all reports, all statements, witness statements, defendant’s admissions, citation notices, photographs, body worn camera footage, and surveillance footage, to include any and all inculpatory and exculpatory material from DOI relating to the instant case and the other cases where USPP had taken reports of vandalism related to the Reflecting Pool. Indeed, prosecutors specifically involved in the cases related to the Reflecting Pool made dozens and dozens of communications were made in an effort to identify and obtain the materials necessary to have all information to evaluate the case. After significant demands by USAO-DC, USPP provided the police reports and body-worn camera for roughly 10 individuals associated with the Reflecting Pool.

Only after the July 17 visit to the pool (which probably happened on July 16) did Interior turn over records that showed the entire case was shite, Pirro’s filing claims. And because of the volume, it took “days” to read them all (but still almost two weeks and multiple damning filings before they dropped the case against Hearn).

It was at that time that USAO-DC first became aware of the significant damage throughout the pool and accordingly requested all documents from DOI concerning the how the pool was lined and all records regarding the installation of the lining.

Based on this request, USAO-DC received 695 megabytes of additional documents from DOI, which took days to review.

But here’s what the timeline actually shows.

Even if you buy prosecutors’ improbable claims that they lived in DC metro and remained ignorant of the coverage of the pool’s problems before Hearn’s arrest, even if you excuse their failure to walk the 1.4 miles to check out the pool after it was drained on July 10, even if you believe the pool visit was on July 17 and not July 16, in spite of the court filing with a July 16, 6:27PM timestamp (or if you suspect there was a second visit with Pirro herself on July 17), prosecutors still knew their case was shit by July 17, the day before Speedy Trial Act would have required them to charge Hearn.

Sure, given the other slovenliness exhibited by prosecutors, it might be a reach to assume they would have done the due diligence that Hearn’s prosecutors forced them to do if they had not already charged him.

But even granting all the fluff built into prosecutors’ timeline, they still had time to test the evidence before charging Davey Hearn. They still had time to get the evidence from Interior before the STA would have expired.

Instead, Jeanine Pirro rushed out to get the indictment and do a press conference (Michael Spence, who signed the MTD, attended) on the last business day before July 4. After wailing about anarchy (and, later in the presser, refusing to answer questions about January 6), Jeanine Pirro made this presser indicting 3-time Olympian Davey Hearn on fabricated charges about America’s Declaration of Independence from tyranny, all the while boasting about expert evidence just over three hours after her expert had altered their testimony upon being recalled before the grand jury.

This is not the way of a civilized society. It is anarchy.

[snip]

The other part of that executive order was to make DC beautiful, and as part of that, in anticipation of the celebration of 250 years of American history, the President — as you heard from him — has been able to improve and to clean up 50 parks, more than 48 monuments that have been repaired, 22 fountains have been returned to service, and these monuments and fountains must be protected. And those who decide they want to do harm will be held accountable.

[snip]

The United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia remains committed to protecting our national resources, our monuments and our parks from vandals, and we are especially committed to doing so in advance of our 250th Anniversary.

This press conference was dialed up to serve Trump’s plans for the Fourth and the way we can prove that is that prosecutors confessed in their motion to dismiss that they didn’t yet have all the evidence they had been asking for when they indicted Hearn in time for a pre-holiday press conference.

They didn’t wait for the evidence.

They indicted Davey Hearn so Jeanine Pirro could have her pre-July 4 press conference.

Everything that went wrong with the reflecting pool, including the damage to the pool itself and the fabricated charges against Davey Hearn, went wrong for two reasons: Trump’s unprecedented corruption, and his rush to include the reflecting pool in his Narcissistic hijacking of the Nation’s celebration of independence.

And both Trump and Pirro should be held accountable for that.