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1. Small Pools
Two items today.
(1) I have an idea for how to fix our post-Trump political system.
(2) There’s an opening in the Reflecting Pool case to send someone from the Trump administration to jail.
This is as close to Optimistic JVL as you’re ever going to get. Let’s dive in.
By the end of this week America will forget about the case of David Hearn, the man Donald Trump blamed for the failure of his Reflecting Pool.
Quick catchup for anyone who has already forgotten:
Trump is obsessed with the physical beauty of Washington, D.C., and so is trying to turn the downtown area into a presidential palace compound.
Part of this project involved his revulsion that the Reflecting Pool by the Lincoln Memorial resembled an actual patch of water and not a hyper-idealized artist’s rendering.
So Trump gave a no-bid contract to “fix” the Reflecting Pool to a vendor no one knew anything about.
Within days of the project’s completion, the Reflecting Pool failed in a spectacular and embarrassing manner.
Trump needed to blame the failure on someone; he claimed that the project had been physically attacked and vandalized (despite having previously promised it would be vandalism-proof). He set his Justice Department on the case of finding someone to prosecute for this imagined crime.
U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia (and former TV lawyer) Jeanine Pirro looked around and decided to charge David Hearn with a felony—thus bringing the full weight and power of the American government against a blameless citizen purely to satisfy the narcissism of the president.
I want to underline this: Hearn faced up to ten years in prison for these charges.
On Friday Pirro’s office withdrew its case against Hearn, claiming that its own charges were baseless—that the Reflecting Pool failed because of the contractor, not because of vandalism, and that a different branch of the Trump administration had hidden these facts from the prosecution.
I encourage you to read the motion for dismissal. I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me that either someone from the Department of the Interior should go to jail, or someone from the Department of Justice should be disbarred. (Or both?) We’re going to talk about why that is and who it might be in a moment.
But first, let’s talk about Jeanine Pirro.
On July 2, Pirro held a press conference to brag about her indictment of Hearn. Here’s a sample of her remarks:
“The defendant, Hearn, ripped a piece of recently installed sealant on the bottom of the Reflecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial. The evidence shows, and we will prove beyond a reasonable doubt, that Hearn willfully destroyed property at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.”
“Our evidence further shows that the National Park Service employees observed Hearn actually forcefully and violently pulling up and removing the bottom liner with both hands.”
After Pirro’s prepared remarks she took questions from reporters. She insisted that, “There was an effort, a violent effort, to rip up the sealant from the bottom of the pool.”
When a reporter pressed her, pointing out the trove of video evidence existing that showed the Reflecting Pool failing prior to Hearn’s arrival on the scene, Pirro mocked the reporter:
Reporter: Did he have any tools or was it just his bare hands?
Pirro: Right now, we believe it’s his bare hands, both hands.
Reporter: So does that indicate in your belief that it was probably damaged before or do you believe that he—
Pirro: Oh, he damaged it.
Reporter: —further, but do you believe it had already been damaged before—
Pirro: He damaged the pool.
Reporter: —before he touched it.
Pirro: He damaged this pool.
Reporter: But there had been, you know, all these videos.
Pirro: Well, good. I’m glad you’ve got that evidence. Come on in the grand jury, you can testify.
By the Justice Department’s own admission, we can now say—definitively—that these were falsehoods. Pirro lied. She lied about a private citizen in the course of a criminal prosecution against him.
It’s outrageous. But it also tells us how we can fix almost everything in American politics going forward: ...
