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.
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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.
It would be nice to know more about this ludicrous bit of petty tyranny.
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, D.C. and 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 from humiliation. Pirro did subsequently move to dismiss the case. But there’s a ton we still don’t know about all these corrupt machinations.
Corrupt and at the same time absolutely ludicrous.
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.
It doesn’t hold water or pieces of blue pool lining.
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