Jeanine Pirro crashes into the limit of Trump's lies
It's one thing to bullshit on Fox. It's another to lie in court.
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In the ultimate Friday night news dump, US Attorney for the District of Washington DC Jeanine Pirro filed a truly startling motion to dismiss in the federal government’s case against David Hearn, the former Olympian canoeist who became the avatar for the comically unjust prosecution of people rolled up in the attempt to make Trump’s reflecting pool fantasies a reality.
It’s a remarkable document, an attempt to save some sort of face before the DC Superior Court by throwing the Department of the Interior totally under the bus, backing up the bus, and then running it over again.
Pirro clearly wanted to spare herself and her office any further scrutiny by the courts, but this is comically inept, an attempt to paper over the fact that her office charged Hearn and several others based only on the fevered imaginings of President Trump, who declared that antifa wrecked his pool rather than face the fact that his own handpicked contractor screwed everything up. But all the filing really does is highlight how much she was willing to lie in the first place.
When Pirro somehow managed to get a DC grand jury to indict Hearn on felony charges of damaging the reflecting pool, her July 2 press conference announcing the charges wasn’t light on detail, and that might have been one of the things that doomed this misbegotten prosecution.
According to Pirro, a National Park Service employee saw Hearn “forcefully and violently pulling up and removing the bottom liner with both hands.” He also rudely shouted at an NPS employee who told him to stop, so committed was this 67-year-old man to his felonious behavior. She vowed they would be able to prove he did more than $1,000 in damage and howled that her office “will not allow our sacred monuments to be roped off, or diminished, or in any way impacted by disgruntled individuals who think that they and not the rest of the nation have the right to decide what should happen.”
That certainly makes it sound like Pirro’s office had investigated the matter and talked to witnesses before bringing charges, doesn’t it?
And what of the Department of the Interior and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum? What did Burgum have to say when this was all unfolding?
After Hearn was charged, Burgum used the opportunity to make the rounds of the Sunday shows, declaring on CNN that the liner “didn’t peel off. There was vandalism, there were box cutters, there has been several arrests.” Burgum went on to explain that the liner couldn’t possibly have peeled up on its own: “This is an industrial liner. The only way you can end up with slices in one spot and not another is if someone has physically cut it.”
Burgum, a man who was in the business of selling software pretty much continuously since finishing his MBA over 40 years ago, also took time out to pretend he was a salt-of-the-earth type and that those people laughing at the administration for pretending that antifa secretly cut a 300-foot gash in the Reflecting Pool unnoticed simply didn’t understand how Rural Things Work.
So, he faux-farmsplained everything condescendingly to Dana Bash on CNN: “Every farmer and rancher in America that’s had their pickup liner lined by this sprayed-on liner knows that you literally, literally, it would never just like peel off or fall off. This is like a strong material, and it’s the size of eight football fields.”
Uh-huh. Got it.
So how does all this hype compare to what Pirro later came clean and said really happened?
First, Pirro wants the court to know that her office could not possibly have been at fault because her office couldn’t possibly tell what was really going on with the reflecting pool at the time she charged Hearn with damaging it because the pool “remained filled with water, making it difficult to observe the condition of the floor of the entire pool, which was mostly obscured as it covered with water.”
It’s unclear why that single sentence had to tell the reader twice that the pool was filled with water, but even setting aside this crime against good writing, that doesn’t really explain why, if things were so gosh-darn hard to see, she barreled ahead and nabbed an indictment anyway.
Pirro then explained that her prosecutors landed their indictment “armed only with DOI’s representations that defendant caused more than $1,000 of damage to the Reflecting Pool.” Declaring to the court that your prosecutors seemingly undertook no measures of their own to determine whether Hearn should be charged with a crime but instead dutifully just repeated whatever another agency told them is, well, a choice.
Then, according to Pirro, it was only on July 17, when she finally had an expert review the now-drained pool, that her office “first became aware of the significant damage throughout the pool and accordingly requested all documents from DOI concerning how the pool was lined and all records regarding the installation of the lining.”
Yeah, here’s the problem. There was tons of reporting before Hearn was even arrested detailing how the “American flag blue” coating was just peeling off, mere days after Trump’s handpicked contractor pals finished their renovation. But Pirro and apparently everyone else employed at her office remained somehow unaware of this and therefore only asked the DOI for evidence after the scales fell from her eyes on July 17. Then, her office’s review of material from the DOI showed “a rushed and flawed installation process, with repeated failures of the lining during the installation process, and extensive peeling of the lining throughout the Reflecting Pool.”
Pirro’s filing dutifully trundles through a day-by-day recap of the haphazard pool liner installation, concluding by reproducing a June 11 message from an NPS engineer alerting their colleagues to the liner peeling already on that day.
This, then, is the Burgum-under-the-bus part, as Pirro is telling the court that DOI knew as of June 11 that the pool was a crumbling nightmare but hid it from her and let her charge Hearn and others anyway. So, Pirro and her prosecutors were just babes in the woods who took the dastardly Interior Department at face value when Interior knew all along that the damage was already present on June 19 when Hearn allegedly used his superhuman rage and strength to tear the lining, presumably only after antifa helped cut it.
It’s pretty easy to surmise that Pirro was motivated here by a desire to save her skin and, presumably, the skin of whatever prosecutors in her office obtained a felony indictment against a 67-year-old man for the crime of water touching. And perhaps the thought was that Burgum and the DOI would be just fine because they are not subject to the same sort of jurisdiction and oversight by federal courts and state bars that lawyers are.
Those other government agencies have also not faced the catastrophic, potentially career-ending consequences of what happens when judges, say, ask to see the grand jury transcripts and find out that you and your prosecutors played extremely fast and loose with the whole process. The US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois not only dropped the high-profile prosecution of the Broadview 6 as the drip-drip-drip of revelations of attorney misconduct became a steady torrent, but also agreed not even to fight the attorney fee demand from the onetime defendants, something that is basically unheard of.
Or take the US Attorney’s office in Minnesota, where Trump’s pick there, Daniel Rosen, quietly dismissed criminal complaints against two Venezuelan men, Alfredo Aljorna and Julio Sosa-Celis, earlier this year.
Rosen’s office had charged both men with felonies based on an ICE agent’s yarn of fighting the two immigrants for several minutes as they attacked him with brooms and shovels and, exhausted and fearing for his life, shot wildly to save himself, hitting Sosa-Celis through the closed door of his home.
But charges were pure stenography, based on an FBI agent’s wholesale swallowing of the tale told by ICE agent Christian Castro and an ostensible “preliminary” review of CCTV video. The video — available to the FBI and federal prosecutors all along — showed that 24 seconds elapsed between when Castro got out of his car and when he squared up and shot through the door of the home, no Battle Royale against murderous immigrants in sight.
While the truth about the incidents in Chicago and Minnesota took a bit to come to light as things played out in court filings, everyone with eyes to see could tell that Trump and Pirro and Burgum were lying about the reflecting pool all along. Nonetheless, Pirro’s motion to dismiss is quite similar, philosophically, to that of Rosen’s dismissal of charges against Aljorna and Sosa-Celis, where he declared that “newly discovered evidence in this matter is materially inconsistent with the allegations in the Complaint Affidavit as well as the preliminary hearing testimony.”
As with Pirro, Rosen was trying mighty hard here to make it sound like his office did everything right, but those dastardly other agencies steered them all wrong.
Et tu, Judge Box o’ Wine?
While we might never know what, exactly, sparked Pirro’s crisis of conscience or drive for self-preservation, of all the people one would expect to get crosswise with Trump, she would probably be pretty far down on the list.
Pirro has been a loyal soldier, willing to bring the most ridiculous charges in support of Trump’s most ridiculous lies. She did a full-fledged trial in a vain attempt to convict Sean Dunn for throwing a sub sandwich at a federal agent on misdemeanor charges after failing to land a felony indictment. She was perfectly suited to dutifully bring charges against Hearn and others based only on a figment of Trump’s rancid imagination, a belief that somehow his precious reflecting pool was disintegrating not because of his slipshod and corrupt no-bid contract but because he was under siege.
That true believer streak is why it isn’t at all clear why Pirro, of all people, thought Trump would be totes fine with her dropping the charges against Hearn and the three other defendants her office had similarly, absurdly charged. The very nature of dropping the charges means disbelieving in Trump.
In the most misguided belief imaginable, Pirro seems to have decided that perhaps Trump somehow did not know what was going on, and that if she could only enlighten him, he’d understand why she dropped the charges. So she brought the literal evidence to him at the White House, evidence showing that no, Hearn and others charged did not cut a 300-foot gash in the pool and seed it with algae.
Did Pirro genuinely believe the scales would fall from Trump’s eyes if she showed him some pictures from the Park Service showing the damage had been there since pretty much the second his contractor finished its substandard work? This is Donald Trump we’re talking about! There is not one single solitary thing Pirro could show him that would cause him to change his mind and acknowledge that his own actions led to the wrecked pool. The man will go to his grave yelling that antifa did it.
Trump is furious, though oddly not yet furious enough to fire Pirro. He declared that Pshe “choked” and “folded like an umbrella,” and called her to the White House for what was presumably a spittle-flecked yellathon, but she still has her job.
For his part, Burgum seems to think the best course of action to keep his cabinet role is just to pretend that the evidence Pirro presented in the motion to dismiss simply doesn’t exist and also that his department did a perfect job giving Pirro everything she needed.
Per Burgum, the “evidence is clear, vandals have repeatedly caused damage to the Reflecting Pool. Some of these acts were even caught on camera. We also provided the US Attorney’s office expert and eyewitness testimony to the damage done by vandals and provided every piece of evidence they asked for in the requested time line detailing each area of damage at the pool.”
While it’s delightful to watch these two fight, the fact that Burgum seems willing to pretend his department does not have physical evidence objectively showing that the reflecting pool was not attacked by Hearn and the forces of antifa is not great, because it ensures that the saga of the pool is not yet over.
Here’s hoping Pirro’s surprising decision to grow a spine stays intact and she declines to charge anyone else, no matter how much Trump demands it.
That’s it for today
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I wonder if the colloquial phrase “you can indict a ham sandwich” will change to “you can indict a 67 year old Olympic canoeist.”
Mark Hamill reposted the Kit Maher image of Pirro wheeling a briefcase and a white box.
He wrote: You misspelled wine box.