Jeanine Pirro faced the cameras on July 2 with characteristic self-assurance to announce the indictment of the 67-year-old ex-Olympian David Hearn for trashing “sacred” government property, President Trump’s highly prized but shoddily renovated Reflecting Pool.
“This is not only a priority for the president, but for myself,” said Ms. Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, disclosing felony vandalism charges against Mr. Hearn for touching the lining of the pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. She added: “We will prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Hearn willfully destroyed property.”
This was not the case.
Ms. Pirro’s office dramatically reversed course on Friday, not only withdrawing the charge against Mr. Hearn but blasting the Interior Department for the rushed and “botched” renovation, along with U.S. Park Police officials who fed bad information that led her to publicly cite “tremendous evidence” against Mr. Hearn. In the process, intentionally or not, she skated perilously close to contradicting Mr. Trump — and he noticed.
Ms. Pirro’s 20-page filing did not refer to, much less rebuke, Mr. Trump for claiming the damage was caused by left-wing vandals rather than his administration’s missteps. But it raised innate doubts about his assertion that criminals had slashed the pool’s lining with a “knife or blade.”
That Ms. Pirro, a former Westchester, N.Y., district attorney and Fox News personality was aiming much of her criticism not at Mr. Trump, but his interior secretary, Doug Burgum, who oversaw the issuance of a no-bid contract to renovate the pool, did not appear to matter much.
On Saturday morning, Mr. Trump dashed off a post on Truth Social that made clear he was unhappy with Ms. Pirro, a friend and ally since the 1980s.
“I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro,” Mr. Trump wrote.
“I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM,” he wrote, adding, “There may have been some contractor difficulty, but the major damage was caused by VANDALS!”
Ms. Pirro’s U-turn was a rare instance in which a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney publicly acknowledged that a prosecution once embraced was fatally compromised, in an administration in which admitting fault is seen as weakness and in which taking actions that contradict the boss is seen as self-destruction.
“Trump is mad at Pirro because she finally admitted what we made clear in our legal filings all along: Trump’s botched renovation was responsible for the damage, not Davey Hearn,” said Norman L. Eisen a member of Mr. Hearn’s defense team and a co-founder of Democracy Defenders Fund, which has represented people targeted by the Trump administration.
“Her claim that she and her office were previously duped by Interior is nonsense,” he added. “Starting immediately after the arraignment, our motions repeatedly proved that the administration was to blame, not Davey.”
Tim Lauer, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office, declined to comment. “The filing speaks for itself,” he wrote in an email.
The about-face also underscored a recurrent pattern that has diminished the Justice Department’s once-sterling standing with federal judges and juries — the rush by Trump- appointed U.S. attorneys across the country to take quick action against those accused by the president of transgressions, even petty ones.
It is now much more common for grand juries around the country, particularly in Washington, to reject indictments brought by the department. In years past, this almost never happened.
Last December, grand jurors in Virginia rejected the department’s effort to indict Letitia James, the New York attorney general, on mortgage-related charges for the second time in a one-week period. Earlier, a jury in the district halted an attempt by Ms. Pirro’s office to prosecute a Justice Department employee who tossed a sandwich at federal officers. Around the same time, she thrice tried and failed to indict a woman who pushed an F.B.I. agent during a protest.
Ms. Pirro’s filing is, in a sense, an effort to replace the case against Mr. Hearn in federal court with a case in the court of public opinion against Mr. Burgum; the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings; and Park Police officials.
In the filing, she said that her staff relied almost exclusively on claims by Interior Department officials that the extensive damage to the lining of the pool was caused by Mr. Hearn and other vandals who were observed tugging at or removing pieces of material from the wall.
That information, coupled with police testimony about Mr. Hearn’s movements, convinced prosecutors to bring the case before the grand jury on July 2. They opted for a felony, which carried a potential 10-year prison sentence, rather than a misdemeanor, because the damage exceeded the legal threshold of $1,000.
At the time, Ms. Pirro wrote, her office “was not in possession of any information from D.O.I. indicating that any damage to the Reflecting Pool was caused by anything other than the actions of the defendant and other vandals who damaged the pool’s lining.”
It all began to unravel, however, after prosecutors followed up by asking for “everything” — government reports, police and witness statements, photographs, body camera footage and, critically, internal assessments of the high-profile renovation project.
By late July, Ms. Pirro’s office obtained 695 megabytes of documents that led Ms. Pirro to conclude the damage observed was “the result of flawed installation by the contractor,” coupled with “the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America250 celebration.”
But Ms. Pirro’s critics, including Mr. Eisen, said her account ignored the fact that problems with the renovation of the algae-choked pool had been widely known and reported in the press and in their own court filings.
Mr. Hearn’s team maintained that he had merely “touched a piece of coating that had already detached, released it when asked to do so by a park employee, and left the pool in no worse condition in which he found it.”
Photos and testimony introduced in the case had indicated that substantial cracks had already appeared, and water started leaking from the pool, before Mr. Hearn’s visit. Mr. Hearn’s lawyers questioned whether that information had been made clear to grand jurors, complaining of “irregularities that reflect a misleading presentation.”
His legal team was “evaluating all legal remedies,” Mr. Eisen said.
Zach Montague contributed reporting.
