A quick refresher for anyone who has blocked out the summer. Trump\u2019s rushed, multimillion-dollar renovation of the pool started peeling almost immediately, and the administration blamed vandals. A 67-year-old, three-time Olympic canoeist out on a bike ride became the face of the \u201cvandalism.\u201d On July 2, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro got him indicted on a felony carrying up to 10 years. Then, on July 31, she moved to dismiss, conceding the damage came from a \u201cflawed installation.\u201d That earned her a presidential review of \u201cfolded like an umbrella\u201d and weeks of speculation that Trump would fire her for having one foot in reality<\/a>. On October 1, Judge Todd Edelman dismissed the case with prejudice, finding the government \u201cshot first and asked questions later.\u201d<\/p>\n But according to the letter, Pirro deserves a lot less credit for eventually seeing the light than she\u2019d like:<\/p>\n On July 1, 2026\u2014the day before it went to the grand jury\u2014the USAO-DC received the National Park Service\u2019s Damage Assessment\u2026 Even setting aside the mountain of public reporting on the failing liner before Mr. Hearn ever approached the pool, the prosecutors possessed written documentation that Mr. Hearn did not and could not have caused $1,000 of damage to the Reflecting Pool. Nevertheless, they sought and obtained an indictment the very next day.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n So the government had the paperwork saying the guy couldn\u2019t have done it, and went to the grand jury the next morning anyway. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool.<\/p>\n But don\u2019t worry \u2014 it gets worse, fast. Per the letter, the government\u2019s sole damages witness told the grand jury the pool had substantial preexisting damage and that he couldn\u2019t quantify any loss tied to Hearn. He was excused, then recalled 21 minutes later, and this time declared the damage would \u201cdefinitely be $1,000 or more.\u201d Which\u2026 just happens to be the exact line between a misdemeanor and a felony.<\/p>\n The letter also says the government\u2019s claim that it first learned about the liner\u2019s pervasive failures on July 17 is \u201cblatantly false.\u201d Prosecutors had produced the June 30 damage assessment to the defense a week earlier. And then there\u2019s what Pirro herself was doing at the pool on July 17:<\/p>\n A U.S. Attorney who personally interrogates a represented defendant\u2019s testifying expert, in the field, surrounded by her own staff and without notice to counsel, is not gathering evidence\u2014she is testing how the defense intends to prove its case, and doing so in a setting that essentially held the expert captive.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n According to the letter, members of her own staff cautioned her not to ask the expert those questions, but she kept asking. That fits an office whose grand juries and trial juries keep handing it losses<\/a>, and whose boss convened a special grand jury<\/a> right as her job was on the line.<\/p>\n Pirro isn\u2019t the only one in the letter\u2019s crosshairs. Her own dismissal motion blamed Interior for giving her office \u201cless than fulsome information,\u201d and the letter takes that and runs with it. Interior\u2019s own engineer flagged the liner as \u201cvulnerable to peeling\u201d on June 11, eight days before Hearn showed up, while Interior Secretary Doug Burgum was out claiming \u201cpeople are using box cutters to do vandalism on this thing.\u201d Asked for comment by the AP, Interior is still insisting Hearn \u201cadmitted to officers that he was tampering with the Reflecting Pool.\u201d His lawyers\u2019 response, \u201cHe touched the loose liner in the Reflecting Pool. Big Difference.\u201d<\/p>\n The letter is clear-eyed about who will be reading it. It notes the administration has pushed out roughly 20 inspectors general over the past 20 months in favor of \u201cpolitically aligned replacements.\u201d DOJ\u2019s IG, Don Berthiaume, was confirmed 51-47 after declining to call January 6 an attack on the Capitol. Hearn\u2019s lawyers call their request \u201ca further test of the IG system under this Administration,\u201d which is generous of them, considering the administration has spent 20 months rigging that very test.<\/p>\n Earlier:<\/strong> Donald Trump Likely To Fire Jeanine Pirro For Having One Foot In Reality<\/a> Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of\u00a0The Jabot podcast<\/a>, and co-host of\u00a0Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email\u00a0her<\/a>\u00a0with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter\u00a0@Kathryn1<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky\u00a0@Kathryn1<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n The post Lawyers Want A Watchdog To Look At Jeanine Pirro\u2019s Reflecting Pool Case. Good Luck Finding One.<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Last week, a D.C. Superior Court judge made sure the Trump administration can never again prosecute David Hearn for touching a piece of the Reflecting Pool that was already falling off. Now Hearn\u2019s lawyers want to know how the case happened in the first place.<\/p>\n On Tuesday, Hearn\u2019s legal team sent a 21-page letter<\/a> to the inspectors general at the Justice and Interior Departments. The team includes Michael Bromwich (himself a former DOJ inspector general), Steven Levin, and Jason Weinstein of Steptoe; Mary Dohrmann of the Washington Litigation Group; and Norm Eisen and Joshua Kolb of Democracy Defenders Fund. They\u2019re asking for coordinated investigations into Hearn\u2019s arrest, his indictment, and everything that came after.<\/p>\n A quick refresher for anyone who has blocked out the summer. Trump\u2019s rushed, multimillion-dollar renovation of the pool started peeling almost immediately, and the administration blamed vandals. A 67-year-old, three-time Olympic canoeist out on a bike ride became the face of the \u201cvandalism.\u201d On July 2, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro got him indicted on a felony carrying up to 10 years. Then, on July 31, she moved to dismiss, conceding the damage came from a \u201cflawed installation.\u201d That earned her a presidential review of \u201cfolded like an umbrella\u201d and weeks of speculation that Trump would fire her for having one foot in reality<\/a>. On October 1, Judge Todd Edelman dismissed the case with prejudice, finding the government \u201cshot first and asked questions later.\u201d<\/p>\n But according to the letter, Pirro deserves a lot less credit for eventually seeing the light than she\u2019d like:<\/p>\n On July 1, 2026\u2014the day before it went to the grand jury\u2014the USAO-DC received the National Park Service\u2019s Damage Assessment\u2026 Even setting aside the mountain of public reporting on the failing liner before Mr. Hearn ever approached the pool, the prosecutors possessed written documentation that Mr. Hearn did not and could not have caused $1,000 of damage to the Reflecting Pool. Nevertheless, they sought and obtained an indictment the very next day.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n So the government had the paperwork saying the guy couldn\u2019t have done it, and went to the grand jury the next morning anyway. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool.<\/p>\n But don\u2019t worry \u2014 it gets worse, fast. Per the letter, the government\u2019s sole damages witness told the grand jury the pool had substantial preexisting damage and that he couldn\u2019t quantify any loss tied to Hearn. He was excused, then recalled 21 minutes later, and this time declared the damage would \u201cdefinitely be $1,000 or more.\u201d Which\u2026 just happens to be the exact line between a misdemeanor and a felony.<\/p>\n The letter also says the government\u2019s claim that it first learned about the liner\u2019s pervasive failures on July 17 is \u201cblatantly false.\u201d Prosecutors had produced the June 30 damage assessment to the defense a week earlier. And then there\u2019s what Pirro herself was doing at the pool on July 17:<\/p>\n A U.S. Attorney who personally interrogates a represented defendant\u2019s testifying expert, in the field, surrounded by her own staff and without notice to counsel, is not gathering evidence\u2014she is testing how the defense intends to prove its case, and doing so in a setting that essentially held the expert captive.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n According to the letter, members of her own staff cautioned her not to ask the expert those questions, but she kept asking. That fits an office whose grand juries and trial juries keep handing it losses<\/a>, and whose boss convened a special grand jury<\/a> right as her job was on the line.<\/p>\n Pirro isn\u2019t the only one in the letter\u2019s crosshairs. Her own dismissal motion blamed Interior for giving her office \u201cless than fulsome information,\u201d and the letter takes that and runs with it. Interior\u2019s own engineer flagged the liner as \u201cvulnerable to peeling\u201d on June 11, eight days before Hearn showed up, while Interior Secretary Doug Burgum was out claiming \u201cpeople are using box cutters to do vandalism on this thing.\u201d Asked for comment by the AP, Interior is still insisting Hearn \u201cadmitted to officers that he was tampering with the Reflecting Pool.\u201d His lawyers\u2019 response, \u201cHe touched the loose liner in the Reflecting Pool. Big Difference.\u201d<\/p>\n The letter is clear-eyed about who will be reading it. It notes the administration has pushed out roughly 20 inspectors general over the past 20 months in favor of \u201cpolitically aligned replacements.\u201d DOJ\u2019s IG, Don Berthiaume, was confirmed 51-47 after declining to call January 6 an attack on the Capitol. Hearn\u2019s lawyers call their request \u201ca further test of the IG system under this Administration,\u201d which is generous of them, considering the administration has spent 20 months rigging that very test.<\/p>\n Earlier:<\/strong> Donald Trump Likely To Fire Jeanine Pirro For Having One Foot In Reality<\/a> Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of\u00a0The Jabot podcast<\/a>, and co-host of\u00a0Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email\u00a0her<\/a>\u00a0with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter\u00a0@Kathryn1<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky\u00a0@Kathryn1<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n The post Lawyers Want A Watchdog To Look At Jeanine Pirro\u2019s Reflecting Pool Case. Good Luck Finding One.<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last week, a D.C. Superior Court judge made sure the Trump administration can never again prosecute David Hearn for touching a piece of the Reflecting Pool that was already falling off. Now Hearn\u2019s lawyers want to know how the case happened in the first place. On Tuesday, Hearn\u2019s legal team sent a 21-page letter to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":164506,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-164505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-above_the_law"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164505"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164505\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/164506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
\n
Judge Demands Answers From DOJ For Refusing To Dismiss Reflecting Pool Case With Prejudice<\/a>
How Much Misconduct Is Jeanine Pirro Willing To Do To Save Her Job?<\/a>
Litigants Ask To Check Reflecting Pool For \u2018Sabotage\u2019<\/a>
Jeanine Pirro Is The Biggest Loser<\/a><\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/abovethelaw.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2021\/06\/IMG_5243-1-scaled-e1623338814705-620x568.jpg\" "\\"\\"")
<\/p>\n\n
\n
Judge Demands Answers From DOJ For Refusing To Dismiss Reflecting Pool Case With Prejudice<\/a>
How Much Misconduct Is Jeanine Pirro Willing To Do To Save Her Job?<\/a>
Litigants Ask To Check Reflecting Pool For \u2018Sabotage\u2019<\/a>
Jeanine Pirro Is The Biggest Loser<\/a><\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n