In June, David Hearn was riding his bike and stopped near the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. He said he reached into the water to touch a piece of lining that had already come loose. He didn’t give it much thought. A lot of people wouldn’t. Tho it was only a moment, that event on the National Mall set off a chain of events that have now reached the highest levels of American law enforcement and made people question how justice is supposed to work.
Hearn, who used to be an Olympian, was charged with destroying government property was a felony. He was accused of damaging the sealant at the bottom of the pool by federal prosecutors led by Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. President Trump had pushed for this renovation project to happen. There was real weight to the charge. More than $1,000 worth of damage was done to a public monument, which is a felony.
After that, the case broke down. The damage was there before Hearn even showed up, according to evidence given to the prosecutors. A 20-page court document from Pirro’s office said it was hard to say for sure that one man was responsible for the widespread damage, let alone that it was vandalism. The charges were dropped at the end of July. After that, three more people who were being held on misdemeanor charges were quickly released. That’s where it should have stopped. It wasn’t.
Trump said in public that Pirro had “choked” and that he didn’t agree with her choice “100%.” It’s a bit strange for the president to criticize someone he hired for following the evidence, which is exactly what prosecutors are supposed to do. But the bad things said didn’t just stay on social media. It is said that the White House asked the Department of Justice to look into whether Hearn could be charged with new crimes, possibly as a misdemeanor to avoid a grand jury. Sources said it was an exploratory check. There was no choice. The talk did happen, tho.
That talk is what this is really about. Not whether Hearn touched the pool—the prosecutors already said that—but whether Americans should think it is normal for the White House to tell the DOJ to look into a case that was already thrown out. In the past, when it comes to criminal cases, the Justice Department has stayed away from the White House so that it doesn’t look like prosecutions are based on political preferences. At his confirmation hearing, Attorney General Todd Blanche gave a different view. He said that the DOJ was just another part of the executive branch. That might be technically correct. It doesn’t really let you rest easy.
Lawyers for Hearn called the case a “sad chapter” in DOJ history and said it was like harassing an innocent man over and over again. Another lawyer for him, Michael Bromwich, made it clear: the case was thrown out because there was no evidence. It won’t change even if more people work on it for longer.
After dropping the charges, Pirro was seen carrying a box of materials into the White House. These were materials she got from the Interior Department that, according to sources, showed Hearn was not guilty. The picture itself says something. A U.S. attorney brought evidence that cleared her to the president, who made her look bad in public for acting on it.
The case was officially thrown out by a judge in D.C. Superior Court, but the question of whether it could be re-filed was put off. There will be briefings in late summer and early fall. In that sense, the case is still alive.
Watching all of this happen, I get the sense that the specifics of the Reflecting Pool are becoming less important every week. A bigger question is being answered about how far away the Oval Office is from the courtroom.
