A former federal prosecutor on Monday pumped the brakes on the perception that Jeanine Pirro acted graciously when she ended the prosecution of David Hearn in a surprise move last week.
Reports indicated that President Donald Trump was furious with Pirro after she dropped the prosecution of Hearn, an Olympic canoeist who was arrested and charged with felony vandalism of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Pirro dropped the prosecution after a report from the Department of the Interior found that the damage to the surface of the reflecting pool was likely caused by shoddy work from the contractor, and not Hearn reaching into the pool and ripping the surface, as the administration alleged.
Trump erupted over Pirro’s decision during a press conference in the Oval Office on Monday, saying she “folded like an umbrella.”
Harry Litman, a former federal prosecutor, argued in an essay for The New Republic that Pirro really didn’t have a choice in the “humiliating debacle.”
“Once those documents surfaced, she had two choices,” Litman argued. “She could either dismiss the case on her own terms—spinning the story as diligent prosecutors misled by a careless agency—or turn the material over to Hearn’s lawyers and let them present it to Judge Todd Edelman, a former career public defender who, a week earlier, had already warned the government it was ‘operating at its own peril.’”
Litman added that the move revealed the ploy lurking behind what he described as “the most perfectly Kafkaesque prosecution [he] can remember outside the annals of fiction.”
“Handed the Interior documents, he would have blown his top and dismissed the indictment himself, in open court. So Pirro’s dismissal was not virtue: It was damage control,” he wrote.
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