U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro faces calls for a watchdog probe into whether her office recalled a grand jury witness to “manufacture” a felony charge against an Olympian later cleared.
Lawyers for three-time Olympian David Hearn, including former Justice Department Inspector General Michael Bromwich, made the request Tuesday in a letter to the inspectors general at the Justice and Interior departments.
Pirro’s office indicted Hearn in July after he touched a loose piece of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool’s new coating. It later moved to drop the case, conceding a botched installation caused the damage, the letter says.
The letter’s section on misconduct at the Justice Department carries Pirro’s name in its heading. It says the only damages witness Pirro’s office put before the grand jury first testified that the pool already had substantial damage and that the same repairs would have been needed anyway.
He also said he could not put a number on any loss Hearn caused, according to the letter. The witness was then excused and recalled 21 minutes later. Only then did he testify that the damage would “definitely be $1,000 or more.”
That amount is the line between a misdemeanor and a felony that carries up to 10 years in prison. The letter asks the Justice Department’s inspector general to determine whether Pirro’s office recalled the witness “to manufacture a damages figure unsupported by the evidence.”
“Ultimately, the government conceded that it had no proof of any damage at all, thus undermining the basis for any criminal charge,” the lawyers wrote.
On July 1, the day before the indictment, Pirro’s office received a National Park Service damage assessment that did not measure any loss tied to Hearn, according to the letter. Pirro and senior supervisors from her office visited the pool that same day.
“[T]he 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,” the letter says.
“The record reflects an indictment obtained through unusual haste and a prosecution shaped from the outset by political pressure and built on an inadequate investigation,” the lawyers wrote.
“[T]he government shot first and asked questions later,” D.C. Superior Court Judge Todd Edelman found in the ruling that ended the case, according to the letter.
In its July 31 motion to drop the case, Pirro’s office told the court that prosecutors first learned of the coating’s widespread failures during a defense expert’s July 17 inspection, according to the letter.
But the damage assessment the office received July 1 documented damage across the pool as early as June 8, and the office gave it to the defense on July 10, the letter says.
“[T]he record clearly shows that [Pirro’s office] charged Mr. Hearn despite a mountain of evidence that the Reflecting Pool was failing from installation defects, and then it misled the Court regarding when it learned of these defects in order to cover up its own misconduct and incompetence,” the letter says.
The first of two requests naming Pirro herself concerns her July 2 press conference announcing the indictment, where the letter says she vouched for government witnesses, weighed in on Hearn’s guilt and called his alleged conduct “anarchy” and “criminal behavior.” The lawyers ask whether those remarks violated professional conduct rules and Justice Department policy.
“This is not only a priority for the president, but for myself,” Pirro said at the press conference, according to a column by former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman in The New Republic.
The second concerns July 17, when the letter says Pirro, surrounded by armed agents, questioned a defense expert who was inspecting the pool. She kept pressing him after he said he could not discuss the matter and after her own staff cautioned her against it.
“A U.S. Attorney who personally interrogates a represented defendant’s testifying expert, surrounded by her own staff and without notice to counsel, is not gathering evidence—she is testing how the defense intends to prove its case,” the lawyers wrote.
Pirro’s decision to drop the case drew fire from President Donald Trump, who accused her of having “choked” and “folded like an umbrella,” the Associated Press reported.
After Trump lashed out, Pirro carried a box of evidence from the case into the White House and presented it to him, sources told CBS News.
Edelman pointed to Trump’s pressure on Oct. 1, when he dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning prosecutors can never bring it again, CBS News reported. Pirro’s office had asked to keep that option open, the letter says.
“Should the Court dismiss this case in a fashion that allows the government to reinitiate prosecution in the future, the Court would be exposing him to the risk that, due to pressure from the President Of the United States apparently motivated at least in part by Mr. Hearn’s political views, he would again be charged with a crime that prosecutors have determined he did not commit,” Edelman wrote.
Pirro’s office did not return an email seeking comment, the Associated Press reported. A Justice Department spokesperson told Reuters that the inspector general’s office operates independently “and makes its own decisions about what to review.”
The post Jeanine Pirro ensnared by grand jury misconduct questions amid Reflecting Pool fallout appeared first on Raw Story.
