A CNN legal analyst and former federal prosecutor rejected Jeanine Pirro’s attempts to blame career prosecutors in her own office for a legal filing that infuriated Donald Trump.
The 80-year-old president was livid after his longtime ally, a former Fox News host who now leads the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, dismissed baseless charges against former Olympian David Hearn accusing him of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
The filing acknowledged that damage to the pool’s new “American-flag blue” sealant was caused by shoddy construction work and blamed the Department of the Interior for failing to “fully and accurately provide information” to federal prosecutors.
But during a heated phone call with the president on Saturday, Pirro tried to distance herself from the decision by claiming career officials in her office were responsible for the filing, sources told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.
The network’s resident legal analyst, Elie Honig, didn’t believe that excuse for “one second,” he told Collins during Monday’s episode of her show The Source.
“There is no way on this earth, having been one of those career officials, that when your U.S. attorney calls a press conference like that, that’s covered on national news, you would then go and dismiss the case without looping in the U.S. attorney,” he said.
“That’s a fireable offense, so I do not buy that that was done without her knowledge for one second,” he added.
Reporting from The Washington Post appeared to confirm his observations, with sources telling the newspaper that Pirro had reviewed and approved the motion after speaking with Michael Spence, chief of the Superior Court Division, who signed it.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the DOJ for comment.
The president spent months hyping his renovations of the famed monument, only for the $16 million “repairs” to result in peeling blue sealant and a record-breaking algal bloom that turned the water slime-green.
Instead of blaming the companies that received no-bid contracts to complete the work, Trump claimed the damage was the work of vandals and ordered a law-enforcement blitz at the site.
Pirro announced during a July 2 press conference that she was charging Hearn, a former Olympic canoe racer, with a felony count of property destruction that carried a sentence of up to 10 years in prison if convicted.
She claimed he had used both hands to “forcefully and violently” pull up the pool’s new sealant in a “deliberate act,” and became belligerent toward an employee who asked him to stop.
“This is a case with tremendous evidence,” she said, as reported by PBS.
Hearn, however, said he was arrested after he stopped by the Reflecting Pool during a bike ride and reached down to touch a piece of detached lining “to satisfy my curiosity as a citizen.”
The case fell apart after partial transcripts of the grand jury proceedings that led to Hearn’s indictment revealed that the government’s own witness testified the property was already damaged before Hearn touched it, and would have needed thousands of dollars’ worth of repairs regardless of Hearn’s actions.
Within days of Hearn’s lawyers asking for the full transcripts and legal instructions provided to the grand jurors, Pirro’s office moved to dismiss the charges against him.
Trump spent the weekend fuming over the motion and considered firing Pirro over it, according to CNN.
On Saturday, he ripped into her on Truth Social, writing, “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool. I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM.”
He also told reporters in the Oval Office that he was “really disappointed” in Pirro, whom he claimed “folded like an umbrella” and “choked” under pressure.
The two have discussed the matter on the phone multiple times and met at the White House on Monday, but so far, Pirro hasn’t been fired or resigned.
