Jeanine Pirro's Reflecting Pool case achieved its nefarious goal
By: Jarvis DeBerry (MS NOW)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Aug. 6, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT By Jarvis DeBerry
We shouldn't know who David Hearn is. The 67-year-old placed ninth in a white water canoe race at the 1996 Olympics — a distant finish in the near-distant past that underscores the point that, in 2026, he should be blissfully anonymous.
But in a move that violated the legitimate expectation that our government will not wrongly scapegoat its people, the Trump administration slimed Hearn's name. In June, the Justice Department made the outrageous claim that Hearn had vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington and charged him with a felony count of destruction of property, which brings a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.
Rather than admit to a botched renovation, Trump's despotic administration charged Hearn, and three others, with crimes.
Hearn was one of several people who reportedly reached into the 104-year-old Reflecting Pool and touched pieces of the recently installed liner they said had peeled off, and rather than admitting to a botched renovation, Trump's despotic administration charged Hearn, and three others, with crimes. After leaving them in this legal peril for more than a month, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro said Friday that her office was dropping the case against Hearn and the others after documents from the Interior Department made clear that they didn't vandalize the pool, but rather that a contractor on the project did poor work.
This is not a "no harm, no foul" situation — because unwarranted attention from the federal government is harm in and of itself. Yes, Pirro throwing out the cases is better than her continuing to pursue them, but dismissals and acquittals will never be as significant as not having been wrongly prosecuted in the first place.
Though the right to be left alone by our government is not explicitly stated in the Constitution, that idea animates the very idea of the Bill of Rights. If the government doesn't have a reasonable suspicion that we've done something wrong, then the government must leave us alone.
Play Trump blasts Pirro over Reflecting Pool: 'She choked' August 3, 2026 / 05:21
That's the theory, at least. In practice, the state has immense power to disrupt our lives and harass us with near impunity, and the prosecutor is one of the people who wields that power.
As Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson told a gathering of U.S. attorneys more than 75 years ago, "The prosecutor has more control over life, liberty, and reputation than any other person in America. His discretion is tremendous." Jackson continued, "While the prosecutor at his best is one of the most beneficent forces in our society, when he acts from malice or other base motives, he is one of the worst."
In charging Hearn and others with crimes, the apparent motives of Pirro's office — and the Trump administration, more broadly — appear worse than "base." They're gross, even despicable: The president needs to feel something other than embarrassment over his inability to refurbish a pool. Let's spare his feelings by blaming some innocent passersby instead.
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He will fire her unless the story goes away in the next week.
Then she should be fine.
Trump hates to lose and will soon cast her as a proverbial straw ... it's his modus operandi.
She was never qualified to begin with
Today they announced "proof" with pictures of long straight gashes just indie the edge of the pool.
Where the impervious igneous rock called granite meets the concrete pool bottom.
Granite suffers zero thermal effect from sunlight or any heat for that matter.
Concrete expands during the summer days and shrinks as it cools at night.
The sealant they used cannot handle that.
It caused the blue material to tear in a perfectly straight line along the seam it was supposed to fill.
Now they are calling it vandalism again.
SMH
Antifa with box cutters and invisibility cloaks. It’s so obvious.