President Donald Trump’s determination to blame the botched Reflecting Pool renovation on anyone but himself has fallen apart, with his US Attorney Jeanine Pirro dropping cases earlier this week against the wrongfully accused, including former Olympic canoeist David Hearn.
Now a new report reveals that Trump’s “fury” over Pirro’s dismissals of the cases reveals that his obsession with weaponizing the Justice Department against foes.
“Jeanine Pirro has pushed a slew of flimsy, short-lived, Trump-endorsed prosecutions — but Trump's fury over her failure to prosecute Reflecting Pool vandalism is a sign of his second-term obsession and desire to use [Department of Justice] to fulfill it,” Politico reporter Kyle Cheney posted on X on Tuesday.
In his Politico report, Cheney and fellow Politico journalist Josh Gerstein broke down the fallout of Pirro’s failure to blame others for the Reflecting Pool renovation blunders.
“Jeanine Pirro’s focus on murders and other major crimes in Washington has helped President Donald Trump deliver on his pledge to go after violent offenders in the nation’s capital — work he often touts publicly,” Cheney and Gerstein wrote. “But her moves to advance Trump’s personal and political grievances have flopped — drawing Trump’s public frustration and potentially putting her job at risk.”
They also pointed out that “Pirro’s decision to concede in court that vandals didn’t cause high-profile damage to the Reflecting Pool — and Trump’s fury over that decision — is just the latest in a string of cases in which Pirro, the U.S. attorney for D.C., has given up on a long-shot prosecution demanded by Trump.”
Even though “Pirro enthusiastically supported Trump’s dubious claims that vandals were responsible for widespread damage to a liner in the Reflecting Pool,” she eventually determined the cases were unwinnable because of “extensive evidence of pre-existing damage to the pool’s coating.” Trump responded to her decision in a Monday press conference by saying Pirro “choked” and he was “really disappointed” in the former Fox News host and judge.
“Trump’s response to Pirro’s decision to drop the case — after prosecutors revealed they didn’t have the goods on the man they hit with a felony charge — was palpably more intense than his reaction after other failed prosecutions,” Gerstein and Cheney wrote.
They continued, “Because U.S. attorneys have some autonomy about when to bring cases and how to handle them, it’s difficult to know how much involvement other DOJ officials — such as acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — had in the Reflecting Pool cases or other politically sensitive inquiries Pirro has overseen.”