Trump foe obliterates DOJ's reflecting pool vandalism charges

Olympian David Hearn will appear in court on Thursday morning alongside one of President Donald Trump's biggest legal foes: Norm Eisen.

One of the co-founders of CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington), Trump has raged about Eisen for years as he loses case after case against the former ethics czar. Trump once referred to Eisen as a “major sleazebag” and “the Lawfare King and Color Revolution Expert” in Truth Social posts. At one point, Trump even blasted CREW, complaining, “Everything I read is Norm Eisen.” According to Trump, “You don’t get much lower than him.”

Eisen responded by saying that it's clear Trump is obsessed with him.

Eisen has taken up a high-profile case in which the administration is accused of trying to make Hearn the "scapegoat" for their own failures around the Reflecting Pool.

This is the "latest scandal of scapegoating and blame shifting and the administration's own failures on the Reflecting Pool," Eisen said in a video chat with former prosecutor Joyce Vance. "They've charged, with a felony, our client with The Washington Litigation Group, my wonderful co-counsel Mary Dorman, Davy Hearn, the Olympic canoeist."

He asked Vance how, as a former prosecutor and former U.S. attorney, she would have handled something like this. She explained that in cases like this, she looks through the lens of someone who not only ran a U.S. attorney's office but also spent a decade prosecuting criminal cases.

In "a properly functioning DOJ," she said, something like this would have been investigated by the National Parks Service before being handed to the Justice Department. In her experience, the NPS typically handles things like smoking cannabis on federal lands, a relatively low-level felony. NPS doesn't "do big criminal cases," she said.

"Your job as a prosecutor is to consider whether that case is significant enough to merit becoming a federal felony," Vance continued. "This case doesn't pass the smell test on that ground, but it also has another major flaw, which is evidence."

Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum appeared on CNN, where he was asked directly about the Reflecting Pool and asserted, "It didn't peel off. It was — it was — there was vandalism. There was box cutters. There have been seven arrests." At no point did police find a box cutter on Hearn, who was cycling down to the mall in his bicycle shorts and jersey.

A video from Emily Miller of the arrest shows Hearn talking about the pool scandal being "funny," and later he relayed that he accidently hit the hose from the giant cleaner.

Hearn has said publicly, “I did not remove, I did not damage, I did not rip, tear, break, destroy or harm any part of the Reflecting Pool."

According to him, he dipped his hand into the pool to feel the coating on the bottom, which was supposed to be "American Flag blue."

Vance explained that, unlike in many other cases, there was no grand jury that U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro went to for an indictment. They merely filed the case in superior court, which has "less rigorous standards." Pirro has failed to indict several people by going to grand juries in D.C.

In her press conference, Pirro alleged an NPS employee witnessed Hearn willfully and "violently" ripping up about two square feet of the pool's newly installed liner using his bare hands. She asserted to reporters questioning her about evidence, “He damaged the pool! He damaged this pool!”

Pirro's charging document also doesn't say anything about "violently" doing anything. It claims Hearn “ripped a piece of the recently installed blue pool sealant” or “pulled up and removed the bottom liner with both hands."

Miller's video shows Hearn took off one of his padded cycling gloves to put his hand in. He pulled his hand out of the pool and put the glove back on in the video.

"The U.S attorney should have stepped in and said, folks we have a lot bigger fish to fry," Vance said. "But even if this case was an important one, it doesn't have the evidence. I mean, Norm, that's my issue with this case. I just don't see how the government proves its case. I suspect that they'll do everything that they can to keep it from going to trial they've made their splash indicting the case now they're going to try to stay as far away from a courtroom as they can."