Leaker reveals the true danger of Trump’s Reflecting Pool witch hunt

On Thursday, an insider from President Donald Trump’s first administration laid bare the true level of danger posed by the Reflecting Pool renovation debacle. While it became something of a joke, according to Miles Taylor – who served as Homeland Security’s Deputy Chief of Staff, leaked White House secrets, and himself became targeted for revenge – the affair proves how far Trump and his collaborators in the Department of Justice are willing to go to use prosecution as a means of “retaliation.”

“As you may remember,” writes Taylor, “former Olympic canoeist David Hearn was detained by National Guardsmen at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, indicted on a felony carrying ten years in prison, and publicly branded a vandal by the Secretary of the Interior. The pool liner he touched was already peeling (as Interior’s own engineers had flagged eight days earlier), a consequence of Trump’s rushed and botched makeover of the National Mall ahead of America’s 250th celebrations. Prosecutors already knew about the renovation errors. Yet they indicted Hearn anyway.”

Ultimately, the case blew up in humiliating fashion when U.S. Attorney and longtime Trump ally Jeanine Pirro was forced to admit the whole thing was baseless. Trump raged that she “choked” and pushed for the DOJ to keep up the prosecution, but finally, the charade ended last week when a federal judge dismissed the charges “with prejudice,” meaning the government could never try again. Now, Hearn’s lawyers have asked watchdog groups at the DOJ and Interior to investigate how the case came about.

Trump’s efforts to weaponize the DOJ have forced Taylor to do the same, who writes, “After Trump signed an executive order falsely accusing me of stealing classified information and committing treason, he stripped my security clearance and ordered the Department of Homeland Security and the Attorney General to investigate me. The order identified no wrongdoing. It didn’t need to. The offense was that I had publicly revealed the depths of his incompetence and corruption. That June, my lawyer Abbe Lowell filed a formal complaint with the inspectors general of DOJ and DHS. We asked a simple question: are your departments being used to punish dissent, and are your employees aware they’ve been directed to violate the constitutional rights of an American citizen in the process? The answer was already visible. People I went to high school with were getting calls from federal agents. Multiple U.S. government employees whom I was friends with were fired for mere association. I was told they were already digging through my emails. Sixteen months later, I’m still waiting for a serious answer.”

As Taylor notes, he and Hearn are far from the only targets of Trump’s prosecutorial revenge. In cases regarding former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Leticia James, and more, career lawyers working for the government “were pushed out for refusing to sign onto bogus cases, and the ones who stayed came under grave pressure to bring charges against the president’s enemies, whether or not they had evidence.” Those who collaborated with the administration’s schemes did so knowing they were using bad evidence, asserts Taylor, writing, “The officials who executed the order against me knew that a president isn’t allowed to declare someone guilty of a crime and then have them investigated in order to find some kind of evidence. These were all lawyers who swore an oath to the Constitution and were bound by professional rules that forbid exactly this. They made a choice, and they made it knowing the law was on the other side.”

With all this in mind, Taylor argues that the country should look to the slogan Trump used in 2019 during the probe into his possible collusion with Russia: “Investigate the investigators.” As Taylor concludes, “The process of accountability starts with the inspectors general, even the ones Trump installed after firing seventeen of their predecessors in his first week. These letters create a real-time record of misconduct — opening lines in eventual investigations into how Trump’s prosecutors were directed to bring fake charges against people as a means of retaliation. But it can’t end there. Every prosecutor who signed an indictment they knew they couldn’t prove should face disbarment or prosecution. Every official who retaliated against a citizen for protected speech should end up in a courtroom. And the next Justice Department should reopen every one of these cases… and turn the focus on the investigators themselves."