Dropped Cases Against Alleged Reflecting Pool Vandals Followed a Rush to Judgment

At a press conference on July 2, Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said she had “tremendous evidence” proving that David Hearn had deliberately caused more than $1,000 in damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, making him guilty of a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison. That was not true, Pirro admitted last Friday, when she withdrew the charge against Hearn, a 67-year-old former competitive canoeist.

Pirro’s embarrassing reversal, which enraged President Donald Trump, could be seen as evidence of her courage in contradicting her boss’s claim that damage to the reflecting pool’s newly installed liner was caused by vandals, as opposed to the “rushed and botched installation” she described in her motion to dismiss the indictment against Hearn. But it also raises questions about Pirro’s decision to charge Hearn given what she knew at the time, which suggests she was keen to make an example of him even though there was already reason to doubt his guilt.

By the time Pirro obtained the indictment, news outlets had reported that parts of the reflecting pool’s blue liner, which was installed under an unusual no-bid contract by a company that had never done work for the federal government before, were coming loose. The earliest reports appeared on June 18, the day before Hearn was arrested and two weeks before his indictment.

By Hearn’s account, he paused during a bike ride and reached into the pool to touch a floating piece of liner because he was curious what it felt like. “I didn’t vandalize anything,” he told The Washington Post. “I didn’t destroy or break or peel anything.”

Interior Department employees told a different story. The initial U.S. Park Police report, which Pirro quotes in her motion, said Hearn saw “a big piece of material flapping in the water and began to grab at it,” citing “a witness” who said Hearn “began to rip and pull at a chunk of liner material.”

Two National Park Service (NPS) employees said Hearn was yanking at the flap and “further damaging this compromised area.” In other words, everyone conceded that the liner was already coming loose, and the only dispute concerned whether and to what extent Hearn had “maliciously” compounded the damage.

At her press conference the day of the indictment, Pirro embraced the Interior Department’s account, saying NPS employees “observed Hearn actually forcefully and violently pulling up and removing the bottom liner with both hands.” Now she says she was too quick to believe that story, blaming the Interior Department for concealing relevant information about recognized problems with the liner installation.

According to the information provided by the Interior Department, Pirro says, “the damage was entirely caused by vandals.” But judging from internal documents that her office subsequently obtained, the damage “was the result of flawed installation by the contractor.”

While those documents may have illuminated the extent of the problem, it should not have been news to Pirro, since it had been discussed in press reports (including stories based on Interior Department records) weeks before she stood in front of a podium and accused Hearn of a felony. But Pirro disregarded that alternative explanation, apparently because she was eager to punish “unchecked vandalism” of “our sacred monuments,” which she said was “a priority not only for the president, but for myself as well.”

That priority overrode the question of whether Hearn was provably guilty of vandalism, which should have been the only consideration in the decision to charge him. “The government’s approach was ready, fire, aim,” Hearn’s lawyers said. Something similar seems to have happened with three other cases against alleged reflecting-pool vandals, which Pirro’s office also dropped.

“I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro,” Trump said on Saturday. “I guess she choked,” he added on Monday, saying he was “really disappointed” in her because “she folded like an umbrella.” For the president, the question of individual guilt or innocence remains irrelevant.

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