Donald Trump Likely To Fire Jeanine Pirro For Having One Foot In Reality

For 14 months, it didn’t seem as though there was a case too ridiculous for Jeanine Pirro to bring. Grand juries no-billed her office dozens of times. D.C. juries have acquitted her defendants at the drop of a sandwich. At one point, her office’s lack of faith in these joke prosecutions got so bad that she had to bring in a dance photographer to run a case. As the embarrassments in service of Trump’s whims mounted, you had to wonder: how low could Pirro’s office sink?

As it turns out, roughly 30 inches.

That’s the depth of the Reflecting Pool in Washington, and that’s the case that even Pirro’s zeal for the frivolous couldn’t overcome. Pirro’s office had charged a former Olympian with a federal crime as a patsy after the administration’s gross incompetence turned the Pool into a green mess, but as the trial drew closer, the lack of any evidence left the former judge staring down another humiliating — and potentially ethically fraught — defeat. She’d painted herself into a corner and, unlike the Reflecting Pool project, it wasn’t peeling up fast enough. Thus, she dismissed the case, admitting what everyone in touch with reality knew all along: the damage to the Pool came from the slapdash renovation effort.

Unfortunately, Pirro’s boss no longer enjoys the warm caress of reality’s touch. So the former TV host is reportedly poised to be fired by… the other former TV host. According to CNN:

The president is “furious” with Pirro, one of the sources said, telling CNN that he fumed about her all weekend. They added that based on his criticisms of her, they find it “highly likely she’s removed from her job.”

A senior administration official also told CNN the president was “blindsided” by the decision, which is a strange complaint to make about a prosecutor declining to prosecute an obviously innocent man, until you remember the president’s brain is a mush of dementia warmed over every morning in the microwave of Fox News propaganda. Absorbing a steady diet of credulous hosts pretending the Reflecting Pool vandalism claims made sense, Pirro’s filing almost certainly marked his first contact with the idea that David Hearn, a 67-year-old former Olympic canoeist, had not “forcefully and violently” dredged up a 2,000-foot national monument.

Back on July 2, when Pirro announced the charges, she was willing to indulge the charade. When NBC’s Ryan Reilly asked her at that time about pre-existing problems with the renovation, she waved him off:

Irrespective of whether or not we think that there is some situation that preceded it, we can state and prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he caused damage and that damage is over $1,000.

On July 31, Pirro and Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Spence told the court the precise opposite. The rush to finish before the America 250 festivities produced “hasty and botched work.” An NPS engineer had flagged contractor overspray on June 1 — 18 days before Hearn allegedly touched anything. And then there is the detail that ends the case on its own:

Finally, a recent visual inspection showed damage throughout the Reflecting Pool, even in the middle of the pool, where a vandal would not likely attempt to peel the lining.

Where a vandal would not likely attempt to peel the lining. Because the vandal would have to swim out to the middle of a monument under National Guard patrol and AI-equipped surveillance towers, submerge, and peel epoxy off the bottom by hand, for reasons. The government’s own filing concedes it is “difficult to attribute the widespread damage” to vandalism, “let alone to establish that fact beyond a reasonable doubt.” That is the same evidentiary standard she was so confident about four weeks earlier.

All of this was obvious the day Pirro brought charges, too. Perhaps the plan was to bully Hearn into pleading guilty to a lesser charge to give the administration a win. If so, it didn’t work.

Instead, Hearn upped the pressure. Hours before the dismissal landed, Michael Bromwich entered an appearance for Hearn. Bromwich is senior counsel at Steptoe and a former Justice Department inspector general, and his arrival meant Hearn was about to start pulling on the grand jury thread. How had the government sold a grand jury on this insane conspiracy theory in light of all these facts? It sure seems as though the government would’ve had to pull a fast one on the grand jurors to get to this point. And when that happens, it does not end well for prosecutors.

Pirro and her office ran like curs once they realized the public might hear what went down in front of the grand jury. Does that necessarily mean they violated their ethical duties? No. But it’s a hell of a coincidence!

Trump was unmoved by the ethical plight of the government’s lawyers. He posted that he disagreed “100%” with Pirro, insisted it was “a pure case of VANDALISM,” and allowed only that “there may have been some contractor difficulty.”

Removing Pirro is the easy part… replacing U.S. Attorneys is where the administration continues to stop on rakes. Pirro only got the job because Ed Martin couldn’t survive the Senate. And the field of confirmable options hasn’t improved. So, yet again, we’ll see the administration make an interim appointment under § 546, which is statutorily limited to 120 days. This will be followed by a very dumb showdown with the district court who is then bound to select a full-time prosecutor to maintain law and order, while Trump instead tries to circumvent the Constitution by making his interim simultaneously their own assistant.

For government lawyers, the choice remains professional ethics or their jobs.