This Might Just Reflect Badly On The Regime
Are you wondering why Jeanine Pirro dropped the criminal case against the former Olympic canoeist David Hearn for allegedly vandalizing the Reflecting Pool? And why she actually admitted that the damage to the pool stemmed from a rushed, botched contractor renovation rather than criminal acts — thus infuriating Donald Trump, for whom she is ordinarily an ardent keister-kisser and to whom she is beholden for having any job at all?
I’ll have the answer for you in a moment. (Spoiler alert: It’s not because she is a dedicated public servant who feels a sacred duty to uphold truth and promote justice at all costs.)
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Even if you’ve never seen Pirro in action — if you’ve just watched Cecily Strong’s portrayal of her as a blowsy, belligerent, dipsomaniacal, brassy-voiced harridan — you understand what Pirro’s public image is. That image is well-earned, never more so than how she behaved when trumpeting her indictment of Hearn a month ago.
Pirro painted the guy as part of a loose cabal of scrofulous, treasonous vandals who are responsible for an epidemic of national monuments “being defaced, roped, torn down, graffitied and damaged by individuals. “ She charged Hearn with “forcefully and violently pulling up and removing the bottom liner with both hands,” an act she said had been seen by several “disinterested witnesses with no motive to lie.” She said Hearn’s behavior had been “characterized by witnesses as belligerent, rude, and disrespectful.” When asked whether she was doing this under pressure from Trump, she snapped: “I charge according to the evidence. This is a case with tremendous evidence,” and predicted Hearn would be convicted “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
The evidence proved to be un-tremendous to the point of nonexistence, and the doubt so immense it caused her to eat a giant wad, as well as risk her job, because the petty and petulant Trump was bound to go ballistic, which he did.
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The question is, why did she eat that wad?
This is, after all, a person who had no compunctions about charging a man with a felony for throwing a sandwich at a federal agent — and was defeated in this crusade by her own grand jury, which rebelled, appalled. In 2025, she was reprimanded by a D.C. District magistrate after her office dropped at least 11 separate felony cases in a single month. All of them were alleged assaults on federal officers resulting from Trump’s “emergency surge” intervention against what he claimed was rampant crime in D.C. Pirro had snapped smartly to attention, and overcharged a whole bunch of people who evidently had done nothing criminal.
But she has never had as spectacular a collapse as this one, and has never done what she did in this case — shift the blame to another office, an office run by another Trump appointee. She blamed the Interior Department for the Hearn indictment collapse, saying they withheld exculpatory information from her office. That made Trump particularly livid.
So, what happened here?
What happened, I think, is that Jeanine Pirro didn’t want to get disbarred and maybe even go to prison.
The magnitude of the screwup here in a high-profile, politically incendiary case was mammoth: Pirro eventually realized that her office knew the person they were prosecuting was innocent — that the damage to the pool they blamed on Hern had been done days before Hearn’s arrival. I think what was particularly galling for her — I am perhaps being cynical — is that her office provably knew it. These warnings were in documentary form, from government files — things they would legally have had to turn over in discovery.
Prosecuting a criminal case with knowledge that the defendant is innocent is a classic case of prosecutorial misconduct. Being judged to have committed prosecutorial misconduct is a very, very bad thing to happen to a lawyer. At best, it merely ends his or her career. If certain other facts come up —say, that they coerced a witness to lie or intentionally buried exculpatory evidence — they can be charged with obstruction of justice, or contempt of court.
But maybe I am wrong. Maybe she’s just a swell person.
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Hey, Rachel writes today in The Post about being a human biohazard. It’s great.
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Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:
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Hey, I just noticed that most Substack hosts beg for money near the top of their column, so the plea gets more eyeballs. I don’t do that. Do you know why? BECAUSE I HAVE RESPECT FOR YOU AND YOUR EYEBALLS.
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