Dirty Water

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, August 04, 2026

 

It’s Mystery Week at Boiling Frogs. Yesterday we considered the curious case of Sens. John Cornyn and Thom Tillis, who had nothing to lose by doing the right thing yet refused to do it.

 

Today we take up the even more curious case of the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, who had lots to lose by doing the right thing—yet chose to do it.

 

Pirro reportedly blindsided the president late Friday afternoon when she withdrew her indictment of David Hearn, the man charged earlier this summer with felony vandalism of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. The pool’s renovation has been a passion project for Donald Trump and therefore a matter of personal prestige, so when chunks of the “repairs” began floating to the surface in June, someone had to be blamed.

 

And it sure wasn’t going to be him or the crony he hired as a contractor.

 

The indictments of Hearn and three others (on misdemeanor charges) solved that problem. The renovation wasn’t botched, you see; it was left-wing saboteurs, as usual, who had connived to make the president look bad.

 

Pirro’s motion on Friday blew up that narrative, admitting that incompetent repairs plausibly explained the presence of debris in the pool according to information provided by the Department of the Interior. That triggered a dayslong presidential crashout replete with an angry Truth Social post, a phone call between Trump and Pirro that allegedly “wasn’t pretty,” and an ominous visit by the U.S. attorney to the Oval Office on Monday afternoon.

 

Shortly before she arrived, the president derided her to a roomful of reporters. “I was disappointed with Jeanine Pirro!” he complained. “Really disappointed with Jeanne Pirro! She folded like an umbrella! And people get away with things, and it’s a disgrace!”

 

“Instead of going after the people that did it, the judge went after her and went after her department, and I guess she choked,” he said at another point. “I don’t know what the hell happened.” She hasn’t been fired as I write this on Tuesday, but sources told CNN yesterday that it’s “highly likely she’s removed from her job.”

 

For once, I agree with Trump: I don’t know what the hell happened here either.

 

Jeanine Pirro isn’t any random toady. Like Pete Hegseth, she was plucked from the purgatory of Fox News infotainment and handed immense power on the assumption that she would do whatever her longtime friend, the president, asked of her. She was a propagandist’s propagandist in her previous job, remember, using her Fox show to platform some of the most defamatory lies told about alleged cheating in the 2020 presidential election. Trump had every reason to believe that the next time he began peddling some self-serving fiction, like sabotage of his beautiful reflecting pool, his new U.S. attorney in D.C. would be the last person to undercut him.

 

But she did undercut him—in a highly visible controversy in which he’s heavily invested, no less. That seemed about as probable as Hegseth refusing a presidential order to commit war crimes, an all but unthinkable development. Yet here we are.

 

What the hell happened?

 

An ethical non-dilemma.

 

The difference between Hegseth and Pirro is easily explained, you might say. He’s a political appointee who answers to Trump, whereas she, as a prosecutor, serves two masters. She works for the president, sure, but she’s also an officer of the court bound by a professional code of conduct.

 

She couldn’t ethically prosecute Hearn unless she believed in good faith that she could convict him. Once evidence of the botched renovation emerged, that belief disappeared and so the indictment had to disappear with it. Simple as that.

 

To which I would respond: Do you hear yourself right now?

 

If Jeanine Pirro were a stickler about personal ethics, she wouldn’t have spent the winter of 2020-21 seeding conspiracy theories to support a coup plot. And if she were a stickler about legal ethics, she wouldn’t have sought to indict six Democratic members of Congress who pissed off Trump and Hegseth by reminding service members—accurately—that they shouldn’t obey illegal orders.

 

The president appointed her because he believed, and had good reason to believe, that her sense of ethics was weaker than her sense of loyalty to him. That’s why her withdrawing the Hearn indictment felt like a firing offense: Doing the right thing when Trump wanted her to do the wrong thing contradicted the entire premise of putting her in the job.

 

“But if she had proceeded with a baseless case, she might have been sanctioned, disciplined, or disbarred,” one might say to that. Would she? Even if she had disclosed the exculpatory information from the Interior Department to Hearn’s lawyers, as she was constitutionally obliged to do, and left the indictment intact?

 

Had she done that, I assume Hearn would have moved quickly to dismiss the charges and the court would have granted his motion, a perfect ending from Pirro’s standpoint. The right outcome would have been reached, but instead of failing Trump’s loyalty test by withdrawing the indictment, she could have told the president she gave it the ol’ college try. It was those damned liberal judges, not her, who had sided with the “vandals.”

 

I’ll defer to those on the Dispatch staff who are better lawyers than I am (which is every lawyer on the Dispatch staff), but my guess is that Pirro wouldn’t have been disciplined simply for proceeding with a pitifully weak case. The embarrassment of having her indictment tossed likely would have been deemed sufficient.

 

But let’s say I’m wrong about that and she did end up being sanctioned professionally for refusing to withdraw an obviously dubious indictment. So what? Why would she care?

 

Pirro doesn’t need to practice law. She’s 75 years old and, until recently, hadn’t worked as a prosecutor since 2005. Her career pivoted long ago from legal work to the lucrative niche of “television personality,” and later to the very lucrative niche of “right-wing television personality” during the Trump era. In an industry like that, suffering some type of “martyrdom” for defending the president’s corrupt prerogatives too vehemently is a golden ticket.

 

The libs disbarred Jeanine Pirro because she wouldn’t back off the “vandals” who defaced Mr. Trump’s reflecting pool would have been a killer hook for her inevitable return to Fox News. It would have made her a hotter, more highly paid commodity on the right-wing vaudeville circuit than she ever was before, and assuredly more than any other manner of exit from the U.S. attorney’s office would have.

 

So why did she choose the ignominy of ethical behavior over the glory of unethical “martyrdom”? I think it’s because she misunderstood how Trump Cabinet members are expected to proceed when reality contradicts a presidential narrative.

 

Choosing reality.

 

Reading about the Pirro saga this morning, I thought of “Sharpiegate.”

 

Remember that? In September 2019, the president tweeted that Hurricane Dorian was inbound and warned several Southern states to prepare for impact, including Alabama. That surprised locals, who had been told that the storm would miss them. The Birmingham office of the National Weather Service was soon flooded with anxious phone calls and online requests for information, so it tweeted out a clarification: Alabama wouldn’t be affected.

 

But Trump wouldn’t relent. Rather than admit error, he continued to claim for days that Dorian would reach the state, culminating in one of the most embarrassing incidents of either of his presidential terms. Addressing reporters in the Oval Office, he waved around a National Weather Service map of the hurricane’s projected path that showed it stopping short of Alabama … with an extra line hand-drawn with black marker that extended the path to that state. (Hence “Sharpiegate.”)

 

When the president says one thing and reality says something else, it’s the duty of all loyal subordinates to defend his version. And that’s what Trump’s subordinates did in Sharpiegate: Before long, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross was reportedly threatening to fire top officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the agency that oversees the National Weather Service, for undermining the boss.

 

Sharpiegate was a low-stakes Three Stooges-tier illustration of the authoritarian mind at work. But all of the same elements present in that episode later conspired to produce the near-coup of the “Stop the Steal” period following the 2020 election. Trump had failed in some way that embarrassed him; unable to cope with the embarrassment, he constructed a storyline in which he hadn’t failed at all and became emotionally invested in it; after convincing himself that his version of events was true, he expected all of his allies to adopt it; any deputy who refused was deemed to have failed a supreme loyalty test and terminated.

 

He failed to win the election and to properly identify Hurricane Dorian’s path. In both cases, he concocted an alternate reality in which no such failure happened. And when authorities inside his own administration contradicted him—then-Attorney General Bill Barr in one instance, federal meteorologists in the other—the betrayal was so wounding that heads had to roll.

 

That pattern is repeating in the matter of the reflecting pool. Trump screwed up the renovations, a special humiliation for a former developer. Rather than give his political enemies the satisfaction of conceding that, he latched onto the possibility that saboteurs had caused the damage and, to all appearances, talked himself into believing it. Ever the loyal ally, Jeanine Pirro backed him to the hilt, filing numerous indictments alleging vandalism.

 

And then, last Friday, to his astonishment, she suddenly turned into Bill Barr.

 

I think Pirro assumed that once the information from the Department of the Interior about a botched renovation emerged, Trump would be forced to accept it and would blame that department for the failure of the vandalism prosecutions. That’s why she went to such lengths to identify Interior as the source of the exculpatory material in her motion to withdraw Hearn’s indictment. Doug Burgum’s agency blew this case, Mr. President, not my office.

 

And I understand her instinct. In a movement like Trump’s, the race to scapegoat others before you’re scapegoated is relentless.

 

But that’s not how the president approaches failure, as I’ve explained. When information emerges that contradicts a narrative that’s important to him—even when it comes from within his own administration—a loyal ally is expected to continue to side with his version of events, not to admit what really happened while blaming someone else in the Cabinet for it. Burgum himself understands this perfectly. If Trump says it’s vandalism, it’s vandalism.

 

Pirro was given a choice between what’s actually true and what her boss wants to believe is true, and she thought she could get away with choosing the former if she could prove that some other Trump official revealed the painful truth here. She chose reality. I’m amazed she still has a job.

 

Truth and consequences.

 

On the spectrum of self-serving Trump fantasies that threaten the American experiment, with Sharpiegate at one pole and “Stop the Steal” at the other, I’d place the reflecting pool fiasco somewhere in the middle.

 

There are some Three Stooges aspects to it. Watching a sycophant as foul as Pirro be un-personed after doing the right thing for once is amusing, a lesson to all Trumpers that the only loyalty test that matters is the next one. And if it was pathetic to see the president get spun up about a minor error in a hurricane announcement seven years ago, it’s doubly pathetic to see him invest so much mental energy in a pool now.

 

Maggie Haberman, who’s covered him intently for years for the New York Times, guesstimated recently that 70 percent of his mind is presently occupied by his various renovations around Washington. It’s a legacy thing, she alleged—a way for him to leave an indelible physical mark on America that his critics won’t (easily) be able to erase once he’s gone. When you can’t subdue Iran or reduce the cost of living, you can at least pretty up the Lincoln Memorial.

 

No wonder, then, that the specter of vandalism at the pool has taken root so deeply in his psyche. If he’s now banking on improvements to the landscape as his path to immortality, the thought of saboteurs breaking off pieces of the pool’s new liner will be mortifying in a way that, say, terrorists free-firing at oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz isn’t.

 

But this episode isn’t all laughs either.

 

Yesterday Pirro’s office quietly dismissed the misdemeanor vandalism charges that were pending against three other people arrested near the reflecting pool—but too late to prevent lasting damage. A lawyer for Justin Carreno, one of the suspects, told CBS News that Carreno lost his job as a government contractor after his arrest and had to move out of his home because he couldn’t make rent after being fired.

 

The Justice Department “literally fabricated a crime,” the lawyer alleged, calling his client’s ordeal “the epitome of the politicization of the criminal justice system.” The good news, I suppose, is that Trump’s new “anti-weaponization” slush fund is alive and well thanks to Cornyn and Tillis, so maybe Carreno can squeeze a few million dollars out of that for his trouble. If I were him, I’d already be scouting around for some less fascist country to relocate to after receiving my check.

 

But the bad news is that, if the president had his way, Carreno would still be caught in the legal snare that’s already ruined his life. And there’s no doubt—zero—that if Pirro and Todd Blanche came to Trump and said, “We believe these people are innocent of vandalism, but we also think we can convict them,” he would have told them to proceed. If others have to suffer for the sake of sparing him from personal embarrassment, he’s fine with that. That’s what January 6 was all about.

 

As it is, in the same way that Sharpiegate presaged “Stop the Steal,” we’re left to wonder which much more horrific national trauma this reflecting-pool debacle will be seen in hindsight to have anticipated. Tick tock.