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.
