When Cole Allen allegedly wrote that he was “no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” was he referring to President Donald Trump?
Jeanine Pirro did not want to answer that question when she was asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday.
Pirro, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Washington who’s prosecuting Allen, seemed upset that Tapper raised the question. She called it “outrageous” and said, “There’s a lot of other things you could’ve referred to.”
When the anchor pressed the prosecutor on whether she thought Allen meant Trump, she said, “You’re gonna have to ask him that. I don’t really care.”
But Pirro has reason to care. The incendiary language has legal relevance in the case her office brought against Allen. The top charge he faces is for allegedly attempting to assassinate Trump at the White House Correspondents’ dinner in the nation’s capital last month.
As I wrote last week, Allen’s unnamed but unmistakable reference to the president puts federal prosecutors in a strange spot. It’s potent evidence of the defendant’s intent, but it’s intertwined with potent claims about the would-be assassination victim: Trump.
To be sure, at issue in Allen’s case is not whether any of his alleged claims about the president are true, but rather whether they help to prove his intent to kill Trump.
Still, Pirro’s attempt to parry Tapper’s question highlights the delicate task prosecutors might have in harnessing that evidence to prove the defendant’s guilt while trying not to unduly anger the president. Trump keeps a close hold on the Justice Department and has denied any wrongdoing related to deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who died in 2019 while facing child sex trafficking charges and has politically plagued Trump’s second term.
The incendiary description in Allen’s alleged “Apology and Explanation” letter, which the DOJ has quoted in court filings, was on a list of points under “On to why I did any of this.” Similarly, his alleged “Expected rules of engagement” in the letter said, in part, “I would still go through most everyone here to get to the targets if it were absolutely necessary (on the basis that most people *chose* to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist, and traitor, and are thus complicit) but I really hope it doesn’t come to that.” (As for the reference to “targets” plural, Allen’s alleged “Expected rules of engagement” also included “Administration officials.”)
Ahead of a hearing in his case last week, Allen’s lawyers observed that the letter “makes no mention of the president by name.”
Yet, DOJ lawyers in Pirro’s office assumed the defendant was talking about Trump. They wrote, “In his own words, he viewed anyone attending the Dinner as a legitimate target because they ‘chose’ to attend the President’s speech.” Though prosecutors did not quote Allen’s “pedophile, rapist, and traitor” language in making that point, they appeared to cite the defendant’s alleged writing about people who “*chose* to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist, and traitor.” That appears to be the only part of the letter that uses the word “chose.”
Like Pirro, Trump similarly sounded offended last month when a reporter asked him if he thought Allen was talking about him. The president responded, in part, by saying he’s “not a rapist” and “not a pedophile.”
Again, the question in Allen’s case is not whether the president is any of those things. But if the case goes to trial, then prosecutors may find themselves in the unenviable position of having to explain that to a jury, while Pirro may find herself having to explain to Trump why he keeps hearing about it.
It’s understandable that Pirro, a former Fox News host who may have her sights on becoming Trump’s next attorney general, does not want to address that language about the president on television. But she must understand that her prosecutors know it’s relevant in court, because they have raised it themselves.
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