We shouldn’t know who David Hearn is. The 67-year-old placed ninth in a white water canoe race at the 1996 Olympics — a distant finish in the near-distant past that underscores the point that, in 2026, he should be blissfully anonymous.
But in a move that violated the legitimate expectation that our government will not wrongly scapegoat its people, the Trump administration slimed Hearn’s name. In June, the Justice Department made the outrageous claim that Hearn had vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington and charged him with a felony count of destruction of property, which brings a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.
Rather than admit to a botched renovation, Trump’s despotic administration charged Hearn, and three others, with crimes.
Hearn was one of several people who reportedly reached into the 104-year-old Reflecting Pool and touched pieces of the recently installed liner they said had peeled off, and rather than admitting to a botched renovation, Trump’s despotic administration charged Hearn, and three others, with crimes. After leaving them in this legal peril for more than a month, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro said Friday that her office was dropping the case against Hearn and the others after documents from the Interior Department made clear that they didn’t vandalize the pool, but rather that a contractor on the project did poor work.
This is not a “no harm, no foul” situation — because unwarranted attention from the federal government is harm in and of itself. Yes, Pirro throwing out the cases is better than her continuing to pursue them, but dismissals and acquittals will never be as significant as not having been wrongly prosecuted in the first place.
Though the right to be left alone by our government is not explicitly stated in the Constitution, that idea animates the very idea of the Bill of Rights. If the government doesn’t have a reasonable suspicion that we’ve done something wrong, then the government must leave us alone.
That’s the theory, at least. In practice, the state has immense power to disrupt our lives and harass us with near impunity, and the prosecutor is one of the people who wields that power.
As Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson told a gathering of U.S. attorneys more than 75 years ago, “The prosecutor has more control over life, liberty, and reputation than any other person in America. His discretion is tremendous.” Jackson continued, “While the prosecutor at his best is one of the most beneficent forces in our society, when he acts from malice or other base motives, he is one of the worst.”
In charging Hearn and others with crimes, the apparent motives of Pirro’s office — and the Trump administration, more broadly — appear worse than “base.” They’re gross, even despicable: The president needs to feel something other than embarrassment over his inability to refurbish a pool. Let’s spare his feelings by blaming some innocent passersby instead.
To be called out by the president of the United States and called a sick, violent vandal when all I had done was pick up a piece of trash was awful.
A woman charged with vandalizing the lincoln memorial reflecting pool
Indeed, the charge against Hearn was so outrageous — especially in the context of multiple news reports about the renovation being a shoddy rush job — that there’s little reason to believe Pirro or the DOJ ever had any real hopes of finding Hearn guilty. Their goal, instead, appears to have been finding a way to avoid telling the octogenarian boy-king that his $16 million vanity project was a slimy, green mess.
“To be called out by the most powerful person in the world, the president of the United States, and called a sick, violent vandal when all I had done was pick up a piece of trash was awful,” a woman charged with a misdemeanor related to the reflecting pool told The Washington Post. A naturalized citizen who called the experience “heartbreaking,” she added, “Nothing about this feels good.”
And even now, the petulant president won’t acknowledge that no crimes were committed or that his demand that somebody pay for the mess he made led to Hearn being egregiously mistreated. Trump has said instead that Pirro “choked,” and on Tuesday evening, he told MS NOW’s Jake Traylor that he had not “made a determination” about whether he will let Pirro stay in her job. As is typical of him, rather than admit the truth, he has demanded that the whole world accept his lies.
Rather than admit the truth, he has demanded that the whole world accept his lies.
Pirro demonstrated her fealty to the president — and his lies — when she had people expressing curiosity at the Reflecting Pool’s botched renovation wrongly arrested. But she had to have known from recent experience that the cases were eventually going to be rejected — if not by a judge, then by a jury.
If you have followed this news, then you may have heard some people characterize Pirro’s dismissal of these cases as failures. But because the Reflecting Pool cases never had any real chance at success, how could the dismissal of them be failures? To the contrary, the Trump administration is succeeding at what it intends to do: send the message that it can mess over anybody it chooses to, and for whatever reason it chooses.
In that sense, the dismissal of his case notwithstanding, the fact that we know Hearn’s name is proof that he didn’t win; Trump did.
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