The New York Times reports:

Jeanine Pirro faced the cameras on July 2 with characteristic self-assurance to announce the indictment of the 67-year-old ex-Olympian David Hearn for trashing “sacred” government property, President Trump’s highly prized but shoddily renovated Reflecting Pool.

“This is not only a priority for the president, but for myself,” said Ms. Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, disclosing felony vandalism charges against Mr. Hearn for touching the lining of the pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. She added: “We will prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Hearn willfully destroyed property.”

This was not the case.

Ms. Pirro’s office dramatically reversed course on Friday, not only withdrawing the charge against Mr. Hearn but blasting the Interior Department for the rushed and “botched” renovation, along with U.S. Park Police officials who fed bad information that led her to publicly cite “tremendous evidence” against Mr. Hearn. In the process, intentionally or not, she skated perilously close to contradicting Mr. Trump — and he noticed.

Ms. Pirro’s 20-page filing did not refer to, much less rebuke, Mr. Trump for claiming the damage was caused by left-wing vandals rather than his administration’s missteps. But it raised innate doubts about his assertion that criminals had slashed the pool’s lining with a “knife or blade.”

That Ms. Pirro, a former Westchester, N.Y., district attorney and Fox News personality was aiming much of her criticism not at Mr. Trump, but his interior secretary, Doug Burgum, who oversaw the issuance of a no-bid contract to renovate the pool, did not appear to matter much.

On Saturday morning, Mr. Trump dashed off a post on Truth Social that made clear he was unhappy with Ms. Pirro, a friend and ally since the 1980s.

“I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro,” Mr. Trump wrote.

“I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM,” he wrote, adding, “There may have been some contractor difficulty, but the major damage was caused by VANDALS!”

In his own social media post on Saturday, Mr. Burgum said that his department had “provided the U.S. Attorney’s office expert and eyewitness testimony to the damage done by vandals and provided every piece of evidence they asked for in the requested time line detailing each area of damage at the pool.”

Ms. Pirro’s U-turn was a rare instance in which a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney publicly acknowledged that a prosecution once embraced was fatally compromised, in an administration in which admitting fault is seen as weakness and in which taking actions that contradict the boss is seen as self-destruction.

“Trump is mad at Pirro because she finally admitted what we made clear in our legal filings all along: Trump’s botched renovation was responsible for the damage, not Davey Hearn,” said Norman L. Eisen a member of Mr. Hearn’s defense team and a co-founder of Democracy Defenders Fund, which has represented people targeted by the Trump administration. [Continue reading…]