Reflecting Pool is just the latest politically charged prosecution to fall flat

Jeanine Pirro struggles to give Trump the wins he craves the most

She’s delivering on some core priorities — but the Reflecting Pool is just the latest politically charged prosecution to fall flat.

By Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney

Jeanine Pirro’s focus on murders and other major crimes in Washington has helped President Donald Trump deliver on his pledge to go after violent offenders in the nation’s capital — work he often touts publicly. But her moves to advance Trump’s personal and political grievances have flopped — drawing Trump’s public frustration and potentially putting her job at risk.

Pirro’s decision to concede in court that vandals didn’t cause high-profile damage to the Reflecting Pool — and Trump’s fury over that decision — is just the latest in a string of cases in which Pirro, the U.S. attorney for D.C., has given up on a long-shot prosecution demanded by Trump.

Pirro’s prosecutors struck out before a grand jury when seeking an indictment of six sitting Democratic lawmakers over comments they made about the duty of military members to refuse unlawful orders. Her probe targeting alleged wasteful spending by Federal Reserve Board Chair Jerome Powell was stymied by a federal judge — who accused her of carrying out Trump’s personal vendetta — and then abandoned.

Grand juries rejected several politically sensitive cases related to protests in Washington, including anti-ICE demonstrations and the man accused of throwing a sandwich at National Guard troops.

Pirro enthusiastically supported Trump’s dubious claims that vandals were responsible for widespread damage to a liner in the Reflecting Pool, filing a series of criminal cases against alleged perpetrators, only to publicly drop the prosecutions last week and declare them unwinnable due to extensive evidence of pre-existing damage to the pool’s coating.

“I guess she choked … I don’t know what the hell happened,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, describing himself as “really disappointed” in the former judge and Fox News host.

His public criticism has compounded simmering criticism from other doubters on the right.

Trump tapped Pirro for the U.S. attorney post after it became clear that the man who filled that job at the outset of the second Trump administration, Ed Martin, could not win Senate confirmation. Some MAGA voices and Martin allies insist he would have been more successful than Pirro in pursuing the president’s priorities.

“If Ed Martin was the U.S. attorney in D.C., people would be in cuffs,” former Martin aide Neil McCabe said last week on Real America’s Voice, a pro-Trump media outlet.

Jonathan Gross, an attorney who worked with Martin at the Justice Department on what the Trump administration calls weaponization issues, has repeatedly called on Pirro to investigate her office’s handling of Jan. 6-related cases. Gross, who represented Jan. 6 defendants prior to joining the administration, said he’s gotten no response.

“To date, there has been no public statement about these abuses from her office and no investigation into how this occurred or who gave the orders,” Gross said in an email to POLITICO. “This was an assault on our justice system that demands accountability.”

Others say the Reflecting Pool case was simply another political errand Pirro was doing for the administration — one which went south when it collided with the facts.

“It’s pretty clear there was never any real evidence that the damage was caused by vandalism, and the cases would have fallen apart in court,” said Randall Eliason, a former prosecutor in the office Pirro now runs. “Determining whether criminal charges are warranted against a particular defendant is the sole responsibility of the Justice Department, and that decision can’t be blamed on another agency. This was just another example of Trump’s Justice Department trying to please him and back up his fantasies through the misuse of the criminal justice system.”

A spokesperson for Pirro declined to comment. However, her office pointed to statistics they say demonstrate her achievements.

During the Biden administration, prosecutors dropped their cases in about two-thirds of arrests made in Washington, but now only “5-7 percent” are abandoned, according to the office’s data. Since arriving, Pirro has filed 67 percent more cases in Superior Court, where most violent crime cases are brought, and her office has obtained more than 7,000 convictions, the office’s tally shows.

Trump’s acute sensitivity about Pirro’s handling of the Reflecting Pool case appears to stem from its connection to his broader effort to remake Washington in his gilded vision.

Trump’s response to Pirro’s decision to drop the case — after prosecutors revealed they didn’t have the goods on the man they hit with a felony charge — was palpably more intense than his reaction after other failed prosecutions.

Because U.S. attorneys have some autonomy about when to bring cases and how to handle them, it’s difficult to know how much involvement other DOJ officials — such as acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — had in the Reflecting Pool cases or other politically sensitive inquiries Pirro has overseen.