▶ Watch Video: Trump rebukes Jeanine Pirro for dropping Reflecting Pool charges
The top federal prosecutor in the nation’s capital carted a box full of evidence to the White House on Monday, in a bid to prove to President Trump that the damage to the Reflecting Pool was caused by shoddy construction and not by vandals, sources familiar with the matter told CBS News on Tuesday.
U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro, a staunch ally of the president, made the case in a sometimes heated private meeting in the Oval Office Monday, hours after Mr. Trump had publicly rebuked her for dropping criminal charges against Olympic canoeist David Hearn.
She was later photographed leaving the White House carting a large white box and other bags, which sources said contained all of the evidence collected from the Interior Department that exculpated Hearn and several others from criminal vandalism.
A spokesperson for Pirro’s office declined comment.
CBS News
Mr. Trump earlier in the day had accused Pirro of folding “like an umbrella,” after her office on Friday filed a motion dismissing the felony case against Hearn.
In the motion, prosecutors blamed the Interior Department for holding back critical evidence that they claimed they did not see until after they had secured the indictment from the grand jury in D.C.’s Superior Court. They said new information they had received indicated that the damage was caused by a “botched installation” by a contractor, not vandalism, as the president and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum claimed. On Saturday, Burgum said in a post on X, “The evidence is clear, vandals have repeatedly caused damage to the Reflecting Pool.”
The U.S. attorney’s office has also since moved to dismiss criminal charges against three others accused of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool.
Pirro’s office has suffered a number of high-profile setbacks involving cases related to Mr. Trump’s enemies and topics of personal interest to him.
Earlier this year, a grand jury uniformly refused to indict six Democratic lawmakers for posting a video urging military members not to follow orders they believe are illegal. Historically, a grand jury refusing to return an indictment is highly unusual, let alone having a grand jury unanimously refuse to do so.
Then, the chief judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia quashed grand jury subpoenas issued by Pirro’s office to investigate former Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and the Fed itself in connection with a costly renovation and statements he made to Congress about that work.
In doing so, the judge said the subpoenas were merely a pretext to pressure Powell to lower interest rates. Pirro later dropped the investigation, but not before several of her deputies first made an unannounced visit to the Fed’s construction site and tried to gain access to the property before being turned away.