D.C. Attorney General Jeanine Pirro and her office stand accused of serious “crimes” relating to their handling of the Reflecting Pool case, as laid out in a letter sent by the legal team of the former Olympian they went after.
David Hearn is a former Olympic canoeist who was arrested and charged by Pirro’s office over the summer on allegations that he damaged the Lincoln Memorial. This came shortly after President Donald Trump accused the pool’s poor condition of being the result of vandalism instead of shoddy work done by the contractors he hired to remodel it, leading to the impression that Hearn was being set up as a sacrificial lamb to back up the president’s claims.
The charges against him were ultimately dropped, but now, as explained in a new blog post from national security expert Marcy Wheeler, his attorney, Michael Bromwich, has reached out to the Inspectors General for the Justice and Interior Departments, demanding investigations into why Hearn was charged in the first place.
As Wheeler noted, however, the more intriguing part of the letter was “something else Bromwich did: Lay out the crimes that Jeanine Pirro and her attorneys may have committed.”
“It starts in the first letter, where Bromwich not only lays out Pirro’s highly inappropriate press conference and the lies DOJ told in their motion to dismiss, but also described something I was not aware had occurred: when Hearn’s defense expert showed up to inspect the reflecting pool, Pirro mobbed him and pressured him to provide her with his assessment,” Wheeler wrote.
“Beyond these instances of improper conduct, additional misconduct was committed at the highest levels of the USAO-DC,” Bromwich explained. “While the government’s own motion to dismiss places U.S. Attorney Pirro at the Reflecting Pool on July 17, 2026, the motion does not describe what else occurred there. Accompanied by a group of armed government agents who positioned themselves around defense counsel’s expert, the U.S. Attorney personally approached the expert while he was conducting his inspection and questioned him about his conclusions, the results of his work, and why he was present. Even after the defense’s expert advised the U.S. Attorney that he could not speak to her about the matter—and members of her own staff cautioned her not to ask him such questions—the U.S. Attorney repeatedly pressured the defense expert to provide her with information.”
He continued: “Defense counsel was given no notice that the encounter would take place and was not present for it, and the government has never produced any report, note, or record of the exchange. A U.S. Attorney who personally interrogates a represented defendant’s testifying expert, surrounded by her own staff and without notice to counsel, is not gathering evidence—she is testing how the defense intends to prove its case, and doing so in a setting that essentially held the expert captive. The DOJ OIG should determine who was present at this encounter; what was said by Ms. Pirro, the defense expert and others; whether the encounter was recorded or reported, and whether anyone in the USAO-DC office considered the propriety of it before or after the fact.”
Wheeler also noted that Bromwich claimed, “there was some kind of discussion between the FBI case agent and the National Park Service witness that, Hearn asserts, lied about what happened.” Hearn did not receive any record of such a meeting.
Further parts of the letter also allege “that Pirro herself may have obstructed the case or made false statements,” and “that DOJ personnel conspired to deprive Hearn of his civil rights.”
“Moreover, the DOJ OIG should investigate whether DOJ personnel engaged in a conspiracy to deprive Mr. Hearn of his civil rights,” Bromwich added. “Under 18 U.S.C. § 241, it is a crime for two or more persons to ‘conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person…in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States or because of his having so exercised the same.'”
He continued: “The evidence developed in the litigation warrants investigation into whether multiple prosecutors, and potentially supervisory and political-level officials, participated in conduct that deprived Mr. Hearn of his due process rights, including through abuse of the grand jury process and in connection with his June 19 arrest. The investigation can and should determine whether DOJ personnel had any role in authorizing his June 19 arrest, and it should fully explore the apparent violations of his right to due process under the 5th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution in connection with the actions of DOJ personnel in securing the indictment. It is now undisputed—by everyone except President Trump—that Mr. Hearn should never have been arrested and certainly should not have been indicted.”
Wheeler concluded that, if nothing else, these allegations amount to “a bowtied package” for the potentially Democrat-controlled Congress to dig into in January.