Edelman says Trump pressure created risk of re-prosecution
D.C. Superior Court Judge Todd Edelman dismissed the criminal case against former three-time Olympian David Hearn with prejudice on Thursday, prohibiting the federal government from reviving a felony vandalism charge that prosecutors have already concluded was meritless.
In a 26-page ruling, Edelman described the circumstances as “exceptional” and warned that allowing the government to retain the ability to reinitiate prosecution would expose Hearn to the risk of being charged for a crime his own prosecutors have determined he did not commit. “Mr. Hearn faces the unique possibility that the government will revive this case—one that it has already announced to be meritless—based on political pressure brought by the President of the United States upon his subordinate officers,” Edelman wrote, noting that Trump’s pressure is “motivated at least in part by” Hearn’s political views.
U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro indicted Hearn in July for allegedly causing more than $1,000 in property damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Her office abandoned the case one month later, telling the court in an extraordinary filing at the end of July that it had obtained new information showing the problems that plagued the pool following its renovation were caused by a “botched installation, not vandalism.”
Pirro’s July filing caused tension with President Trump, who maintains the blue coating he had installed ahead of the nation’s 250th birthday was damaged by vandals. Trump considered firing Pirro for abandoning the case, telling advisers he felt betrayed by the court filing because it contradicted his version of why the coating started peeling days after the renovation work was completed. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum also publicly criticized Pirro after her office blamed his agency for providing “less than fulsome information” about Trump’s project. Burgum said on social media that he had given Pirro’s office in D.C. “expert and eyewitness testimony to the damage done by vandals.”
Hearn said in court papers that the government had tried to indict him in bad faith and urged the judge to protect him from “prosecutorial harassment” by eliminating any possibility that he could be charged again. His lawyers pointed to the public statements from Burgum and Trump as proof of the risk he faced, urging Edelman at a Sept. 4 hearing to shield their client. “Here the government has acknowledged there is nothing that can revive this case and yet it still wants to hold on to the power to do so,” Hearn’s lawyer, Norm Eisen, told the judge, noting the government would have six years to bring a new charge under the statute of limitations.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Spence told the judge there was no plan currently to recharge Hearn, but he could not promise the office would not investigate further whether he vandalized the reflecting pool. “Ten minutes from now that decision could change,” Spence said. During the same hearing, Edelman pressed Spence on whether Trump’s social-media posts and public comments were intended to pressure Pirro’s office to recharge Hearn.
Hearn, a three-time Olympian white water canoe racer, was arrested in June after he said he reached into the water to touch a piece of the coating that had already detached from the bottom of the reflecting pool. The National Park Service at that time had been working to remove the algae that had covered the pool bottom shortly after the renovation work Trump ordered was finished, with crews spending days vacuuming the pool floor after dumping gallon jugs of hydrogen peroxide into the water to abate the blooms.
Edelman, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, wrote that “the government has no right to retain the ability to compound the errors it has already made, or even to threaten to do so, at Mr. Hearn’s expense.”