The Reflecting Pool Case Has A Long Way To Go

This post is exclusive to paid subscribers because it’s our third piece of the week. If your circumstances permit, I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber—your support is what makes in-depth analyses like this possible. And to paid and free subscribers alike, thank you for being part of the Fed Head community.

Having been completely vindicated by the government’s motion to dismiss the bogus case against him, David Hearn might be expected to breathe a sigh of relief and return quietly to the normal life from which Jeanine Pirro and the Department of Justice yanked him.

Instead, Hearn’s lawyers have filed a response to the government’s motion to dismiss the Reflecting Pool prosecution, and it is a strong sign that the case will be fought harder dead than it ever was alive.

Of course they do not oppose the dismissal of the charges. But they do oppose the terms Pirro imposed in her own motion, and especially the dismissal without prejudice, meaning the case against Hearn could return. And they also ask Judge Todd Edelman to pry open everything Pirro was hoping she had smothered.

For Pirro, it means she is between a rock and a hard place. (I used the timely Scylla and Charybdis on Monday and I will try to keep to one Odyssey reference per week.) The rock is the law applied to her own glaring misconduct and the possible record of her prosecutors in the Grand Jury. The hard place is the president, who gave her the raspberry over the dismissal—telling the world she had “choked,” and “folded like an umbrella,” along with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, whom she blamed for the debacle in a high-drama showdown with Trump.

Hearn’s motion asks the court to dismiss the case with prejudice on the ground that it was obtained in bad faith. In the alternative, it asks to unseal the grand jury record, which it avers will support the dismissal with prejudice.

And while the motion itself stops short of requesting sanctions, the behavior it lays out—Pirro’s “unprofessional and unethical’ conduct—is the sort of record a bar complaint feeds on. One has already been filed.

All of which means the dismissal she thought would put the case on ice only turned up the heat. Every strand Pirro loosened has pulled another one tight. There are three separate legal fronts of peril Pirro has now brought on herself.