In the grand scheme of things, with wars going on with Iran, Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its invasion of Lebanon, the mess that Trump has made of the Lincoln Pool is small potatoes. But the public humiliation of Trump that it reveals, when even his loyal cult member Jeanine Pirro had to contradict his claim of vandalism, is worth savoring even as the episode reveals how despicable and dishonest the Trump administration is.

We saw how they made up false charges to prosecute David Hearn which they dropped late Friday evening. But they also arrested and charged three other people for vandalizing the pool and now they have quietly dropped those charges as well.

Within days, Pirro’s office also moved to drop misdemeanor charges against three more people accused of the same phantom vandalism. Justin Carreno, Sophie Dennison-Gibby and Cameron Thiers all faced lesser counts of destroying property worth less than a thousand dollars, and their attorneys told reporters the common thread was simple: The federal government had just spent millions repainting and relining the pool, and when the work failed, the Trump administration needed a scapegoat. The entire theory of the case — that ordinary citizens had descended on a national monument with knives to sabotage it out of political spite — evaporated once anyone with subpoena power actually looked at the evidence.

But what we must never forget is that these people do not care how many innocent people are harmed because of their determination to pursue a false narrative. They do not care if there is no evidence to support the charges. The whole point of the arrests and prosecution is not to find guilt but to use the government and law enforcement to inflict punishment and instill fear.

As people swept up in this kind of prosecutorial overreach have noted, the goal is not really conviction. It is using state power to inflict maximum disruption on a person’s job, housing and relationships, and to send a chilling message to anyone else who might draw the government’s attention. A conviction, when one happens, is treated as a bonus. The process itself is the punishment.

And let us be clear, people who are arrested and charged by the government suffer enormous damage even if the charges are later dropped, because of the stress and the money they have to spend to defend themselves. One of the three has now spoken to the press about how traumatic the whole thing was for her.

Sophie Dennison-Gibby, a veterinarian with more than 20 years of experience caring for animals, considers herself “rather obsessed about picking up litter.” So, when she visited the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in June and noticed what appeared to be trash floating in the water, her first instinct, she said, was to remove it to help local wildlife.

In an interview with The Washington Post on Tuesday, Dennison-Gibby, speaking publicly for the first time, detailed what happened that day. Shortly after plucking what turned out to be peeling liner from the water, an officer approached her, she said.

“Well, I wish you hadn’t done that. Now I’m going to arrest you,” Dennison-Gibby recalled the officer, whom she identified as a U.S. marshal, telling her.

Dennison-Gibby said the officer told her to place her hands behind her back and handcuffed her. A Post reporter who was visiting the Reflecting Pool with her family witnessed the arrest.
…

Dennison-Gibby said Trump’s comments against her and others accused of damaging the Reflecting Pool, including threatening jail time, made her feel “sick.”

“To be called out by the most powerful person in the world, the president of the United States, and called a sick, violent vandal when all I had done was pick up a piece of trash was awful,” Dennison-Gibby said.
…

Dennison-Gibby said she was “publicly humiliated” by the arrest and that it took a toll: on her health, on her business and on her as a parent. She said she feared her 10-year-old daughter would hear about her arrest.

“I wanted to protect her,” Dennison-Gibby said. “I wouldn’t have been able to tell her it was going to be okay.”

Though relieved that the charges were dropped, Dennison-Gibby said the experience has left her disheartened.

“The reality,” she said, “is that this is a symptom of a much bigger problem, and people need to wake up, and they need to do it fast.”

The level of petty and vindictiveness is shown by how Dennison-Gibby, instead of being given a citation for a manifestly trivial misdemeanor (if what she did was an offense at all), had her hands cuffed behind her back and marched off to jail as if she was a dangerous criminal. It would be like handcuffing someone for jaywalking.

Let’s be clear: Pirro’s decision to drop the charges is not due to any newfound respect for justice. It is an act of pure self-preservation.

Pirro’s appointment as U.S. attorney represented the full realization of the MAGA media pipeline, in which performative loyalty on television is treated as the primary qualification for federal law enforcement authority. What she is now discovering is that a courtroom does not run on the same rules as a cable television set. At Fox, Pirro could tell her audience whatever she wanted without personal consequence. Telling a federal judge the same kind of thing carries the threat of disbarment and perjury charges, and no amount of bravado previously reserved for on-air broadcasts could change that math.

Predictably, the moment Pirro chose self-preservation over total subversion of the law, Trump turned on her.

I hope that the falsely accused people are able to take the government to task for its reckless disregard for the rights of people.

Lawyers for Hearn have also called on prosecutors to disclose the legal instructions they gave to grand jurors about the elements of the criminal charge handed up against him.

“The grand jury transcripts disclosed to the defense thus far contain other irregularities that reflect a misleading presentation to the grand jury and a need for review of the entire grand jury record in this matter,” Hearn’s attorneys wrote.

Hearn’s opportunities for legal recourse against the federal government may come only after his attorneys petition the court to dismiss the case “with prejudice”, meaning that it could not be refiled. The justice department dropped the charge “without prejudice”, meaning that it can be refiled.

“We are responding with our own motion to dismiss with prejudice so that he is not longer at risk of being harassed by the government further,” Levin said on Tuesday. “Once that is resolved Mr Hearn will focus on what comes next.

“He’s considering all options.”

In a statement to the Wall Street Journal, Hearn’s attorney Norm Eisen said the team plans to go on the offensive against the government: “All legal remedies are on the table going forward to respond to the miscarriage of justice,” Eisen said.

Of all the agencies of government, the justice department is the one that needs to act with the most care and impartiality because they alone can target innocent individuals for harassment and deprive them of their freedom. The government said that Hearn caused more than $1,000 worth of damage because that was the threshold needed for a felony conviction that could have put him behind bars for ten years.

As much as I would like to see these four people sue the government for massive damages, it is not easy for ordinary people to hold the government to account for reckless and vindictive behavior. They could sue the government for malicious prosecution but those cases are hard to win and will cost them more money to pursue, while the justice department has almost unlimited taxpayer funds to defend itself and can even threaten to take other actions against them.