Greg Sargent argues that simply because the justice department has dropped all the charges against the four people who had been accused of deliberately vandalizing the Lincoln Reflecting Pool does not mean that the problems for Jeanine Pirro, the US attorney for Washington DC, who gleefully announced the indictments before later dropping them, will go away.

When the charges were dropped, they were done ‘without prejudice’ meaning that they could be filed again. Norm Eisen, the lawyer for David Hearn who had been charged with a felony that could have had him imprisoned for ten years, is first seeking to have the charges dropped ‘with prejudice’ to prevent Pirro from carrying out what Trump clearly wants, which is to charge them again. But in addition, he is seeking to have the transcripts of the grand jury proceedings that led to the indictments released, because they will show if the jurors were grossly misled by Pirro, which could result in sanctions against her.

Eisen and Hearn’s other lawyers are not letting this drop. For some time now, they’ve been seeking access to full transcripts of the grand jury proceedings—including instructions that prosecutors gave jurors on charging guidelines—to determine whether prosecutors misled them to secure Hearn’s indictment.

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True, success on that front will be difficult; for many good reasons, defense lawyers are rarely permitted to view grand jury materials. But it’s not unheard of. “Courts are generally very reluctant to grant access to grand jury transcripts,” Daniel R. Alonso, a former prosecutor and law professor at Cornell, told me. But here, Alonso said, the defense has “more than a colorable argument.”

Recall that well before the indictment, Trump was already publicly stating as fact that the project had been vandalized. This was surely understood by Pirro and Burgum as a command to make it true that vandalism caused the renovation’s failure. And that provides more grounds for transparency on grand jury materials, as Alonso noted: “If anything, the president’s involvement strengthens the defense’s position.”
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That’s why it’s critical to seek all manner of censure and redress. In the Hearn affair, this will likely include civil lawsuits against the government, asking the courts to impose professional sanctions on key actors, and seeking their disbarment—possibly up to Pirro herself.

“You can’t just limit this to the lowest person on the totem pole or the highest,” prominent legal commentator Katie Phang told me. She argued that “each and every lawyer who’s had their fingerprints on this illegal indictment” are complicit in “the collective destruction of the rule of law.”
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Subpoena power would help fumigate all this. Were there internal objections to this prosecution based on lack of evidence? Were they overridden? What communications about this went on with the White House? Why did Burgum look away as the prosecution proceeded—and why did he continue to allege vandalism—even as his own agency knew what really caused the damage? Democrats should put Pirro and Burgum under oath and take them apart.

Democrats in Congress are also not letting go.

This week, Representative Jamie Raskin—the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee and potentially its future chair—will formally demand that the Justice and Interior Departments turn over a wealth of documents related to the charging decisions made in this case.

“Judiciary Democrats will investigate who lied, who buried the evidence, and who decided to threaten an American citizen with prison simply to protect Trump’s wounded feelings and continuing corruption,” Raskin said in a statement to me. “Participants in this frame-up will be held to account.”

As I’ve said many times before, the use of the justice department to harass and threaten ordinary people is one of the worst abuses of government power and should be severely punished to discourage future such acts.