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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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.
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Rodrigo Duterte was president of the Philippines from 2016 to 2022. A self-proclaimed tough guy, he encouraged the extra-judicial killings (i.e., murder without trial by government forces) of supposed drug dealers and criminals, claiming that he himself had carried out such killings when he had been mayor of the town of Davao. The victims were alleged drug users, alleged petty criminals, and street children. After leaving the office of the presidency, he was re-elected as mayor of Davao in 2025.

But he may not be able to serve out his term as mayor because a little over a year ago, he was arrested and taken to the International Criminal Court in The Hague to stand trial and is now the first former Asian head of state to stand trial in the ICC.

On March 11, 2025, Duterte touched down at Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport after a flight from Hong Kong to find more than three hundred officers waiting for him. Under “Operation Pursuit,” Filipino police and Interpol executed an International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant tying him to crimes against humanity committed during his self-proclaimed “war on drugs” and quickly put him on a plane to the Netherlands.

The ICC judges have now confirmed that Duterte will stand trial in November 2026. We should be happy that the once untouchable strongman has been in jail for over a year and will soon be held to account for his record in power.
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That Trump is a brazen grifter goes without saying. He has also used the justice department as his own personal law firm, using them to attack his enemies and reward his friends. But he may have outdone himself with his latest attempt to get money from the government to fund his grifts.

What happened was that Trump sued the government for $10 billion, charging that his rights had been violated when a private contractor leaked his tax returns back in 2019 and 2020. The idea of a president suing his own government was ridiculous enough and would likely have been thrown out. But he had appointed his own former personal lawyer Todd Blanche as attorney general and before the case went to trial, the ‘two sides’ (which are actually just one side) announced that a settlement had been reached in which the government would create a slush fund of $1.776 billion (how patriotic!) to compensate those people who had been charged in the January 6th insurrection and then pardoned by Trump. We do not know whether this was the original plan or a fall back position after the outrage that emerged at the thought of such blatant chicanery by Trump to enrich himself. If this was allowed to stand, then there was no end to how much a president could get out of the government to do with as he wished simply by suing and settling.

But this was too much for some judges and they have called for an investigation into what they see as the abuse of the judicial system.
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The Guardian published an excerpt from the posthumous memoir Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, the young woman who started the process that took Andrew down as part of her expose of the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

There is something so disgusting in her revelations about the smooth and practiced way in which Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell broke down the initial natural resistance that Roberts had to becoming a sexual toy, first to service them, and then to do so for his friends, that it makes you want to puke. I am not going to excerpt the salacious parts but just those where she gives her thoughts on why these things happen, starting with how a sociopath like Epstein is able to identify the vulnerabilities of people and knows how to exploit them, be they young girls or the wealthy, powerful, and intellectual people he wanted to surround himself with.
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