Deadline: Legal Blog

US admin August 3, 2026 0 Comments

We didn’t need yet another reminder of the grand jury’s singular importance as a bulwark against government overreach in President Donald Trump’s second term — a term in which the Justice Department has been a combination of vengeful and incompetent.

But we got one when Jeanine Pirro’s office moved to dismiss the indictment her office had just obtained against David Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist.

In filed Friday, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia told the court that, although her office had alleged to the grand jury that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was caused by Hearn, prosecutors later learned it was due to flawed installation by the contractor and the rush to complete the project ahead of the America 250 celebration in the nation’s capital.

The Hearn case is procedurally different from other instances that have highlighted the necessity of an independent body of citizens standing between the government and an indictment. In those other instances, grand jurors in D.C. and elsewhere have refused to approve some of the administration’s most politicized attempts to manipulate the justice system. Those refusals to indict have been so shocking because the evidentiary bar to clear in the grand jury is so low that prosecutors historically have rarely failed to clear it, certainly in so many high-profile cases in such a short period of time.

Unlike in those other cases, Pirro’s prosecutors managed to clear it against Hearn. But they might as well not have, because as they just admitted, they only did so erroneously. Their admission came as Hearn’s lawyers were probing the process that led to his indictment.

The Reflecting Pool case therefore joins the Trump DOJ’s other failures in reaffirming the grand jury’s singular significance in this era. Because even if this DOJ manages to smuggle politicized charges through a grand jury, the administration’s conduct over the past couple of years has given judges plenty of reasons to scrutinize indictments more than ever before. Indeed, grand juries will continue to be at least as crucial if Senate Republicans confirm the president’s attorney general pick, Todd Blanche, who has shown that he is willing to use the awesome power of the government for Trump’s personal ends.

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