Transcript: Trump Seethes at Reflecting Pool Mess as Damning Leaks Hit

As Trump’s effort to jail people over his failed renovation starts looking even worse, a former federal prosecutor explains why this corruption of DOJ is so dangerous—and how to fight back.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 5 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

As you’ve heard by now, Donald Trump’s effort to prosecute people for vandalizing his Reflecting Pool renovation crashed and burned when the facts showed the charges were bogus. Then it got weirder as Trump raged for days at prosecutors for refusing to bring the prosecution he had ordered up. Now, new leaks to reporters show Trump’s conduct here to be even more corrupt than we thought. How much worse might this get, and can a Democratic Congress rein it in?

We’re asking former federal prosecutor Barb McQuade to walk us through just how irregular all this really is and what can be done about it. Barb, good to have you back on.

Barb McQuade: Thanks, Greg. Good to be with you.

Sargent: So a former Olympian, David Hearn, and several others had been facing vandalism charges for supposedly ripping up the bottom of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, because Trump was badly embarrassed by the failure of his renovation of it. But then Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., dropped the case, admitting the problem was shoddy construction. Barb, can you just sum up how we got to this point?

McQuade: Well, it’s pretty shocking that these charges were ever filed in the first place. I looked at the charging document when it first came down, to try to understand what facts they were alleging. And it was the most bare-bones of an indictment you’ve ever seen. It was one sentence. And there are two parts of it that struck me as very difficult to prove.

One is that you have to prove that the person acted knowingly and willfully. That is, that they intended to do damage, that they acted maliciously. And the one that I always thought they would have problems proving is that they caused damage exceeding $1,000 in value.

Now remember the timing of this. This all happened long after the public became aware of the failures to the Reflecting Pool. I mean, the reason he said he went over there to check it out after a long bike ride is he wanted to see what the fuss was all about. And he saw all kinds of floating pieces of paint. And so now, whether he picked one up or he grabbed it or he pulled on it, you were never going to establish that he caused a thousand dollars’ worth of damage by what he had done. And so it struck me as really doomed from the start.

Nonetheless, Jeanine Pirro indicted this case, in my opinion, because it advanced Donald Trump’s false narrative that the reason his renovations to the Reflecting Pool failed were not because of his own mismanagement, but because of vandals. And so Mr. Hearn provided a convenient scapegoat, even though it meant perhaps ruining his life.

Sargent: So just to give you a sense of how angry Trump got when Pirro dropped the charges, listen to him raging over it to reporters. Here he’s talking about Pirro and then goes on to abuse a reporter who asks him a question. Listen.

Donald Trump (voiceover): I think she choked because the judge was really vicious. Instead of going after the people that did it, the judge went after her and went after her department. And I guess she choked. I don’t know what the hell happened.

Reporter (voiceover): Are you reconsidering her role here?

Trump (voiceover): I don’t know what you—you don’t—you’re fake news. Don’t ever talk again. You’re fake news. One of the worst of the business.

Sargent: Barb, note how Trump says there, “they did it.” He really doesn’t understand that he doesn’t get to make that true by decree. I mean, there’s like a long history of presidents trying to corrupt DOJ in various ways, but here it’s just stated baldly that this one man gets to decide by fiat who’s guilty and who’s innocent, and the system’s supposed to just bend itself around that. Can you talk about this?

McQuade: Yes, it does seem that President Trump wants to call the shots, as we’ve seen with cases being filed against Jim Comey for seashells and Letitia James for mortgage fraud—cases that have fallen apart. He really seems to think that he can just demand that lawyers file indictments against his enemies........

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