GUILTY AS CHARGED

In Trump’s Courtroom, Judge Jeanine Is Now on Trial

In an administration plagued by incompetence, the Reflecting Pool story may stand alone for its combination of stupidity, corruption, perfidy, and a shocking level of pettiness.

Opinion

The closest I’ve ever come to being a lawyer was playing the bowling alley manager for a bowling-alley-owning lawyer on the TV show Ed, so I may not be fully qualified to discuss the imbroglio now surrounding actual United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro.

But here we are anyway. You probably already know that Pirro’s vandalism case against Olympic canoeist David Hearn has dissolved as surely as the paint coating the bottom of the Capitol’s Reflecting Pool. Pirro petitioned the court to drop Hearn’s case, having apparently been assured the issue was the sh-tty renovation job, prompting a furious response from her boss, who is continuing to insist that vandals—probably ANTIFA or, possibly, members of the Sharks from West Side Story—were responsible for the pool’s bungled rehab job.

“She choked,” Trump stated in the Oval Office Monday, when asked about Pirro.

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Later, while boarding Air Force One (the old one), he was asked if Pirro’s job is safe. “I haven’t made a determination,” he said.

He also encouraged people to look at a Department of Interior videotape provided to Fox News host (and former Pirro colleague) Jesse Watters which purports to show these terrible, terrible vandals bullying the Reflecting Pool and then stealing its lunch money.

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I watched the videotape. What it actually shows is two people sticking their hands in the water for a few seconds in broad daylight, in public view. They do not appear to have any cutting implements in their hands, nor do they dip deep enough or remain inside long enough to do anything destructive. (Insert “that’s what she said” joke here.)

Like so much with Trump, the “evidence” shows the exact opposite of what he claims.

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So what’s going on? How is it that Pirro found herself called to the Oval Office carpet getting chewed out by the man she’s spent the last decade nut-glazing? It basically boils down to the former prosecutor breaking Patrick Murray’s observation about attorneys: “A lawyer will do anything to win a case; sometimes he will even tell the truth.”

(Yes, it’s nice–albeit surprising–to discover that after years pickling in the brine of Fox News, some semblance of Pirro’s conscience remains intact.)

Pirro’s mistake was telling the truth. And the truth, as reported by the New York Times, is that Trump’s Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum, crafted a (false?) narrative to fit Trump’s theory of the case. “Schlepping a white box containing evidence plus a black box with documents on wheels” into the White House, Pirro told the president that Burgum had “promoted a self-serving cover story to conceal his own missteps.”

To quote the greatest legal mind of the 19^th century, Clarence Darrow: “duh.”

But Trump wasn’t having it. The two sparred for over an hour before Pirro departed, her job hanging by a thread.

For his part, Burgum continued to insist that the Reflecting Pool is Ground Zero for a Marxist plot, possibly instigated by the state of Minnesota in concert with transgender Chinese Communists and Rosie O’Donnell, to make the President of the United States look like a dummy.

The plot appears to be working.

Meanwhile, this is the most exciting moment in American Olympic canoeing history since Nevin Harrison eked out a spring victory against Canadian Laurence Vincent Lapointe in the inaugural women’s canoe 200m final. I bet we all remember where we were when that happened!

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Jokes aside, this whole stupid saga reveals, again, the profound and disturbing truth that Trump does not live in reality. What we think of as his multitudinous lies may, in fact, be something far stranger: they may be true to him.

He may actually believe he won the 2020 election. He may actually believe that asylum seekers come from mental asylums. He may actually believe that windmills cause cancer. In other words, he may actually be clinically insane.

But this is what happens when a malignant narcissist is challenged. He would rather blow up an Olympian’s life – Hearn was facing 10 years in prison if convicted - than admit an error.

Surely Pirro knew all this. She’s watched Trump for years. Yet she still walked into the Oval Office believing evidence might succeed where loyalty had failed. That’s a remarkable misreading of a man whose defining characteristic is that facts never outrank fealty. Trump has never been interested in any truth that doesn’t earn him a commission.

Will Pirro still have her job when this column publishes? Hard to say. Perhaps he’ll bump Pirro to a new role, the way he shuffled Kristi Noem from heading up the Department of Homeland Security to shuffling papers at the newly-invented and wholly-fake “Shield of the Americas.” Perhaps “Judge Box of Wine” can become the new leader of ICE—well, if she can beat out Laura Loomer. It makes a certain kind of sense considering how a single cube of ice can transform simple rosé into delicious frosé. Yum yum yum.

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Michael Ian Black

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