President Donald Trump’s crusade to prosecute imaginary “vandalism” of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is a massive humiliation for his administration, former federal prosecutor Elliot Williams told a CNN panel on Monday.
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This whole episode, he said, is “embarrassing for [D.C. prosecutor] Jeanine Pirro … it’s also embarrassing for the Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum. It’s embarrassing for the President of the United States. It’s embarrassing for the Justice Department. Everything about how this played out is horribly embarrassing.”
While Trump’s vendetta against Pirro is absurd, he continued, she is no “hero” in all this either.
“The question is, at the time that they filed charges in the first place, did they have enough evidence to proceed with a case that they thought they could win in court?” said Williams.
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Based on everything known about the case in the public record, he said, “it doesn’t look like they do.” And then, “this bonkers memorandum that the Justice Department submitted, [threw] the Department of the Interior under the bus.”
Effectively, he said, the DOJ stuck Burgum with the blame for having gone forward “with a purely political prosecution that they could not plausibly stand up in court and say that they could support in any court of law. They knew that. We all knew that. And quite frankly, the president knows that as well.”
“There was never credible evidence that could stand up in court that this individual committed a federal crime,” he added.
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