DOJ’s Watchdog Won’t Investigate Jeanine Pirro’s Reflecting Pool Prosecution

Two weeks ago, David Hearn’s lawyers asked the inspectors general at the Justice and Interior Departments to figure out how a 67-year-old Olympian ended up indicted for touching a piece of the Reflecting Pool that was already falling off. And the result of that quixotic ask is in, and, yeah it’s not happening.

In an October 8 letter to Hearn’s attorneys, DOJ Inspector General Don Berthiaume said limits in the law required him to send the case to the Office of Professional Responsibility. Berthiaume is the IG who was confirmed 51-47 after declining to call January 6 an attack on the Capitol. On Wednesday, Hearn’s lawyers wrote back asking his office to reconsider, pointing to evidence of what they describe as potential crimes committed both by DOJ personnel alone and by DOJ and Interior employees together. That legal team includes Michael Bromwich, who ran the DOJ OIG during the Clinton administration.

Berthiaume isn’t inventing the jurisdictional line. Allegations against DOJ lawyers acting as lawyers (grand jury abuse, discovery abuse, and the like) have long gone to OPR rather than the inspector general. Bromwich knows the arrangement better than almost anyone. He was recruited as IG in 1993 on the understanding that the OIG and OPR would be merged, a plan that died when members of the Senate Judiciary Committee made clear they’d hold up his confirmation over it. In 2001 testimony before that same committee, he recalled that an earlier order had handed OPR jurisdiction over attorneys “even though it lacked the manpower to do a credible job in that regard.” Twenty-five years later, OPR is down to 16 people.

But the letter isn’t only about lawyers. Federal agents accused of misconduct during investigations do fall under the inspector general’s jurisdiction, and the DOJ OIG has run a number of high-profile investigations into department lawyers’ conduct in the past anyway. And Hearn’s team isn’t alleging sloppy lawyering. They say the handling of the case involved “numerous potential crimes, including witness tampering, subornation of perjury, obstruction of justice, and criminal civil rights violations.” That would include the grand jury witness who couldn’t put a number on Hearn’s damage, got excused, then came back 21 minutes later certain it was at least $1,000, which… happens to be the felony line.

So what does all that mean for the investigation? Since Trump returned to office, OPR has shrunk from 29 employees to 16. In fiscal year 2025 it opened seven new investigations, its lowest total in two decades, while receiving 1,666 complaints, the most since 2005. OPR also reports up to the deputy attorney general and the attorney general, and unlike the IG it has no obligation to publicize its work or report its findings to Congress. The OIG has punted before, too: Reuters found it had referred a DOJ whistleblower’s allegations against senior Trump officials to OPR on the theory that OPR was better positioned to investigate.

Hearn’s lawyers aren’t pretending this is anything but a sham. They wrote that OPR is “no longer a fully functioning entity capable of conducting rigorous oversight,” and that the IG’s declination means an investigation simply won’t happen. Norm Eisen, another member of the team, told The Hill “there is no excuse for OIG [Office of Inspector General] not to look into it.”

The one watchdog that does seem willing to take a look works for the Interior Department. According to the new letter, Interior’s inspector general is investigating Hearn’s allegations about Interior personnel. Of course, Interior is also the department that commissioned the liner that peeled off in the first place. So the agency responsible for the pool is the one asking questions, while the agency responsible for the prosecution has decided it’s someone else’s problem.

Hearn’s lawyers called their original request “a further test of the IG system under this Administration,” and the Justice Department’s watchdog handled it the way plenty of people handle a test they’d rather not take, by insisting he was never enrolled in the class in the first place.

Earlier: Lawyers Want A Watchdog To Look At Jeanine Pirro’s Reflecting Pool Case. Good Luck Finding One.
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