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.
This whole episode, he said, is "embarrassing for [D.C. prosecutor] Jeanine Pirro ... it's alsoembarrassing for the Secretaryof the Interior, Doug Burgum.It's embarrassing for thePresident of the United States.It's embarrassing for the Justice Department. Everythingabout how this played out ishorribly embarrassing."
While Trump's vendetta against Pirro is absurd, he continued, she is no "hero" in all this either.
"The question is, at thetime that they filedcharges in the first place, didthey have enough evidence to proceed with a case that they thought they could win in court?" said Williams.
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.