The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 29 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.The saga involving Donald Trump’s Reflecting Pool renovation is getting stranger and darker. Federal prosecutors are now saying they’re aware of citations that have been issued to the supposed vandals that, according to Trump, have sabotaged the renovation, but no details and no records of any kind are being released. Meanwhile, Trump is rambling in a truly crazed way about this, describing the people who have received citations or have even been arrested as enemies of our country. This is really taking on the cast of an unhinged tyrant, and while it’s tempting to laugh at the story, there’s something about it that signals a profound degradation that’s underway.Former federal prosecutor Ankush Khardori has been writing well about how Trump has been degrading the rule of law and arguing that we need to be thinking now about how to address that down the line. So we’re working through all this with him. Ankush, thanks for coming on.Ankush Khardori: Thanks for having me.Sargent: So we know very little about this right now. Trump is very angry that the Reflecting Pool has gone off the rails. There’s been the algae and the peeling paint. Trump has posted on Truth Social that six people have been arrested and seven others have gotten citations, some he says for cutting a 350-foot gash in the pool’s sealant with a knife or with razors. But there doesn’t seem to be any clear evidence of these arrests. Ankush, this has gotten truly weird, hasn’t it?Khardori: Yes, this is quite strange. Ordinarily you would expect a little bit more clarity from the federal government in a situation like this.Sargent: You sure would. And there’s one guy we know of who says he’s gotten a citation—the former Olympic canoeist David Carter Hearn. He’s 67. I believe there’s another woman who’s been quoted saying something similar, that she got a citation or was temporarily detained. I mean, a 67-year-old former Olympian who was biking in on the National Mall doesn’t seem like an Antifa vandal, does he?Khardori: No. This thing seems like it’s gotten quite out of hand and that federal law enforcement, the Park Police in particular, seem to have been dispatched to preserve the president’s ego, I guess.Sargent: Can you talk about that a little? In other words, you think that maybe the park police were in some sense directed to find something wrong out there? Khardori: It kind of seems like they were directed to watch things very, very closely and to behave in a way that they ordinarily wouldn’t.Sargent: Right. And we should just clarify for people that the Reflecting Pool is on the National Mall. It’s in front of the Lincoln Memorial. And that’s why the Park Police, I guess, have jurisdiction or something. But here’s where it gets murky. It gets really murky here. The New York Times just got a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington, which handles prosecutions in D.C. And all they said was, we are aware of citations being issued, meaning by the park police. But the U.S. Attorney’s office provided no specifics, no number of people given citations. Here’s how the Times put it: “No records of arrests or citations have been produced by the administration or law enforcement officials to support the president’s claims.”Ankush, he said six people were arrested and seven people were given citations for serious vandalism. And they’re not putting out anything about this, the Washington office of the U.S. Attorney’s office. What on earth could this possibly mean?Khardori: Look, my first suspicion is that they don’t want to put out information that would contradict the president’s claims about what’s happening there. Because bear in mind that the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., under Jeanine Pirro, has been more than happy to speak publicly on pending matters when it serves the administration’s preferred narrative.I think the most prominent example that comes to my mind is when they arrested the sandwich guy. Jeanine Pirro put out a video taunting him. Now, that video is deeply hilarious for the wrong reasons for her in hindsight, since they totally flopped on that case—they couldn’t even get a misdemeanor conviction on the guy. But of course, that’s just to say that when there’s a thing of public interest to them where they want to produce information and make a show to the public, they will absolutely do it. So we should infer that the facts would not reflect well upon them if they were being forthright about them.Sargent: It’s such a good point. The U.S. attorneys have been willing to bend over backwards to support even the most tenuous and ridiculous things that Trump wants to make true.
