Inside Trump's 'contentious' Oval Office meeting with Jeanine Pirro over Reflecting Pool fiasco: Sources
President Donald Trump said Tuesday he had not yet made a determination about whether Jeanine Pirro's job is safe in his strongest public comments yet on her future as U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia.
The remarks came after Trump told reporters on Monday in the Oval Office that Pirro "choked" and "folded like an umbrella" in dropping the charges against former Olympian David Hearn, who was accused of damaging the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
Pirro then showed up to the White House on Monday afternoon with a banker's box in tow full of evidence as she prepared to defend her decision to the president, according to sources familiar with the meeting.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, whose agency oversees national parks, including the Reflecting Pool, was invited to the meeting, too.
During the meeting, which sources have described as "contentious," Pirro lashed out at Burgum directly and blamed him for misleading the president about the evidence in the case, sources said.
The president has long maintained that the pool was damaged by vandals, but privately National Park Service engineers blamed the outside private contractor who did the installation after winning a no-bid contract from the Department of the Interior -- evidence Pirro said emerged after prosecutors brought charges, according to court documents.
In court documents, Pirro pointed to internal National Park Service communication from June 11 that raised concerns about the peeling pool liner more than a week before Hearn was arrested. Pirro also dropped misdemeanor cases against three other people related to destruction of property at the pool.
During Monday's meeting, Pirro accused Burgum of a series of mistakes that she believed he was covering up, sources said.
The New York Times was first to report details of the meeting.
After Pirro dropped the charges, Burgum posted on social media that the "evidence is clear" vandals damaged the Reflecting Pool.
Trump did not tell Pirro he intended to fire her, nor did she offer to resign during the meeting, according to sources familiar with the meeting who said that Trump did make clear during the private meeting he still had not made a decision on the future of her job.
Sources told ABC News that while Pirro gave some in the White House a heads up that she intended to drop the Reflecting Pool charges, it's not clear whether the president knew himself, or at least the extent to which she and her prosecutors place the blame squarely on the Department of Interior. A White House official told ABC News that the president was not aware Pirro would be filing court papers dropping the charges ahead of time.
Pirro dismissed a felony indictment against Hearn last Friday. She said in a 20-page filing that the damage was caused by "flawed installation by the contractor" and not vandalism as she and the president had long claimed.
Late Tuesday night, the president reiterated his belief that Pirro is "totally wrong" about the pool and said he was "not happy" with his hand-picked U.S. attorney.
