Miles Taylor, who served as deputy chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security during President Donald Trump's first administration, argued on Thursday that the collapsed prosecution over the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool demonstrates how far Trump and allies within the Department of Justice are willing to go in using prosecution as an instrument of "retaliation."

In an essay published at Defiance News, Taylor — who publicly disclosed internal White House secrets and was himself later targeted for reprisal — wrote that the episode, which he said initially drew ridicule as a renovation dispute, in fact reveals a broader pattern of politically directed charges.

"As you may remember," Taylor wrote, "former Olympic canoeist David Hearn was detained by National Guardsmen at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, indicted on a felony carrying ten years in prison, and publicly branded a vandal the Secretary of the Interior. The pool liner he touched was already peeling (as Interior's own engineers had flagged eight days earlier), a consequence of Trump's rushed and botched makeover of the National Mall ahead of America's 250th celebrations. Prosecutors already knew about the renovation errors. Yet they indicted Hearn anyway."

Taylor's reference to "America's 250th celebrations" points to the semiquincentennial — the 250th anniversary of American independence, set for July 4, 2026.

According to Taylor's account, the case unraveled when U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, a longtime Trump ally, was compelled to acknowledge that it lacked foundation. Trump reacted angrily, saying Pirro had "choked" and pressing the DOJ to continue the prosecution. The matter ended last week when a federal judge dismissed the charges "with prejudice," a ruling that bars the government from retrying the case. Hearn's lawyers have since asked the internal watchdogs at the DOJ and the Interior Department — the inspectors general, statutory offices charged with investigating waste, fraud, and abuse inside federal agencies — to examine how the prosecution came about. Whether and how those offices respond is the next development to watch.

Taylor described a parallel effort in his own situation. "After Trump signed an executive order falsely accusing me of stealing classified information and committing treason, he stripped my security and ordered the Department of Homeland Security and the Attorney General to investigate me," he wrote. "The order identified no wrongdoing. It didn't need to. The offense was that I had publicly revealed the depths of his incompetence and corruption."

Taylor said his attorney, Abbe Lowell, a veteran Washington defense lawyer, filed a formal complaint that June with the inspectors general of the DOJ and DHS. "We asked a simple question: are your departments being used to punish dissent, and are your employees aware they've been directed to violate the constitutional rights of an American citizen in the process?" he wrote. "The answer was already visible. People I went to high school with were getting calls from federal agents. Multiple U.S. government employees whom I was friends with were fired for mere association. I was told they were already digging through my emails. Sixteen months later, I'm still waiting for a serious answer."

In Taylor's view, he and Hearn are far from the only targets of prosecutorial payback. He pointed to the cases involving, among others, former FBI Director James Comey, whom Trump dismissed in 2017, and New York Attorney General Letitia James, whose office brought a civil fraud case against the Trump Organization, in which career government lawyers, he wrote, "were pushed out for refusing to sign onto bogus cases, and the ones who stayed came under grave pressure to bring charges against the president's enemies, whether or not they had evidence."

Taylor asserted that those who carried out the actions did so knowingly. "The officials who executed the order against me knew that a president isn't allowed to declare someone guilty of a crime and then have them investigated in order to find some kind of evidence," he wrote. "These were all lawyers who swore an oath to the Constitution and were bound by professional rules that forbid exactly this. They made a choice, and they made it knowing the law was on the other side."

Taylor argued that the answer lies in the slogan Trump himself used in 2019 during the investigation into his possible collusion with Russia, the special counsel inquiry then led by Robert Mueller: "Investigate the investigators."

"The process of accountability starts with the inspectors general, even the ones Trump installed after firing seventeen of their predecessors in his first week," he concluded. "These letters create a real-time record of misconduct — opening lines in eventual investigations into how Trump's prosecutors were directed to bring fake charges against people as a means of retaliation. But it can't end there. Every prosecutor who signed an indictment they knew they couldn't prove should face disbarment or prosecution. Every official who retaliated against a citizen for protected speech should end up in a courtroom. And the next Justice Department should reopen every one of these cases… and turn the focus on the investigators themselves."