Reports indicated that President Donald Trump was furious with Pirro after she dropped the prosecution of Hearn, an Olympic canoeist who was arrested and charged with felony vandalism of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Trump erupted over Pirro's decision during a press conference in the Oval Office on Monday, saying she "folded like an umbrella." Harry Litman, a former federal prosecutor, argued in an essay for The New Republic that Pirro really didn't have a choice in the "humiliating debacle." Litman added that the move revealed the ploy lurking behind what he described as "the most perfectly Kafkaesque prosecution [he] can remember outside the annals of fiction." So Pirro’s dismissal was not virtue: It was damage control," he wrote.