DOJ Concedes That the Reflecting Pool Damage Trump Blamed on ‘Vandalism’ Was Caused by His Own No-Bid Contractor’s Botched Work

On July 2, U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro indicted former Olympic canoeist David Hearn on a felony charge, telling reporters the evidence would prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that he had “forcefully and violently” torn up the liner of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool during Trump’s multimillion-dollar renovation. When a reporter asked whether preexisting problems with the renovation might be the real cause, Pirro waved him off.

A month later, Pirro’s office quietly reversed course. After Pirro herself visited the drained pool and Interior Department officials sent over documents they hadn’t previously shared, prosecutors admitted the damage was actually the result of a rushed, botched installation by the contractor Trump’s team hired without competitive bidding. Hearn is now demanding an apology; his lawyers say the case should never have been brought in the first place.

NBC News reports:

The Justice Department filing said that based on its review of evidence, “it is difficult to attribute the widespread damage to the Reflecting Pool to vandalism, let alone to establish that fact beyond a reasonable doubt.” …

[A] supervisor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, which is headed by Jeanine Pirro, wrote that officials obtained information that undermined “the evidentiary basis for the indictment” against Hearn. Prosecutors said that after the indictment came down on July 2, the Interior Department provided additional documents to the U.S. attorney’s office “indicating that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in June 2026 was the result of flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings.” …

President Donald Trump, in a post on Truth Social Saturday, said he “disagreed” with the Justice Department’s decision to drop the case. “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool. I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM,” Trump wrote, adding, “There may have been some contractor difficulty, but the major damage was caused by VANDALS!”

An innocent man spent a month facing a felony charge so the president wouldn’t have to admit his signature beautification project was built on a no-bid contract that produced shoddy work.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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