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In a classic Friday night news dump, the Department of Justice last night moved to dismiss the criminal charges against David Hearn, the U.S. Olympian the Justice Department indicted for vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. The filing says that “damage to the Reflecting Pool in June 2026 was the result of flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings (“AIC”), and the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration in the weeks surrounding Independence Day 2026.”
President Donald J. Trump announced in April that he was planning to renovate the reflecting pool and on May 7 said it would take a week and cost about $1.8 million. By May 8 the cost had jumped to $13.1 million, with the contract awarded on a no-bid basis. When the pool reopened on June 6, Trump declared it a triumph, writing on social media: “Thank you President Trump.”
But the day after the reservoir filled with water, algae began to bloom in it. A spokesperson for the Interior Department said the algae were “residual” and a normal part of the process of refilling the pool. “President Donald J. Trump is an expert builder who has fixed the Reflecting Pool for good unlike the failed and extremely costly attempt by Obama and Biden,” she said in a statement.
By June 16, crews from the National Park Service were pouring hydrogen peroxide into the water to kill the algae that had turned the pool bright green even as Trump insisted the pool was perfect.
By Thursday, June 18, the new blue epoxy at the bottom of the pool was peeling off and floating in the vivid green pool. David Fahrenthold reported in the New York Times that the National Park Service contracted not only the coating and painting of the pool under a no-bid contract—the price tag had jumped to at least $14.2 million—but also an additional $1.7 million contract for a water purification system.
That no-bid contract went to a firm called Greenwater Services, whose ultimate owner is the J.J. Cafaro Investment Trust, led by Trump donor John J. Cafaro, whose wife chaired the 2017 International Red Cross Ball at Mar-a-Lago and who lives near Mar-a-Lago at a mansion that is listed as the water treatment company’s address in Florida corporate records.
On June 19, U.S. Park Police officers arrested 67-year-old Hearn, a former Olympic canoe racer, who had stopped by the pool on a 52-mile bike ride and reached into the water to feel what the detached material felt like, for destruction of public property. “I didn’t vandalize anything,” Hearn told David J. Lynch and Aaron Schaffer of the Washington Post. “I didn’t destroy or break or peel anything. By the time I realized what was going on, I was being put in handcuffs.”
That night, Trump blamed “Radical Left Lunatics, most likely Dumocats [sic], who have spent their lives trying to ruin our Country,” for “some real problems with Vandalism at the beautiful Reflecting Pool.” By the next day, he was blaming “multiple individuals for vandalizing our Nations magnificent Reflecting Poll [sic]. Who would do such a thing? These are very serious crimes having to do with the destruction of National Monuments. Years in jail! Work will begin immediately on its repair.”
Minnesota governor Tim Walz commented: “Found an imaginary problem, said only they could fix it, didn’t listen to experts, hired buddies who grifted millions, failed miserably, bragged how great it went. The entire Trump presidency in a nutshell.”
Administration officials insisted that the problems with the reflecting pool renovations were entirely the fault of vandals. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt pushed back on Walz’s statement, saying “The vandalism is very real.” Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, scoffed at the idea that there had not been vandalism, telling Jesse Watters of the Fox News Channel that she had just been at the pool and “someone was intent on doing incredible damage to the pool.”
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told Dana Bash of CNN that the contractors had nothing to do with the problems; it was “vandalism.” He insisted the government could prove there were vandals and suggested there were “photographs.” When Bash pressed him over whether the government actually had “photographs of a person or people cutting a 300- or 350-foot gash in the bottom of the reflecting pool,” he deflected, saying: “I’m not sure why you and others in the media think that you want to keep trying to question” the president’s version of events.
On June 29, Trump posted: “The Reflecting Pool, which suffered great damage due to the Vandals and Radical Left SCUM that hate our Country, has been, for the past two days, in full operation. It looks beautiful! After July 4th, we will release the water, fix the damage done to the very expensive waterproof matting, with the use of sharp knives and muscle, including the 350 foot gash along its right side, and have it looking as good as it was two weeks ago, when it was absolutely PERFECT!”
Now, of course, the Department of Justice’s filing proves that the idea of vandals was always a lie. The problems with the renovation of the reflecting pool were exactly what critics said all along: a hasty, expensive, ill-thought-out project failed. This case is so bad, Chris Geidner of LawDork noted, that Pirro went out of her way to blame the Interior Department for the misguided indictment.
The disparity between the fantasy Trump and his cronies sold to their supporters and the reality of the situation when they were forced to prove their allegations in court matters. Administration officials insisted before the media that the project had been a great success, hurt only by “Radical Left SCUM that hate our Country.” In order to prove their lie, administration officials used the power of the government to harass, indict, and threaten a random individual whom they could blame for their own failures. Then, when forced to prove their allegations in a court of law, they withdrew the claim entirely.
This has always been the pattern of Trump and his cronies: weave a fantasy story in front of friendly media cameras, a fantasy of their own great success undercut by haters, then abandon—or lose—the legal cases based on the fantasy.
For all the bluster before the cameras of Trump cronies insisting the 2020 election was stolen, Trump’s attorneys backed away from the claims. They either withdrew or lost all but one of the 60 lawsuits they brought over the election. As a headline in the Wall Street Journal put it in 2020: “Trump Cries Voter Fraud. In Court, His Lawyers Don’t.”
The one case Trump’s lawyers won found that the Pennsylvania secretary of state overstepped by allowing voters extra time to provide missing identification for mail-in ballots. Even with that ruling, Daniel Barnes of NBC News reported, Biden still won the state by more than 80,000 votes.
Even as reality makes it clear that his claims are a fantasy, Trump continues to spin his yarns, seeming to have little else to convince voters to support him. Today he doubled down on his insistence that vandals caused the problems with the reflecting pool. “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…. There may have been some contractor difficulty, but the major damage was caused by VANDALS! President DJT”
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Notes:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/31/reflecting-pool-damage-olympian
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/11/us/politics/reflecting-pool-paint-contract-trump.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/us/politics/reflecting-pool-trump-contract.html
https://campaignlegal.org/results-lawsuits-regarding-2020-elections
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/10/us/politics/trump-dc-reflecting-pool-repairs.html
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RonFilipkowski/status/2083381784536826056]