Charges Dropped in Reflecting Pool Case as Prosecutors Say Work Was ‘Botched’

Federal prosecutors on Friday said that contractors hired by the Trump administration had botched the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, leaving behind “widespread damage” in the pool’s new blue lining, and that the Interior Department had then falsely blamed that damage on vandals.

In an extraordinary motion filed Friday evening, the U.S. attorney in Washington, Jeanine Pirro, said she was seeking to dismiss a felony charge against David Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist who was accused of pulling up a piece of the pool’s lining.

In doing so, Pirro — a longtime ally of President Donald Trump’s — directly contradicted the president’s repeated claim that the reflecting pool’s peeling liner was caused by people slashing its coating with knives. Instead, she said, “the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism.”

In July, Pirro had echoed the president’s claims, calling a news conference to announce Hearn’s indictment July 2. She said that she had “tremendous evidence” that Hearn had committed a felony and noted that he faced up to 10 years in prison.

But on Friday, Pirro said her prosecutors had been misled by the Interior Department, which had awarded a no-bid contract to a first-time government contractor to repair the iconic landmark.

Pirro said that the pool’s new blue coating had actually started to peel within two days of the project’s completion and that the Interior Department kept that fact from prosecutors, telling them that “nearly all of the damage” was done by vandals.

Later, Pirro said, prosecutors visited the pool themselves and saw that could not be true. The lining was peeling in many places, some far from the edge where Hearn had stood. After that, she said, prosecutors had demanded more information from the Interior Department, which made clear that the pool’s problems had developed during the renovation itself.

“Given all of this newly discovered information, it is difficult to attribute the widespread damage to the Reflecting Pool to vandalism,” Pirro wrote in her motion to the court.

The filing was a remarkable and detailed indictment of a project that, until now, the Trump administration had defended as an astounding success. “President Donald J. Trump is an expert builder who fixed the reflecting pool permanently before deranged people vandalized it,” Katie Martin, an Interior Department spokesperson, said in July.

Pirro blamed both the government’s vendor and the administration’s timetable, saying the pool’s poor state “was the result of a flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, and the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration” on July 4.

The Interior Department did not respond to questions about the filing Friday evening. It is not clear if there would be consequences for the Interior Department officials whom Pirro accused of deception.

The reflecting pool has been fenced off and drained so the faults in the lining can be inspected and repaired. In a recent filing in a separate court case, the Interior Department said it would be closed until Aug. 10.

Hearn, who pleaded not guilty last month, was the only person known to be facing a felony charge, rather than a misdemeanor, related to Trump’s false claims of vandalism to the pool. A lawyer for one of those defendants said Friday night that his case had not been dropped. It was unclear what happened to the rest. Pirro’s office could not immediately be reached for comment.

Six other people have been arrested on charges of vandalism, federal officials have said. Three face misdemeanor charges of destruction of property under $1,000, court records show.

Hearn’s trial on a charge of destruction of property had been scheduled to begin Sept. 28.

In a statement Friday, lawyers representing him said that the charges should never have been brought.

The dismissal of charges “does not erase the abuse of government power in arresting and charging a patriotic American who did nothing wrong,” the statement said. “The government’s approach was ready, fire, aim. The administration owes Hearn an apology.”

The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The reflecting pool, built in the 1920s, has been plagued for years by water leaking out between its long concrete slabs.

This year, the Interior Department bypassed regular procedures to give a no-bid contract to fix the pool to Atlantic Industrial Coatings, a small firm in rural Virginia. Trump said at first that he had chosen the firm personally, because it had repaired a pool at one of his golf clubs.

Later, Trump reversed himself and said he did not know the firm.

The Interior Department asked the firm to do something that had never been done before at the pool: In addition to filling the gaps between the slabs, it wanted the contractor to spread a dark blue waterproof coating across the pool floor, including the slabs themselves. That added time and cost. The company also added a 20% profit margin to its bill, according to internal documents obtained by The New York Times. So far, the government has agreed to pay the company $14.7 million.

Soon, problems appeared. The firm’s first efforts to seal the gaps between the slabs failed, internal documents showed. Bubbles and holes appeared in the blue coating. The work fell behind schedule. The pool was finally finished and refilled in early June.

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But both Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Trump insisted that the damage to the pool was caused by vandals, not errors in the installation. The Justice Department motion revealed that this account was not just for public consumption: Prosecutors said that the Interior Department had told them the same.

Atlantic Industrial Coatings did not respond to requests for comment Friday evening. In the past, the company has defended its work, saying that the problems affected a “very small part” of the pool’s lining and that it would fix them under warranty.

The Trump administration also awarded a no-bid contract to add water-purification devices called “nanobubblers” to the pool’s filtration system. But soon after the pool was refilled, an algae bloom turned its water bright green, in part because the nanobubblers had been removed during the time that a promotional event connected to a UFC event at the White House was planned at the Lincoln Memorial.

Trump claimed that the algae bloom, too, was the work of vandals dumping in fertilizer, though the pool had been plagued by algae blooms for decades. No one has been charged with adding fertilizer to the pool.