DOJ moves to drop case against Olympian, says damage to reflecting pool from ‘flawed installation’
The Department of Justice moved on Friday to dismiss the case against Olympic canoeist David Hearn, who it accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. In a court filing obtained by The Hill, U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro said the damage seen at the pool was not vandalism, but instead, the result of a “botched installation.”
Hearn earlier this month pleaded not guilty after a grand jury indicted him on one count of destruction of property. Prosecutors initially alleged he caused more than $1,000 in damage by pulling up part of the pool’s newly installed blue liner based on reports from the Department of the Interior and U.S. Park police.
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However, Pirro said in the filing, the Department of the Interior later provided additional documents to her office indicating the damage to the pool from June was because of the “flawed installation” by the contractor. She said this was because of the “rush” to complete the project before the America 250 celebrations taking place in July.
“Because these recently-produced materials significantly undermine the evidentiary basis for the indictment initially supplied by the DOI and U.S. Park Police, the USAO-DC respectfully moves to dismiss the indictment without prejudice,” Pirro wrote.
These documents specifically show that work on installing the lining “almost immediately fell behind,” Pirro wrote, because of a combination of “very rainy and windy weather, repeated failures of testing on the sealing of the expansion joints, and delays in obtaining sealing product at the worksite.”
“The rush to complete the project led to hasty and botched work that was not remediated before the project was finished and the fencing removed,” Pirro said.
One of Hearn’s lawyers, Norm Eisen, wrote in a statement on X that the Trump administration’s case against his client “should never have been brought.”
“Its dismissal today does not erase the abuse of government power in arresting and charging a patriotic American who did nothing wrong,” Eisen wrote. “The administration owes Mr. Hearn an apology.”
President Donald Trump earlier this year made restoring the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool one of his Washington beautification priorities. Shortly after reopening, though, the more than $16 million project ran into visible problems, including the new blue liner peeling and algae turning the water green.
Trump, on Saturday, said he disagreed “100%” with Pirro about the Reflecting Pool.
“There may have been some contractor difficulty, but the major damage was caused by VANDALS!” he wrote on Truth Social.