Donald Trump dives back into Reflecting Pool rampage, considers new case against Olympian
Donald Trump may not be ready to let the embarrassing legal fiasco over the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool’s botched renovation quietly drift away.
Weeks after the Justice Department dropped its vandalism charges against Olympian David Hearn and admitted that the damage to the Reflecting Pool was the result of a hasty and botched renovation job — and days after Trump himself admitted a “contractor error” was the cause of at least some of the damage to the Pool — the 80-year-old president is back on Hearn’s case.
Trump is considering bringing a lesser charge against Hearn
According to The Wall Street Journal, Trump and his newly confirmed attorney general, Todd Blanche, are trying to see if they can slap Hearn with a lesser vandalism charge.
Hearn and three other citizens were charged with vandalism by the Justice Department, which formally moved to have the charges dropped when it became clear they had no case. The move blindsided and angered Trump, and U.S. District Attorney Jeanine Pirro had to physically show Trump that there was no evidence that the pool was slashed up by mysterious Antifa vandals or any other nefarious entities to keep her job.
The DOJ already dropped the case against Hearn and other accused ‘vandals’
Hearn was accused of riding his bike by the pool and leaning down to touch one of the blue chunks that had become detached from the pool’s lining and floated to the surface. Per Hearn, he touched one of the chunks, but immediately let it go when directed to by a National Park Service ranger.
In a Truth Social post on August 9, Trump quoted a National Park Service worker who claimed he saw Hearn “violently rip” the dislodged chunk. It is unclear if Trump will pursue further litigation based on that testimony.
Hearn’s lawyers promise a fight
Hearn’s lawyers vowed to fight the charges if they were taken back to court.
His co-counsel — Norm Eisen of Democracy Defenders Fund, Mary Dohrmann of Washington Litigation Group, and Steve Levin of Steptoe LLP — gave a statement to The Daily Beast in which they mocked Trump’s DOJ.
“If true, it would mark a shocking first: a case that the DOJ lost by its own admission because it lacked the evidence to convict returning from the dead,” they wrote. “This would add another bizarre turn to a sad chapter in the DOJ’s history and further harass an innocent man.”
There is no evidence suggesting the pool was vandalized
There have been no formal new charges brought against Hearn yet.
Trump has fought the idea that he is in any way at fault for the green and messy Reflecting Pool fiasco for months, to the point where he claimed vandals with box cutters were caught on camera knifing “300-yard long” gashes into the pool’s lining. No such video exists, which he finally admitted on August 9.