Via NBC News: Trump administration drops Reflecting Pool case, blaming damage on ‘botched’ installation.
The Trump administration has dropped its case against a former Olympic canoeist charged in connection with damage to the Reflecting Pool, acknowledging their allegations against David “Davey” Hearn don’t hold water.
In a filing Friday afternoon, 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.
It is sincerely heartening that basic evidentiary standards continue to apply in lower courts in the United States. Like with the lies about the 2020 elections, the stuff the president and his flunkies say on TV end up falling apart when they have to make an actual case.
I wish more Americans were paying attention and would see all of this for what it is.
Meanwhile, the DOJ continues to prove it is more interested in pleasing Trump than anything else.
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.”
DOJ said it “first became aware of information showing that the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism” after reviewing more documents.
“Had [the Interior Department] been forthcoming with the information clearly in its possession, the government would not have sought a grand jury indictment,” the filing said.
DOJ said when it presented the case to a grand jury, it was “not in possession of any information from DOI indicating that any damage to the Reflecting Pool was caused by anything other than the actions of the defendant and other vandals who damaged the pool’s lining.”
Of course, this may be because they didn’t try to do their due diligence and instead went to get Trump a “vandal” to prosecute. Moreover, it was obvious to anyone with two eyes and half an ounce of honesty that the problem with the pool wasn’t vandalism.
It may be technically true that DOI documents made it impossible to find a fig leaf for this naked political prosecution, but they are backing off and telling the truth because they have to in court, not because they want to.
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.”
In the spirit of a recent post, no shit, Sherlock.
Also, behold the competence on display.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin Reddington, a rookie federal prosecutor, earlier in the week accused Hearn’s defense attorneys of violating grand jury secrecy rules. But as Hearn’s defense attorneys noted, the rules that Reddington cited applied to government attorneys, not defense attorneys.
Such an impressive array of folks in this admin!
