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Federal prosecutors on Friday admitted what everyone else already knew: The reflecting pool vandalism bullshit pushed by Pres. Donald Trump was bullshit.
But most of the coverage ignored the serious, and potentially criminal, conduct of the Interior Department.
Friday’s filing — signed by Trump loyalist and former Fox host Jeanine Pirro, now the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia — said that the Department of the Interior (DOI) provided false information, withheld exculpatory information, and repeatedly delayed sharing the whole truth with prosecutors.
The filing was to drop the vandalism charges against former Olympic canoeist David Hearn. But the filing went well beyond that. Not only could the Department of Justice (DOJ) not prosecute Hearn, the DOJ couldn’t even prove there was a crime. At least not the crime of vandalism.
But as the filing implies, Interior Department officials may have made false statements in the investigation. Secretary Doug Burgum certainly did so publicly.
“DOI provided less than fulsome information at the outset of this case,” Pirro wrote. It’s a much more polite way of saying someone lied to the cops than the DOJ uses for most people.
“Had DOI been forthcoming with the information clearly in its possession, the government would not have sought a grand jury indictment,” Pirro wrote. Again, this is a nice, bureaucratic way of saying Interior “clearly” covered up the truth.
The reason to cover up the truth was also clear, more so than the pool: Trump had pushed false claims that had to be substantiated, or at least perpetuated as long as possible until a judge and defense attorneys got their hands on it.
Trump had put his ego on the line with the pool project, citing his real-estate experience, specifically including pools. He oversaw the pool renovation. Admitting it failed amounts to saying Trump screwed up.
On June 19, after reports of peeling liner in the reflecting pool, Park Police made their first arrests. We don’t know what prompted the hunt for supposed vandals, but Trump that night took up the narrative, although he first blamed not knives, but chemicals:
“No different than the chemicals that were used on the National Mall, they used something similar in the Reflecting Pool to try to destroy and demean our beautiful work.”
Initially blaming chemicals was actually closer to the truth than the knives Trump ultimately went with. (He also accused ABC’s Jonathan Karl of “trying to rip the rubber [sic] off.”)
Either way, the federal arrests abetted and/or enabled Trump’s lie, providing Trump with putative “evidence” that it wasn’t his process to blame. The Interior Department even served up video ostensibly showing some of the culprits with their hands in the algae jar.
Right-wing media amplified the lies. On June 25, the White House posted Fox covering an Interior Department video that purported to capture vandals in action.
An Interior Department statement quoted by Fox says, “In the video[,] you are seeing two suspects observed destroying and removing a piece of the lining and attempting destruction of the lining.”
That wasn’t true. (Never mind the legal incoherence of referring to them as suspects while also saying they did it.)
According to the Justice Department, the Interior Department knew it wasn’t true at the time. But didn’t tell DOJ.
Pirro’s filing says:
“[I]t was not until after the return of the [Hearn] indictment, that the DOI provided additional documents to the USAO-DC [the DC U.S. attorney] indicating that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in June 2026 was the result of flawed installation by the contractor … and the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration in the weeks surrounding Independence Day 2026. It was not until after these documents were produced that USAO-DC first became aware of information showing that the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism as initially represented by DOI.”
Most media have focused on the botched work and the rush, which Pirro notably does not attribute to Trump ordering the work with only about two months before July 4. But her filing goes on to nail the Interior Department for, in effect, covering up the truth.
Pirro complains that initially she got only “barebones police reports from the United States Park Police,” part of the Interior Department.
According to Pirro, the key witness against Hearn was a worker with the National Park Service, also part of the Interior Department:
“The NPS employee, W-1 [Witness One], stated that the defendant [Hearn] then knelt, placed both hands into the reflecting pool-below the surface of the water-—and started to ‘violently’ rip and tug at a large portion of the blue pool coating.”
The National Park Service told Pirro’s prosecutors the damage was estimated at more than $1,000, which had legal repercussions for Hearn. And, she wrote, “DOI represented that nearly all of the damage to the Reflecting Pool was due to vandalism with only a small portion due to unidentified other causes.”
In other words, the vandalism claims came not from DOJ’s investigation, but from Burgum’s department.
And even by July 1, when Pirro and her staff met with Interior Department officials at the scene of the pretend crime, “none of the DOI employees suggested that the poor condition of the Reflecting Pool was largely the result of failures during the process of installing the liner.”
Prosecutors got a grand jury to indict Hearn the following day. And then, on July 5, here’s what Burgum told CNN’s Dana Bash:
BURGUM: …[T]here was vandalism. There was box cutters. There have been seven arrests. There was people literally trying to destroy part of a monument, the Reflecting Pool...
BASH: And you're 100 percent sure that what happened with the liner was vandalism? You can prove it?
BURGUM: Oh, yes, absolutely, Dana. And we drain it, and we have got all the photographs, we can see. I mean, there's no possible way—
BASH: There are photographs of a person or people cutting a 300- or 350-foot gash in the bottom of the Reflecting Pool?
BURGUM: Dana, I'm not sure why you and others in the media think that you want to keep trying to question whether or not — think: This is an industrial liner. … literally, it would never just like peel off or fall off. This is, like, a strong material.
BASH: Yes.
BURGUM: And it's the size of eight football fields. And the only way you can end up with actual slices in one spot and not the other is that someone physically cut it.
At the time of Burgum’s lies, his department already knew the truth. There had been lining failures during installation. A June 11 internal email revealed that peeling had begun well before any alleged vandalism.
This was a week before the first arrests. Almost a month before Burgum lied to CNN.
But according to Pirro’s filing, the Justice Department didn’t find out until July 17 about the significant damage throughout the pool and only then requested all of Interior’s records about the lining and installation. That’s when the truth started to peel up.
Pirro writes that Interior turned over “695 megabytes of additional documents.”
The new documents revealed there had been “repeated failures of the lining during the installation process, and extensive peeling of the lining throughout the Reflecting Pool.”
In case anyone might miss the point that Interior covered this all up, Pirro noted that “This was the first time that DOI made USAO-DC aware of such information.”
Interior knew as early as May 14 that initial sealants had failed, Pirro writes. Blisters in the finished lining were spotted on May 20. Those problems were fixed, or believed fixed, in time for the June 14 UFC fight.
But on June 11, The National Park Service learned of more liner peeling. An internal email that day said the contractor acknowledged the peeling and attributed it to “overspray,” not vandals.
And yet, on June 23, the Interior Department posted that “failing legacy media is [sic] trying to cover up for criminals who desecrated a great American monument.”
And then Burgum lied to CNN on July 5. He either didn’t know the truth or didn’t care to know. He stated definitively that any explanation but vandalism was impossible.
Years ago, as governor of North Dakota, Burgum was seen as an old-school Republican, even talking about carbon neutrality. In his confirmation hearing to serve as Interior secretary, he committed to an “all of the above” approach to generating energy.
Since taking office, he has joined Trump’s war against and barrage of lies about wind power.
There’s also reason to question whether the DOI lied about Hearn specifically, including the supposed witness accounts. If the DOJ considered those witnesses credible, Pirro could have prosecuted Hearn regardless of what the contractors did.
Pirro’s filing doesn’t address what conclusions DOJ ultimately reached about those witnesses.
Either way, neither Burgum nor Pirro has been willing to put the blame where it ultimately belongs. Whatever the contractor’s faults, there wasn’t enough time for anyone to do the job right.
That was on Trump. He didn’t order the renovation in time to do it right by his deadlines.
He first mentioned wanting to fix the pool in November 2025:
“This is the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool before Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum and I fix it. Study it hard because you won’t be seeing this Biden filth and incompetence much longer!”
It would be four more months until Trump began bringing new filth and incompetence to the pool, only ordering the work on April 9, when he wrote,
“President Donald J. Trump and Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum, are proud to be fixing the once beautiful Reflecting Pool between The Washington Monument and The Lincoln Memorial. We were told it was going to take YEARS to do this job, and it will take a fraction of that time…”
The work didn’t actually start until later that month. Then, Trump told the media it would take a week and cost just $1.5 million. He added that the lining was impervious to knives.
It’s taken far more than a week. The cost so far is more than $16 million. It’s very pervious.
Trump was right that he only took a fraction of the years it would take to do it right. And that, not vandals, is why it failed.
And his demand for loyalty, we now know, may have led Burgum and other Interior officials to lie for him.
TFN creator and writer Jonathan Larsen co-created Up w/ Chris Hayes and wrote for Countdown with Keith Olbermann at MSNBC, helped launch CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360° and Air America Radio, and has also worked at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Young Turks.
I love how the Senate thinks its an acceptable use of their time to grill an 85 year old public servant who did his best to keep EVERYONE (even those who might've injected bleach!) alive through a pandemic, but this everyday criminal incompetence just gets a pass.
Make Government Competent Again.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR FULSOME ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!
So Pirro's position is, Interior told all the lies, DOJ is 'only' guilty of gross incompetence for not even looking at the evidence before going to the grand jury. Pretty unbelievable, although incompetence is definitely believable.