Federal prosecutors on Friday said that contractors hired by the Trump administration had botched the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, leaving behind \u201cwidespread damage\u201d in the pool\u2019s new blue lining, and that the Interior Department had then falsely blamed that damage on vandals.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s lining two feet square.<\/p>\n
In doing so, Ms. Pirro \u2014 a longtime ally of President Trump\u2019s \u2014 directly contradicted the president\u2019s repeated claim that the Reflecting Pool\u2019s peeling liner was caused by people slashing its coating with knives. Instead, she said, \u201cthe damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism.\u201d<\/p>\n
Earlier this month, Ms. Pirro herself had echoed the president\u2019s claims, calling a news conference to announce Mr. Hearn\u2019s indictment on July 2. She said that she had \u201ctremendous evidence\u201d that Mr. Hearn had committed a felony, and noted that he faced up to 10 years in prison.<\/p>\n
But on Friday, Ms. Pirro said that her prosecutors had been misled by the Interior Department, which had awarded a no-bid contract<\/a> to a first-time government contractor to repair the iconic landmark.<\/p>\n Ms. Pirro said that the pool\u2019s new blue coating had actually started to peel within two days of the project\u2019s completion, and that the Interior Department kept that fact from prosecutors, telling them that \u201cnearly all of the damage\u201d was done by vandals.<\/p>\n Later, Ms. 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 Mr. Hearn had stood. After that, she said, prosecutors had demanded more information from the Interior Department, which made clear that the pool\u2019s problems had developed during the renovation itself.<\/p>\n \u201cGiven all of this newly discovered information, it is difficult to attribute the widespread damage to the Reflecting Pool to vandalism,\u201d Ms. Pirro wrote in her motion to the court.<\/p>\n The filing was a remarkable and detailed indictment of a project that, until now, the Trump administration had defended as an astounding success. \u201cPresident Donald J. Trump is an expert builder who fixed the Reflecting Pool permanently before deranged people vandalized it,\u201d Katie Martin, an Interior Department spokeswoman, said earlier this month.<\/p>\n Ms. Pirro blamed both the government\u2019s vendor and the administration\u2019s timetable, saying the pool\u2019s poor state \u201cwas 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\u201d on July 4.<\/p>\n The Interior Department did not respond to questions about the filing on Friday evening. It is not clear if there would be consequences for the Interior Department officials whom Ms. Pirro accused of deception.<\/p>\n The Reflecting Pool has been fenced off and drained so the faults in the lining can be inspected and repaired. In a recent filing<\/a> in a separate court case, the Interior Department said it would be closed until August 10.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Mr. Hearn, who pleaded not guilty last month, was the only person known to be facing a felony charge, rather than a misdemeanor, related to Mr. Trump\u2019s false claims of vandalism to the pool. A lawyer for one of the other defendants said Friday night that his case had not been dropped. It was unclear what happened to the rest. Ms. Pirro\u2019s office could not immediately be reached for comment.<\/p>\n Mr. Hearn\u2019s trial on a charge of destruction of property had been scheduled to begin on Sept. 28.<\/p>\n In a statement on Friday, lawyers representing him said that the charges should never have been brought.<\/p>\n The move to dismiss charges \u201cdoes not erase the abuse of government power in arresting and charging a patriotic American who did nothing wrong,\u201d the statement said. \u201cThe government\u2019s approach was ready, fire, aim. The administration owes Mr. Hearn an apology.\u201d<\/p>\n The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n The Reflecting Pool, built in the 1920s, has been plagued for years by water leaking out between its long concrete slabs.<\/p>\n 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. Mr. Trump said at first that he had chosen the firm personally, because it had repaired a pool at one of his golf clubs.<\/p>\n Later, Mr. Trump reversed himself and said he did not know the firm.<\/p>\n The Interior Department asked the firm to do something that had never been done before<\/a> 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 percent profit margin<\/a> 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n Soon, problems appeared. The firm\u2019s first efforts to seal the gaps between the slabs failed, internal documents showed. Bubbles and holes<\/a> appeared in the blue coating. The work fell behind schedule. The pool was finally finished and refilled in early June.<\/p>\n But both Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Mr. 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.<\/p>\n Atlantic Industrial Coatings did not respond to requests for comment on Friday evening. In the past, the company has defended its work, saying that the problems affected a \u201cvery small part\u201d of the pool\u2019s lining, and that it would fix them under warranty.<\/p>\n The Trump administration also awarded a no-bid contract<\/a> to add water-purification devices called \u201cnanobubblers\u201d to the pool\u2019s 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<\/a> during the time that a promotional event connected to an Ultimate Fighting Championship Event at the White House was planned at the Lincoln Memorial.<\/p>\n Mr. 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.<\/p>\n Clarence Williams contributed reporting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Federal prosecutors on Friday said that contractors hired by the Trump administration had botched the renovation of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":311734,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[117862,4074,1452,85681,43153,18540,82861,1082,89530,86664,9,11,10,82860,1069,1876,5614],"class_list":["post-311733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-david-1959","tag-dc","tag-donald-j","tag-government-contracts-and-procurement","tag-hearn","tag-interior-department","tag-jeanine","tag-justice-department","tag-lincoln-memorial-washington","tag-national-mall-washington","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-pirro","tag-trump","tag-united-states-politics-and-government","tag-vandalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311733"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311733\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/311734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}