Trump has lashed out at U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro after she dropped vandalism cases and blamed damage at the pool on rushed and flawed work by a contractor.
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Standing on the basin of the Lincoln Memorial’s Reflecting Pool in early May, President Donald Trump promised to fix the leaks and other problems that had long plagued one of the capital’s most recognizable landmarks.
“It’s going to last, I would say 50 years,” he said. “It’ll last, it’s going to last a long time.”
Trump vowed to finish the job in time for July Fourth celebrations on the National Mall. He and his aides cast the project, launched with a multimillion-dollar no-bid contract and without the normal review process, as a demonstration of how quickly the longtime real estate magnate could transform Washington.
Trump’s changes instead lasted a few days. The basin’s coating began to visibly peel, with chunks of Trump’s new pool liner, tinted “American Flag Blue,” littering the surface and algae blooms clouding the water.
Since then, the administration’s response — to blame “vandals” for the damage — has morphed into a political headache, raising questions about what leaders in the administration knew as the government pursued criminal charges against four people, including former U.S. Olympian David Hearn.
The president is furious at one of his most ardent supporters, Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the nation’s capital, for dropping vandalism charges against the four people in recent days. Prosecutors in a Friday court filing blamed the damage on flawed installation work and said the Interior Department had not shared critical information in a timely manner.
Trump lashed out at Pirro on social media and delivered a “very pointed” message in a phone call Saturday, a White House official said. On Monday, he renewed the criticism from the Oval Office, saying she had “folded like an umbrella.”
The Reflecting Pool project, intended as a showcase for Trump’s ability to quickly get things done, has instead become a speed bump in his second term. Its problem-riddled rollout comes as Trump presses ahead with larger and more complex projects that would remake Washington’s skyline, including a new White House ballroom and a 250-foot-tall triumphal arch.
The pool was drained again July 10 for more repairs.
Government records “strongly suggest that a rushed and botched installation by AIC, the primary contractor,” led to the visible damage in the pool’s new liner, Pirro and one of her deputies wrote in the filing Friday. Pirro accused the Interior Department of withholding relevant documents that would have scuttled the investigation.
The pool’s problems had sparked tirades from Trump inside the White House, and the president soon grew angry for another reason: Pirro did not give the White House a heads-up about dropping the charges, a White House official said. The president spoke with her by phone Saturday to discuss the decision, a call first reported by CNN.
Trump publicly turned his ire on Pirro too, saying on social media he disagreed “100%” with her decision and again insisting that vandals were to blame. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum chimed in to agree that vandals “repeatedly” damaged the site, claiming the acts were caught on camera and insisting his agency had been forthcoming with Justice Department lawyers.
The White House and Interior Department declined further comment, referring to Trump and Burgum’s posts. Atlantic Industrial Coatings, the contractor, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Outside observers for weeks had dismissed claims of widespread vandalism. A Washington Post analysis of satellite imagery and photos and videos taken in June during the renovation concluded that the basin’s peeling was probably caused by application errors. Waterproofing experts who reviewed the evidence reached the same conclusion.
The administration publicly disputed that the coating had been improperly applied, but on Monday, Trump acknowledged some frustration with contractors’ work.
“I’m not saying I was 100 percent thrilled with the contractor, but the contractor was rushing,” he said in the Oval Office, noting that workers had a tight deadline. He saved his sharpest words for Pirro.
“I guess she choked. I don’t know what the hell happened,” he said.
Pirro, a former Fox News host, had been a staunch defender of the president before joining his administration, and in her current role had pursued several claims of wrongdoing involving Trump’s perceived political foes — having setbacks in court along the way, including a failed attempt to prosecute a D.C. man for misdemeanor assault after throwing a sandwich at a federal agent last year.
The 20-page filing by prosecutors to drop Hearn’s case was extraordinary not only because it contradicted what Trump and Pirro had said publicly about charges, but because it painstakingly outlined Interior Department documents showing problems with the liner’s installation and how prosecutors came to feel deceived. Pirro reviewed and signed off on the motion after speaking with Michael Spence, the chief of the unit handling Superior Court cases in the U.S. attorney’s office, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
Norm Eisen, a lawyer for Hearn, said he did not accept the claim that the Justice Department was unaware of evidence indicating Hearn’s innocence. Eisen cited public photographs and reports demonstrating that the damage probably stemmed from contractor errors.
“The idea that Jeanine Pirro and her office were somehow hornswoggled by Interior is not credible,” Eisen said.
This account is drawn from interviews with Justice, Interior and White House officials as well as public statements and documents disclosed by the Trump administration in legal battles over the Reflecting Pool. Some of the people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss matters publicly.
Trump decided to revamp the century-old pool early this year, saying that friends had criticized the historic site’s appearance and smell.
“I was getting complaints from people saying that it wasn’t good,” Trump told reporters. “I called Doug [Burgum] and he agreed.”
The pool’s last significant renovation began during the Obama administration, took several years and cost $34 million. Trump concluded he could do it much faster and far cheaper.
The president also believed he could personally drive the project, having transformed the relationship between the White House and National Park Service staff. Trump had torn down the White House’s East Wing to build a planned 90,000-square-foot ballroom addition, begun planning a triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery and envisioned other major projects on federal parkland, such as renovating several golf courses. The pool, in comparison, felt straightforward, Trump would tell allies.
The administration had also stripped away layers between on-the-ground Park Service employees and senior Interior and White House officials. Many senior Park Service employees left amid U.S. DOGE Service cuts last year that reduced the agency’s staff by about a quarter, leaving fewer experienced officials between junior staff and political appointees.
Officials with little historic preservation experience wound up making construction decisions while Park Service staff with experience renovating the Mall would end up being sidelined.
By March, the National Park Service was fast-tracking the pool project at the White House’s direction. The changes, which included applying a new tinted epoxy to its basin, did not undergo the normally required reviews because “there is no option other” than to speed the project to meet the administration’s timeline, a Park Service official wrote in a March 30 document.
Trump unveiled the project in the Oval Office on April 23, releasing an accompanying promotional video later that day and calling it a “business study.”
“It will look far more beautiful, more beautiful than it did in 1922 when they built it,” Trump said. Rather than spend years and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars, he said, his renovation would cost less than $2 million and take less than two weeks. That cost would later balloon.
Almost immediately, historic preservationists and past administration officials cautioned Trump was moving too quickly.
Charles A. Birnbaum, who heads the Cultural Landscape Foundation, an education and advocacy organization focused on historic sites, said after Trump’s announcement that he didn’t understand how “something so important could be changed without testing” the new materials.
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“The notion has been, do the work and ask questions later,” Birnbaum said, referencing Trump’s other local construction projects, such as his demolition of the White House’s East Wing to build a new ballroom. Birnbaum’s group also sued to stop the pool project, although a judge rejected an injunction.
The work on the pool began May 5, as contractors cleaned the site and began spraying a specialized protective coating, Rhino 406, on a portion of the basin, according to the Justice Department. Then on May 6 it rained, forcing workers to pause for a day.
Behind the scenes, warning signs came quickly.
“It appears AIC is significantly behind schedule,” an employee with a contractor responsible for monitoring AIC’s progress wrote in an email shared with Interior Department officials on May 7, according to the Justice Department.
More delays followed. Rain repeatedly halted work, and contractors ran out of Rhino 406 on May 18, forcing another pause until more supplies arrived, according to the Justice Department.
The job was largely complete by June 7, and workers began refilling the pool. A final inspection was held June 9, the Justice Department wrote, as the pool officially opened — one month later, and costing more than $12 million more than Trump had originally promised.
The cleaned-up pool initially won some bipartisan praise, and the president posted a flurry of photos to his social media account. Trump also shared images of the pool looking grimy and filled with trash — saying that was its appearance under predecessor Joe Biden — compared with a pristine pool that he said was due to his leadership.
“Everybody’s looking at that reflecting pool; they can’t believe it reflects,” Trump said in the Oval Office the following day. “When I’m here, it’ll be perfect.”
The next day, a Park Service engineer concluded that the pool’s new liner had already begun to peel, blaming contractor error, according to documents released Friday by the Justice Department.
Soon, passersby noticed the peeling too. Hearn told The Post that when he visited the pool on June 19, he saw a piece of liner that was already partially detached from the pool bottom and reached into the water to see what it felt like.
He was quickly arrested by U.S. Park Police officers and charged with vandalizing the site. More arrests followed.
The charges gave administration officials cover for their claim that the pool’s problems stemmed from deliberate damage. But none of those arrested were accused of the most serious conduct that Trump publicly alleged — using blades or chemicals to damage the liner.
“They took some form of knife or blade, and put a 250 foot long gash into the beautiful facade of what took so much work, competence, and money to build and complete. They also poured corrosive and destructive chemicals into the Pool,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on June 20, increasing the length of the gash to 300 and then 350 feet in subsequent posts.
Frank Lands, the Park Service’s deputy director, also told a federal judge in a separate case on June 24 that foam sealant on the pool had been “cut with a sharp knife or razor.” Lands, a former Army deputy garrison commander who joined the Park Service in 2021, had become a central figure in carrying out Trump’s policies in Washington. He declined to comment to The Post.
Pirro, whose office handles prosecutions of both local and federal crimes in D.C., initially framed the alleged vandalism as an assault on Americans’ shared heritage. She visited the pool on July 1 to inspect the damage, according to court records. When a grand jury indicted Hearn the next day on a felony charge of destruction of property — the sole felony vandalism charge pursued in connection with the pool — Pirro gave a news conference and later a Fox News interview in which she described him “forcefully and violently” tugging at the liner with both hands and shouting at a Park Service employee who told him to stop.
“I didn’t charge anything harshly,” she told reporters at the time, adding that “there was tremendous damage.”
But inside the U.S. attorney’s office, frustration was building with Interior officials, who had yet to furnish the information prosecutors were requesting about the damage to the pool. All the prosecutors had were a set of “bare-bones” police reports from the Park Service officers who had arrested Hearn and three other defendants who were charged with misdemeanor offenses, according to a Justice Department filing.
When Hearn’s defense team toured the site on July 17, Pirro visited again. With the pool drained, prosecutors could see the damage more clearly, according to her office’s court filing. The peeling wasn’t just around the edges, court papers say, but in the middle of the pool too — spots that would have been very difficult for vandals to reach.
Pirro said her office immediately requested Interior Department records about the liner installation process.
“These documents indicated a rushed and flawed installation process, with repeated failures of the lining during the installation process, and extensive peeling of the lining throughout the Reflecting Pool,” Pirro’s office said in the court filing. The records included emails and reports documenting the liner’s installation flaws, rain-related setbacks, blistering and peeling — all of it in writing before the charges had been filed in court.
“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.
Prosecutors also dropped the charges against the three people facing misdemeanors.
One of them, Justin Carreno, lost his job as a government contractor because of the case and suffered reputational damage, according to his lawyer David Benowitz.
“The charge never should have been brought in the first place,” Benowitz said.
The Justice Department could try to charge the cases again, but it would be difficult given prosecutors’ conclusions in the filing.
Trump has seemingly continued his own investigation.
On Saturday, the president shared security footage on Truth Social that showed people with their hands in the reflecting pool. “Look for yourselves at the VANDALISM that took place at The Reflecting Pool,” he wrote. “The material is being cut with a knife or a box cutter, for all to see!” The video shows three people reaching into the water along the north edge of the pool, but it is not clear whether anyone is holding a knife or a box cutter.
The video appears to be a longer version of a clip previously shared by the U.S. Park Police on June 24 seeking the public’s help identifying a person in the footage. Police said it was recorded on June 19 at 3:36 p.m., roughly an hour before Hearn was approached by officers.
The saga has angered congressional Democrats, who have launched investigations into Trump’s project and say that passersby never should have been arrested, and left some Republican lawmakers bemused and befuddled.
“It’s pretty close to a textbook definition of kakistocracy,” said Rep. Jared Huffman (D-California), the top Democrat on a House committee that oversees the national parkland where the Reflecting Pool is located. “Pirro is between the proverbial rock and a hard place — getting fired if she tells the truth, or getting disbarred if she continues to lie.”
Among the Republicans struggling to make sense of the episode was Sen. John Kennedy (R-Louisiana).
“The whole thing is a multiple vehicle pileup,” he said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” musing about Trump and Pirro’s motivations. “I don’t know why she filed the suit without doing a full investigation. She says she relied on the Department of Interior. But she was smart to pull it back.”
The pool is closed until Aug. 10 for more renovations, the administration has said in court filings.
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Isaac Arnsdorf, Perry Stein and Meg Kelly contributed to this report.
