House Democrats are pushing the Trump administration to release records related to the felony prosecution of a former Olympian who had been accused of damaging the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, questioning whether prosecutors were misled in an attempt to conceal a “botched” renovation.
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Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee made the move days after a judge granted federal prosecutors’ request to drop a felony charge against David Hearn, attributing the pool damage to faulty installation.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) sent a letter Tuesday to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro requesting the release of all documents related to the decision to prosecute Hearn and any communications between the agencies and the White House about the case.
The letter called on the departments to answer whether President Donald Trump exerted pressure to “retaliate against and scapegoat an American citizen.”
“How did this debacle happen?” wrote Raskin, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. “The conclusion seems inescapable that at least one, if not both, of you have misled the American public about the evidence and used it to corrupt and weaponize our justice system against an innocent 67-year-old American citizen.”
Pirro’s office maintains it didn’t know about the widespread damage at the Reflecting Pool until after the indictment, accusing the Interior Department of withholding documents indicating the peeling was caused by flawed installation. But Hearn’s attorneys say there’s evidence that they knew of problems before indicting him.
Asked for comment on the letter, the White House referred The Washington Post to Trump’s previous Truth Social posts alleging vandalism.
The Interior Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“The Department of Justice follows the evidence when determining if crimes have been committed,” the federal agency said in a statement. “We always evaluate any case based on the facts and the law.”
Raskin’s letter comes after Hearn’s attorneys alleged that prosecutors may have misled jurors to secure an indictment against him. In a filing last week, the attorneys alleged that a key government witness testified that repairs would have been necessary regardless of Hearn’s actions but that prosecutors recalled the witness and “elicited” them to say that damage “attributable to Mr. Hearn” would be more than $1,000.
The attorneys are asking the judge to ensure federal prosecutors can’t charge Hearn again in the future.
Pirro, a longtime Trump ally, has faced intense public scrutiny over the decision to prosecute Hearn and others alleged to have damaged the pool and again after abruptly dropping the cases.
In the letter, Raskin points to Trump’s repeated comments about renovating the Reflecting Pool. Raskin also questioned the noncompetitive process in awarding a contract and referred to reporting from CNN that another company declined the July 4 deadline.
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“President Trump’s ‘highly sophisticated’ and slapdash paint job didn’t even last 100 days, much less a century,” Raskin said.
Atlantic Industrial Coatings, the contractor, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Despite reports of Reflecting Pool renovation failures before June 19, when Hearn touched a piece of the detached liner, Raskin said Trump and Burgum latched on to the claim that vandalism was to blame. Pirro followed with a felony charge against Hearn in July. He was initially charged with a misdemeanor count of destruction of government property.
The case collapsed the same month. Pirro’s office said in a court filing that the Interior Department did not provide sufficient information ahead of the indictment, including an email from an engineer on June 11 detailing the peeling of the liner.
“After DOJ’s filing, President Trump went off the deep end of the Reflecting Pool, you might say,” Raskin said in the letter.
Trump has blasted Pirro for dropping the vandalism charge against Hearn and three others and has continued to blame the former Olympian.
On Sunday, Trump again accused Hearn of “‘violently’ ripping and tugging at the Pool’s somewhat delicate coating” in a social media post. He conceded that there was “some contractor error” due to the rushed job but that it damaged only a small area.
Raskin poked jabs at Trump in the letter, referencing “local vandalism crimes,” including the East Wing demolition and the affixing of Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center. A judge later ordered the removal of the name.
The letter requests that the records in the pool case be shared by Aug. 25.
In a statement Tuesday, attorneys for Hearn said they “welcome any Congressional oversight that seeks the truth.”
“As we have stated from the beginning, the indictment of Davey Hearn was a clear miscarriage of justice and an egregious misuse of government power,” Norm Eisen, Mary Dohrmann and Steve Levin said in the statement. “Our client and the American public deserve the truth, so it won’t happen again.”
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