President Donald Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum still say vandals damaged the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, a day after federal prosecutors said government contractors — and the DOI — were to blame.
Trump criticized U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro’s motion to dismiss the case after the agency assessed that a “flawed installation by the contractor” caused damage to the famed water feature. The filing contradicted the president and other White House officials’ weekslong allegations of vandalism.
“I don’t know what she was thinking?” Trump said of Pirro, one of his staunch allies, on Truth Social Saturday. “There may have been some contractor difficulty, but the major damage was caused by VANDALS!”
Trump attached an image of a sizable imprint of the numbers “8647,” a sequence interpreted by the White House as a threat against the president, left on the National Mall’s grass. Authorities have said they were investigating the matter.
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Burgum also decried Pirro’s decision not to prosecute David Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist, and others accused of vandalism. Pirro’s office cast blame on the DOI and other agencies in the court filing, saying the department had erroneously presented a grand jury with evidence of vandalism despite recently unveiled documents that proved otherwise.
Burgum maintained on Saturday that his department provided the U.S. attorney’s office with “expert and eyewitness testimony to the damage done by vandals and provided every piece of evidence they asked for in the requested time line detailing each area of damage at the pool.”
Some of the vandalism was also caught on camera, Burgum said.
“We won’t back down to deranged people who want to destroy, deface, or degrade our monuments,” Burgum wrote in an X post.
Trump had ordered changes to the Reflecting Pool ahead of the Fourth of July holiday. Algae blooms appeared shortly after the nearly $15 million work was completed and blue material surfaced at the pool, likely from the coating Trump wanted to be painted “American flag blue.”
Hearn’s legal team said on Friday after his charges were dropped that the Justice Department should never have brought the case forward to begin with. They demanded a public apology.
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