Trump Tells U.S. Attorney Pirro to Reverse Course on Dropped Reflecting Pool Case

President Trump wants his own hand-picked U.S. Attorney to undo a case her office already told a federal judge shouldn't go forward.

On Friday, Trump posted on Truth Social that Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., should "re-visit her hastily made decision" to drop charges against David Hearn, a former Olympian accused of vandalizing the newly renovated Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, according to Reuters.

The pool underwent a renovation as part of Trump's broader push to remake the capital ahead of the nation's 250th birthday celebration last month. Sometime after, the liner started peeling. The Justice Department, under Pirro, initially accused Hearn of deliberately damaging it.

Then Pirro's own office reversed course. In a court filing last week, prosecutors told the judge that flawed installation, not vandalism, caused the liner to peel, according to Reuters. Pirro's Justice Department put that conclusion in writing to a federal court. Her office then moved to drop the charge entirely.

A judge granted the government's own request to dismiss the case Thursday, court records show. Hearn has denied any wrongdoing throughout.

Trump isn't having it. He's repeatedly claimed vandals damaged the pool, and this week he ripped into Pirro personally, saying she "choked" under pressure from the judge and "folded like an umbrella," according to Reuters.

The problem with the president's position

Trump is entitled to be skeptical of any decision that drops a case he cares about. That's a fair instinct for a president who made the mall renovation a signature project. Nobody wants to hear that a costly public works project failed because of shoddy contracting work rather than someone else's sabotage.

But the people who actually looked at the evidence, Pirro's own prosecutors, told the court the liner failure was an installation defect. That's not a talking point from the defense. That's the government's own filing.

If Trump has evidence contradicting his own DOJ's court filing, he hasn't presented it. Reuters reported the Justice Department and Pirro's office did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the president's demand. No new evidence has surfaced publicly that shows vandalism after Pirro's office already concluded otherwise in a sworn court filing.

Pirro is a former Fox News host and one of Trump's longest and most loyal political allies. She has zero incentive to embarrass the president or manufacture an excuse to let someone off the hook. If her own office concluded the vandalism theory didn't hold up, that's a strong signal the theory genuinely didn't hold up.

What this actually is

This is a president publicly pressuring a federal prosecutor in his own administration to reopen a dismissed criminal case based on his personal belief rather than new evidence.

Conservatives who care about prosecutorial independence and due process should want charges dropped when the physical evidence doesn't support them. Charging an innocent man because a public project failed due to contractor error isn't law enforcement.

Hearn was accused of a crime he says he didn't commit, and the government's own case collapsed under its own filing. Pressuring Pirro to revive it anyway, absent new evidence, looks less like law enforcement and more like political theater aimed at protecting the administration's preferred narrative about the renovation.

What's unresolved

Nobody has publicly identified who or what actually caused the liner to peel beyond "flawed installation," according to the court filing described by Reuters. No contractor has been named as responsible. No cost estimate for repairs has been disclosed in available reporting.

Whether Pirro actually reopens the case, and on what grounds, remains to be seen. Her office hasn't responded publicly to Trump's demand as of this writing. If she does revisit it without new evidence, that's a story about political pressure overriding a prosecutor's own factual findings. If she doesn't, Trump will likely keep hammering her publicly, an ally he installed now facing sustained criticism from the president himself over a case his own DOJ said didn't hold up.