WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Saturday posted photographs he said document deliberate vandalism at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, escalating his public pressure campaign on U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro to reopen a case her office dropped last week.
Trump shared images from freelance photographer Andrew Leyden on Truth Social, saying they show "pure VANDALISM" at the site where former Olympian David Hearn was charged with felony destruction of property.
Trump wrote that witnesses saw people "on their knees with their hands in the water at the exact location of the 'slashes'" and claimed the flexible sections of the pool's coating were cut with a knife. The post is Trump's most direct assertion yet that the physical evidence supports prosecution—an argument his own appointed U.S. attorney rejected when she asked a court last Friday to dismiss the indictment.
Hearn, a competitive canoeist who represented the United States at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, was indicted July 2 on one count of felony destruction of property. U.S. Park Police alleged he grabbed and pulled at a loose section of the pool's coating on June 19 and continued after a National Park Service employee told him to stop. Prosecutors initially said the damage exceeded $1,000—the threshold for a federal felony charge.
Pirro's office moved to dismiss after the Department of the Interior turned over documents that prosecutors said had been withheld before the grand jury returned the indictment. In court filings, prosecutors wrote that DOI provided only "barebones" reports and did not disclose records showing problems with how the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, installed the coating. The filing said the damage in June 2026 resulted from flawed installation and a rush to finish the project before events tied to the America 250 celebration around Independence Day.
"Had DOI been forthcoming with the information clearly in its possession, the government would not have sought a grand jury indictment," prosecutors wrote in the dismissal filing. The court dismissed the indictment without prejudice, meaning charges can be refiled if new evidence emerges.
Trump has not accepted that framing. Earlier this week he said Pirro had "choked" under pressure from a judge and "folded like an umbrella." The day after the dismissal, he wrote on Truth Social: "I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool. I don't know what she was thinking?"
Saturday's post went further. Trump wrote that Pirro "should re-visit her hastily made decision" and identified two factors he said she failed to weigh: Hearn's connection to ActBlue, which Trump called a "disgraceful fundraising SCAM," and his legal representation by attorney Norm Eisen and the watchdog group CREW. Trump described Eisen as a "TRUMP DERANGED SLEAZEBAG, Political Hack Lawyer" and said CREW uses charitable status "for political purposes which is, to the best of my knowledge, ILLEGAL."
Eisen and co-counsel Mary Dohrmann and Steve Levin issued a statement after the dismissal last Friday calling the case an abuse of government power. "The Trump administration's case against Davey Hearn should never have been brought," the attorneys said. "Its dismissal today does not erase the abuse of government power in arresting and charging a patriotic American who did nothing wrong. The government's approach was ready, fire, aim."
The conflict puts Pirro—a Trump ally and former Fox News host he appointed to the D.C. U.S. attorney post—in direct public dispute with the president who gave her the job. Trump's criticism is unusually sharp for a sitting president dressing down his own appointee by name on a case-by-case basis. Pirro has not publicly responded to the weekend posts.
The dismissal's terms complicate the legal picture. Because the court dismissed without prejudice at prosecutors' request, the Justice Department retains the option to seek a new indictment if it develops sufficient evidence. Trump's public identification of Hearn's political associations and legal team as reasons to revive the case creates a record that defense attorneys would almost certainly use to argue selective prosecution if charges are refiled.
At the center of the dispute is a factual question the court never resolved: whether Hearn caused any damage at all, or whether the coating failure the contractor produced made any individual act of touching irrelevant. Prosecutors themselves wrote that the new DOI documents made it difficult to prove Hearn caused the damage beyond a reasonable doubt. Trump's position is that the photos prove otherwise. Pirro's office concluded the documents proved the opposite.
