Prosecutors drop 3 more Reflecting Pool cases
When Donald Trump decided to blame “vandals” for his Reflecting Pool fiasco, many of the president’s critics pointed to the inconvenient fact that these nefarious scoundrels did not appear to exist in reality. Many of the White House’s Republican allies, however, clung to a specific argument.
That some people were formally accused by prosecutors of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool, Republicans said, suggested that Trump’s claims couldn’t be entirely made up. After all, these GOP partisans argued, if the president’s claims didn’t have at least some merit, the charges wouldn’t have been filed in the first place.
This argument has collapsed in humiliating fashion in recent days.
The most notable example came late Friday, when U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, the top federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C., moved to drop her felony case against former Olympian David Hearn, conceding that the damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was caused by “botched work” performed by the project’s contractor, not by criminal conduct.
Hearn, however, was not alone. The New York Times reported: