There was “tremendous evidence.” Not just evidence, but “tremendous evidence.”
As it turns out, it wasn’t that “tremendous” after all.
Federal prosecutors on Friday said that contractors hired by the Trump administration had botched the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, leaving behind “widespread damage” in the pool’s new blue lining, and that the Interior Department had then falsely blamed that damage on vandals.
You mean, what everyone saw, or at least had the capacity to see if they chose to do so, with their own eyes turned out to be true rather than the ridiculous lies that propagated by Trump and his adoring minions about the 150 250 300 350 foot cut of the liner by vandals?
In an extraordinary motion filed Friday evening, the U.S. attorney in Washington, Jeanine Pirro, said she was seeking to dismiss a felony charge against David Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist who was accused of pulling up a piece of the pool’s lining two feet square.
In doing so, Ms. Pirro — a longtime ally of President Trump’s — directly contradicted the president’s repeated claim that the Reflecting Pool’s peeling liner was caused by people slashing its coating with knives. Instead, she said, “the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism.”
In the ordinary course, the government would have conducted its own investigation rather than merely accept the word of another agency, and be reasonably sure that there was evidence before going on TV to proclaim that evidence of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt was overwhelming. In other words, Pirro wouldn’t be able to throw Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior, under the bus to cover for her own humiliating failure.
But on Friday, Ms. Pirro said that her prosecutors had been misled by the Interior Department, which had awarded a no-bid contract to a first-time government contractor to repair the iconic landmark.
Ms. Pirro said that the pool’s new blue coating had actually started to peel within two days of the project’s completion, and that the Interior Department kept that fact from prosecutors, telling them that “nearly all of the damage” was done by vandals.
But both Burgum and Pirro were doing yeoman’s work for their liege, the president, who stated with complete certainty that the damage was done by vandals, since Trump was the greatest builder ever and neither this nor anything else that goes stunningly wrong can be his fault.
The filing was a remarkable and detailed indictment of a project that, until now, the Trump administration had defended as an astounding success. “President Donald J. Trump is an expert builder who fixed the Reflecting Pool permanently before deranged people vandalized it,” Katie Martin, an Interior Department spokeswoman, said earlier this month.
Ms. Pirro blamed both the government’s vendor and the administration’s timetable, saying the pool’s poor state “was the result of a flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, and the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration” on July 4.
You’ll never guess whose fault it wasn’t? That’s why Pirro moved to dismiss the charge against David Hearn, who was made the poster-scapegoat for a massive failure and an administration incapable of taking responsibility for its massive failure, and one that would rather see an innocent person prosecuted than suffer the embarrassment of reality. Hearn was no vandal. There were no vandals. Vandals had nothing to do with it. Trump lied. Again.