On Tuesday, following the dramatic collapse of President Donald Trump’s case against Olympian David Hearn and others accused of vandalising the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, top Senate Democrats on two committees that oversee the Interior Department demanded that the agency’s inspector general investigate how the vandalism lie was “cooked up” in the first place.
According to exclusive reporting by the Washington Post, “The Interior Department had publicly blamed damage to the pool’s new liner on ‘vandals,’ a claim echoed by Trump and prosecutors who pressed charges against several people. The Justice Department on Friday said that Interior officials did not share relevant internal information that indicated the problems were due to contractors’ mistakes and has dropped the cases.” Now Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Martin Heinrich (D-NM) of the Environment and Public Works and the Energy and Natural Resources committees, respectively, called for an “immediate investigation” into whether Interior Department officials misled the president about the cause of the damage.
“Numerous questions remain: How was the vandalism lie cooked up? How did it get to President Trump’s desk? Or did it originate from the White House?” Whitehouse and Heinrich wrote to the inspector general’s office. In the letter, they demand to know “what employees of the Department of the Interior knew — and when they knew it — regarding the peeling of the coating and other engineering issues at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.” While Trump had been vocal about his demands for the prosecution of Hearn and others accused of vandalism, the Senators noted that the Interior’s own documentation acknowledged the damage was caused by “a rushed and flawed installation process, with repeated failures of the lining during the installation process, and extensive peeling of the lining throughout.”
As the letter mentions, Trump has repeatedly declared that vandals had cut a 250-foot-gash — at times increasing that number to 350 feet — using a “very sharp knife or razors,” even though the drained pool later showed no evidence of this. And even after the Department of Justice found that the Interior knew the damage was caused by faulty installation, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum continued to push Trump’s already debunked claim, tweeting, “The evidence is clear, vandals have repeatedly caused damage to the Reflecting Pool.”
According to the Post, “A spokesman for the inspector general declined to comment on the letter. The inspector general, which is intended to be an independent watchdog of the agency’s actions, is not bound to open an investigation.”