Trump described the crime three times, in detail. Someone had slit the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool liner with “a knife, a box cutter and a razor,” he said, opening 350 feet of it. He called them “thugs,” “sick,” “terrible.”
Nobody was ever charged with making those gashes.
Park Police searched the pool anyway. Interior swore out its account, a grand jury indicted, and Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, accused David “Davey” Hearn, an Olympic canoeist arrested in June, of “forcefully and violently pulling up and removing the bottom liner with both hands” on 2 July.
Prosecutors gave it up on Friday. They moved in D.C. Superior Court to dismiss the felony indictment. “Had [the Interior Department] been forthcoming with the information clearly in its possession, the government would not have sought a grand jury indictment,” they wrote. Interior “provided less than fulsome information at the outset of this case.”
That makes three Justice Department cases to collapse in nine days. The Minnesota anti-ICE protester prosecutions came apart on 31 July with “missteps mounting,” the New York Times reported. Axios reported on 23 July that the department walked away from its subpoenas against the Times.
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