No evidence? No problem. Trump pushes ahead on false claims that Reflecting Pool was vandalized

WASHINGTON (AP) — Jeanine Pirro this week found out there's a tradeoff between loyalty to President Donald Trump and being loyal to reality.

The U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia — a fierce defender and decades-long friend — openly refuted Trump’s claims of vandalism regarding one of his treasured D.C. construction projects , admitting in court filings that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was due to shoddy workmanship.

The moment comes as Trump is struggling to convince Americans to believe what he’s telling them on the economy , his agenda and his war on Iran ahead of pivotal midterm elections in the fall — and reveals the inherent challenges for his team in delivering hard truths he doesn’t want to hear. Trump has historically engaged in exaggeration, but this was a moment in which he wanted a U.S. citizen, Olympic canoeist David Hearn , to be indicted, tried and possibly imprisoned for the act of touching a chunk of sealant in the already damaged pool.

The White House said that Trump was not aware ahead of time that Pirro’s office would drop the charges.

Trump says he told Pirro he was “not happy” about her decision. “Well I just think she was totally wrong,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday night. "And everybody saw the vandalism. All you have to do is look at the tape.”

By publicly rebuking Pirro, Trump sent a message to other administration officials that he is not to be contradicted, regardless of what the facts show.

“He just blows it up like a keg of dynamite — it’s a form of intimidating employees to be in group-think,” said Rice University professor Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian. “'If you work for me, you triple down.' Never disagree with the boss, even in a small fractional way.”

Trump has faced withering criticism for launching a war with Iran without fully laying out the rationale for the public or considering that country’s ability to withstand intense bombing. Trump snubbed a housing bil l to address the affordability problems that voters say are their biggest concern, letting it become law without his signature.

Some Republican lawmakers have suggested that Trump is being sheltered from facts or chalk up his choices to poor staff work. During Trump’s second term, Republican senators including Ted Cruz of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina have said publicly the president was receiving “bad advice,” a subtle critique of the president that shifts blame onto the aides who are supposed to be providing him with credible information.

The latest blow-up "reflects a president who is struggling to shape the narrative as his national approval ratings remain extremely low,” said Julian Zelizer, a political history professor at Princeton University. “The more controversy that he faces — over Iran, the Epstein files , inflation and more — the less control he has and the stronger the chances that he will be forced to confront reality.”

The president continues to dwell on the 2020 election that he falsely claims to have won. He likes to boast that America is booming with an unverifiable $19.2 trillion in investments from foreign countries, even as economic growth has been meager over the prior three months. He posted a Jesus-like picture of himself on social media and said after a backlash that he thought it depicted him as a medical doctor.

The White House did not respond to questions about how aides brief the president and whether officials feel comfortable providing information that could contradict his public statements.

Until now, Pirro, a former Westchester County judge and TV show host, has largely been faithful to Trump's wishes. Her office sent a subpoena in January to the Federal Reserve regarding the congressional testimony by the central bank's then-chair, Jerome Powell, about a $2.5 billion renovation of its headquarters .

Pirro defended her decision to threaten Powell, who said the threat of a criminal indictment was really a pretext to pressure the Fed into slashing its benchmark interest rates in accordance with Trump's wishes.

“This office makes decisions based on the merits, nothing more and nothing less,” Pirro posted on X. “We agree with the chairman of the Federal Reserve that no one is above the law, and that is why we expect his full cooperation.”

Her actions temporarily slowed efforts in the Senate to confirm Kevin Warsh as the next Fed chair. The Justice Department dropped the probe in April, roughly a month after a government prosecutor said in a closed-door court hearing that the government hadn’t found any evidence of a crime .

On the reflecting pool, Pirro pursued the investigation despite what defense lawyers say was abundant evidence from the outset that the damage at the pool was the result of preexisting problems that had nothing to do with Hearn. A new court filing from Hearn’s team disputes the Justice Department’s contention that it only recently learned its case was flawed and urges a judge to not only dismiss it but to foreclose the possibility of ever resurrecting it.

“From day one, the case against Mr. Hearn was motivated by political considerations and devoid of adequate factual support,” defense lawyers wrote. “Those political pressures have not dissipated in the mere four weeks since the government saw fit to obtain the indictment.”

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche declined to discuss internal Justice Department conversations related to the case, including whether leadership was aware in advance of Pirro’s decision to dismiss the indictment.

He also deflected on the question of whether or not he supported the decision, acknowledging on one hand that Trump has “every right to be extraordinarily frustrated with damage done to our national monuments in this city and elsewhere” while simultaneously praising Pirro for what he asserted was “an unprecedented effort” to improve safety in the nation’s capital.

“When you look at the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s body of work over the past year and a half and where we are in this city compared to where we were, they are doing a phenomenal job,” Blanche said. “Now does that mean that every case goes exactly the way that President Trump wants or I want or U.S. Attorney Pirro wants? Of course not, it doesn’t.”

What makes the reflecting pool incident different was that the administration contradicted claims of property damage made repeatedly by the president.

On Friday, the government moved to dismiss the criminal case and said that any damage to the pool was caused by the bungled work of the contractor and “the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration in the weeks surrounding Independence Day 2026."

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has supported Trump’s claims that vandals damaged the pool. That suggests that the conflict around this issue could continue to simmer.

While Trump and many of his supporters are able to exist within their own information bubble, the administration had basically declared in court that the president was wrong. That was different from a judicial ruling or news report fact-checking him, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

“It’s difficult to discredit that by saying these are anti-Trump forces,” she said.

Associated Press writers Eric Tucker in Washington and Darlene Superville in Rancho Palos Verdes, California contributed to this report.