According to a report on August 11, two people familiar with the matter say President Trump has asked the Justice Department to take another look at fresh allegations that the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was deliberately vandalized. This is noteworthy because the department had already decided to drop the case.
Here’s the backstory: back in April 2026, Trump ordered a makeover for the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial, swapping the bottom coating from dark gray to “American flag blue.” The project set taxpayers back a cool $14.7 million (roughly 99.16 million yuan). But just weeks after the revamp wrapped up in early June 2026, problems started popping up left and right—algae creeping in, the blue coating peeling off, you name it.
Trump’s camp has repeatedly cried foul, insisting the damage to the pool floor was no accident but pure sabotage. They handed the case to federal prosecutor Jeannine Piro, a Trump appointee, for review. That’s how former Olympic athlete David Herne ended up facing a property destruction charge—accused of “yanking and damaging the pool’s bottom liner” while biking nearby. Herne has pleaded not guilty and flat-out denies any wrongdoing.
But here’s the twist: Piro’s office later dropped the case against Herne, concluding that the widespread damage came down to shoddy contractor work, not the “sabotage” Trump kept touting.
The Wall Street Journal is now reporting signs that the Trump administration might be considering reopening these cases. The paper calls it yet another example of the White House meddling in criminal investigations, a serious departure from the Justice Department’s decades-long norms.
Herne’s lawyer had some sharp words about this, saying any new charges would “add another bizarre twist to a sad chapter in Justice Department history and keep harassing an innocent man.”
A district judge in Washington, D.C. has already dismissed the case against Herne and will decide in the coming weeks whether to give prosecutors another shot at seeking new charges or shut it down for good.
According to the two insiders, any fresh charges would likely be handled by the criminal division at DOJ headquarters—the unit that typically deals with big-ticket items like corporate fraud and transnational crime syndicates, not the local D.C. cases Piro’s office usually handles.
Reports indicate Trump was furious when Piro dropped the case and pushed hard for her to reconsider. Even though he “acknowledged there’s no evidence of sabotage” in a Sunday social media post, he still insists on blaming “saboteurs” for the pool floor damage.