DC US Attorney Jeanine Pirro moved to dismiss the felony vandalism case against former Olympic canoeist David Hearn after discovering the Interior Department had withheld evidence that a contractor's rushed, flawed work, not Hearn, caused the damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
Pirro's office filed the motion on July 31, less than a month after a grand jury indicted Hearn on one felony count of destruction of property. The filing lays the blame squarely on the Department of Interior, which prosecutors say told them before the indictment that "nearly all of the damage to the Reflecting Pool was due to vandalism." That claim, the motion makes clear, was wrong, and the department knew it, or should have.
The real culprit, according to the court filing, was Atlantic Industrial Coatings, a Virginia-based company that received a no-bid contract worth more than $14 million to paint the pool's 68,000-square-foot bottom. AIC's coating job started peeling almost immediately after it was finished, two days, to be exact. And a National Park Service engineer flagged the problem in writing on June 11, eight days before Hearn ever set foot in the pool.
AIC began work in early May, spraying Rhino 406 and Pipeliner 5000 coatings over the pool bottom for most of the month. Rain delays and complications with expansion joints slowed the project. The crew finished on June 9, and by June 11, the lining had already begun to fail.
A National Park Service engineer sent an internal email that day raising the alarm. The New York Post reported the engineer's warning in detail:
"I stated my concern that this 'overspray' along the perimeter of the pool could lead to a 1′-2′ strip that is vulnerable to peeling. The contractor would not confirm in field if this was or wasn't a risk."
The contractor wouldn't say whether its own work might peel. Within days, it did. And eight days after that warning, on June 19, Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist who happened to be at the National Mall, tugged at a piece of the already-failing lining. National Park Service employees told him to stop. He did.
Hearn remarked that authorities were "awfully sensitive about the pool." He also described the peeled-back lining as "really funny." Park Police arrested him and cuffed him next to his bicycle. Video of the arrest circulated on X shortly afterward.
The Interior Department assessed just $1,000 in damage attributable to Hearn's tugging, a fraction of a fraction of the $14 million contract that produced a coating job already falling apart on its own.
Pirro visited the Reflecting Pool on July 1. Her office convened a grand jury the next day, July 2, and secured an indictment against Hearn. He pleaded not guilty earlier this month.
But the timeline in Pirro's own filing reveals how thin the government's information was at the time of indictment. Prosecutors had to rely on what the filing calls "barebones police reports" from US Park Police. The department had not yet turned over body-worn camera footage, which eventually covered roughly 10 individuals, or the contractor records that would upend the case.
Pirro, who has made accountability a hallmark of her tenure as DC's top federal prosecutor, has also pledged to hold parents accountable for juvenile crime in the District, signaling a willingness to use the office aggressively. In this case, her office turned that same energy toward the federal bureaucracy that misled it.
The filing states that DOI "provided less than fulsome information at the outset of this case." It gets sharper from there. Prosecutors wrote that they had to reach out to the department "dozens and dozens of times" before DOI "slowly started trickling information" to them. In mid-July, the office finally received 695 megabytes of additional documents about the installation process, a data dump that changed everything.
Those documents showed the damage was the result of "overspraying and a failure of the coatings to bond," compounded by what the filing describes as "the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration in the weeks surrounding Independence Day 2026."
The filing's conclusion was blunt: "Given all of this newly discovered information, it is difficult to attribute the widespread damage to the Reflecting Pool to vandalism, let alone to establish that fact beyond a reasonable doubt."
The most damaging passage in the motion targets DOI directly. Prosecutors wrote that "DOI's failure to fully and accurately provide information to USAODC undermined the government's ability to abide by these responsibilities." In plain English: the Interior Department kept the prosecutors in the dark, and the prosecution fell apart because of it.
This is not a case where prosecutors overreached on ambiguous facts. By Pirro's own account, her office was actively misled by a federal agency that characterized the pool damage as vandalism while sitting on records showing a botched contractor job was the real cause. The grand jury heard a version of events that DOI knew, or had every reason to know, was incomplete.
Pirro has handled high-profile cases since taking the DC US Attorney post, including the prosecution of Cole Allen in the Trump assassination attempt. Her willingness to publicly fault a sister federal agency in a court filing is notable. Prosecutors rarely air that kind of grievance on the record.
President Trump had previously claimed that others also received citations and that six people were arrested in connection with damage to the pool in June. He described damage including a "350 foot gash, made by a very sharp knife or razors." The motion to dismiss does not address those claims or other individuals. It deals solely with Hearn.
Hearn's defense attorneys, Norm Eisen, Mary Dohrmann, and Steve Levin, issued a statement that did not hold back. They called the prosecution an "abuse of government power" and demanded accountability:
"The Trump administration's case against Davey Hearn should never have been brought. Its dismissal today does not erase the abuse of government power in arresting and charging a patriotic American who did nothing wrong."
They also offered a sharper summary of the prosecution's failure, saying "the government's approach was ready, fire, aim" and that "the administration owes Mr. Hearn an apology."
Pirro has shown she is willing to use her office to pursue tough cases, she has targeted parents of minors involved in DC teen takeovers with prosecution threats, among other initiatives. But the Hearn case shows what happens when prosecutors depend on a federal bureaucracy that feeds them bad information and then stonewalls requests for the rest.
Several questions remain unanswered. The Interior Department did not respond to requests for comment. It is unclear who authorized the no-bid contract to AIC, why DOI withheld the contractor records before the indictment, or what the current status of the Reflecting Pool repairs is. The motion to dismiss had not yet been formally granted by the court as of the filing date.
The broader pattern in Pirro's tenure has been one of aggressive enforcement paired with a demand for straight answers from the agencies she works with. In this case, she got neither, and an American citizen paid the price.
When a federal agency can mislead prosecutors, get a man indicted on a felony, and then hide behind a slow drip of documents, the problem isn't one canoeist tugging at a piece of peeling paint. The problem is a bureaucracy that nobody held accountable until the case blew up in court.
