Reflecting pool damage was caused by ‘botched’ renovation, not vandalism, prosecutors say as they ask to drop charges
In a court filing on Friday, the office of the US attorney in Washington DC, Jeanine Pirro, moved to dismiss charges against David Hearn, a former Olympian her office had accused on vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool.
In asking to dismiss the criminal indictment, Pirro’s office told the DC Superior Court that “it was not until after the return of the indictment,” that the Department of the Interior “provided additional documents” to prosecutors “indicating that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in June 2026 was the result of flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings (“AIC”), and the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration in the weeks surrounding Independence Day 2026.”
“It was not until after these documents were produced,” Pirro’s office added, that her office “first became aware of information showing that the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism as initially represented by DOI.”
“The Trump administration’s case against Davey Hearn should never have been brought,” Hearn’s lawyers, Norm Eisen, Mary Dohrmann and Steve Levin said in a statement. “Its dismissal today does not erase the abuse of government power in arresting and charging a patriotic American who did nothing wrong. The government’s approach was ready, fire, aim. The administration owes Mr. Hearn an apology.”
The government’s request to dismiss the case against Hearn said that when Pirro inspected the pool on 17 July, “as a defense expert inspected the now-drained Reflecting Pool” that she “immediately noted extensive damage throughout” the pool and requested “all records regarding the installation of the lining.”
“These documents indicated a rushed and flawed installation process, with repeated failures of the lining during the installation process, and extensive peeling of the lining throughout the Reflecting Pool,” the filing added.
Key events
Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second TRump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:
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Kamala Harris, speaking at the National Urban League conference in Nashville, said that she has “not made a decision” on a potential 2028 presidential run.
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The US government released its anxiously awaited plan for how to manage the Colorado river crisis on Friday, outlining cuts in water supplied to California, Arizona and Nevada.
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During a cabinet meeting at Camp David, the US treasury secretary Scott Bessent carelessly revealed plans for the US to buy $5-$10bn in Japanese yen in a scribbled ‘to do’ list left visible to a Reuters photographer. The Financial Times reported later that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York sold euros to buy yen on behalf of the US treasury department to support the Japanese currency.
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In a court filing, the office of the US attorney in Washington DC, Jeanine Pirro, moved to dismiss charges against David Hearn, a former Olympian her office had accused on vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, Pirro’s office said documents on the renovation indicate that damage “was the result of flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings … and the rush to complete the project”.
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Donald Trump told reporters he wasn’t sure whether he should grant Patriot missiles to Ukraine as he said he would, because “they can someday turn on you”.
US treasury department intervened to prop up Japanese yen – report
The US treasury department intervened in yen exchange rates on Friday to support the Japanese currency through outright purchases, the Financial Times reported.
According to the report, citing unnamed sources, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York conducted a sale of euros to buy yen on behalf of the Department of the Treasury.
The depreciation of the yen, which dipped last week to its weakest level since 1986, has been driven by a number of factors, including rising oil prices, according to Bloomberg News.
Reuters photograph shows US treasury secretary Scott Bessent scribbled plan to buy $5-10bn of Japanese yen on ‘to do’ list
During a cabinet meeting at Camp David on Friday, the US treasury secretary Scott Bessent carelessly revealed plans for the US to buy $5-$10bn in Japanese yen in a scribbled ‘to do’ list left visible to a Reuters photographer.
The image, taken over Bessent’s shoulder during a portion of the meeting open to journalists, showed a Camp David notepad with the underscored words “To Do” followed by “Buy Japanese Yen (JPY) $5-10 bil.”
Bessent’s name card on the Camp David conference table is visible and positioned immediately above the notepad.
The photograph was taken at 11:33 am local time, Reuters reported.
Video of the televised portion of the cabinet meeting showed that the notepad was still clearly visible in front of Bessent when he spoke, to praise the president, 30 minutes later.
A treasury spokesperson did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on the contents of the notepad, “or whether the Treasury had intervened to help prop up the yen’s value against the dollar on Friday,” the news agency said.
Earlier on Friday, about two hours before the note was seen in front of Bessent, Reuters reported that the treasury department had notified a number of banks that it could intervene in the yen market that day, an unnamed source said.
Japanese authorities had stepped in to prop up the yen earlier on Friday, triggering a substantial strengthening of the Japanese currency during early trading hours.
Reflecting pool damage was caused by ‘botched’ renovation, not vandalism, prosecutors say as they ask to drop charges
In a court filing on Friday, the office of the US attorney in Washington DC, Jeanine Pirro, moved to dismiss charges against David Hearn, a former Olympian her office had accused on vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool.
In asking to dismiss the criminal indictment, Pirro’s office told the DC Superior Court that “it was not until after the return of the indictment,” that the Department of the Interior “provided additional documents” to prosecutors “indicating that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in June 2026 was the result of flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings (“AIC”), and the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration in the weeks surrounding Independence Day 2026.”
“It was not until after these documents were produced,” Pirro’s office added, that her office “first became aware of information showing that the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism as initially represented by DOI.”
“The Trump administration’s case against Davey Hearn should never have been brought,” Hearn’s lawyers, Norm Eisen, Mary Dohrmann and Steve Levin said in a statement. “Its dismissal today does not erase the abuse of government power in arresting and charging a patriotic American who did nothing wrong. The government’s approach was ready, fire, aim. The administration owes Mr. Hearn an apology.”
The government’s request to dismiss the case against Hearn said that when Pirro inspected the pool on 17 July, “as a defense expert inspected the now-drained Reflecting Pool” that she “immediately noted extensive damage throughout” the pool and requested “all records regarding the installation of the lining.”
“These documents indicated a rushed and flawed installation process, with repeated failures of the lining during the installation process, and extensive peeling of the lining throughout the Reflecting Pool,” the filing added.
Trump sows fear about migration by pointing to video from Europe, again
In a social media post sent from Air Force One on Friday afternoon, Donald Trump drew attention to video of tens of thousands of migrants entering the Spanish enclave of Ceuta from Morocco the day before.
“What’s happening with Spain,” Trump wrote, characterizing the arrival of migrants in the enclave on the North African coast that has been a Spanish possession since 1580 as an invasion, “happened in the United States during the Sleepy Joe Biden Administration, and it will happen again, only worse, if the Dumocrats ever again gain power.”
Trump illustrated his warning about the US-Mexico border with video of migrants crossing the border from Morocco into the Spanish territory that Morocco claims as its own, and calls “occupied”.
This is not the first time that Trump has sought to sow fear about the US southern border by using video of migrants in Europe.
In January 2016, Trump released an ad in support of his first presidential campaign that featured images of migrants surging across a border fence as a narrator promised that Trump would “stop illegal immigration by building a wall on our southern border that Mexico will pay for”. That video, however, was not recorded on the US-Mexico border, but in another Spanish enclave on the Moroccan coast, Melilla, in 2014.
Trump’s closing ad for that campaign, released in November 2016 also featured footage of migrants in Europe, passed off as video of immigrants streaming across the border from Mexico into the United States.
Near the start of that ad, as the candidate could be heard complaining of “massive illegal immigration,” thousands of people were shown walking along a highway.
As I reported in 2016, however, that video was not shot along the southern border of the US — where Trump had promised to build a great wall — but in Hungary, at the height of the 2105 migrant crisis, and it showed Syrian refugees, desperate for safe passage to Germany, marching out of Budapest.
That video was lifted, without permission, from a social media account of Nabih Bulos, a foreign correspondent who had accompanied the refugees.
“When this footage was taken, thousands of refugees were on an odyssey through the Balkan corridor and Europe to escape the cataclysm ripping their country apart,” Bulos told me at the time. “As a son of two Palestinian refugees who benefited from Jordan’s largesse, a naturalized American welcomed to the country even after 9/11, as well as a working conflict journalist, the last thing I would want this footage to be used for is to embody Trump’s xenophobic, repugnant message.”
Earlier this year, the Republican-led House appropriations committee referred to the dispute over the two enclaves in a report, in which it noted “that the Spanish-administered cities of Ceuta and Melilla are located in Moroccan territory and remain the subject of Morocco’s longstanding claim.”
The committee added that it “supports efforts by the Secretary of State to encourage diplomatic engagement between Morocco and Spain on the future status of Ceuta and Melilla.”
Gabrielle Canon
The US government released its anxiously awaited plan for how to manage the Colorado river crisis on Friday, outlining cuts in water supplied to California, Arizona and Nevada.
The proposal from the US Bureau of Reclamation spares Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming from facing mandatory cuts, for now. But it is a temporary fix as the states that rely on the river continue to fight over a long-term management plan for the dwindling resource that supplies huge swaths of the western US.
The proposal is the federal government’s answer to a years-long stalemate between the seven states responsible for forming a plan on how to distribute the deep cuts needed to pull the system back from the brink. It comes just months before the framework that currently governs the essential and imperiled waterway is set to expire.
“This framework provides the flexibility to respond to changing hydrologic conditions while preserving the opportunity for the Basin States to continue working toward durable, consensus-based solutions,” said Doug Burgum, the US interior secretary, in a press release.
Under the 10-year plan, the Lower Basin states could face deep cuts of up to 3m acre-feet (3.7bn kiloliters) a year – up to 40% of their collective total – “subject to hydrology”, according to the press release by the Department of the Interior. That’s about enough water annually to serve more than 25 million people.
The plan would also allow annual releases of between 5m and 12m acre-feet from Lake Powell, the basin’s second-largest reservoir. Under the 10-year federal framework, water management decisions will be made every two years.
The federal government is expected to release a record of decision in the coming week that will detail operations under the plan in the short term, but it is likely they will closely follow a proposal issued by the lower basin states earlier this year that would shave 3.2m acre-feet from their combined total over 2027 and 2028.
Rachel Leingang
Senior Democrats accused Republicans in the US Congress of becoming “gelatinous blobs” who won’t stand up to Donald Trump and “rubber stamps” for his war on Iran.
Elizabeth Warren, a US senator for Massachusetts, and Chris Van Hollen, a US senator for Maryland, argued that the Republican-controlled Congress had surrendered its constitutional authority to the president.
In interviews with the Guardian, the senators urged their Republican colleagues to stand with Democrats and assert Congress’s authority as a separate branch of the federal government – with power over declaring war.
“The Republicans have all had their spines surgically removed,” Warren said in Michigan, while stumping for the Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. “I mean, they’re just gelatinous blobs that kind of make it through the United States Senate.”
The constitution sets up three separate branches of government to hold one another accountable, Warren noted – and the assumption was that each of the three branches would “jealously guard its own powers”.
Roque Planas
Current and former prosecutors are denouncing the Trump administration for fast-tracking the deportation of immigrant children, as a key contract for legal services is set to expire on Friday.
A series of federal laws has for decades shielded child immigrants from removal, either to protect their safety or to allow them to testify against abusers or human traffickers.
But the Trump administration has undermined those laws, immigrant advocates and prosecutors say, by directing immigration judges to fast-track deportation cases for minors and blocking their access to lawyers who might help them apply for several forms of relief from removal – including acting as witnesses in cases of human trafficking or domestic violence.
“By arresting and deporting survivors who have come forward and applied for protection, the Administration not only risks endangering the survivor and their family members, but the Government also sends a chilling message to the larger community: don’t call the police, don’t report crime – you or your loved ones will get deported,” reads a Wednesday letter to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from 10 current and former prosecutors. “This undermines public safety for us all.”
Although Kamala Harris did not announce whether she would run for president in 2028, she did appear to signal a policy platform at the conference, saying:
“We need to revisit the point of expanding the court to 13 justices like we have 13 district courts. We need to revisit, if they so want, statehood for Puerto Rico and DC.”
Kamala Harris also condemned Donald Trump’s decision to enter a war with Iran, saying: “I would have opposed it even if [Congress] had approved this war.”
“They’re asking for hundreds of billions of dollars to pay for this war, meanwhile, you have people in America who are losing their health care every day, cannot afford their housing, cannot afford health care, cannot afford child care. There has been no articulation of the end game,” she said.
Harris went on to say: “[Trump] is now talking about this deal. You know, the deal would basically be what Barack Obama got – that he pulled us out of,” referring to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action the US signed during the Obama administration which Trump pulled out of in 2018.
“I think that it is important to not be a conspiracist, but at the same time, you can listen to what people are saying. And one, it just a full-on distraction from the things he can’t handle or has not handled. But this war is a war of choice that this president got into with Israel, with no clear national security issue,” she continued.
Kamala Harris says she has “not made a decision” on potential 2028 run
Kamala Harris, who is speaking at the National Urban League conference in Nashville, Tennessee, said that she has “not made a decision” on a potential 2028 presidential run.
“I am fully, sincerely, focused on these midterms,” she told the audience.
Harris further stressed the importance of “having an agenda that is about turning out the vote in the greatest numbers we have ever seen so that…in this environment where they are cheating, we will be too big to rig.”
“It means being ruthless. They are ruthless. We need to be ruthless, too. And by that, I do not mean cruel. That is not our nature. By that, I do not mean breaking the law. That is not what we do. But I do mean we must be uncompromising,” she added.
Gavin Newsom and his wife made from $1.7m to $2m annually from 2022 through 2024, and paid about half a million a year in federal and state taxes, according to tax returns released by his office.
The California Democratic governor’s office released more than 700 pages of tax filings spanning four years for reporters to review, offering a window into Newsom’s finances as he prepares to leave office and considers a 2028 presidential bid. Newsom’s office did not release returns for 2025, because the couple filed for an extension and will complete those returns in October.
The returns show the Newsoms’ income has remained relatively consistent since he took office in 2019, when the couple reported $1.7m in annual income. The exception was in 2021, when the family sold a house for nearly $6m in Marin county, making roughly $800,000 from the sale. That year, they made $4.2m and paid more than $1m in federal and state taxes. They earned roughly $2m in 2022.
The release of the couple’s tax filings comes as their finances have been under scrutiny after the US justice department launched investigations into the Newsoms, the governor announced last month. Newsom has blasted the investigations as politically motivated.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talked about her involvement in midterm primaries and how voters are responding to the schisms in the Democratic party after the 2024 loss, which are playing out in campaigns in swing states now.
She told the Majority Report this week that her motivation is “winning” and that requires “a lot of different players on the field”. When she first got to Congress, and still now, she said, there was a concrete idea in the Democratic party of who could win a swing seat, and it was “very conservative” and “very cookie-cutter”.
Ocasio-Cortez is supporting Abdul El-Sayed, the progressive candidate in the US senate primary in Michigan. She has used her fundraising prowess to help candidates who were willing “to take a risk and buck convention” to help build the left movement, she said.
“The reckoning that we’re seeing in some of these primaries is that what is different between Trump 1 and Trump 2 is that I think your median Democratic voter desperately wants to do everything to get Trump out of power and get Republicans out of power,” she said. “And in Trump 1, they trusted the establishment to do that. And in Trump 2, they do not. And we are seeing how that is playing out in real time.”
New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said she has been surprised by polls showing her strength as a presidential candidate in 2028, saying that in her travels around the US, “people are pissed off” at the state of the country.
Ocasio-Cortez appeared on leftwing podcast the Majority Report this week and shared how the electorate and politics have changed in the eight years she has served in congress. She said on data centers, in particular, a cross-partisan group is standing against them, giving Democrats a chance to harness the issue in a “majoritarian” way.
“I think we always have to be making three arguments at the same time for any issue: moral argument, an economic argument, and also a political argument. And when we’re able to argue for something in a chorus of all of those three, then we’re able to build a majoritarian coalition to actually win on them,” she said.
Ocasio-Cortez is the co-sponsor of a data center moratorium bill, which she said has gotten support not just from “your expected lefty members of congress” but from more moderate Democrats who are seeing the “outrage among the electorate” on the issue.
“I do think that the revolt that is happening in these communities is very palpable and powerful,” she said.
Here’s what’s happened today so far…
Donald Trump met with his Cabinet at Camp David, where he defended the Iran war, said he wasn’t sure about granting Patriot missiles to Ukraine and blamed Minnesota’s leaders for a cyberattack on water systems in the state.
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Trump told reporters he wasn’t sure whether he should grant Patriot missiles to Ukraine as the country has requested, calling it a “big step” because “they can someday turn on you”.
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When asked by a reporter at Camp David about negotiations with Iran, Trump said the US would be “hitting them very hard”.
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Trump defended the IRS slush fund while also claiming it was “dead” but saying that he wished it weren’t because he wanted to see people who were targeted by the Biden administration get paid. “Big damages should have been given to me. I don’t want anything. I’m not talking about myself,” he said.
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He attacked Senator John Cornyn over his refusal to approve Todd Blanche as attorney general, saying Cornyn was upset by Trump’s endorsement of his opponent in the senate race and that Blanche had become a “pawn” in the ordeal.
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Trump said of potential Iranian hackers’ involvement in water systems in Minnesota: “We heard in Minnesota there was a cyber-attack, and they blame it on Iran. I don’t think so. I think I blame it on Minnesota because they’re grossly incompetent.”
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In the last few days before Michigan’s 4 August primary, US representative Haley Stevens accused her opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, of blaming “all of (his) problems on Jewish Americans”.
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The Republican president pro tem of the Indiana senate, Rodric Bray, announced today that he wouldn’t run again to lead the chamber, which Donald Trump – who tangled with Indiana’s top Republicans on redistricting – applauded.
Trump says he is unsure about granting Patriot missiles to Ukraine
Trump told reporters he wasn’t sure whether he should grant Patriot missiles to Ukraine, calling it a “big step”.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy asked Trump for Patriot air defense interceptors to defend itself from Russian attacks when the two presidents met earlier this week.
“These weapons are incredible,” Trump said. “We have to be very careful about letting somebody build them. … You have to be very judicious, but you have to be very careful. … it’s a hard thing to give away that kind of technology, and I don’t think this would ever happen, but, you know, those people that you get that technology, they can someday turn on you. You know, that is possible.”
Expanding on his post on Truth Social earlier today that defended the IRS slush fund, Trump told reporters at Camp David that the Biden administration “weaponized and abused” Trump supporters who deserve compensation.
He said Todd Blanche, the nominee for attorney general, is a “very, very good man” who should not be used as a “pawn” in this argument. He said John Cornyn, a holdout on Blanche, has become “a very angry person” since Trump endorsed his opponent, who won the US senate primary.
He said the fund “is dead” though he wishes it weren’t because he wanted to see people compensated.
“This fund was not for me,” he said. “This fund was for those people that have been weaponized that have been abused. I was abused, they attacked my house, Mar-A-Lago, where I live. And I was, you know, big damages should have been given to me. I don’t want anything. I’m not talking about myself. I think that there’s a group of people in this country, history will show that were treated like nobody else has ever been treated, so badly, so horribly. … They’ve committed suicide. People that were very successful and wanted to go to a rally or an event and ended up spending the rest of their lives in horror.”
