It might be tempting to think Donald Trump’s Reflecting Pool debacle has effectively run its course. With federal prosecutors having dropped all the pending criminal charges against accused “vandals,” what remains is a humiliating scandal that reflects, as The New York Times recently summarized, the Republican administration’s “willingness to skirt laws, expend millions of dollars, ignore facts and punish truth tellers in service of the president’s demands to put his mark on the capital.”
But this fiasco isn’t over just yet.
On the contrary, the president has spent the last six weeks continuing to insist that nefarious criminals, who don’t appear to exist in reality, are principally responsible for problems plaguing his beloved renovation project. As recently as last week, Trump used his social media platform to publish a message, which was apparently directed at U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, which read in part, “Anybody who thinks the Reflecting Pool wasn’t vandalized should go back to Law School!”
Unfortunately for the president, however, federal prosecutors in the nation’s capital aren’t the only ones who’ve acknowledged the truth that Trump refuses to believe. The New York Times’ latest report, published Friday afternoon, added:
The contractor that renovated the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has told the Trump administration that errors in its own work and flaws in the repair plan, not vandalism, caused the pool’s new blue liner to peel and break loose, according to government documents reviewed by The New York Times. […]
[T]he documents, which have not previously been reported, make clear that the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, found problems in both the design and the execution of the renovation. The documents include Atlantic’s reports to the government as well as daily progress updates from the National Park Service over the past two months.
The report, which has not been independently verified by MS NOW, added that the private contractor acknowledged a combination of “human oversight” and the use of incompatible chemicals.
Pressed for a response, a White House spokesperson referred questions about the contractor’s findings to the Interior Department, which was of particular interest because an Interior spokesperson issued a statement that appeared to continue blaming vandals for the damage, saying that they had “repeatedly reached into the pool and ripped at the coating.”
In other words, Trump’s own prosecutors have given up on the “vandals” claim, and Trump’s own contractor has conceded in writing that these imaginary criminals aren’t to blame, but Trump’s administration is still sticking to the discredited talking points anyway, reality be damned.
At this point, there’s no shortage of questions. We could, for example, benefit from some answers about the White House’s misguided use of rushed no-bid contracts, and I’d love to hear Trump elaborate on his earlier claims about the extensive evidence he claimed to have that proved his “vandalism” claims.
But near the top of the list is this one: Will there be any accountability for the president leaning on his Justice Department to bring a felony charge against a former Olympian who apparently didn’t do anything wrong?
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
The post Trump’s Reflecting Pool contractor acknowledges reality, discredits ‘vandals’ claim appeared first on MS NOW.
