Doug Burgum doubles down on Trump’s Relecting Pool ‘vandals’ fantasy & points the finger at Jeanine Pirro

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum publicly challenged Jeanine Pirro on Saturday, deepening an extraordinary dispute inside President Donald Trump’s administration over who bears responsibility for a felony prosecution that collapsed after government records undercut its central premise.

Earlier in the day, Trump attacked Pirro, his hand-picked U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, after her office moved Friday to dismiss the indictment against David Hearn, a 67-year-old former Olympic canoeist accused of damaging the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

“I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I don’t know what she was thinking?”

Hours later, Burgum sided with the president. “The evidence is clear, vandals have repeatedly caused damage to the Reflecting Pool,” Burgum wrote on X. “Some of these acts were even caught on camera.”

Related: Trump’s Reflecting Pool lie needed a vandal. Jeanine Pirro served him up an innocent American

He also disputed Pirro’s explanation for why prosecutors pursued Hearn. Burgum said Interior provided prosecutors with expert testimony, eyewitness accounts and “every piece of evidence they asked for in the requested timeline detailing each area of damage at the pool.”

Pirro’s office told a judge something starkly different.

Related: Trump rages after Jeanine Pirro abandons his imaginary Reflecting Pool vandals

In a 19-page motion filed Friday, prosecutors said Interior initially supplied “barebones” reports and “less than fulsome information.” They said records disclosed only after the indictment revealed that the pool’s new blue coating had been compromised by a “rushed and botched installation” marked by blistering, overspray, poor bonding and peeling that began before Hearn encountered it.

“Had DOI been forthcoming with the information clearly in its possession,” prosecutors wrote, “the government would not have sought a grand jury indictment.”

The dispute follows weeks in which Trump insisted, without producing substantiating evidence, that vandals armed with knives or box cutters had slashed a gash hundreds of feet long through the pool’s coating. He repeatedly portrayed the peeling surface as an intentional attack rather than a construction failure, and his administration mobilized around that account.

National Guard members and U.S. Park Police officers patrolled the pool. Authorities erected fencing, made arrests and issued citations. Roughly half a dozen mobile surveillance towers equipped with AI-powered detection and deterrence technology were placed around one of Washington’s most visited public landmarks. After the basin was drained, the FBI Washington Field Office’s Evidence Response Team joined Park Police investigators, using scanning and measuring equipment to document the site.

The federal mobilization sought evidence supporting Trump’s vandalism narrative. What prosecutors ultimately found was evidence of a defective installation.

Pirro’s filing said prosecutors received 695 megabytes of additional Interior records only after the drained pool revealed widespread deterioration, including damage in the basin’s center, where someone would be unlikely to attempt to peel the coating.

Burgum had previously said he was “100 percent sure” vandals were responsible and insisted the industrial coating had not simply peeled away. Records from his own department documented peeling eight days before Hearn touched the loose material.

On Sunday morning, Hearn’s attorney, Norm Eisen, said the government’s public rupture was alarming.

“It was pretty extraordinary to have Jeanine Pirro say what she said in this filing, then the president and secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum, attacking Jeanine Pirro,” Eisen said on MS NOW’s The Weekend.

“From a democracy perspective, it’s deeply concerning to Davey and to us,” he added.

Eisen said Hearn’s lawyers had presented before-and-after photographs shortly after his July 10 arraignment that showed the pool’s condition did not materially change after Hearn reached into the water.

“They knew or should have known all along this was not a righteous case,” Eisen said.

He also said Hearn’s legal team was considering “all remedies” for the reputational and personal harm caused by the prosecution.

“Imagine what it feels like,” Eisen said. “You watch TV, and you have the president, other administration officials saying you could go to jail for 10 years.”