President Donald Trump’s claims of widespread vandalism at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool have collapsed in a heap of aborted prosecutions, as officials recognize the pool’s problems were actually caused by a “botched” renovation — not the malicious acts of liberal hoodlums. Yet even as the president’s broader narrative disintegrates, the administration has not walked back his most sensational allegation: that “thugs” deliberately cut a 300-foot gash, or gashes, into the pool’s facade.The Interior Department and National Park Service did not respond Tuesday when asked for an update on the investigation into that particular bit of alleged vandalism. The White House referred HuffPost to the president’s public statements regarding the Reflecting Pool. A spokesperson did not respond to a question on whether the gash investigation had gone “cold.”Trump continued to insist on Monday that bad actors were to blame for the pool’s sad state, and he rebuked one of his most loyal foot soldiers, Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for D.C., for dropping her case against David Hearn, the former Olympian canoeist she’d accused of destruction of property.“The destruction grew with each retelling by the president: first the gash was 250 feet long, then it was 300, then 350.”“It was vandalism,” Trump told reporters once again at the White House. “When it was completed, it looked beautiful — and then they cut it, and they vandalized.”Interior Secretary Doug Burgum stuck to the same line in a post on X: “The evidence is clear, vandals have repeatedly caused damage to the Reflecting Pool.”As the pool’s surface peeled and algae bloomed after his hasty restoration of the site this year, Trump claimed on several occasions that a vandal, or group of vandals, had inflicted a massive slash, or slashes, with a knife or box cutter. The destruction grew with each retelling by the president: first it was 250 feet long, then it was 300, then 350, or nearly the length of a football field, including end zones.Three weeks later, the aforementioned gash had multiplied into “slashes” plural, and grown to 300 yards — or the equivalent of 900 feet. The Reflecting Pool itself is a little over 2,000 feet long.“[T]he floor of the pool was cut and then pulled upward, with great force, by these thugs,” the president railed.The Reflecting Pool was drained again in July after a problematic renovation spearheaded by the president.ALEX WROBLEWSKI via Getty ImagesThe New York Times, citing internal agency documents, reported in June that National Park Service workers had found two long cuts in the foam of the pool’s expansion joints, narrow gaps that ring a pool and are typically filled with foam and caulk. The Times said the documents described them as “two 171-foot blade cuts but did not address how they were made” — for instance, if they’d happened in the course of maintenance work.Hearn, 67, was arrested at the Reflecting Pool on June 19 after a long bike ride. Pirro accused him of “forcefully and violently” pulling the pool’s surface in an effort to destroy it; Hearn said he had merely touched a piece of the pool’s already-damaged liner that was floating in the water. He faced a felony destruction-of-property charge and up to 10 years in prison.Pirro moved to drop the charge on Friday, stating in a court filing that the damage was in fact due to a “flawed installation” and “rush” to complete the job in time for Trump’s Freedom 250 celebrations. As HuffPost reported, her office faced near-impossible odds of convincing a D.C. jury that Hearn had acted with “malicious” intent and caused more than $1,000 in damage, especially since the pool’s problematic renovation was already widely documented.Hearn’s lawyers said in a statement that the case “never should have been brought,” and that its dismissal “does not erase the abuse of government power in arresting and charging a patriotic American who did nothing wrong.”Pirro has since moved to drop three other misdemeanor charges that alleged Reflecting Pool vandalism. In all three cases, police officers accused the defendants of pulling on pieces of pool sealant after the apparently faulty resealing job. But none of those cases involved long gashes of several hundred feet, or the use of knives or box cutters, according to court documents.RelatedDonald Trumpjeanine pirroreflecting pool