Touch the Reflecting Pool, Get Indicted by a D.C. Grand Jury. Even If You’re an Olympian!
A grand jury apparently agreed that it's now a crime to touch the Reflecting Pool in D.C., despite a century of people wading in it.
Photo via Unsplash, Harrison Mitchell Splinter department of justice
“A grand jury would indict a ham sandwich” is a classic legal adage attributed to former jurist, attorney and Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals Sol Wachtler, allegedly coined in 1985, although it’s never stopped being relevant in the decades since. Its meaning should be obvious enough to infer: a skilled prosecutor often has an easy time manipulating the one-sided grand jury process, selectively sifting, cajoling and leaning on dissenters until they secure the indictment they’re after. Perhaps that’s why the DOJ is currently reviewing more than 20 years of Chicago grand jury cases following accusations of systemic corruption? Still, we haven’t seen an indictment in recent memory that is seemingly so sandwich-like as the one a D.C. grand jury reportedly just laid down against former Olympic canoeist David Hearn, who was arrested by United States Park Police last month for the heinous crime of touching (and somehow damaging???) the newly renovated and algae-filled Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool while biking by one afternoon. CNN is reporting that Hearn will face federal felony charges thanks to the indictment, consisting of one count of “destruction of property with a value of more than $1,000,” which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison if convicted.
Hearn would become the first person demonstrably charged with a crime for what President Donald Trump has claimed is a calculated conspiracy of “vandalism” that bears a shocking similarity from the outside to shoddy pool renovation work. The indictment says the D.C. grand jury determined that Hearn “maliciously did injure, break and destroy certain property, that is, the lining material of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.” How he is meant to have done this in broad daylight is entirely unclear.
Statement from Counsel for Olympian Davey Hearn:
— Katie Phang (@katiephang.bsky.social) 3:31 PM · Jul 2, 2026
Granted, Hearn is not the only person that Trump has claimed was arrested, but not a single other one of the supposed offenders has been named by the U.S. government or Justice Department to date. As the face of the evil conspiracy against the reflecting pool, the administration instead chose a 67-year-old former three-time Olympian, someone who represented our country on the world stage over and over, as if the administration was searching for who would be the most sympathetic possible person to use as a scapegoat. Hearn has unsurprisingly maintained his innocence, saying that he simply stopped to take a look at the reflecting pool during a 52-mile bicycle journey out of curiosity after Trump’s expensive renovations and the subsequent, embarrassing (but entirely predictable) bloom of green algae made it into a news story that refused to go away. He says he was arrested after merely touching some of the detached blue sealant material he found floating in the water, and was then held for hours without being allowed to contact anyone.
“I didn’t remove, tear, rip, break or destroy any of it,” said Hearn, describing the encounter. “The condition of the reflecting pool was the same after I stepped away from the water as it was before I got there. All of a sudden they were handcuffing me behind my back, and they hadn’t really told me what I was charged with I was just a curious, concerned citizen. I guess I was there at the wrong place, wrong time.”
As Hearn’s attorney likewise observed at the time: “There’s no basis for this. We’re going to contest it vigorously. It’s not a federal crime to touch water.”
That much should go without saying, but it also likely rates as totally pointless to state in a media landscape where the President’s supporters simply accept whatever narrative they are fed, even when that narrative is rebutted by a century or more of visual evidence. In the weeks that the stupid reflecting pool story has determinedly dragged onward, Trump and co. have attempted to rewrite reality by claiming that it has always been a federal crime for a person to physically interact with the reflecting pool, despite decades of photos of children, families and entire political movements splashing around in it. They’ve even gone so far as to claim that the surface of the water in the pool somehow just now began to reflect light, despite it being named “the reflecting pool,” and the fact that there are endless reams of visual evidence of water in the pool having behaved as water does since time immemorial. Never doubt this administration’s passion for building an entirely imagined scenario, complete with reimagined laws of physics and optics.
Q: Was this part of the pool already damaged? Hearn maintains the sealant was already partially moved and it looks the same as it did before he arrived.
PIRRO: You know, I’m not going to get into the evidence. Come to the trial. Come to the grand jury and you can testify.
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 3:03 PM · Jul 2, 2026
One wonders how this felony charge against David Hearn is supposed to be reconciled with Donald Trump’s constantly evolving claims that vandals had somehow “put a 250-foot long gash into the beautiful facade” using “some form of knife or blade,” when Hearn was apparently touching the pool for mere seconds. Even the length of that “gash” has fluctuated in Trump’s subsequent pronouncements, growing to 350 feet and beyond. Surely there’s plenty of security camera footage of the vandals and their blades, putting a football-field length gash into the sealant material–which Trump once claimed could not be cut with a knife–right? Why would it be that Trump or Kash Patel hasn’t been posting any of that incriminating footage, as they so love to do?
The actual pool, meanwhile, has now seemingly been largely purged of the accursed algae that immediately infested it after it was initially refilled, but the actual sealant on the bottom of it–which cost the administration $16.4 million and counting–seems to be a total mess. Trump has implied that the entire pool may need to be drained once again to address the damage, which can only mean another blank check is probably on its way to Trump’s cigar-chomping pool guy, John J. Cafaro. How much will the administration manage to lose in the reflecting sinkhole, when all is said and done? And how many other patsies will need to take falls on account of shoddy construction work?
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