The ranking Democratic member of the House Judiciary Committee announced an investigation into key members of the Trump administration Tuesday for bringing “baseless” charges against a former Olympian canoeist over alleged vandalism of the National Mall’s Reflecting Pool.
The announcement was accompanied by the public release of a letter that Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) wrote to Jeanine Pirro, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, and Doug Burgum, secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior.
The letter framed the issue by saying that at the end of July, the U.S. Justice Department “admitted it had baselessly indicted and prosecuted an innocent American citizen based on trumped-up charges of ‘vandalizing’ the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.”
That citizen was David Hearn, one of Raskin’s constituents from his Maryland district that abuts the District of Columbia.
Hearn, 67, is a former canoeist for the U.S. Olympic team. He navigated the Reflecting Pool in the past, legally, as a way of promoting the sport during the U.S. bicentennial celebration in 1976.
The former Olympian canoeist was arrested where he had once dipped his paddle into the water on June 19, for actions whose full extent is disputed.
Hearn and his legal team maintain that he was looking into the Reflecting Pool, saw something weird, reached into the water to examine a section that was coming up, and was arrested by the United States Park Police, assisted by the National Guard, for it.
The charge that the U.S. Department of Justice attempted to bring against him was a felony count of destruction of public property worth more than $1,000, which could have put him in jail for up to 10 years.
In a pair of President Donald Trump’s posts on Truth Social that the White House directed The Epoch Times to, published on Aug. 7 and 9, Trump painted Hearn’s actions as part of a broader effort to vandalize the Reflecting Pool and publicly asked Pirro to reconsider her decision not to prosecute.
“A National Park Service career employee, a highly credible witness, saw David Hearn (ActBlue) in broad daylight vandalize the Reflecting Pool by ‘violently’ ripping and tugging at the Pool’s somewhat delicate coating,” Trump wrote.
ActBlue is a progressive Democratic political action committee to which Hearn may have given some small donations. “David Hearn” is a common name that shows up for many different people as donors to that organization in the Federal Election Commission’s database.
The pool’s “somewhat delicate coating” that the president referred to is also a matter of dispute related to the pool coating’s deterioration and an accompanying algae bloom.
Trump is making the case that the re-coating of the pool in the dark blue of the American flag might have worked out but for sabotage.
Many Democrats believe that story is largely false and is being used as a cover for a botched $15 million contracting job. It appears that Pirro was leaning in their direction, having moved to dismiss the charges against Hearn.
Raskin has questions about how one of his constituents faced the possibility of a decade behind bars for this.
The congressman is demanding a slew of documents from the Departments of Justice and the Interior by Aug. 25. These include all documents on the decision to prosecute Hearn, all Hearn-related communications between the DOJ, DOI, and the White House, and all evidence presented before a grand jury against Hearn.
Raskin’s office did not immediately reply to a request for comment about whether some sanction would have been appropriate for Hearn, if he would be working to claw back some of the $15 million awarded to re-coat the Reflecting Pool, and what he thought of the president’s call for the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., to launch a renewed prosecution.
