Grand jury indicts former Olympian in Trump DOJ’s Reflecting Pool vandalism case

In recent weeks, as Donald Trump’s renovation project at the Reflecting Pool became an embarrassing fiasco, the president settled on a curious strategy to deflect blame. He contended “vandals” had secretly attacked the pool, and it was their intervention, rather than his incompetence, that ruined the Republican’s triumph.

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In the days that followed, the president and his administration made a variety of claims about these alleged criminals, whose existence was in doubt, though one name was confirmed: David Hearn, who represented the United States in three Olympics as a canoeist, acknowledged that he’d received a citation.

Hearn recently told MS NOW’s Chris Hayes that he’d touched a piece of peeling blue paint toward the end of a bike ride.

“I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong, so I had no reason to think I was going to be arrested … and kind of before I knew it, I was being handcuffed,” Hearn said, adding that he made no effort to tear the pool’s coating.

His lawyer, Norm Eisen, soon after told The New York Times, “It is not a crime in America to touch water.”