Six people have been arrested over alleged vandalism at the recently renovated Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, the White House said.
Announcing the arrests, press secretary Karoline Leavitt hit out at “deranged individuals” who had “desecrated” the pool, which has been given a $14 million makeover in Washington D.C.
“The vandalism is very real…in fact I spoke with the National Parks Service just before joining the show,” Leavitt told Fox News Monday. “They now have 17 police reports that have been filed in just a matter of a few days.
“There’s actually been six arrests at the Reflecting Pool where, again, these deranged individuals, many of them longtime donors to the Democrat Party, to Barack Obama, to Act Blue, that have been vandalising and desecrating our federal monument.”
Leavitt said President Trump is going to “hold these people accountable,” before slipping over her words, saying the White House is going to “make it, continue to make it beautiful.”
The administration has now deployed National Guard soldiers to walk the perimeter of the pool. A video shared on X shows a woman leaning over to touch the water, and possibly pull something out of it, before nine officers gather on the grass to detain her.
One of the reported arrests was of Olympian David Hearn, who told reporters he leaned over to touch a “loose flap of coating” by the pool when he was arrested and charged with a misdemeanor.
“I didn’t destroy or break or peel anything,” he told The Washington Post. “By the time I realized what was going on, I was being put in handcuffs.”
The president has accused alleged vandals of using “a box cutter or a knife of some kind” to strip off the paint, without evidence.
Trump told reporters he may now have order the pool re-drained and repainted, which would presumably increase the cost of the troubled project even further.
One June 18, the U.S. Interior said on X: “The Reflecting Pool water is crystal clear, and our National Park Service team is now vacuuming up the dead algae resting on the bottom of some parts of the Reflecting Pool—just like the destroyed Iranian Navy resting on the bottom of the Persian Gulf.”
However, photos and videos over the past week have shown chunks of that coating separating and floating up to the surface as National Parks Service employees battle swamp-green algae.
The Atlantic has had a sample of the pool water tested, identifying an algae known as Scenedesmus which was turning the water green.
In a post slamming the renovation, Minnesota governor Tim Walz wrote: “Found an imaginary problem, said only they could fix it, didn’t listen to experts, hired buddies who grifted millions, failed miserably, bragged how great it went.
“The entire Trump presidency in a nutshell.”
