Trump’s Reflecting Pool lie needed a vandal. Jeanine Pirro served him up an innocent American

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was designed to return an image. This week, it returned one of Donald Trump’s Washington with almost unbearable clarity.There was the president’s expensive vanity project, its blue coating blistering and separating almost as soon as the water returned. There was Trump, unwilling to accept the possibility that something done in his name had simply failed, inventing vandals armed with knives, box cutters and mysterious chemicals. Cabinet officials were repeating his story as fact. And there was Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, using the power of her office to put a man under felony indictment before prosecutors had established what had actually happened.That man was David Hearn, a 67-year-old former Olympic canoeist from Bethesda, Maryland, who encountered a loose piece of coating while cycling near the pool on June 19. According to the federal government, witnesses said he continued pulling at the material after being told to stop. Hearn maintained that he had touched material that was already detached.“The evidence shows” that Hearn intentionally destroyed government property, Pirro said at a July 2 press conference. Pirro described him as belligerent and said witnesses had watched him “forcefully and violently” pull up the coating with his bare hands. She promised that prosecutors would prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt and called it a case with “tremendous evidence.” Hearn faced as much as 10 years in prison.On Friday, Pirro’s office admitted that it should never have sought the indictment.In a remarkable 19-page motion, prosecutors said documents belatedly provided by the Interior Department showed that the Reflecting Pool’s damage resulted from a “rushed and botched installation,” not the vandalism Interior officials had initially represented. The coating had been blistering, peeling and failing before Hearn ever reached into the water.“Had DOI been forthcoming wi