When President Donald Trump kicked off the White House’s Great American State Fair on Wednesday night, he couldn’t help but discuss the nearby Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

“It’s been gruesomely vandalized by thugs, bad people,” he told the crowd.

The “vandals,” he added, have “largely been caught and are being prosecuted.”

A day earlier, in a social media post, the president said “six people have been arrested, and seven people have been cited, for the damage they did to our Country’s now beautiful Reflecting Pool” following a more than $14 million renovation that came at Trump’s behest.

He made similar claims in another post Saturday, when he wrote that “many additional people have been arrested” for allegedly cutting “a 250-foot-long gash” (which he later said was 350 feet) and pouring “corrosive and destructive chemicals” into it.

But despite Trump making those claims almost daily over the past week, public records appear to confirm that just one person has been charged so far: former Olympic canoe competitor David Hearn, who says he was picked up for touching a floating piece of the pool’s peeling blue paint.

Hearn, a three-time Olympian, was arrested a week ago and charged with misdemeanor destruction of government property, for which he could face fines and up to a year in jail if convicted. Hearn told MS NOW’s Chris Hayes that he stopped off during a long bike ride to check out the pool “as a concerned, curious citizen,” and was arrested and “held incommunicado” for five hours.

Federal court records reviewed by MS NOW show no other criminal cases related to the Reflecting Pool, though a spokesperson for the federal prosecutor’s office in Washington said that could change.

Someone who has been cited, but not arrested, by U.S. Park Police would not yet necessarily have a court record, said Tim Lauer, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.

“The individual is charged by USPP at the time the citation is issued and is released with instructions to appear in court on a specified date,” Lauer said in a statement emailed to MS NOW on Thursday afternoon. If prosecutors pursue the case at that point, a record of it would be made public then, he said.

Someone who has been arrested on federal charges, not just cited, would have a public record of the arrest within a few days unless their case was sealed. So unless a judge has sealed the cases of at least five other people accused of vandalizing the pool, Trump’s assertions about the number of arrests appear inaccurate.

Lauer referred MS NOW to the Park Police for further questions. Spokespeople for the Park Police and D.C. District Court did not respond to questions from MS NOW on Thursday seeking evidence of additional arrests or support for Trump’s claims of how the pool was vandalized. The White House referred questions to the Interior Department, which did not respond.

Like virtually all of the nation’s capital, the National Mall is replete with surveillance cameras. Yet Trump himself was the only member of his administration to have publicly made the allegation about the slashing of the pool, until Wednesday. That is when Frank Lands, deputy director of operations for the National Park Service, said in a court document that the Park Police responded to an NPS report on June 9 “of damage to the reflecting pool, including a caulk over the foam sealant that was cut with a sharp knife or razor and destruction of delaminating surface material.” Lands added that “approximately 70 fence post tops were thrown into the pool,” according to the filing.

Also on Wednesday, the Park Police posted video of someone reaching into the pool, saying it happened June 19 and that officers wanted the public’s help finding the person “in connection with a Destruction of Government Property investigation.”

On Thursday, the White House shared a post of that video and a similar one, showing another person seemingly reaching into the pool, provided by the Interior Department to Fox News. In a statement the Interior Department provided to Fox, officials called the people captured on video “suspects” who were “attempting destruction of the lining.”

Both videos show people kneeling by the pool and reaching in while dozens of other visitors stand and stroll nearby, and in full view of numerous workers in waders scooping algae out of the pool.

The pool’s water turned green from an algae bloom and new blue paint began peeling off the bottom soon after the work began. Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, sent two letters to the contractors overseeing the makeover on Wednesday requesting information about why it was being carried out and why they received no-bid contracts, as MS NOW first reported.

Sydney Carruth, Sydney Reynolds and Lisa Rubin contributed reporting.

The post Trump says 6 Reflecting Pool ‘vandals’ arrested. Records show just 1 person charged so far. appeared first on MS NOW.

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