damaged

WASHINGTON — President Trump says vandals are to blame for large swaths of dead grass on the National Mall near the World War II Memorial — in the spot where he had a stage built and hosted crowds for his July 4 celebration.

Trump made the accusation in a social media post on Sunday without saying why he believes it’s the work of vandals instead of trampled turf from the Independence Day festivities. The Republican president posted a photo showing a once-grassy area by the World War II Memorial, now patchy and brown across much of the sprawling turf.

“Look what VANDALS did to the grass connecting the vandalized World War II Monument and the vandalized Reflecting Pool, which will be opened again, and better than ever, shortly,” Trump said on his social media website.

“Anybody who thinks the Reflecting Pool wasn’t vandalized should go back to Law School!” he added.

Trump has repeatedly blamed vandals for damage to his renovation projects in the nation’s capital, often without evidence and sometimes despite opposing accounts from his officials. He lashed out at U.S. Atty. Jeanine Pirro this month after her office concluded that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was the result of poor construction and not the work of vandals, as Trump claimed.

Authorities on Friday announced an arrest in connection with vandalism at the World War II Memorial, after the words “Clean hands dirty $” were found painted on the monument and bubbles filled a fountain. Pirro said felony charges were being brought against Melissa L. Farris, who was in custody and couldn’t be reached for comment.

A woman identified on her Facebook page as Melissa Lovewell on Thursday posted a video in which she is seen taking cans of spray paint from her bag and then painting the monument. “I will wait here to be arrested for spraying our veterans’ fountain,” she says. “It was me. I’m doing it. It’s on camera.”

The woman was identified by her Kentucky driver’s license as Melissa L. Farris of Elizabethtown, an arrest warrant says.

Charging documents in that case make no mention of the grassy area Trump is highlighting in his new claims. Authorities said Farris had been arrested previously for camping on federal property a few blocks from the World War II Memorial, but not the area cited by Trump.

That stretch of lawn is instead where a large stage was built and crowds gathered to hear from Trump and watch fireworks at a July 4 event celebrating the nation’s 250th anniversary. Trump claimed without providing evidence that more than 400,000 people attended the event before a storm hit the area and delayed his remarks.

Photos from the time, taken by a streaming webcam atop the Washington Monument, show a large bandstand and seating areas covering nearly the entire lawn that Trump now says has been vandalized. Associated Press photos from the days that followed showed workers removing the structures, revealing brown, damaged grass underneath.

On Aug. 1, Trump posted a different photo of the same area that appears to show the numbers “86 47” — which federal officials have said constitutes a threat against Trump, the 47th president — emblazoned into the grass. He cited it as evidence refuting Pirro’s conclusion, calling it “a pure case of VANDALISM, that included the grass.”

“There may have been some contractor difficulty, but the major damage was caused by VANDALS!” he wrote.

Those numbers are not visible in the photo Trump posted to social media on Sunday.

From the bus window, the ridge looks like a giant slumbering beast stretched deep green across the flat farmland. “It feels alive,” I say to the woman beside me. “Yes,” she answers. “It is where you would run for safety, don’t you think?”

I am in southern Sweden to explore Söderåsen national park, established in 2001 to protect more than 1,600 hectares (4,000 acres) of the larger Söderåsen ridgeline. Shaped over millennia by immense geological collisions, fractures, volcanic eruptions and ice ages, today it is one of northern Europe’s largest continuous protected broadleaf forests, and only 90 minutes by car from Copenhagen or, in my case, two hours by public transport.

The little village of Röstånga at the gateway to the park is where travellers stop for supplies from the supermarket before disappearing into the forest on foot, bike or horseback, and people gather for food, live music and art.

My room for the first night is in Villa Söderåsen, a grand timber-framed yellow and white guesthouse, which has stood at the park’s entrance since 1904. It was built for tourists arriving via the new railway in search of connection to nature. Sebastian and Åsa, the owners, want to continue that tradition. “We humans are as loud as elephants in the wood,” says Sebastian. “Sit quietly for half an hour and see what happens.”

That evening, I eat with strangers at long wooden tables outside the hip restaurant and live music venue Stationen. Music drifts out of open doors, adults chat around the fire, children run circles around us.

The next morning, Åsa recommends I take a dip in Odensjön (Odin’s Eye) Lake. “Some say it is bottomless,” she says. It’s almost perfectly round, edged by steep beech-covered slopes, and fed by underground springs. Fifteen minutes into the forest and I am there.

A woman making her way back to the village says: “There is a rock in the water, heated by the sun, sit there, let your body adjust.”

Grasshoppers trill, spider silk trails from branches, noble chafer beetles glimmer like the aurora borealis, a dragonfly rests electric-blue on my now empty walking boots. I swim, the circle of blue sky rippling, and emerge ready for anything.

A few years ago, scientists obtained a sediment core from the bottom of the lake, providing detailed information from the past 600 years of land-use history. This showed that in the 18th and 19th centuries the plateau was largely deforested. I would have been walking across a heath, repeatedly burned to improve grazing grounds. It is difficult to imagine as I move through endless layers of beech, interspersed at times with birch, oak and rowan, mossy trunks, roots like octopuses.

Once I start searching, the signs of human history are everywhere too, from hollow ways to clearance cairns and dry-stone walls.

Two hours of hiking later, I arrive at the second entrance to the park: Skäralid, a rift valley. The visitor centre Naturum, packed with information and playful exhibits, shares its premises with Café Italia. Both look out onto a picturesque dam. A ranger explains that much of the initial conservation efforts since designation as a national park involved the felling of non-native Norway spruce and the planting of broadleaved trees in its stead.

In search of solitude, I choose the wilder three-hour Hjortsprångsrundan or Deer Leap circular, a trail named after a prehistoric hunting method where people drove game over a narrow cliff shelf. I pick my way along it, across heather and bilberry, to perch on the hard gneiss bedrock that blushes a startling mineral pink. A buzzard swoops down from the branch of a gnarled oak.

The descent is like scrambling and slipping back through time into an entirely other world. Many of these slopes managed to escape the historical land clearances and thus are the closest to ancient woodland. But all around this area, ferns, lichen, fungi, seeds and spores are recolonising the land.

The scree slopes are dotted with springs pushed up from a subterranean lake and laced with streams that feed into the Skärån river. The scent in the bottom of the valley is heady, sweet and damp, bringing with it a keen awareness of how much is always happening just out of sight.

I rest on a wooden walkway, pop a wild raspberry in my mouth and watch a slowworm the length of my forearm slither past. Then, a sudden crashing through undergrowth. Wolf? Wild boar? Moose? A young stag steps from a pocket of alder trees, pawing the ground. We look at one another. The sun drops, and as it does its light rises up the walls of the ravine.

My room for the second night is in Söderåsens Skafferi, a vandrarhem, or wanderer’s home. The house glows like a lantern on the edge of the dark wood. The owner Elisabeth, who spent her childhood exploring Söderåsen on horseback, says the house was once the first nature school in Sweden.

On my final morning I climb to Kopparhatten, the park’s highest viewpoint at 212 metres, and hold up a booklet with an image of a painting from 1840 of this same vista, almost bare of trees. “We used to holiday in the south,” a couple tell me. “But we’re searching for cooler climates now.” I wonder what stories they will bring home.

Summer, all green infusion; autumn, rust and gold; winter, snow and stone; spring, wood anemones and paper-thin leaves. The national park feels like living proof that damaged landscapes can recover if nature, and humans, are given half a chance.

Accommodation was provided by Villa Söderåsen (doubles from 1,095 Swedish Kronor, about £85, B&B). Coco also stayed at Söderåsens Skafferi (doubles from around £78). Söderåsen national park has multiple wild campsites with wind shelters and barbecue areas. For information on public transport access, visit skanetrafiken.se

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Saturday sharply criticized U.S. Atty. Jeanine Pirro’s assessment that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was the result of shoddy construction and not the work of vandals, as he claims.

Pirro’s office, in a court filing Friday, moved to drop criminal charges against a former Olympian, David Hearn, who had been accused of deliberately damaging the pool after it went through a renovation ahead of the nation’s 250th birthday celebration last month.

Trump, in a posting on social media, acknowledged that there “may have been some contractor difficulty” in the installation of a new pool liner. But he continues to insist, without evidence, that “the major damage was caused by VANDALS!”

“I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool,” Trump added in his post.

The dismissal was a striking reversal for a Justice Department that had previously echoed Trump’s claims and billed the prosecution as pursuing accountability for damage at a Washington landmark, a pet project of Trump. Despite Pirro’s conclusion that there was no evidence of vandalism resulting in widespread damage, the president continued to allege Saturday that most of the damage to the pool was caused by vandals.

Government lawyers in their 20-page court filing Friday said that additional documents provided by the Interior Department since the indictment of Hearn show that the damage was the result of a botched installation by a contractor as well as “the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration in the weeks surrounding Independence Day 2026.”

In addition, a recent visual inspection revealed damage throughout the pool, including in the middle — where prosecutors say a vandal would not likely have attempted to peel the lining.

Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist, was accused of pulling up a two-foot-square piece of the pool’s lining.

“Given all of this newly discovered information, it is difficult to attribute the widespread damage to the Reflecting Pool to vandalism, let alone to establish that fact beyond a reasonable doubt,” Pirro, a Trump appointee and former Fox News host, said in her filing asking a judge to formally dismiss the case.

In the filing, Pirro also blamed the Interior Department for providing “less than fulsome information at the outset of the case.”

The filing added that had “DOI been forthcoming with the information clearly in its possession, the government would not have sought a grand jury indictment.” It was a jarring turn in position from Pirro, who claimed the government’s case was built on “tremendous evidence” when she announced the indictment against Hearn last month.

Hearn’s legal team on Saturday criticized both Trump and Pirro and said it was weighing “legal remedies” on behalf of their client.

“Trump is mad at Pirro because she finally admitted what we made clear in our legal filings all along: Trump’s botched renovation was responsible for the damage — not Davey Hearn,” the legal team said in a statement. “However, her claim that she and her office were previously duped by Interior is nonsense. Starting immediately after the arraignment, our motions repeatedly proved that the administration was to blame for the Reflecting Pool failures, not Davey.”

Trump on Saturday also posted a nearly four-minute video that appears to have been taken from a security camera, in which three individuals can be seen with their hands in the pool, including one for an extended period.

The president claimed the video shows “material is being cut with a knife or a box cutter, for all to see!”

It’s not clear from the video, which appears to be shot from some distance, that any vandalism occurred. Workers can also be seen standing nearby and don’t appear to notice the people sticking their hands into the water.

In May, Trump announced plans to beautify the Reflecting Pool this spring. Virginia-based Atlantic Industrial Coatings was awarded a $14.7-million, no-bid contract to repaint and waterproof the pool’s concrete floor.

Atlantic Industrial Coatings did not respond to requests for comment.

Water was drained and Trump directed that the bottom be painted with what he called “American flag blue.”

But problems emerged within days of the project’s completion, with chunks of the new liner peeling off.

Trump was quick to blame vandals. And the National Park Service reported to the U.S. Park Police a June 9 incident in which it claimed a sharp knife or razor cut the pool’s new liner.

The work on the Reflecting Pool is just one of a number of projects Trump has spearheaded across the nation’s capital. Most prominently, he demolished the White House’s East Wing to build a $400-million ballroom and plans to build a towering arch between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery.

Madhani writes for the Associated Press.

But in a court filing Friday evening, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro said the damage was caused by a “botched installation.” Photo by Jemal Countess/UPI. | License Photo

July 31 (UPI) — Trump administration prosecutors on Friday moved to dismiss the felony case against U.S. Olympian David Hearn, admitting that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was due to a “botched installation and not vandalism.”

Hearn, 67, was indicted by a federal grand jury early July on accusations that he purposefully ripped up a piece of the recently-installed blue sealant from the pool’s bottom.

President Donald Trump claimed the pool, which cost nearly $15 million to renovate, had been damaged by Hearn and other vandals.

But in a court filing Friday evening, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro said she had been misled by the Interior Department into believing “nearly all of the damage” was done by vandals.

In charging Hearn, Pirro had said she had “tremendous evidence” that he committed a felony that could have landed him in prison for 10 years.

“Given all of this newly discovered information, it is difficult to attribute the widespread damage to the Reflecting Pool to vandalism,” Pirro wrote in court papers, The New York Times reported.

Pirro added the “botched” renovation “was the result of a flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, and the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration.”

In a statement, Hearn’s attorneys said, “The Trump administration’s case against Davey Hearn should have never been brought.”

“Its dismissal today does not erase the abuse of government power in arresting and charging a patriotic American who did nothing wrong,” the attorneys added. “The government’s approach was ready, fire, aim.

“The administration owes Mr. Hearn an apology.”

The Ukrainian SBU launched a drone strike on Russia’s Saki Air Base in Crimea on Friday. The attack, the latest in a string of strikes against Russian aviation and logistic assets on the peninsula, is part of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s latest campaign to inflict so much pain on Russia that Vladimir Putin moves to end the war.

SBU claimed to have destroyed several Russian tactical combat jets today as well as on Wednesday. Saki is home to the Russian Navy’s 43rd Independent Naval Attack Aviation Regiment, which flies mostly Su-30SM Flankers. It has been a frequent target of Ukrainian strikes and was hit by a devastating attack in the early days of the war.

“At the ‘Saki’ airfield, seven hangars storing aviation equipment were hit, in which Su-30SM, Su-30, and Su-24 fighter jets and frontline bombers were located,” SBU added. “According to preliminary information, at least seven aircraft were destroyed or damaged.”

SBU told us it had no visual evidence from either attack to back their claim, but we reached out to Vantor to see if they had any satellite imagery of the base. Vantor provided us a picture that showed damage to four hardened aircraft shelters that was taken this morning. Some of shelters have clear damage to their structures, others literally have their doors blown off and laying on the taxiway in front of them. From the overhead angle of the image, it is impossible to determine if aircraft were in those shelters at the time, and if they were, what, if any damage, was inflicted. In addition, we can’t tell when this happened from just one picture, although imagery we reviewed from Planet Labs dating to June 27th doesn’t appear to show the same damage to the shelters.

It is very possible that any aircraft in those shelters could have been damaged by fire, as the SBU claimed, or by shrapnel, but we just don’t know. Regardless, the shelters remain generally intact. We have written frequently about Russia’s efforts to protect its aircraft this way, including on Crimea.

Regardless, these attacks come after months of Ukrainian strikes on bridges connecting the peninsula with the mainland and on it’s fuel infrastructure. The situation has gotten so bad on Crimea that the officials there have tried to initiate gasoline rationing, making life miserable at the height of the traditional summer vacation season there.

Amid the ongoing Ukrainian pressure campaign, a Russian military officer said he recently took part in an exercise to see what it would take to fend off Ukrainian attacks on Crimea.

“I participated in the operational command-staff military game ‘Crimean Alert,’” Russian reserve colonel and military expert Viktor Murakhovsky claimed on Telegram. “The game was dedicated to the landing of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in Crimea and our measures to repel it. The staffs were organized according to the scenario from officers (in reserve and retired) of our armed forces.”

“The ‘Blue’ side acted unconventionally, widely using the latest means of detection and destruction,” he added. “The ‘Red’ side was forced to act ‘on the defensive.’ Overall, the exercises went smoothly and at a high level thanks to the organizers.”

Clearly, Ukraine does not possess much of a Navy, let alone landing craft to carry out a Normandy-style invasion. However, that is not the scenario played out in this wargame, according to an analysis by the award-winning The Insider news outlet.

“The scenario clearly simulates an amphibious or maritime operation: numerous blue arrows and routes are drawn across the Black Sea, extending from the direction of Odesa and the northwestern Black Sea toward Crimea,” the publication noted. “Red defensive positions are marked on the map within Crimea, particularly around Sevastopol, in northern Crimea, and in the eastern part of the peninsula.”

The map “shows the Kerch and Kerch Strait area on the right—also densely marked with red icons—indicating that the game scenario accounted for the eastern flank in addition to western Crimea and Sevastopol,” The Insider proffered. “Judging by Murakhovsky’s post, the scenario likely envisioned not a classic World War II-style amphibious landing—with hundreds of ships approaching the shore—but rather a modern operation involving the mass use of drones, long-range precision-guided weapons, reconnaissance systems, and possibly small, high-speed boats.”

As we have frequently reported, Ukraine has for years been using its air and sea drones to attack Russian air defenses and radars inland, its seaports and largely driven the Black Sea Fleet out of Crimea through the use of its innovative sea drone campaign.

Ukraine, as we reported in the past, has already carried out several incursions on the peninsula. In October 2023, the Ukrainian Defense Intelligence Directorate (GUR) sent a small raiding party into a point north of Tarkhankut Bay. It was carried out by troops traversing the Black Sea on Sea-Doo GTX 300 personal watercraft. They were loaded down by grenade launchers, machine guns, man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS) and other equipment needed to assault Russian positions. You can read more about that raid in our interview with the unit commander here.

Those attacks did not lead to a sustained presence, but they were not intended to. They were meant as a morale-boosting reminder to Moscow that Crimea would never be completely out of reach.

Whether Ukraine can marshal enough of its asymmetric assets and troops to really carry out any sort of a wide-scale amphibious landing on Crimea remains questionable bordering on impossible. One thing, however, is not. Ukraine is inflicting significant amounts of pain on Russian forces and assets on the peninsula.

UPDATE: 4:49 PM EDT –

Vantor provided us with additional satellite images of Saki. A very cursory analysis shows that six out of seven hardened aircraft shelters were damaged, with doors blown off of four of them.

There appears to be possible damage to two other shelters seen in a wider shot of Saki.

Contact the author: howard@twz.com