The Harry Sisson Show - Trump PANICS As Reflecting Pool Gets FINAL DAGGER

Episode Date: August 1, 2026

Harry Sisson breaks down the humiliating news for the Trump team as his own administration is now admitting the truth about the Reflecting Pool. Everything has come crumbling down for Trump.

Look, folks, it's all come crashing down. All of it for Donald Trump. This might very well be one of the most humiliating moments of his presidency so far. I just know that right now as you're watching this and right now as I'm filming this, Donald Trump is sitting in the White House stewing with anger. He is furious because his own Department of Justice has dropped charges in the reflecting pool saga against that former Olympian who was arrested for touching water. And they are now admitting in court documents that it wasn't.

vandalism that caused the reflecting pool to be destroyed and have the paint ripped up. It was a botched job. The job was botched by the contractor that Donald Trump got for the project, and they completely ruined it. It wasn't anybody else. There wasn't vandalism. There wasn't a 300-foot cut, as Donald Trump has said of the reflecting pool. It was a botched job. This is coming from Donald Trump's own Department of Justice. Nobody else, not the Democrats, not the crazy liberals, as Trump would say, from Donald Trump's own team. A human. humiliating, humiliating moment. But let's just be clear about something.

This is not surprising. I mean, we've all known this. We've known that the reflecting pool was not vandalized. There was no box cutters or anything. Even before the paint was laid and the project was completed, as Donald Trump has claimed, there were concerns. I mean, the reflecting, this is reporting from the New York Times all the way back in May of 2026. So they said the reflecting pool repairs appear uneven and behind schedule, according to officials,

Interior Department staff members have raised concerns about the quality and speed of the repair work that a contractor is performing on the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, according to government documents. The staff members said that bubbles and small holes had appeared in one of the layers meant to waterproof the pool, an uneven application of the tinted waterproofing left the pool modeled in varying shades of blue. The documents indicate. So there were concerns even before the project had really begun or got close to finishing. And yet Donald Trump was out there in public saying it's indestructible. I mean, his real quote here, and this is what he actually said, if you had a knife, you couldn't even cut the reflecting pool.

It's so strong. He said this at the White House. This will last for at least 50 years and you'll never have a leak. It's very strong. You couldn't, if you had a knife, I don't want to give anybody ideas. If you had a knife, you can't even cut it. It's so strong, so powerful, powerful rubber. It is beautiful, sealed.

And I looked at just one of the little pieces. that they did to finish. It's like a piece of glass. Beautiful color, beautiful everything. Beautiful piece of glass. The finish is perfect. You couldn't destroy it with a knife if you tried, said Donald Trump, despite these internal documents sounding the alarm here. And then disaster struck. The pool turned green. The pool turned green. There's algae in it all over the pool, despite Donald Trump saying that it was blue. And you can see that there's algae in this clip building up on the paint on the floor. And the algae was just all over the pool. Donald Trump was on social media trying to claim that it was American flag blue,

but anybody with two pair of eyes could see that the pool was green. And it was very much not blue. It was very much covered in algae. And then it got even worse. The paint started, if that's what we're calling it, rubber, whatever Donald Trump put on the floor, the paint started to peel. And then he started to claim vandalism.

He started to cry and say that it was the Democrats who apparently in the middle of the night got into the pool with box cutters and knives and axes, and we just decided to take a hammer to it. and we destroyed all the paint. He said that the peeling was because people were ripping it off. He even was on social media saying the reflecting pool so badly damaged by deranged vandals has been emptied as the massive slash gets repaired. He was doubling down, tripling down, quadrupling down on this idea that Democrats were vandalizing it.

Even members of his administration. I mean, he was Doug Bergam, who is his interior secretary, was confronted on CNN, Dana Bash saying, but it peeled off, why did that happen? He said it didn't peel off. There was vandalism. That's what he said. Half miles of expansion. But it peeled off.

Why? Why did that happen? Do you know? It didn't peel off. There was there was vandalism. There was box cutters. There have been seven arrests. There was people literally trying to destroy part of a monument.

The reflecting pool is not just a pool on the mall. It is part of the Lincoln Memorial. And if anybody says that they're going to go and vandalize that, it's no different than if someone was throwing paint on Lincoln itself. And you're 100% sure that what happened with the liner was vandalism. You can prove it. Oh, yeah, absolutely you can. And as we drain it, and we've got all the photographs we can see. I mean, there's no possible way.

You're photographs of a person or people cutting a 300 or 350-foot gash in the bottom of the reflecting pool? Dana, I'm not sure why you and others in the media think that you want to keep trying to question whether or not think. Want to talk ETS with the people behind them? Join me. It's Jean-Jacqueshaw on the upside ticker talk. We dive into what's moving markets with timely analysis, trends and answers to ETF questions you've actually been thinking about.

Hit play on the upside ticker talk and elevate your ETF investing IQ. This is an industrial liner. Every farmer and rancher in America that's had their pickup liner lined by this sprayed on liner knows that you literally, literally it would never just like peel off or fall off. This is like a strong material. How gross have Doug Bergam to be so condescending? Like, I don't know why you and the liberal media just don't trust us. You know why we don't trust us?

Because everything he said in that interview is now completely crap. I mean, to be clear, we've known that it's been crap. But now the Trump administration is admitting that it's crap. Everything he said in this interview is wrong. There was no vandalism. There was nothing like that. Nothing of the sort. And he said, yeah, we can prove that somebody was in there.

We have photos of people gashing the reflecting pool. No, they didn't. I can't believe how brazenly they lied to the American people. How openly they don't feel bad about it. They do it all the time. What about Janine Piro, the attorney in D.C., who Donald Trump hired from Fox News, saying that they have undeniable evidence of vandalism. Take a look.

There was an effort, a violent effort to rip up the ceiling from the bottom of the pool. We can state and prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he caused damage, and that damage is over $1,000. With an expert, come to the trial. Did he have any tools or is it just his bare hands? Right now we believe it's his bare hands, both hands. So does that indicate in your belief that it was probably damaged before or do you believe that he... Oh, he damaged it. Further, but do you believe it had already been damaged before?

He damaged the pool. He damaged this pool. Is this not just like the most humiliating thing you've ever seen? being a member of the Trump administration, being part of MAGA, I'm convinced is a humiliation ritual. Who can embarrass themselves the most in the least amount of time? It seems like that's the competition in the Trump administration. Janine Piro up there saying, yeah, he damaged it. We have evidence can prove beyond a reasonable doubt.

He used both of his hands to rip it up. And the, you know, the journalists are asking very basic questions that she seems to struggle to answer. She's struggling because she's lying. That's a difficult thing to do in real time. But man, is that embarrassing? And the final clip I want to show you, I just, you know, I wanted to highlight all this stuff before we get into the story. The final clip I want to show you of, before we read this article and talk about these charges that were dropped against this Olympian, which Janine Barrow said she could prove beyond a reasonable doubt is guilty is Donald Trump. Let's watch a brief montage, 40-second montage of Trump saying that it was vandalism.

We had vandalism. You know, we have 100, and we have a, I think, 290, 300 foot slit right through. probably a box cutter or a knife of some kind. Somebody went in with a knife and cut it. They cut it up good. And then they cut a 200, 350-foot slip in the form of lots of little slips, a real horrible stuff. They took razors and they started cutting this, you know, very expensive stuff. We caught some people vandalizing.

You get the idea. Donald Trump was out there claiming that it was vandals and that bad people destroyed the pool. And none of that happened. Not true. So charges have been dropped in the Reflecting Pool case, as prosecutors say that the work was botched. They are openly acknowledging this. So federal prosecutors on Friday acknowledge that contractors hired by the Trump administration had, quote, botched the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and sought to drop charges against David Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist, who was one of several people accused of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool. The U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington said in a court filing that it had received documents showing the damage to the pool was, quote, the result of a flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, and the rush to complete the project prior to the events associated with the America 250 celebration on July 4th.

Wow, you're telling me that Donald Trump ruined the project and that he promised something that wasn't possible. and as a result, the American people paid a bunch of money for reflecting pool that is now sitting empty? Wow. Who could have seen this coming? Literally everybody. Literally everybody saw this coming. I don't think there's anybody in politics who didn't see this coming, except for Donald Trump. The U.S. Attorney, Janine Piro, a Trump ally, asked a superior court judge to drop charges against Mr. Hearn. He was one of seven people facing charges in connection with what Trump had claimed without evidence were efforts to sabotage the reflecting pool. Quote, given all of this newly discovered information, it's not newly discovered, we all knew

this. It is difficult to attribute the widespread damage to the reflecting pool to vandalism. She previously claimed that a news conference on July 2nd that prosecutors had tremendous evidence underpinning the indictment of Mr. Hearn and condemned what she called unchecked vandalism and civil disorder. Mr. Hearn was arrested in June after the police claimed he had peeled blue-tinted waterproofing off the pool floor. the coating had begun to peel several days before the arrest, according to internal government documents.

Hearn said that after his arrest, he had merely reached down to touch the peal lining out of curiosity. He got arrested for touching water. Now, I want to be clear about something. We all knew this. They knew this. They knew that Hearn and these other folks who have been arrested did not vandalize the pool. They did not peel the lining. They did not destroy it. They are not the cause of the pool's woes. They knew that. It's the botched job. They're admitting that in court, saying that it got screwed up, but they arrested them anyway. The goal was to make an example out of these people to save Donald Trump the embarrassment. That's what they wanted. They wanted to make their lives harder, make them hire attorneys, spend tens of thousands of dollars, show up in court early in the

morning to mess with their lives. It's the intimidation. They never thought that they were going to get a prosecution here. It's the intimidation. That was the goal for the Trump administration. And that's what they got away with. They are actually weaponizing justice. They claim that Joe Biden and the Democrats were doing that. They are actually doing that. That was the goal of these indictments. They knew they weren't going to get a prosecution. Everybody knew that. And they did it anyway. And that's scary. And that's something, you know, zooming out of the reflecting pool. Instead of just picking on the pool, zooming out, that's the broader concern here that in order to save Donald Trump from, you know, national humiliation, they will ruin people's lives. They will make their lives harder to protect Trump. We are led by incompetent fools who are loyal to one man.

some more reporting from CNN on what this order says from Donald Trump's own DOJ and what they're describing in this file. Let's start with you. This is a big admission by the Justice Department. A big admission on two fronts, Pam. One is that they are now saying that this pool liner, it was damaged because it was installed incorrectly. And the reason it was installed incorrectly was because the Trump administration was rushing for a pool liner to be placed on the bottom of the reflecting pool as they were awaiting the July 4th, 250th celebration on the National Mall. They wanted it to be done in time, and so it was rushed, the installation was bad,

and there was damage throughout that liner that the Trump administration had on the bottom of the reflecting pool. The second admission that they're making, now that was already quite a big change in posture by the administration. you admit that their installation was wrong. The second thing they're doing is they are dropping a criminal case, a felony charge against David Hearn, the former Olympic canoeist. He lives up in Maryland, very close to Washington, D.C., and he had visited the National Mall. There were witnesses the Justice Department brought into the grand jury

who were park police, employees of the federal government, who had said that they witnessed Hearn tearing at that reflecting pool. He had been charged with a felony because they said the damage was so significant. It amounted to more than $1,000 that he caused. Now they're entirely reversing that and saying that after the reflecting pool was drained in recent days, the Justice Department went back to look at it. They've already indicted Hearn. They already have alleged that he was the person causing this.

He was a vandal. But then they went back to look at exactly what was the bottom of that, pool looked like after there was water drained from it after the July 4th celebration. And Piro's office determined it looked like there was damage throughout. They didn't realize how extensive it was. And the Department of Interior then backed them up with some more information saying the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism, not Davey Hearn's fault. Wow, quite the admission from Donald Trump's own Department of Justice.

And the final thing I want to bring to your attention in this saga, which hopefully now we can put to rest. You know, the reflecting pool is just like one of the weirdest stories of the year. One of the weirdest stories I think we've covered on the show. But one final thing I want to point out here is that as of now, the reflecting pool cost around $13 to $14 million in taxpayer money that we know of, probably much more than that. That's just what we know. Donald Trump promised it was going to cost $1.8 million that he could get it done in a matter of weeks and that everything would be fine.

Then the tab went up to $14 million. We can spend $14 million on a reflecting pool, but Donald Trump is also simultaneously ending Medicare plans that help seniors and help them have cheaper drugs to stay alive. So he can end this program, have it laps in 2027 without renewal. But the reflecting pool is a worthy investment and a botched installation is a worthy investment according to this administration. They are lunatics.

They are idiots. And I'm so glad that they've embarrassed themselves in this way. So look, I will leave the video there. I just had to talk to you about this really crazy end to the saga. And I'm sure there's probably more to come, knowing Donald Trump. I'm sure he's going to get out there and say, oh, my own DOJ is wrong, whatever. But I will leave it there. Thank you so much for watching.

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