Olympian Seeks Federal Probe Into Arrest, Case Dismissal in Reflecting Pool Incident

Olympic canoeist David Hearn touched a piece of loose pool liner with his hand during a bike ride past the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on June 19. A National Park Police officer asked him to remove his hand from the water. Five hours later, after being detained in jail without being read his Miranda rights or allowed to make a phone call, Hearn learned he faced misdemeanor charges when he found two citations in a brown paper bag with his belongings. By early July, a grand jury had indicted him on a felony count of destruction of government property—a charge that carried a potential sentence of up to ten years in prison.

On Tuesday, Hearn's attorneys filed a letter with the inspectors general of the Justice and Interior departments requesting a full investigation into how this case unfolded. The letter, reviewed by CBS News, argues that Hearn was indicted for a crime he did not commit, that his name and reputation were damaged by high-ranking government officials, and that the prosecution was shaped by political pressure rather than evidence. The officials named include U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and President Trump.

By the end of July, Pirro moved to dismiss the case entirely. She stated that the Interior Department had withheld materials from prosecutors that undermined the case's foundation. The damage to the pool liner, it turned out, had been caused by a contractor's botched installation work—not vandalism by Hearn. Yet Hearn's attorneys contend that prosecutors possessed exculpatory evidence before they ever sought the indictment. They also allege that Pirro improperly approached one of the defense's expert witnesses at the Reflecting Pool, questioning the expert without notice to defense counsel and without producing any written record of the encounter. Such conduct, they argue, crossed the line from gathering evidence into testing how the defense planned to prove its case.

The dismissal itself became contentious. After Pirro moved to dismiss, she was later seen carrying a large box into the White House containing evidence from the case, which she presented to President Trump after he publicly criticized her decision to drop the charges. The White House subsequently held meetings with prosecutors to explore whether other charges could be brought against Hearn. On October 1, however, a Superior Court judge foreclosed that possibility by ruling that the case must be dismissed with prejudice—meaning it cannot be prosecuted again. The judge wrote that allowing the government to reinitiate prosecution would expose Hearn to the risk of being charged again due to pressure from the President, apparently motivated in part by Hearn's political views, for a crime that prosecutors themselves had determined he did not commit.

Hearn's attorneys also challenged Pirro's public statements about the case. At a press conference announcing the indictment, they argue, Pirro went far beyond stating the bare charge. She previewed witness testimony, vouched for the credibility of government witnesses, opined on Hearn's guilt, and characterized his conduct as "anarchy" and "criminal behavior." Such statements, they contend, violated D.C. Rules of Professional Conduct governing trial publicity and prosecutorial conduct. They further questioned whether the sole grand jury witness had been recalled in order to artificially inflate a damages estimate to support the felony charge.

In their letter to DOJ Inspector General Don Berthiaume and DOI Inspector General Caryl Brzymialkiewicz, Hearn's attorneys wrote that the record reflects an indictment obtained through unusual haste and a prosecution shaped from the outset by political pressure and built on an inadequate investigation. They called for detailed and comprehensive investigations to determine what happened inside both agencies. A Justice Department spokesperson responded only that the Office of the Inspector General operates independently and makes its own decisions about what to review. What happens next depends on whether those inspectors general decide to open an investigation into how a routine bike ride led to a felony indictment, and what role political pressure played in that chain of events.