US attorney for DC announces charge against former Olympian canoeist after he reached into reflecting pool – live
US attorney for DC announces charge against Olympian canoeist
At a press conference on Thursday, US attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro announced the single felony charge against David Hearn after he reached into the reflecting pool last month.
“Today is about accountability for damaging a national resource, a national treasure,” she said, adding that the Olympian “forcefully and violently” pulled up and removed the bottom liner in the reflecting pool.
Pirro alleged that Hearn “damaged approximately two square feet of sealant from the bottom of the pool” and his behavior was characterized by witnesses as “belligerent, rude, and disrespectful,” according to National Park Service employees that witnessed the event.
The US attorney claimed that the damage totalled more than $1,000.
Key events
‘Davey Hearn is innocent’, former Olympian’s lawyers say of ‘outrageous’ charge over touching reflecting pool lining
Two prominent Washington lawyers have denounced the indictment of their client, the former US Olympian Davey Hearn, for allegedly destroying government property by reaching into the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool to feel a piece of the new lining that peeled away within days of being applied.
Hearn’s lawyers include Norm Eisen, a former Obama administration ethics and government reform adviser, and Mary Dohrmann, a former federal prosecutor in the District of Columbia who charged rioters for attacking the Capitol on January 6 and then worked for special counsel Jack Smith.
“Davey Hearn is innocent,” his lawyers wrote. “These charges are outrageous and should be alarming to every American. This indictment reflects the administration’s effort to shift blame for their own failures. On the eve of our nation’s Independence Day, Americans should be deeply concerned by the misuse of government power against an ordinary citizen based on a concocted narrative. The justice system exists to determine facts, not to provide political cover.”
Hearn’s legal team, drawn from two non-profits, Democracy Defenders Fund and the Washington Litigation Group, issued the statement after a grand jury alleged that Hearn “maliciously did injure, break and destroy certain property, that is, lining material of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, property of the United States government, causing damage in the amount of $1000 or more.”
US attorney for DC announces charge against Olympian canoeist
At a press conference on Thursday, US attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro announced the single felony charge against David Hearn after he reached into the reflecting pool last month.
“Today is about accountability for damaging a national resource, a national treasure,” she said, adding that the Olympian “forcefully and violently” pulled up and removed the bottom liner in the reflecting pool.
Pirro alleged that Hearn “damaged approximately two square feet of sealant from the bottom of the pool” and his behavior was characterized by witnesses as “belligerent, rude, and disrespectful,” according to National Park Service employees that witnessed the event.
The US attorney claimed that the damage totalled more than $1,000.
Here’s a recap of the day so far
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A three-time US Olympian and canoeist has been indicted by a grand jury in Washington DC after reaching into the reflecting pool, according to a report by CNN, citing a source familiar with the charges. David Hearn was arrested last month on a misdemeanor charge of destruction of government property, after noticing a partly detached piece of the blue liner and reaching into the water to see what it felt like.
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On Thursday, Trump posted his latest AI-generated video – a deepfake clip that portrays him as a doctor talking about the symptoms of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” or TDS – a fictional condition that he has made up to undermine his critics. The video also includes several AI depictions of celebrities who have spoken out against the president and his administration all discussing how their lives have been affected by TDS. White House officials did not confirm whether the White House had reached out to any of the performers depicted, which include Whoopi Goldberg, Edward Norton and Julia Roberts, about using their likeness.
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has thrown her support behind Abdul El-Sayed, the doctor and progressive Democrat seeking the party’s nomination in Michigan’s closely watched Senate race. In an interview with the New York Times, Ocasio-Cortez endorsed El-Sayed, a former public health director, saying that “despite our ideological differences and whatever disagreements there are in the party, every single one of us sees this moment as existential.”
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US employers added 57,000 jobs in June, dropping since last month’s figures, and considerably lower than economists predicted. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), employment continued to trend up in professional and business services, social assistance, and health care. Leisure and hospitality lost jobs. The June unemployment rate dropped to 4.2%, compared to 4.3% the month prior.
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Donald Trump hijacked the United States’ 250th anniversary celebrations to serve “political ideology and pet projects”, a congressional report released today has revealed. The interim report, “From Vanity to Insanity: How the White House Cheated the American People Out of Their 250th Birthday”, outlines a web of alleged corruption, wire fraud and pay-to-play schemes orchestrated through a shadow corporation embedded within the National Park Foundation (NPF). It alleges that the president staged a hostile takeover of the US’s 250th anniversary celebration to enrich political allies, harvest voter data and promote Christian nationalist ideology.
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Also today, a US appeals court has lifted an order requiring the Trump administration to reinstall dozens of exhibits it removed from national parks on the topics including slavery and climate change. A three-judge panel of the Boston-based 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals put on hold a judge’s order requiring the National Park Service to reinstall exhibits that it removed under a Trump directive targeting displays that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living”.
Right-wing commentators double-down on targeting pregnant visitors in wake of supreme court decision, media watchdog finds
Several right-wing commentators and pundits have demanded the Trump administration to target pregnant people traveling to the US, following the supreme court’s decision to uphold birthright citizenship, according to a new report by media watchdog Media Matters.
Mike Davis, a former lawyer and host of the War Room podcast, called the ruling by the top court an “abomination” and said that “any woman illegal alien who is capable of having a child needs to be rounded up first”.
Similarly, the Federalist co-founder Sean Davis suggested denying visas to “all female foreigners” and even requiring “sterilization of all foreign visitors”. Meanwhile, former Fox News anchor Megan Kelly questioned on her podcast whether there would the “possibility of cracking down on pregnant aliens” coming to the US. “Revoking visas? Pregnancy tests, even? I mean, how far could we go with that?” she said.
Former Olympian indicted after reaching into reflecting pool – report
A three-time US Olympian and canoeist has been indicted by a grand jury in Washington DC after reaching into the reflecting pool, according to a report by CNN, citing a source familiar with the charges.
David Hearn was arrested last month on a misdemeanor charge of destruction of government property, after noticing a partly detached piece of the blue liner and reaching into the water to see what it felt like.
“I didn’t vandalize anything,” Hearn, who had been cycling, told the Washington Post. “I didn’t destroy or break or peel anything. By the time I realized what was going on, I was being put in handcuffs.”
At the time of his arrest, Hearn had just finished a 52-mile bike ride when he visited the Lincoln Memorial to see the refurbished reflecting pool – whose botched $14m renovation has seen persistent blooming algae and peeling liner.
Richard Luscombe
in Miami
Immigration advocates in Florida have decried a “cruel and harmful” new rule by education officials aligned to hard-right Republican governor Ron DeSantis to ban undocumented students from state colleges and universities.
The Florida board of education voted on Tuesday to bar access to its 28 state-funded institutions to anybody not a US citizen or “lawfully present” in the country. It follows Florida’s move last year to strip discounted in-state tuition rates for certain immigrant students.
Opponents on Wednesday assailed the new directive, which some analysts estimate could cost Florida up to $15m annually in lost tuition and other fees. They also questioned if it was legal, given that it was approved by DeSantis’s hand-picked board of seven, instead of the elected state legislature.
“The rule-making process is supposed to implement existing legislation and laws that were passed, not create its own, and not create its own policies, which is exactly what the department is trying to do,” said Alexis Tsoukalas, senior analyst of the Florida Policy Institute, at a press conference hosted by the Florida Immigrant Coalition.
She said the action ran contrary to DeSantis’s own “Sail to 60” goal, a 2019 policy that sought to lift the number of Florida residents with “high-value” post-secondary education from below 50% to at least 60%.
“The Florida college system is already struggling with declining enrollment, this has been the case for the past several years, and it’s only gotten worse,” she said.
“It’s not like there are students waiting in the wings to enroll when others are denied admission. Florida cannot reach its attainment goal if a shrinking share are enrolling, so it is very much a concern for the state.”
Trump administration can avoid reinstalling exhibits on slavery and climate at parks, US court rules
On that topic, a US appeals court has lifted an order requiring the Trump administration to reinstall dozens of exhibits it removed from national parks on the topics including slavery and climate change.
A three-judge panel of the Boston-based 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals put on hold a judge’s order requiring the National Park Service to reinstall exhibits that it removed under a Trump directive targeting displays that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living”.
Last spring, Donald Trump issued an executive order to restore “truth and sanity to American history” by wiping away any suggestion that the United States was “inherently racist, sexist or oppressive” from national parks and federal lands.
The order required National Park Service staff to review every sign, brochure, film or book at a national park that “inappropriately disparages” Americans or is “unrelated to the beauty, abundance and grandeur of the American landscape”. Park rangers flagged thousands of materials to the government. Some of these were then removed or altered.
As part of the Guardian’s Deleted Data project, my colleagues Amy Qin and Flávio Pessoa have reviewed every submission and classified them by topic. The most common themes were Native American history, slavery, the climate crisis and the civil rights movement and Black history.
They write: “Critics say what’s happening in the national parks is more insidious than pandering to Donald Trump’s base or winning “culture wars” – it’s about the erasure of anyone who is not white, wealthy, Christian or male, and it’ll likely have a chilling effect on how history is told at the national parks for years to come.”
“It’s both stupid and uninformed and very pernicious,” said Anne Mitchell Whisnant, a history professor at Duke University who helped write visitor handbooks and conduct history research for several national parks in the US south-east prior to the Trump administration. “The Trump administration has a very particular idea of whose stories are important and whose stories made the America that they hope to restore.”
You can read the full report on Trump’s assault on US history here:
Trump posts AI video blasting celebrities for ‘Trump derangement syndrome’
The president has frequently used his social media, since he returned to the White House, to share AI-generated images and video. On Thursday, he posted his latest example – a deepfake clip that portrays him as a doctor talking about the symptoms of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” or TDS – a fictional condition that he has made up to undermine his critics. The video also includes several AI depictions of celebrities who have spoken out against the president and his administration all discussing how their lives have been affected by TDS.
“I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, constantly angry,” said a deepfake version of Robert De Niro. “I made everyone miserable around me.”
In the video the AI-version of Trump, decked out in a white coat and stethoscope, said the “treatment” for TDS is to “turn off fake news, say your prayers, and if you ever feel anxious just have a Diet Coke like me, and you’re going to see a remarkable difference in your life.”
In response to the video, Davis Ingle, a White House spokesperson, said that the president is “right” and that “Trump Derangement Syndrome is a crippling disease that has unfortunately rotted the brains of many people.” Officials did not confirm whether the White House had reached out to any of the performers depicted, which include Whoopi Goldberg, Edward Norton and Julia Roberts, about using their likeness.
My colleagues in Europe have been covering the latest strike in Kyiv, and note that a senior Ukrainian defence official, Rustem Umerov, and Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner have held talks in the past two days, according to Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Speaking at one of the sites targeted in a devastating Russian attack, as rescuers sifted through rubble, Zelenskyy said he still hoped Kushner and envoy Steve Witkoff would visit Ukraine even though US-backed peace efforts to end the war have stalled for months. The Ukrainian president added that he hoped to have a meeting with Trump on the sidelines of a Nato summit in the Turkish capital Ankara next week.
Robert Tait
After a momentous term that ended with Tuesday’s rejection of Trump’s attempt to scrap birthright citizenship as a core tenet of American life, the supreme court has acquiesced in multiple power grabs from the White House’s most consequential occupant in generations to leave a dramatically transformed political landscape.
The birthright ruling, upholding the right to citizenship of anyone born in the US, appeared on the surface to constitute a major setback to Trump on one of his key signature issues.
The apparent rebuff recalled the court’s rejection in February of the president’s use of the emergency economic powers act to impose tariffs on a vast panoply of imports. The verdict provoked a fierce personal attack from Trump on the justices that ruled against him – yet still left him free to pursue tariffs by other mechanisms.
Closer inspection reveals a court that has shifted its perception of what is legally possible, while accommodating Trump’s extravagant and expansive view of his own presidential powers.
Nothing illustrates the sea change in legal perceptions as the lackluster manner of the court’s support for birthright citizenship, legal scholars say.
Read the full report here:
AOC endorses progressive Democrat in closely watched Michigan Senate race
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has thrown her support behind Abdul El-Sayed, the doctor and progressive Democrat seeking the party’s nomination in Michigan’s closely watched Senate race.
In an interview with the New York Times, Ocasio-Cortez endorsed El-Sayed, a former public health director, saying that “despite our ideological differences and whatever disagreements there are in the party, every single one of us sees this moment as existential.”
She told the Times: “I think many people are willing to put aside differences in order to give us the best chance at winning. And I think that Abdul gives us that right now.”
The race to replace outgoing senator Gary Peters has become one of the cycle’s most competitive Democratic primaries, shaping up as a test between insurgent and establishment-backed candidates – and a proxy for the party’s broader ideological rift.
El-Sayed, who already has the backing of independent senator Bernie Sanders, is hoping to capitalize on the momentum of other progressives who have notched congressional primary wins in recent months. He now leads his challengers in the latest polls, a field that includes congresswoman Haley Stevens – backed by senior Democratic leadership, including Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer – and state senator Mallory McMorrow, who has drawn support from prominent Democrats such as senator Elizabeth Warren.
As my colleague Tom Perkins reported last year, El-Sayed’s populist economic platform includes banning tax incentives for companies like Amazon, imposing new taxes on billionaires, eliminating medical debt and strengthening anti-monopoly laws to curb corporate price gouging.
Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement marks her first in a competitive Senate primary this midterm cycle. El-Sayed welcomed the support, writing on X: “AOC has spent her career taking on the powerful on behalf of everyday people, and she has shown all of us what courageous, smart, values-driven leadership looks like. I’m deeply honored to earn her endorsement. Onward to victory.”
Michigan is a critical hold for Democrats as they look to flip several Senate seats and regain control of the upper chamber. The Democratic nominee in the Great Lake State is likely to face former Republican representative Mike Rogers in the general election. Rogers previously ran for Senate in 2024 and lost to Elissa Slotkin by less than 0.5% of the vote, despite Donald Trump carrying the state.
