President Trump acknowledged for the first time this weekend that "some contractor error" contributed to the flawed renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, a notable partial concession after weeks of insisting the damage resulted entirely from deliberate vandalism. D.C. Superior Court Judge Todd Edelman formally dismissed the charges against Hearn, though prosecutors retain the option to seek charges again in the future. No video evidence has been produced supporting the vandalism claims, and prosecutors' own filing pointed to installation failures as the primary cause of the pool's deterioration. The dispute has exposed a rare public rift within the administration over how to characterize the damage. The competing accounts from Pirro's office and Burgum's department leave unresolved how much of the roughly $16 million project's damage stemmed from installation defects versus the vandalism Trump continues to allege.