Government documents reviewed by The New York Times show that Atlantic Industrial Coatings, the firm that renovated the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, told the Trump administration that its own work mistakes and flaws in the repair plan caused the new blue liner to peel and break loose.
President Trump has repeatedly said vandals with knives or box cutters damaged the pool’s “American flag blue” liner. He kept making that claim after the Justice Department dropped the charges it had filed against people accused of vandalizing the landmark.
The Times said the documents had not been reported before. They include Atlantic’s reports to the government and National Park Service’s daily progress updates from the past two months.
Atlantic reports from August and September described work errors and incompatible chemicals
The documents show Atlantic blamed its own errors in an Aug. 14 report and added more detail on Sept. 2. Prosecutors had charged several people with vandalizing the pool in early July and started moving to dismiss those cases on July 31.
Atlantic said in the documents that “human oversight” left workers in some areas short of the primer meant to make the liner layers stick. The company said the larger issue was the contract’s repair plan, which called for two chemicals in the liner layers that turned out to be incompatible.
The documents show the top chemical got hotter than the layer underneath could take, and that heat made the bottom layer blister and loosen. The contractor said it did not expect that result because mixing those two products that way was very uncommon.
The work was part of a hurried spring renovation meant to finish before the nation’s 250th birthday on July 4. Officials skipped competition and awarded Atlantic a no-bid contract for an untested method designed in part by the general manager of one of Mr. Trump’s golf clubs.
The government has agreed to pay Atlantic $14.7 million. The contractor has said the pool is under warranty and that it will repair it again.
Katie Martin, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, did not answer questions about the contractor’s findings directly. Her statement appeared to keep blaming vandals, saying they had “repeatedly reached into the pool and ripped at the coating.”
Ms. Martin said Atlantic was now “well on its way” to fixing the pool. She did not give a date for when it would be refilled.
White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers praised Mr. Trump’s renovation work in a general statement and sent questions about the contractor’s findings to the Interior Department. “President Trump promised to make D.C. safe and beautiful, and he’s delivering,” Ms. Rogers said.
The pool remains empty, and repair work appears to be continuing. On Thursday, some workers tore up large strips of the blue lining while another sprayed a fresh coat as a man wearing an “Atlantic Coating Inspection” shirt looked on.
Atlantic said the next round of repairs would use a smaller, closely watched crew and an adviser from the maker of the liner compounds. Rhino Linings, the manufacturer, did not immediately comment. Chief executive Pierre Gagnon said in a June statement that the peeling was “limited to isolated areas” of the pool.
The documents show Atlantic did blame vandals for cuts in the caulking at the pool’s edge that National Park Service workers had reported to police. The company did not tie those cuts to the peeling liner on the floor, which Mr. Trump repeatedly blamed on “sick people” with knives or razors.
On July 2, federal prosecutors announced a felony vandalism indictment against David Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist accused of pulling up a piece of the liner. Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney in Washington, wrote that the Interior Department had misled her staff about how much of the damage came from vandalism rather than a “botched installation.”
Mr. Trump still blamed vandals after that. In an Aug. 9 social-media post, he conceded that “there is no video or proof.”
“There was also some contractor error done by rushing the job for a July 4th opening,” Mr. Trump said in that post. Trump later did acknowledge that some of the damage was attributable to contractor error, but it was inconsequential.
He said then that the pool would reopen “shortly.” It is still drained a month later. The documents reviewed by The Times help explain the delay and show that the repair work has been difficult and involved.
The documents show the contractor started power-washing loose chunks of blue liner on Aug. 13. By the end of the next day, workers had filled one large trash bag, but many pieces were still stuck to the concrete and would later need razor blades, hammers, and crowbars.
After the loose pieces came off, Atlantic tried to put the blue coating back on and ran into the same trouble. Blisters formed under the surface between liner layers. Early this month, the company determined that the two compounds were reacting with each other and stopped placing the hotter one on top, the documents show.
That cut down the blisters, the documents show. It did not end them. Early this month, the contractor also named sweat as a possible cause. It said a worker in a protective suit in the hot Washington sun left sweat drops on the coating that got trapped when new layers were sprayed over them.
The documents show the man then opened the top of his suit and wrapped cloth around his head and wrists to hold the sweat. The documents reviewed by The Times do not say whether that stopped the blisters.
A National Park Service employee told workers on Aug. 14 that Mr. Trump would fly over the pool on Marine One that day, according to the documents. Gregory Wischer, a political appointee at the Interior Department, also went to the Reflecting Pool that day to supervise the work in person, the documents show.
Mr. Wischer, once an executive at a metal-processing company, joined the Trump administration last year to work on critical-minerals policy. He later turned to the Reflecting Pool project and other presidential projects in Washington.
Interior Department visitor logs show that in March, Mr. Wischer met with David Schutzenhofer, the manager of a Trump Organization golf club in New Jersey, who helped plan the pool renovations. On Monday, Mr. Trump wrote on social media that Mr. Wischer had updated him on cleaning and waxing statues of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri and the French heroine Joan of Arc in a park in Northwest Washington.
Published: Sep 12, 2026 08:30 am