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The Trump administration’s attempt to prosecute alleged “vandalism” at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool hit a snag Thursday.U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro attempted to bar former U.S. Olympic canoeist David Hearn from the pool after he pleaded not guilty to damaging it, only to be rebuffed by D.C. Superior Court Judge Carmen McLean.“The government’s evidence is weak,” one of Hearn’s attorneys, Mary Dohrmann, argued in court.Another of Hearn’s attorneys, Norm Eisen, said, “Every American should be alarmed about this prosecution. It is not a crime to touch the Reflecting Pool.”The government is accusing Hearn of destruction of property, which could send him to prison for 10 years if he’s found guilty. Pirro claims that Hearn “forcefully and violently” ripped two square feet of the pool’s newly added blue paint, while Hearn maintains that he only touched a piece of paint that was already peeling.“The condition of the Reflecting Pool was the same after I stepped away from the water as it was before I got there,” Hearn said.President Trump has spent more than $14 million on the Reflecting Pool, adding a blue coat of paint to the bottom and later dumping hydrogen peroxide into the pool to kill algae, which had the side effect of causing the new paint to peel. Unwilling to accept the consequences of his actions, Trump has blamed vandalism for the poor state of the pool, and Pirro has charged at least four people over it, including Hearn.Many of Hearn’s supporters came to the courthouse on Thursday to cheer for him, including the former chair of the U.S. Olympic national governing body for canoe and kayak sports, Adam Van Grack, who said that Hearn has spent years voluntarily helping maintain National Park Service property near the Potomac River that canoeists use to train.“This is a person who has devoted his life to representing the United States on an international stage, caring for the community, and protecting and caring for National Park Service property,” Van Grack told the Associated Press. “So the idea that he is a malicious destroyer of federal property shocks the conscience and makes no sense to anybody who’s ever known Davey Hearn.”Trump now insists that the pool is fine, even as he is draining it once again.

Graham Platner, the scandal-ridden populist Senate candidate from Maine, suspended his campaign Wednesday night. His announcement came two days after a rape allegation against him was made public in a Politico report, and prominent Democrats—many of whom had looked the other way at Platner’s Nazi tattoo and prior abuse allegations—one by one dropped their endorsements. […]

The president purchased up to $24.3 million in stocks from arms manufacturers and other Pentagon contractors last year.

Platner took a divisive tone in a video announcing his decision, blaming establishment Democrats for his exit.

The Trump administration is not looking to wind down the violence in the Iran war anytime soon.The current escalation could last a day or a month, depending on whether Iran attacks more commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz, according to unnamed U.S. officials who spoke with Axios Thursday. But the brutality and bloodshed aren’t expected to simmer down in the meantime.“We’re going to slap them a bit so they understand we’re not fucking around,” one American official told Axios’s Barak Ravid.The dissolution of the ceasefire reportedly stems from frustration inside Iran’s theocratic regime, with more radical components of Tehran’s leadership unconvinced that the previously arranged peace deal would benefit their nation.U.S. officials told Axios that Iran saw its grip over the strait slipping as ships began to travel through the waterway’s southern route, closer to the Omani coast. The economic incentives of the memorandum had also lost their allure for Tehran as the country found it remarkably difficult to sell oil even after the U.S. lifted economic sanctions. Financial institutions and countries were reluctant to participate in trade that was based on temporary waivers.Iranian officials were also reportedly vexed that the billions of dollars’ worth of Iranian assets held in international accounts had not yet been unfrozen, despite stipulations requiring that Iran first meet nuclear thresholds as required by the memorandum of understanding.“Part of the Iranian leadership was not happy about all of those things,” a U.S. official told Axios. “They started shooting and we decided it’s time to slap them back hard. It’s a process. We have patience. If we don’t feel we’re getting the deal we want, we are not going to do it.”It is not clear exactly how long the current flare-up will last, but Donald Trump signaled Wednesday that he would no longer be willing to negotiate with Tehran’s leadership, suggesting that—despite having been president from 2017 to 2021 and, during that period, dismantling the previous Iran nuclear deal—he had only just now started to understand Iran’s theocracy.“I don’t want to deal with them anymore. They’re scum,” Trump told reporters at a NATO summit presser in Ankara, Turkey. When asked what had changed since the MOU was preemptively signed last month, Trump said: “I got to know ’em.”Also at the NATO summit, Trump openly pitched the idea of committing war crimes against Iran, claiming that the U.S. could “knock down every single bridge in Iran” in a single day.“There’s not a thing they can do about it,” Trump said, seated feet away from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. “If we have to, we’ll take them out. I don’t want to do that. They have desalinization plants, we’ll take them out if we have to.… Maybe we’ll take over Kharg island. We may take over Kharg Island, there’s not a thing they can do about it.”