‘There’s a 350 Foot Gash?!’ Stephanopoulos Grills Trump Official on Bizarre Reflecting Pool Claim

ABC’s George Stephanopoulos challenged an official in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet on a bizarre claim about vandalization of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

In an interview on ABC’s This Week Sunday, Stephanopoulos grilled Interior Secretary Doug Burgum about Trump’s repeated claims that vandals made gashes in the pool totaling 350 feet — more than the length of a football field.

“The 350 foot gash, made by a very sharp knife or razors, is actually numerous slashes over a very long 350 foot length,” Trump wrote in a June 23 Truth Social post. “It was purposefully and criminally done, and somebody had to work very hard, probably in the dark of night, to create such a condition.”

Stephanopoulos pressed Burgum to provide specifics in support of the president’s statement.

“You’ve reported that vandals caused the damage,” Stephanopoulos said. “The president has repeatedly claimed that vandals cut a 350-foot gash in the pool. That’s the claim that’s echoed in a legal filing by your department. What specific evidence do you have to back up that claim?”

“Well, we have the actual cuts that were made into the industrial liner,” Burgum said. “And that’s… been measured out. So, that’s just a fact that that’s what we’ve got to go back and repair.”

“That there’s a 350-foot gash?!” Stephanpoulos said.

“Well, it’s multiple gashes that add up to 350 feet across that,” Burgum said. “And again, some of this happened early on. …we’ve installed more cameras. I mean, we weren’t expecting that we were going to have a small group of people that wanted to try to destroy effectively what is part of the Lincoln Memorial. There’s plenty of cameras around the Lincoln statue and around the memorial, but the Reflecting Pool had gone for, you know, decades without vandalism. But now…we’ve got cameras up, and we’ve got more eyes on it. And we’ll let you know…that’s part of the job of The National Park Service, the U.S. Park Police, is to protect our monuments. And so we’re in — we’re in better shape now. If anyone were to do something now, we would have better video evidence of that now.”

Stephanopoulos followed up.

“But you don’t have video evidence of people making those gashes?” He asked.

“Well, we do have video,” Burgum claimed. And we do have eyewitness reports. And that’s up to the courts now. So that process will go forward in the legal system.”

Numerous fact checkers have called out the claim — noting that the administration has yet to provide evidence to back it up.

——

Watch above, via ABC.

New: The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!