Trump Tussles With CBS’s Ed O’Keefe Over Exploding Cost of His Reflecting Pool Reno: ‘You Write Fake News!’

President Donald Trump made some outlandish claims about the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool during an Oval Office executive order signing on Monday, as CBS News’s Ed O’Keefe pressed him on the exploding cost of the renovation.

“We also fixed the reflecting pool. In fact, if you go over there right now, it looks very good,” Trump said about the algae-ridden water with a blue coated bottom that’s been peeling away since crews used hydrogen peroxide to try to clean it up.

“It’s up,” Trump continued. “They put — somebody said fertilizer in the water. If you put fertilizer in the water you get algae. But somebody said they might have put fertilizer. They did something to create the algae. But that doesn’t matter because that’s been purified. Its dead. Laying at the bottom. They’re taking it out. They vacuum it out. They vacuum it very carefully out. And it will be back to health pretty soon. We’re going to have to let the water out to fix the one little — there’s two little areas — very little areas, where they were cut, and we’ll fix that. But it’s not leaking or anything, it’s got a base underneath.”

“Part of what’s curious about this situation is, we stood here with you in April when you first revealed the plans,” began O’Keefe. “You said you had a guy who was gonna do it in a week for about a million dollars. It’s been two months, $16-and-a-half million.”

“Well, okay, are you ready? Barack Hussein Obama. Have you ever heard of him?” Trump asked.

When O’Keefe indicated that he had, in fact, heard of former President Obama, Trump continued:

He spend two years and over $100 million on trying to fix it. You know what happened to it? It never opened. He took the water from the river. You know about that, right? It turned out to be putrid, and it destroyed the whole thing. Spent over $100 million. Him and [Joe] Biden together spent $147 million. You know what happened? Never opened. You don’t mention that, right? We spent about 10. Many of the — much of the money are park workers. They’re there whether they do this or not, as you know. They work in the park, and they’re very good workers. They did a great job. So, they were going to spend $300 to $400 million. You know that. And it was going to take four years. I spent about six, seven weeks, and I spent probably in terms of — probably about $10 million. Around $10 million. They say 16, but a lot of those workers work for the same thing. So they were going to spend $400 million. I spent 10. They were going to spend four years. I spent two months, maybe? Less? And I have a better product. Now I can’t help if somebody goes in with a knife and starts hacking it up. And we also have pictures of it.

“Can you release the photos? We’ve been asking for that,” O’Keefe asked.

“Yeah, at the right time, you’ll see it,” Trump answered. “In court. You’ll see it in court. All you have to do is call the Parks Department. Call the Department of Interior. And, I don’t know if their lawyers will allow you to speak to them because, you know, you write fake — you write fake news.”

Watch the clip above via Fox News.

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