DOJ indicts Olympian for a crime its own prosecutors already said didn't happen, loses to a coatings contractor

…(cont) Four days later, at an unrelated press conference on transnational crime, a reporter asked U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro whether the push to revive the case was coming from the president. "I'm not going there," she said. Two days after that, the renovation contractor's own account surfaced: according to a report on the pool's blistering, Atlantic Industrial Coatings found its workers had not applied enough primer in places, and that two of the liner materials were not compatible with each other. The crack in the government's theory had been sitting in the pool the whole time.

The ruling noted one more detail worth sitting with: Hearn's political activity, and his donations to Democrats, may have made him a target in the first place.

Nobody at the Justice Department has explained why a closed case about a botched primer job needed a judge to call it meritless twice before it stayed closed. The contractor admitted the mistake within days of being asked. The government took five weeks, one dropped investigation, and a declined press question to arrive at the same sentence it had already written in its own first motion.