INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM HAS AN INEVITABLE TENDENCY toward feeling workaday, full of nuts-and-bolts information, not many soaring flights of eloquent prose. I had a friend and colleague who was a dedicated exponent of the genre, in fact he ran the renowned Insight team, the investigatory arm of London’s Sunday Times, under the legendary editorship of the late Harold Evans, and he once simplified for me the characteristic straightforwardness that’s involved -- well, I suppose he oversimplified it for effect. He said:

“Investigative journalism comes in in just two forms: ‘We name the guilty men’ … and … ‘Arrow points to defective part’.”

I must turn, then, to one of our current era’s leading vehicles for that vital commodity, investigative journalism: The New York Times. It’s my hometown newspaper, of course, though I’m at present consuming it far away in the northerly state of Maine – just like the remarkable proportion of its readers (more than a quarter now) who are spread far beyond New York itself, in widely scattered parts of the world. The ‘Old Gray Lady’ has now well earned the label global newspaper.

A specially-assigned team of Times reporters, Maxine Joselow, David Fahrenthold, Tyler Pager and Clarence Williams, have devoted months — in classic ‘Bernstein and Woodward’ investigative style — to examining in great detail the full story of Washington DC’s Reflecting Pool – its dilapidation … its Trump-ordered restoration (by just whom and just how) … the consequent results of that dubious “restoration,” which merely produced more unwanted debris, and brought with it some appalling victimization of so-called vandals by Trump’s obedient law-enforcement officials --- who then only incurred yet more, and even more publicly embarrassing failure.

For their exhaustive and fluently readable article (dated August 7), the Times reporters who are well-used to the DC beat, covering both politics and metro matters - and in one case a specialty in climate issues, found themselves in rather different territory, digging for information among delegates who attended a concrete industry convention in Las Vegas. They were tracing the course of decision-making that had led to a Missouri-based company, Creative Polymers, being selected to solve the intractable problem of green algae discoloring the Reflecting Pool, and thus preventing it from, well, reflecting.

**DAVID SCHUTZENHFER’s LinkedIn profile pic**

The Times team laid out in full how the President himself had set the story in motion. Late last year he tapped not a member of his government, but one of his New Jersey golf club managers, David Schutzenhofer (right) — who is experienced in the hospitality business, but not in construction — to figure out how to deal with the chronic leaking of the Pool, and its recurring algae growth every summer – and to do so in time for the 250th anniversary celebrations of our nation’s founding.

Acting on what he learned at the concrete convention, Schutzenhofer kicked off a process of essentially no-bid contracts that embraced not just Creative Polymers of St Louis, but also Rhino Linings with bases in Texas and California, plus Atlantic Industrial Coatings of Virginia, whose task was to actually apply the Rhino product to the bottom and the roughly two-feet-deep sides of the pool. The St Louis company had some experience working on their city’s monumental arch, the so-called Gateway to the West … but the others had never previously done any government work. That same Rhino product – an adhesive blue spread with the name “blue,” was, according to the Times, something the President found especially attractive.

Another company, this time in Ohio and again with no-bids allowed from potential competitors, was entrusted with the algae-killing part of the project. Its name is Greenwater Services, and its ultimate owner is an investment trust run by John J. Cafaro (below left) who is a longtime major donor to Donald Trump, and a neighbor of his at Mar-a-Lago in Florida. Cafaro has given almost three-quarters of a million dollars to Trump and his campaigns, plus political action committees aligned with him. The Reflecting Pool contract his company was awarded, with the National Park Service, was worth $1.7 million. Oh, and lest I forget, Cafaro originally made his money from developing shopping malls, and once pleaded guilty to bribery of a US Congressman.

Unsurprisingly perhaps the restoration scheme as a whole deeply troubled the non-profit Cultural Landscape Foundation, which is dedicated to safeguarding our nation’s landscape heritage, indeed it tried to halt it through legal action. Its chief, Charles Birnbaum told the Times reporters that the companies’ lack of relevant experience was “like asking a museum guard to restore a painting in the Metropolitan Museum.”

There was also an economic and logistical backdrop that complicated the companies’ joint efforts to carry out the President’s wishes -- a backdrop created by Trump himself. His own steep tariffs on resins from China and other countries had the effect of limiting the availability of polyurea coatings.

That, plus the tight timetable, made the prospects of success all the more difficult. The Times discovered a Department of the Interior document that suggested the effect of tariffs on material supplies could result in “mission failure.”

WELL, WE ALL KNOW the physical outcome of the entire process. The blue coating was quickly, remarkably quickly, marred by countless blisters and small holes, which in some cases became quite sizable holes, with bits and pieces floating free. Oh, and of course the green algae refused to disappear. The President insisted on social media that the coating would be effective for a hundred years, and then … he started to blame vandals for tearing it up.

His flunkeys did what flunkeys do – commenced a witch-hunt. They even found (surprise, surprise) what they hoped was a high-profile, attention-diverting culprit. That would be Davey Hearn, the onetime star Olympic canoeist, who was charged with pulling out of the water a piece of the blue liner. If convicted he would have faced up to 10 years in jail for destruction of property. But soon – though certainly not soon enough – the charges were dropped by the previously enthusiastic US Attorney for the District Jeanine Pirro (also, previously, one of the President’s favorite Fox News commentators). She now, though, had no choice, given the obvious true facts of the case, to cease her vindictive prosecution of Hearn. And she decided, somewhat bravely, I suppose, to blame the loose blue lining on, in actuality, “a botched installation” by the President’s handpicked contractors, an installation which was “rushed and flawed.”

It was irresistible, I suppose. Times editors neatly headlined the full story “How the Reflecting Pool came to Mirror Trump’s Administration.” But this was more than a clever, perhaps arch kind of witticism. Here indeed was research and writing that offered us much more than mere metaphor – it carried, throughout its three-thousand-plus words, the firm stamp of thoroughly verified facts. And in so doing it did capture indelibly just about everything that characterizes the Trump Administration — its cronyism and corruption … its vindictiveness and vengefulness … its mindless sycophancy toward its leader … its sheer grubbiness … its incompetence … its “falsehoods piled upon falsehoods” (to use the Times reporters’ own words), or what we could all call its complete inability to handle, or even recognize, the truth.

Like all professional investigative journalists, just before going to press the team asked the White House for its official reaction to their discoveries. No word came, to no one’s surprise. But the Interior Department did speak – its spokesperson Katie Martin said “President Donald J. Trump is an expert builder who fixed the Reflecting Pool permanently before deranged people vandalized it.”

Prosecutor Pirro is now very obviously on the outs with the nation’s Chief Executive. He accused her of “choking.” In the Times article the team said about her (with what read to me as very straight poker-faces) that “Mr. Trump told reporters this week that he had not decided whether he would fire her.”

ANOTHER SKILLFULLY CONDENSED and fluently written piece of investigative work, based on two years of closely-observed reporting, comes from Maggie Haberman at the Times, who’s notable for both infuriating Trump and yet still staying on speaking terms with him. Along with her colleague and co-author Jonathan Swan she has a newly published book out, Regime Change, Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. There are many vivid scenes, conveyed directly from the Situation Room and the Oval Office. I urge you to read it, and you might like me be taken aback (though not especially surprised, I’d guess) by their highly detailed, often actually verbatim dialogue, as spoken between Trump and, just for one instance out of many, his Secretary for Commerce.

In that instance, the President is talking about tariffs imposed on the US by other countries, and menacingly demands different and bigger numbers than those he’s just been given by the responsible Cabinet member. The Secretary points out that what he’s already delivered are the true numbers. The President then insists afresh on getting inflated figures, instead of what he calls those “bullshit numbers.” The Secretary calls desperately on another Cabinet member, the Trade Representative to “Speak up” in support of the true numbers … and only a cowed silence ensues.

The scene is utterly emblematic of our nation’s condition nowadays – Rule by the Power of Lies.

A Story to Fully Reflect Trump’s Rule

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