Christina Cotarucci

And Barack Obama, you know, spent $35 million installing a new water filtration and treatment facility.

But less than a month later, the famous pool of water is full of algae.

The algae blooms are endemic to this large pool of stagnant water sitting in the D.C.

sun.

It smells like a wet dog down here, you know.

There's also the fact that it's created with slabs of concrete that, you know, expand and contract with shifting temperatures, maybe freeze in the wintertime, you know, under the water.

It leaks millions of gallons of water a year.

And so, yes, there are things about the reflecting pool that should be repaired and that previous presidents have tried and failed to repair.

But was the color of it one of them?

No.

Oh, absolutely.

So normally the federal government would seek offers from multiple different contractors to see who could do the work most efficiently, cost-effectively, and, you know, best.

Instead, Trump handpicked two different vendors to award contracts to.

I said, my pool guy, I said, take a look at it.

And he said, well, sir, we can do it.

One was for over $14 million, the other one for more than a million.

These were no-bid contracts, which means that there were no other contractors submitting plans for how they would do the job.

One of the contractors was based in Virginia.

Trump said someone who had done work on his Virginia golf course and done some pools there.

And this was for the waterproofing, you know, blue sealant on the bottom of the pool.