Attorneys for the former Olympic canoeist the Trump administration had charged in a felony Reflecting Pool case are seeking to permanently bar any effort to resurface what they called a “politically motivated prosecution” of their client.

The case against David “Davey” Hearn was “motivated by political considerations and devoid of adequate factual support,” his attorneys said in a filing Tuesday, adding that the Justice Department “has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to seek or reinstate criminal charges to satisfy the President, irrespective of the law or facts.”

The “sprint to charge” Hearn, they wrote, “mirrored the expedited timeline to complete the Pool renovations” that led to the damage in the first place.

Jeanine Pirro faces uncertain future after Reflecting Pool case

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Hearn had been on a bike ride in June and stopped by the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, where he was arrested after he allegedly touched material that the Trump administration had recently installed on the pool bottom. U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro told reporters last month that her office could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Hearn had caused at least $1,000 in damage to the Reflecting Pool, and her office convinced grand jurors to indict Hearn on a felony charge.

But on Friday, Pirro’s team moved to dismiss the case against Hearn, admitting that internal Interior Department documents demonstrated that there had been extensive damage that was the result of a rushed and “botched” installation process. Pirro’s team also moved to dismiss misdemeanor cases brought against three others in connection with incidents at the Reflecting Pool.

President Donald Trump wasn’t pleased. He told reporters on Monday that Pirro “choked” and “folded like an umbrella” and claimed that she’s been facing a hostile judge, even though no judge had taken any substantive action in the case. Hours later, Pirro visited the White House, bringing with her an evidence box.

A key witness who testified before the grand jury hadn’t initially been able to show that Hearn caused at least $1,000 in damage. But the witness was later recalled and then claimed that the additional damage that Pirro’s office ascribed to Hearn would cost more than $1,000 to fix, which would have supported a felony charge.

Pirro’s office moved to dismiss the case without prejudice, meaning they could theoretically bring the case again. Hearn’s team wanted the case dismissed with prejudice, which would mean Pirro’s team would be banned from bringing a case against Hearn in connection with the incident.

“By moving to dismiss, the U.S. Attorney’s Office did the right thing,” said attorney Steve Levin, one of the lawyers representing Hearn. “But as our response makes clear, it did so the wrong way.”

Hearn’s filing revealed that a National Park Service engineer even told federal investigators that “he had personally cut loose liner or coating with a knife” to prevent the peeling from worsening.

“The government’s own engineer determined that it was better to cut off the peeling sections than to let them flap around,” Hearn’s attorneys wrote.

In its filing, Hearn’s team said the “exceptional facts and circumstances” warranted a dismissal with prejudice.

“Defying both decency and common sense, the government proceeded to indict Mr. Hearn before it had obtained or evaluated the information necessary to establish a good-faith basis for the charge,” they wrote.

Hearn’s team also said Pirro “held an unprofessional and unethical press conference in which she wholly disregarded DC Bar and DOJ ethics rules by discussing the purported evidence, bolstering the credibility of potential witnesses, and wrongly opining” on Hearn’s guilt.

The case is still active in D.C. Superior Court, and a judge has not ruled on whether to permanently bar Pirro’s office from bringing a new case against Hearn. A hearing that had been set for Thursday has been cancelled.

Julian Beaudion, the Democratic nominee for the Senate in South Dakota, announced Tuesday that he is ending his campaign, clearing the way for independent Brian Bengs to take on GOP Sen. Mike Rounds this fall.

Beaudion is the latest Democrat in a solidly Republican state to drop out of a race that also featured an independent contender.

Democrat Cindy Burbank recently did so in Nebraska, where independent Dan Osborn is running against GOP Sen. Pete Ricketts. Democrat David Roth also ended his Senate bid in Idaho, allowing independent Todd Achilles to face GOP Sen. Jim Risch. Independent Seth Bodnar is also running for the Senate in Montana, but Democrat Alani Bankhead has said she plans to remain in the race.

Beaudion, a nonprofit organization leader and former state highway patrol officer, suggested he was not exiting the race to help give the independent candidate a better chance at victory in November. He said in a lengthy statement on X that he would not be endorsing Bengs or Rounds.

Beaudion said he was ending his campaign after he and his family faced “intimidating threats to drop out of the race.”

Beaudion did not elaborate on the threats, saying the “time will come” for him to reveal more details. But he criticized Bengs in an interview with The Washington Post, saying Bengs has “proven to stoop to whatever level he has to to make sure he gains power.”

Rounds recently told NBC News that his campaign strategy would not change if the Democratic contender dropped out, suggesting Bengs is actually a Democrat. Bengs, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, ran for the Senate as a Democrat in 2022 and lost to John Thune, now the Senate majority leader, by 44 percentage points.

Rounds, who won his last race in 2020 by more than 30 points, also has a financial edge. His campaign had $2.7 million left to spend as of June 30, according to recent campaign finance reports, while Bengs had $51,000.

Republican state Senate President Ty Masterson will face Democratic state Sen. Cindy Holscher in Kansas’ election for governor this fall, NBC News projects, setting up a contest that represents the GOP’s best gubernatorial pickup opportunity this year.

Both candidates won their respective primaries on Tuesday. Masterson rode an endorsement from President Donald Trump to emerge from a crowded GOP field, while Holscher focused on a progressive, anti-establishment message to defeat a fellow state Sen. Ethan Corson, who was backed by term-limited Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly.

Holscher pitched herself in ads as someone who “gets that working people are tired of being sold out by both parties.” She also made her support for a proposed moratorium on new data center construction a big part of her message.

Corson massively outspent Holscher in the primary, and leaned heavily on his support from Kelly, who won two terms in a state Trump won by double digits in the past three presidential contests.

One of his recent TV ads featured Kelly praising him as someone who can “stand up to Trump and ICE” and has the “strength and judgement and backbone” for the state’s top job. Another ad, run by a pro-Corson PAC called Heartland Priorities, showed Kelly lauding Corson for having a “record of standing up for Kansas values” and for “stepping up and fighting back” against Trump.

Kelly, who has maintained strong job approval ratings, told the Kansas City Star in a recent interview that Corson was the only Democrat in the race capable of winning the support of the state’s “extraordinarily moderate” Republican and independent voters in November. She said that, “if he’s not elected, I’m very concerned about the direction Kansas will go in,” while also suggesting that Holscher was an “extremist.”

Meanwhile, on the GOP side, Masterson and his allies were outspent on the airwaves by his opponents, but his support from the president put him over the top.

In a tele-rally last week, Trump lauded Masterson as a “fighter,” a “winner” and as someone who has “done a fantastic job — throughout life, actually.”

“We love each other, we love that state,” Trump said.

In Kansas, registered Republicans outnumber registered Democrats nearly 2 to 1. The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter has rated the general election contest as “lean Republican.”

Missouri voters blocked a Republican-led effort to raise the bar for passing citizen-led constitutional amendments, NBC News projects.

Under current state law, such ballot measures require a simple statewide majority for passage, a process that has been used in recent years to grant abortion rights, expand Medicaid and legalize marijuana.

But Amendment 4 would have required citizen-led ballot initiatives to win a majority in each of Missouri’s congressional districts, boundaries that are drawn by state lawmakers. Other ballot measures, like those referred from the Legislature, would not have been subject to this higher bar.

It would have created “the strictest passage threshold in the country for citizen-initiated ballot measures only,” according to Hannah Ledford, the deputy director of the Fairness Project, a group that supports citizen initiative processes. She added it could have left Missouri’s direct democracy process “functionally dead.”

Missouri is one of 26 states that allows voters to legislate directly by petitioning to place a constitutional amendment on the ballot.

The amendment was first proposed by Republican state Rep. Ed Lewis, after Missouri voters used the method to advance a spate of progressive priorities in a state where the GOP has full control of government. Many recent amendments would have failed under the stricter standard proposed by Amendment 4.

“This amendment is really an amendment to protect our Constitution,” Lewis said on a radio program earlier this month. “We have the absolute lowest and weakest process and that’s why we’ve had six initiative petitions passed in the last eight years that have really done real harm to our state and to our Constitution.”

The state’s Republican-controlled Legislature has repealed or limited some changes made through ballot initiatives, including repealing paid sick leave.

Opponents of the proposal heavily outspent its supporters, pouring more than $6 million into broadcast ads, according to data from the tracking firm AdImpact. The measure’s backers did not air any broadcast ads, AdImpact’s data shows.

The more-moneyed campaign against Amendment 5, a proposal to end income taxes and expand sales taxes, also included arguments against Amendment 4 in their ads.

The effort to change the constitutional amendment process also came after Republican lawmakers redrew the state’s congressional map last year to carve up the lone Democratic-held district. Earlier Tuesday, Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins said that a referendum that sought to undo the new map would not appear on the state’s ballot, arguing the effort was unconstitutional.

Missouri isn’t the only state where Republicans have sought to make it more difficult for citizen-led constitutional amendments to pass. In November, North Dakota and South Dakota voters will decide whether to bump the threshold up from a statewide majority to 60%. And in Utah, there will be a similar measure on the fall ballot specifically related to tax increases.

Kansas voters have rejected a Republican-backed constitutional amendment that would have allowed them to directly elect state Supreme Court justices, The Associated Press projects.

In Kansas, the governor — who since 2019 has been Democrat Laura Kelly — has the power to appoint state Supreme Court justices, chosen from a list created by a nine-member nonpartisan commission. The measure on Tuesday’s ballot, which was referred by the GOP-controlled Legislature, proposed abolishing that system in favor of contests that would have more closely resembled partisan races for other elected offices.

The move came after the Kansas Supreme Court dealt conservatives some setbacks in recent years, including a 2019 ruling that the state constitution protected the right to an abortion. Voters sided with that decision three years later after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

Tuesday’s ballot measure campaign drew more than $12 million in spending on the airwaves, according to the tracking firm AdImpact, with opponents outspending supporters by more than 2-to-1.

Opponents of the initiative argued that Kansas voters already have some say in who their state Supreme Court justices are: After they are appointed, justices face retention votes from voters after one year and then every six years afterward.

Another core part of their message was keeping the judicial process separate from electoral politics to avoid partisan influences. In Wisconsin, for instance, recent state Supreme Court elections — which are nonpartisan in name only — have drawn tens of millions of dollars and attention from billionaire donors like Elon Musk.

“‘No’ stops judges from becoming politicians. ‘No’ prevents billionaires from buying seats on the court,” a narrator said in an ad from Kansas United for Impartial Courts, one of two major groups that opposed the ballot measure.

Supporters of the effort argued that voters should have more input in the process. According to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, voters in 21 states directly elect supreme court justices.

In a spot run by the biggest spender on the pro-amendment side — a group called Kansans for Democracy Inc. — a narrator criticizes the current commission system, ripping “elites” for getting to “decide who’s on the Kansas Supreme Court, behind closed doors, trading favors, rewarding friends.”

“The public can’t see it or control it. Voters like you completely cut out,” the narrator adds.

While none of the ads from either side mention abortion rights or other hot-button political issues that state supreme courts tend to rule on, Democratic operatives in Kansas told NBC News that the intent of the measure was clear.

They noted that as far back as 2019, state Attorney General Kris Kobach, formerly Kansas’ secretary of state, had called on the Legislature to advance a ballot measure to pave the way for the direct election of Supreme Court justices. In 2022, Kobach told The Wichita Eagle that such a move would allow, “slowly and quietly,” for anti-abortion justices to be placed on the court.

“This is about abortion,” Kansas Democratic Party Chair Jeanna Repass said in an interview ahead of Tuesday’s vote. “Plain and simple.”

Progressives also argued that Republicans chose to put the measure on the August primary ballot, rather than on the one for the November general election, to take advantage of lower voter turnout.