The contractor that renovated the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool told the Trump administration that errors in its own work and flaws in the repair plan, not vandalism, caused the pool's new blue liner to peel and break loose, according to government documents reviewed by The New York Times. President Trump has repeatedly blamed vandals wielding knives or box cutters for damage to the pool's "American flag blue" liner, even after the Justice Department dropped charges against people accused of vandalizing the national landmark.

But the documents, which have not previously been reported, make clear that the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, found problems in both the design and the execution of the renovation. Atlantic blamed its own errors in a report dated Aug. 14 and then provided more detail on Sept. 2, the documents show. The Justice Department, which had charged several people with vandalizing the pool in early July, began moving to dismiss the cases on July 31.

Because of "human oversight," workers in some areas did not spray enough of the primer that made the layers of the liner stick together, Atlantic said. But the bigger problem, the company said, was that the repair plan laid out in the contract called for the layers of liner to include two chemicals that turned out to be incompatible. The chemical on top reached a temperature hotter than what the compound underneath could withstand, and the heat caused the bottom layer to blister and come loose.

The failure illustrates the consequences of the Trump administration's rushed effort to renovate the pool this spring. In a hurry to finish the work before the nation's 250th birthday on July 4, the government bypassed competition and gave Atlantic a no-bid contract to carry out an untested approach designed in part by the general manager of one of Mr. Trump's golf clubs.