The company hired to renovate the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool has acknowledged that “human oversight” and flaws in the repair plan caused the newly installed blue liner to peel and tear, according to documents reviewed by the New York Times that challenge Donald Trump’s repeated claims of vandalism.

The president has repeatedly said vandals armed with knives or box cutters were responsible for tearing apart the pool’s “American flag blue” liner. But documents reviewed by the Times show that Atlantic Industrial Coatings, the company awarded the renovation contract, blamed its own execution of the repair work and a flawed design plan.

The justice department has charged several people with vandalizing the pool in early July, but prosecutors began moving to dismiss those cases on 31 July. A federal court filing said information later supplied by the interior department showed the damage was caused by a flawed installation and the rush to finish the project ahead of the country’s 250th anniversary celebrations on 4 July, not vandalism.

The White House referred questions about the contractor’s report to the interior department. In a statement, a spokesperson for the interior department did not directly address the report, but blamed “major vandalism” for the damage.

The spokesperson said Atlantic was “contractually obligated” to remedy the repairs “and is well on its way to doing so”.

Atlantic Industrial Coatings did not immediately return a request for comment.

Atlantic first acknowledged its mistakes in a 14 August report and provided additional details in early September, according to the documents. As a result of “human oversight”, the company said crews failed to spray enough primer to properly bond the liner’s layers in certain places.

The company also said the design spelled out in the contract called for two chemicals to be used in separate layers of the liner even though the products ultimately proved incompatible. The chemical sprayed on top became hotter than the material below it could tolerate, causing the material underneath to blister and separate.

Atlantic said it had not anticipated that reaction because combining the two products in that manner was “very uncommon”.

Virginia-based Atlantic was awarded a $14.7m no-bid contract to repaint and waterproof the pool’s concrete floor in spring of this year. The approach had not previously been tested and was designed in part by the general manager of one of Trump’s golf clubs, according to the Times.

The renovation was carried out on an accelerated schedule as the administration pushed to have the Reflecting Pool completed before the nation’s 250th birthday on 4 July.

Atlantic has said it would repair the pool again under the project’s warranty.

Last month, Trump acknowledged the renovation had been rushed and that the contractor made mistakes, though he has not backed off his claims that vandals were responsible for much of the damage.

Writing on Truth Social, the president said the contractor had taken shortcuts while racing to complete the project for its 4 July opening. “As with many jobs, there was also some contractor error done by rushing the job,” he wrote, claiming that the damage caused by those mistakes was limited to “a very small area” and was “relatively inconsequential”.