David Hearn is a retired Olympic canoe racer, sixty-two years old, who touched peeling paint at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. The federal government indicted him on a felony. Trial date: September 28.
Three other people did the same thing at the same pool. They got misdemeanors. Hearn’s attorney told the court in July that the charge puts “every American at risk.” D.C. Superior Court Judge Todd Edelman set the trial date Monday over the defense’s motion to dismiss, which argues the government failed to preserve key physical evidence from the pool. The prosecution of a man for touching paint continues. The evidence is gone.
The pool, for context, was the government’s own renovation project — ordered by the president ahead of the country’s 250th anniversary, now peeling and cracked. Trump has blamed vandals for the damage. The same administration whose contractors let the pool deteriorate is now sending a man to trial for touching the result. The government then indicted a man who touched the damage. The monument matters. But a monument the government lets crumble while prosecuting the civilian who brushes the crumbling is a monument to something else.
This is what passes for law and order in the republic: a felony for the paint-toucher, and nothing for the people who actually broke things on a larger scale.
In 2012, HSBC admitted it had laundered money for Mexican drug cartels and for regimes under U.S. sanctions — Iran, Cuba, Sudan, Libya, Burma. The bank forfeited $1.256 billion and paid $1.9 billion total under a deferred-prosecution agreement. No individuals were charged. Senator Chuck Grassley said HSBC had “quite literally purchased a get-out-of-jail-free card.” The cartel money moved through American accounts and the bank paid a fine and kept operating. Nobody was indicted for touching anything, because the people involved had lawyers who billed by the hour, not public defenders.
In 2020, Wells Fargo settled for $3 billion over millions of unauthorized accounts opened under sales-quota pressure — accounts opened in customers’ names without their knowledge, over a period of fourteen years. The agreement was reached with the bank itself. No individuals were charged in the criminal settlement. The fine was paid by shareholders, who had nothing to do with the fraud, and the executives who imposed the quotas walked away with their compensation packages. The DOJ called it accountability.
The Economic Policy Institute documented in 2014 that the $933 million recovered for wage-theft victims in 2012 was almost three times the $341 million stolen in every robbery in the country that year — across 292,074 robberies. Total wage theft, the institute reported, runs as high as $50 billion a year. Almost none of those employers saw a courtroom. A separate EPI study found that minimum-wage violations alone exceed $15 billion annually — more than all robberies, burglaries, larcenies, and motor-vehicle thefts combined. The employer who steals wages touches the law and pays a fine. The paint-toucher touches cracked paint and faces a felony.
The government maintains two courts. In one, a retired athlete faces a felony for running his hand over cracked paint at a pool the government itself failed to maintain — a charge filed after a grand jury indictment in a building where the evidence has not been preserved. In the other, the bank that laundered drug money writes a check, the bank that opened fraudulent accounts writes a check, the employer who stole wages writes a check, and nobody touches anything worse than a conference room.
Call it the law-and-order administration. The law touches the people who touch the paint. The order keeps the money where it is.