Jeanine Pirro Is NOT Playing Around With WW2 Memorial Vandal

Someone allegedly spray-painted the World War II Memorial, because apparently honoring the Americans who saved civilization was too much to ask for one afternoon in Washington.

Federal authorities announced Friday that Melissa Farris, 41, of Elizabethtown, Kentucky, was charged by criminal complaint in connection with vandalism at the memorial’s Atlantic Pavilion. She is presumed innocent unless proven guilty.

U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro said her office is pursuing two felony charges: depredation against federal property and injury or depredation of a monument on National Park Service land. Pirro said the offenses can carry penalties of up to ten years in prison.

The WWII Memorial was reportedly found marked with spray paint and bubbles on Thursday. The monument honors the more than 400,000 Americans who died during the war.

President Trump called the vandalism an insult to the nation’s heroes. The Interior Department called it an “utter disgrace.” For once, Washington has found an issue that should not require a 900-page bipartisan commission to understand.

Do not vandalize war memorials.

There is a fashionable strain of activism that treats public monuments as disposable props. We watched mobs decide they could tear down a Columbus statue and dump it in Baltimore’s harbor because they had appointed themselves America’s new historians. Spray the stone, block the road, throw something at the painting, then act shocked when normal people object. The destruction becomes the message because the actual message could not attract attention on its own.

But a memorial is not merely another piece of government property. The WWII Memorial exists to remember Americans who left home, crossed oceans, and died fighting regimes that had turned mass murder into public policy. Defacing it is not brave, edgy, or transgressive. It is pathetic.

The charges are allegations, and the facts still have to be proven in court. That distinction matters even when the underlying act is infuriating.

It is also perfectly reasonable for prosecutors to treat attacks on national memorials seriously. If consequences follow, perhaps the next aspiring revolutionary will discover the ancient protest tradition known as holding a sign and leaving the monument alone.