The Obama Department of Injustice and the New Black Panthers case

Although the Washington Post is a leftist newspaper it's not as radical as the NY Times and to a much greater degree comes up with good journalism. Classic case in post is the article looking at the Holder Justice Department's handling of the New Black Panther's voter intimidation case.

Dispute over New Black Panthers case causes deep divisions
On Election Day 2008, Maruse Heath, the leader of Philadelphia's New Black Panther Party, stood in front of a neighborhood polling place, dressed in a paramilitary uniform. 

...Among those who saw the footage was J. Christian Adams, who was in his office in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division in Washington.

"I thought, 'This is wrong, this is not supposed to happen in this country,' " Adams said. "There are armed men in front of a polling place, and I need to find out if they violated the law, because in my mind there's a good chance that they did."

The clash between the black nationalist and the white lawyer has mushroomed into a fierce debate over the government's enforcement of civil rights laws, a dispute that will be aired next week when the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights unveils findings from a year-long investigation...The Obama administration months later dismissed most of the case, even though the Panthers had not contested the charges.

...the case tapped into deep divisions within the Justice Department that persist today over whether the agency should focus on protecting historically oppressed minorities or enforce laws without regard to race.

OK...only whites cannot be oppressed....I'm getting the image of Monty Python in my head.

At the department, Adams and his colleagues pushed a case that other career lawyers concluded had major evidentiary weaknesses. After the Obama administration took over, high-level political appointees relayed their thoughts on the case in a stream of internal e-mails in the days leading to the dismissal.

Evidentiary weaknesses... a video everyone can see on Youtube and the suspects armed and openly threatening the people there...I said something about justice being blind but let's not get carried away alright.

In recent months, Adams and a Justice Department colleague have said the case was dismissed because the department is reluctant to pursue cases against minorities accused of violating the voting rights of whites. Three other Justice Department lawyers, in recent interviews, gave the same description of the department's culture, which department officials strongly deny.

"The department makes enforcement decisions based on the merits, not the race, gender or ethnicity of any party involved," spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler said. "We are committed to comprehensive and vigorous enforcement of the federal laws that prohibit voter intimidation, as our record reflects."

Right...if there is no more open example of voter intimidation than this I want to see it. If those had been white men dress like that with a stick wouldn't the usual suspects be screaming about voter intimidation.

In Washington that day, word of the racially charged dispute reached the voting section of Justice's Civil Rights Division, a unit already divided over issues of race and enforcement.


The complaint went to Christopher Coates, the section's chief. A respected voting expert, Coates had been hired at Justice during the Clinton administration after a stint with the American Civil Liberties Union. He also came up in an internal watchdog report criticizing politicized hiring at the division during the Bush administration. The report referred to him as "a true member of the team."

Washington Post, maybe you could ask why isn't the American Criminal Lovers Union, err ACLU asking for these emails? I wonder.

Since the division was created in 1957, most of its cases have been filed on behalf of minorities. But there has not always been agreement about that approach.


Civil rights officials from the Bush administration have said that enforcement should be race-neutral. But some officials from the Obama administration, which took office vowing to reinvigorate civil rights enforcement, thought the agency should focus primarily on cases filed on behalf of minorities.


"The Voting Rights Act was passed because people like Bull Connor were hitting people like John Lewis, not the other way around," said one Justice Department official not authorized to speak publicly, referring to the white Alabama police commissioner who cracked down on civil rights protesters such as Lewis, now a Democratic congressman from Georgia.

You mean the Democratic Bull Connor...oh, did I say something wrong.  God knows if he was a Republican this would have been mentioned ten times.  But again you see the difference in the parties and the philosophies.  Conservatives and Republicans are race neutral, focusing on the crime.  Leftists and Democrats focus on the race.

Before the New Black Panther controversy, another case had inflamed those passions. Ike Brown, an African American political boss in rural Mississippi, was accused by the Justice Department in 2005 of discriminating against the county's white minority. It was the first time the 1965 Voting Rights Act was used against minorities and to protect whites.


Coates and Adams later told the civil rights commission that the decision to bring the Brown case caused bitter divisions in the voting section and opposition from civil rights groups.


...The 2008 Election Day video of the Panthers triggered a similar reaction, said a second lawyer. "People were dismissing it, saying it's not a big deal. They said we shouldn't be pursuing that case."


But Coates thought differently; he dispatched two Justice Department lawyers, who interviewed Hill, the Republican poll watcher.


Asked whether any voters were intimidated, Hill said he told the lawyers he had seen three people leave the polling place when they saw the chaos out front. Hill did not have their names and did not know whether they came back to vote.

"We're not going to let this stand," one of the lawyers told him.


A criminal investigation was dropped. But on Dec. 22, Adams, Coates and another lawyer recommended a civil lawsuit under a Voting Rights Act section banning the intimidation or attempted intimidation of voters or those "aiding" voters.


"It is shocking to think that a U.S. citizen might have to run a gauntlet of billy clubs in order to vote," they wrote in an internal memo. Although Adams has called the case a "slam dunk," lawyers acknowledged in the memo that less than 10 lawsuits had been filed under this section of the law and no plaintiff had ever won.

Then who are the lawyers...and if it qualifies as voter intimidation we should take action to punish those who violated one of the greatest acts of the Civil Rights Era.

The dispute over the Panthers, and the Justice Department's handling of it, was politicized from the start, documents and interviews show. On Election Day, the issue was driven by Republican poll watchers and officials and a conservative Web site.

OK, "Republican poll watchers and officials and a conservative Web site" are supposed to be political...just as Democratic poll watchers and officials and a liberal Web site should be. The problem is the political stuff came from the Department of Justice...which is supposed to be blind.

On Jan. 7, 2009, less than two weeks before Obama took office, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit seeking a permanent injunction against Heath, Jackson, Malik Shabazz, the party's national chairman and the party, banning them from standing in front of U.S. polling places with a weapon or wearing the party uniform.

Although the Panthers later denied intimidating voters, they said nothing about the lawsuit. On April 2, the court clerk in Philadelphia entered a "default" against the defendants for failure to respond. The Justice Department had one month to file a motion for a final judgement. A ruling on that motion would have ended the case.

Instead, the department on May 15 dismissed the charges against Jackson, Malik Shabazz and the party without citing a reason.


...Legal experts have called the department's reversal exceedingly rare, especially because the defendants had not contested the charges.

They had the slam dunk and made the conscious decision to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory...why?

...Officials have denied any political considerations and said the final decision was made by Loretta King, a 30-year career lawyer designated by Obama as acting head of civil rights.

No, B Hussein Obama would never put a hack in the bureaucracy would he.

...Justice Department records turned over in a lawsuit to the conservative group Judicial Watch show a flurry of e-mails between the Civil Rights Division and the office of Associate Attorney General Thomas Perelli, a political appointee who supervises the division.

"Where are we on the Black Panther case?" read the subject line of a Perelli e-mail to his deputy the day before the case was dropped. Perelli, the department's No. 3 official, wrote that he was enclosing the "current thoughts" of the deputy attorney general's office, the No. 2 official.

...A few months later, Coates requested a transfer to the U.S. attorney's office in South Carolina. When colleagues scheduled a farewell lunch, one attorney who attended said Coates vented his frustrations, criticizing the department for failing to enforce the law "on a non-racial basis.''


Justice Department officials say they treat everyone equally. Holder, in a speech last year to the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs said the department's "commitment to Equal Protection - and to full participation in our nation's elections - will not waiver. Never."


That was one month after the end of the New Black Panther Party case.

No Mr Coates, the administration of B Hussein Obama and his hack lawyers only want to pay whitie back. A shame what has become of the DOJ.

In the first month of B Hussein Obama's regime there was an article on Eric Holder (a puff piece from the New York Times) reading a book on abuse of blacks after the civil war in a prison labor program that wasn't much better than slavery.  I thought this seemed like a man with a chip on his shoulder.  Might I recommend to this lawyer another thing to read:  Martin Luther King Jr's Letter from Birmingham Jail.  The operative quote is "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

You Mr. Holder have yet to learn what a great man like Dr King knew.