Politics Reigns At Obama’s Justice Department

The corruption of the Department of Justice under Barack Obama and Eric Holder is one of the saddest of many sad stories that have emerged from the Obama administration. Under Obama, the Department has been politicized to a degree this country has never experienced; certainly not in its modern history.
Yesterday the Civil Rights Commission released its final report on its investigation of the New Black Panthers case. That case presented the question–seemingly not a difficult one–whether it is permissible for political partisans, at least one of them an official of the Democratic Party, to wield weapons and make threats outside a polling place on election day for the purpose of deterring members of an opposing political party from voting.
Yet it seems that Barack Obama and Eric Holder approve of such threats of violence and want them to continue in the future, as long as the clubs are wielded on behalf of the Democratic Party. Thus, they quashed the prosecution of the New Black Panthers that had been commenced by professionals at DOJ. The Civil Rights Commission has now completed its investigation of the Obama administration’s conduct in the New Black Panthers case and its findings are shocking. Jennifer Rubin, now writing for the Washington Post, reports:

The statements indicate several points: 1) the New Black Panther Party case brought by career Justice Department employees was meritorious on the law and the facts; 2) there is voluminous evidence of the Obama administration’s political interference in the prosecution of the New Black Panther Party case; 3) there is ample evidence that the Obama administration directed Justice Department employees not to bring cases against minority defendants who violated voting rights laws or to enforce a provision requiring that states and localities clean up their voting rolls to prevent fraud; 4) the Justice Department stonewalled efforts to investigate the case; and 5) vice chairman Abigail Thernstrom has, for reasons not entirely clear, ignored the evidence and tried to undermine the commission’s work.

Jennifer quotes Civil Rights Commissioner Todd Gaziano, who describes the Obama administration’s obstruction of the investigation:

After a year of DOJ’s intransigence and baseless refusals to comply with our subpoenas, two Department attorneys bravely defied orders to testify before the Commission: the former Civil Rights Division Voting Section chief, Christopher Coates, and a lead trial attorney in the NBPP case, J. Christian Adams. Their testimony and the sworn affidavits from former DOJ staff portray a pervasive culture of hostility to race-neutral enforcement of civil rights laws in the Civil Rights Division. The detailed allegations include: a former section chief who doctored a memo to try to prevent a meritorious case from being filed against black defendants, racially offensive statements by several supervisors and staff, and repeated instances of harassment and intimidation directed against anyone willing to work on lawsuits against minority defendants.

The Obama Justice Department, in other words, is both racist and lawless. Commissioner Gail Heriot wrote in her portion of the Commission’s report:

The lawsuit underlying this investigation-United States v. New Black Panther Party–has been called “very small potatoes.” And although I might hesitate to describe a case involving fundamental voting rights in quite those terms, in some ways it was indeed small. This was not a case requiring an army of government lawyers to litigate.
But sometimes the smallest cases are the most revealing. …
[T]he actual activities of the Voting Section have been consistent with the policy statements Ms. Fernandes is alleged to have made and not with Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez’ efforts to assure the Commission that the Division operates race neutrally (made long before Adams’s and Coates’s whistle-blowing testimony). The New Black Panther Party case was indeed disposed of over the vociferous objections of the line attorneys who had worked on the case and against the advice of career attorneys in the appellate section. This is exactly what one would expert if the allegations against Ms. Fernandes [i.e., that the Obama Justice Department enforces the law in a racist manner] were true. No further voter intimidation cases (whether brought under Section 11(b) or the more commonly used Section 2) have been filed against African American defendants–again, exactly as one would expect.

It is impossible to read the Commission’s report without concluding that Barack Obama and Eric Holder are doing their best to turn the Department of Justice into an arm of the Democratic Party and the far Left. This is, to my knowledge, unprecedented in American history.

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