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Posts Tagged ‘Black Panther’
March 19th, 2013 at 12:51 pm
Civil Rights Commissioner Slams Labor Nominee Perez

Peter Kirsanow, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights who did yeoman’s work in helping expose the racialist agenda of the Holder Justice Department and especially its Civil Rights Division under Thomas Perez, has now come out with a scathing letter expressing serious reservations about Barack Obama’s nomination of Perez to be Secretary of Labor.

Kirsanow writes that the nomination “merits extremely close scrutiny by senators from both parties, for several concerns about Perez’s record as head of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice transcend partisanship and ideology.”

And:

The Civil Rights Division refused to answer 18 separate interrogatories pertaining to the substance of the [New Black Panther voter intimidation] case. The Division also failed to provide witness statements for 12 key witnesses and refused to respond to 22 requests for production of documents. Further, DOJ barred two Civil Rights Division attorneys from testifying before the Commission (the two later defied the Department and testified at considerable risk to their professional careers). The Department refused to turn over a number of requested documents, asserting a variety of specious privileges. In response, the Commission requested a privilege log, i.e., a list of those documents DOJ maintained were protected by privilege and therefore not subject to production. DOJ failed to produce such a log.

After a lawsuit finally forced production of the log, the record was such that,

As Judge Reggie Walton of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia diplomatically stated in his opinion, DOJ’s internal documents “appear to contradict Assistant Attorney General Perez’s testimony [before the Commission] that political leadership was not involved” in the decision to dismiss the NBPP case.

After detailing even more concerns about Perez, Kirsanow concluded: “All of these things should be of tremendous concern to all senators, regardless of party, when considering the president’s choice of Thomas Perez for labor secretary. They should, at minimum, be the subjects of extensive questioning of the nominee.”

The battle over Perez’ nomination promises to be very contentious, indeed.

merits
extremely close scrutiny by senators from both parties, for several concerns about Perez’s
record as head of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice transcend
partisanship and ideology