Freedom Line Blog

At The American Spectator today, I detail in exhaustive fashion the outlandish record of Justice Department official Thomas Perez, who is rumored to be President Obama’s choice to be Secretary of Labor. At NRO, the incomparable Peter Kirsanow provides even more details on an important aspect of that record.

Here’s part of Kirsanow’s:

The Civil Rights Division refused to answer 18 separate interrogatories pertaining to the substance of the NBPP case. The Division also failed to provide witness statements for twelve 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).

Here’s part of mine:

Perez has overseen most of the unprecedentedly naked politicizationof DoJ’s Civil Rights Division, as detailed in an exhaustive series of reports at PJ Media. In short, of 113 “career” (meaning supposedly apolitical) civil-service hires for the Civil Rights Division under Obama and (mostly) Perez, every one of those 113 weredemonstrably liberal activists. (The New York Times effectivelyconfirmed this report: “None of the new hires listed conservative organizations.”) In fact, many of them hailed from backgrounds with outfits such as the “Intersex Society of North America,” or wrote essays about “Genital Normalizing Surgery on Intersexed Infants,” or fiercely advocated the “rights” of prisoners in Arizona to perform Hawaiian chants and rituals. Since Dec. 3, 2009, Perez has insisted on personally approving each of these new hires.

He has aggressively continued a series of lawsuits against various municipal police and fire departments to try to force them to jettison written tests for membership – including a suit against the heroic Fire Department of New York in which the Obama team has argued in favor of what amounts to strict racial quotas – at the expense of public safety. Amazingly enough, Perez actually arguedthat black firefighter applicants who fail 70 percent (!!!!) of the entrance exam still be admitted to the fire academy.

From what I hear, more on Perez, quite devastating, might be coming out as early as this afternoon.

From Fox News:

A member of the New Black Panther Party who was charged with voter intimidation in the 2008 election for standing outside a Philadelphia polling site was back Tuesday morning – in an official capacity.

Jerry Jackson, who was charged in the 2008 case along with Minister King Samir Shabazz, but later saw charges dropped by the Department of Justice, was seen early Tuesday outside a North Philadelphia voting site wearing the group’s trademark black beret, combat-style uniform and heavy boots. Fox News confirmed he is a designated poll watcher.

“No comment,” Jackson said when approached by a reporter at 1221 Fairmount Ave., in the city’s 14th Ward, where he lurked on Election Day in 2008.

That headline seems to be the upshot of a little-noticed July 23 ruling by federal judge Reggie Walton — confirming what many of us have been saying and writing for well over two years now. The official in question is longtime trouble-making Civil Rights Division chief Thomas Perez. Hans von Spakovsky explains.

At a hearing before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on May 14, 2010, Perez was asked by Commissioner Peter Kirsanow whether “any political leadership [was] involved in the decision not to pursue this particular case?” Perez’s answer, on page 79 of the transcript of that hearing is an uncategorical “No.” When the statements of Perez are compared to the documents that Judicial Watch forced DOJ to release in the FOIA lawsuit, Judge Walton was polite when he said they are contradictory and “cast doubt on the accuracy” of Perez’s account.

A less diplomatic judge might have said that Perez testified falsely in his hearing testimony before the Commission on Civil Rights. In other words, he may have committed perjury if he knew his statements were false when uttered.

The Commission on Civil Rights repeatedly asked Attorney General Holder to appoint a special counsel to investigate the handling of the NPBB case by the Department and the refusal of Perez to comply with lawful documents requests and subpoenas served on DOJ by the Commission. When will the Attorney General do so, and when will he ask for an investigation of this possible perjury by Perez?

This case has been a travesty all along — and all along, the Department of Justice has been giving false stories about what happened. There will be lots more to say about this in the days ahead.

Robert VerBruggen at National Review Online today reports that DoJ official Ronald Weich, who authored a false letter regarding the “Fast and Furious” gunwalking schedule, is leaving his job. What needs to be added for the record is that his F&F gaffe (or perhaps a lie) was far from his only screw-up of absurdist proportions.

Weich also was the official who tried to excuse DoJ’s dropping of the voter-intimidation charges against New Black Panther Jerry Jackson by claiming that Jackson was allowed to be at the site because he lived in that building. Oops! The building hosting the polling place was a senior citizen center — and Jackson is anything but a senior citizen, and his actual home address, a number of blocks away, was readily accessible on other documents. To this day there is no good explanation for how Weich managed to screw up so badly as to assert that Jackson lived in that senior center. Indeed, throughout the investigation into the Black Panther matter, Weich’s responses to congressmen were riddled with assertions of dubious merit.

Therefore, the American people should wish Mr. Weich good riddance. He did not serve us well.

Here at CFIF, we’ve spent months chronicling the confluence of incompetence, deceit, and political opportunism that is Eric Holder’s Justice Department, whether it takes the form of the Fast and Furious scandal or the administration’s transparently partisan staffing of the department’s Civil Rights Division. Now, without a coherent counterargument, the Attorney General is essentially pulling the fire alarm. From the Daily Caller:

Attorney General Eric Holder accused his growing chorus of critics of racist motivations in a Sunday interview published in the New York Times. When reached by The Daily Caller Monday morning, the Department of Justice provided no evidence to support the attorney general’s claims.

Holder said some unspecified faction — what he refers to as the “more extreme segment” — is driven to criticize both him and President Barack Obama due to the color of their skin. Holder did not appear to elaborate on who he considered to make up the “more extreme segment.”

“This is a way to get at the president because of the way I can be identified with him,” Holder said, according to the Times. “Both due to the nature of our relationship and, you know, the fact that we’re both African-American.”

Arnold Trebach spent four years working for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights back when that body was at the vanguard of securing rights for American blacks. Like Ted Kennedy awardee Bartle Bull before him, Trebach is now on the record, at Pajamas Media, saying that the Obama/Holder Justice Department has thoroughly corrupted the law by jettisoning race-neutral enforcement in favor of a racial spoils system — and worse. Indeed, he calls the gang at Holder’s Civil Rights Division “racial racketeers.” This isn’t just a matter of turning the law on its head, although that is bad enough. It also has real-world consequences:

Like many other officials, I confronted white racists who were terrorizing innocent black citizens. We have not yet succeeded in completely halting such awful practices, but the election of an African American to the White House by a majority white electorate, including me, is proof of just how far we have come in the proper direction.

What outrages me is that despite our country’s wonderful successes, too many seek to gain and hold power by cynically perpetuating and exploiting racial grievances. These racial racketeers seek to convince minority members that nothing will help them improve their lives unless they buy into the myth of racial helplessness and continuing victimhood.

As I noted here yesterday, whistleblower J. Christian Adams is out with an extremely powerful new book detailing all of the Obama/Holder abuses. Adams will be the guest on my weekly radio show, “Hillyer Time,” on Thursday night from 8-9 Central time, with strong radio signal on 106.5 FM from Gulfport to Pensacola along the Gulf Coast, and also a terrific online signal at the station’s web site. Do listen in. And do read Adams’ book. It will make you seethe with righteous anger against the lawless goons running our Justice Department.

Attorney General Eric Holder’s stint at the Justice Department has been ignominious. It seems anytime the DOJ is in the news these days it’s either for incompetence (the Mexican gunrunner scandal) or nefariousness (turning a blind eye towards Black Panther voter intimidation). Time to add another brick to the wall being built around the justice system, with the news that the DOJ recently released a radical leftist terrorist from prison. J. Christian Adams, the former DOJ attorney who brought the Panthers intimidation case has the story at Big Government:

Marilyn Buck was a Marxist terrorist who participated in conspiracies that led to the deaths of multiple police officers.  Buck helped the Black Liberation Army, a violent Marxist offshoot of the black panthers, acquire weapons and ammunition.  She participated in the robbery of an armored car where a guard was murdered.  If that wasn’t enough, Buck was also charged with the bombing of the U.S. Senate, Ft. McNair, the Washington Navy Yard Officer’s Club and a New York City federal building.  In many states, Buck’s behavior might have led to a midnight reservation in the electric chair.

Yet Holder’s DOJ unlocked Buck’s jail cell and set her free last summer. Justice concluded that Buck “expressed a dramatic change from her previous political philosophy.”

Adams’ piece goes on to chronicle how a stunning amount of vacous letters written on Buck’s behalf by leftist elites, primarily from academia, secured her release. Sadly, it’s no suprise that the insular world of the university was able to produce so much sympathy for Buck. What is shocking — and inexcusable — is that such pabulum was enough to convince the federal government to put a terrorist back on the streets.

Marilyn Buck doesn’t deserve her freedom. And Eric Holder doesn’t deserve his job.

The rot in the Obama/Holder Justice Department, especially in its Civil Rights Division, is a particularly important topic to me, and a big sore spot (as well as a threat to the constitutional order).

Thus I was particularly aghast to see the New York Times the other day run a truly bizarre story attempting, somehow, to show that the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice has been wonderfully de-politicized by the Obamites.  The story is bizarre because the facts cited within the article show precisely the opposite.

Here’s how the NYT (via reporter Charlie Savage) frames the story:  “Under the Obama administration, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has reversed a pattern of systematically hiring conservative lawyers with little experience in civil rights, the practice that caused a scandal over politicization during the Bush administration.” The Times then goes to great lengths to explain that those hired by the Obama team came from law schools with higher “ranks” than did the Bush hires (“more selective law schools,” in another description), and that those hires had far more “experience in civil rights.”

Bosh.

Having a “background in civil rights” is a self-defining criterion — as defined by the Left.  As the story itself explained it, the definition of “civil rights” experience is self-limiting, because it encompasses (only) “traditional civil rights organizations with liberal reputations, like the American Civil Liberties Union or the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.”

Of course, all sorts of right-leaning organizations also are concerned with civil rights, as are lawyers in private firms who fight against absurd actions by these liberal groups that purport to be in favor of “civil rights” but that in conservative understandings actually undermine civil rights.  If one defines “experience in civil rights” as encompassing only lefty versions of civil rights, then, of course, more Obamite hires will show such “experience” on their resumes. But that does NOT mean that they are the only ones who have done legal work dealing with civil rights issues.

Here are the key facts, dutifully reported by the Times but buried and spun so that the real import is hidden:

At the same time, there was a change in the political leanings of organizations listed on the résumés, where discernible. Nearly a quarter of the hires of the Bush group had conservative credentials like membership in the Federalist Society or the Republican National Lawyers Association, while only 7 percent had liberal ones.

By contrast, during the first two Obama years, none of the new hires listed conservative organizations, while more than 60 percent had liberal credentials. They consisted overwhelmingly of prior employment or internships with a traditional civil rights group, like the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Look at that again. Not one single new hire for a “career” position by the Obamites had any prior conservative associations. Not one. If that isn’t a sign of true politicization, nothing is.  There is quite literally no way that an apolitical hiring practice could fail to snag at least a single conservative, from 120 hires, in a nation that is majority center-right and with a very large conservative plurality.

If the establishment media had an ounce of intellectual integrity — yeah, I know, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride — then this report would be treated as a major scandal.

This topic merits far lengthier exposition and discussion, but for now suffice it to say that a Civil Rights Division that absolutely excludes conservatives is a sign of viewpoint discrimination that itself should trigger a civil rights investigation — and investigation into the Civil Rights Division itself, one which ought to take some real scalps, starting with that of flagrantly dishonest division chief Thomas E, Perez.

Meanwhile, in sad news that further indicts the DoJ, Hans von Spakovsky writes that whistleblower Christopher Coates, with a tremendous amount of terrific “civil rights experience,” effectively has been hounded out of the Justice Department that he has served with great distinction for nearly two decades.  This comes after he first was, in effect, banished from Washington, all for the sin of trying to enforce laws against racist New Black Panthers to the letter of the law.

Today at the Wall Street Journal, Dorothy Rabinowitz was referring more to the terrorism-related actions/inactions of DOJ than to the other Civil Rights Division problems when she wrote that a good Republican candidate for president “would do well to give time and all due detail—the material is rich—on the activities of the Justice Department under President Obama, the most ideologically driven one in U.S. history. He would make the connection between the nature of this Justice Department and the president’s view of the American nation.” But her advice applies across the board, including and especially to the Civil Rights Division.

In an interview with CFIF, Quin Hillyer, senior editorial writer at the Washington Times and senior editor of The American Spectator, discusses how the mainstream media and Eric Holder’s Justice Department are trying to ignore the Black Panther voter-intimidation case. 

Listen to the interview here.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.