Freedom Line Blog

Attorney General Eric Holder, dismissing the idea that voter fraud is a serious problem in an interview with NBC News last month:

I think there is a misperception that there is a vast amount of vote fraud out there. You do not see huge amounts of vote fraud and the type of vote fraud that we see is not typically the kind that is in-person vote fraud at the polls which voter ID laws are designed to impact.

Now witness the latest from James O’Keefe’s team at Project Veritas, wherein a young white man walks into a Washington D.C. polling place and the poll workers are only too happy to hand him Holder’s ballot:

In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s politically motivated campaign to block implementation of state Voter ID laws and how such laws are needed to secure the integrity of our elections.

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

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

Pity Eric Holder. To be a professional scold is not an attractive quality. Nor is being woefully incompetent. Yet Holder manages to be both. Thus do we end up with the Attorney General of the United States decrying the racism of … wait for it … school principals throughout America. From the Daily Caller:

“We’ve often seen that students of color, students from disadvantaged backgrounds, and students with special needs are disproportionately likely to be suspended or expelled,” Holder said in Atlanta, Ga.

“This is, quite simply, unacceptable. … These unnecessary and destructive policies must be changed,” Holder said at the meeting, which was hosted by 100 Black Men of Atlanta Inc.

Holder attributed his claim of racial disparity in school discipline to a 2011 study that he said showed “83 percent of African American male students and 74 percent of Hispanic male students ended up in trouble and suspended for some period of time.”

However, Holder’s speech ignored the report’s conclusion that 59 percent of white males are also disciplined. He ignored other data suggesting that the different discipline rates roughly align with actual schoolyard behavior.

If one presumes racism is everywhere, one is destined to find it everywhere. As Abraham Maslow noted, for the man with only a hammer in his toolkit, every problem is a nail.

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

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

Another weekend, another document dump from Eric Holder regarding Fast and Furious.  Last Friday Holder’s Justice Department released information about 500 emails that show Holder knew about Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s murder on the day Terry died.  Other emails indicate Holder was aware of the botched gun-tracking program’s connection to Terry’s death.  Per Michael Walsh at the New York Post:

That information came in a series of e-mails in which the former US attorney in Arizona, Dennis Burke, discussed the F&F’s first fatality, agent Brian Terry, with a Holder deputy. The e-mails were sent in the early hours of Dec. 15, 2010, the day Terry died of wounds received the day before in a shootout 18 miles inside the US border, near Nogales.

The deputy, Monty Wilkinson, responded: “Tragic. I’ve alerted the AG.”

Burke, an anti-gun fanatic whose appointment as US attorney in 2009 roughly coincided with the start of F&F, goes on to tell Wilkinson later that day: “The guns found in the desert near the murder of the BP officer connect back to the investigation we were going to talk about — they were AK-47s purchased at a Phoenix gun store.”

That’s right. The government’s top law-enforcement officer has been turning a blind eye to a cancer in his department for more than a year.

In what Fox News calls “the first big break in what has been a unified front in the [Eric Holder’s Justice Department’s] defense of itself in the [Fast and Furious] gun-running scandal,” the number two DOJ official in Arizona is claiming through his lawyer that Holder & Co. are making him the fall guy.

“Department of Justice officials have reported to the Committee that my client relayed inaccurate information to the Department upon which it relied in preparing its initial response to Congress. If, as you claim, Department officials have blamed my client, they have blamed him unfairly,” the letter to Issa says.

Read the entire article here.

Politico has the story of Holder again crying wolf (actually, it’s worse than crying wolf) and playing the race card (sorry: more accurately, it’s worse than that; it’s flat-out race-hustling) about voter ID laws and other legitimate efforts to stop the voter fraud which has become such a staple of the deliberate efforts of pro-Democratic interest groups. This is especially a large issue in South Carolina, where the Justice Department has blocked a voter-ID law even though it tracks laws in Indiana and Georgia that the Supreme Court already has ruled are perfectly allowable under the Constitution. This is, as has become the norm under Holder, nothing less than sheer lawlessness from the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department.

These people do not care about what the Constitution and laws actually say; they merely care about twisting the law to gain power. They are flagrantly anti-republican (small ‘r’) and anti-constitutionalist, and they must be stopped.

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.”

As an addendum to my column on Eric Holder’s disastrous tenure as U.S. Attorney General, the AG was kind enough to deliver a speech on the Voting Rights Act in Austin, TX, Tuesday night.  Though Holder castigated two Republican examples of voter fraud – both of which were swiftly remedied by the Justice Department – he (unsurprisingly) failed to mention any investigation into the well-documented voter fraud conducted by supporters of Tim Johnson (D-SD) and Al Franken (D-MN) during their successful bids for U.S. Senate.

Omissions aside, Holder made an all-too-typical argument: claiming for government the privilege of taking yet another activity away from otherwise responsible adults.  Here’s Holder’s take:

All eligible citizens can and should be automatically registered to vote.   The ability to vote is a right – it is not a privilege.   Under our current system, many voters must follow cumbersome and needlessly complex voter registration rules.   And every election season, state and local officials have to manually process a crush of new applications – most of them handwritten – leaving the system riddled with errors, and, too often, creating chaos at the polls.

Fortunately, modern technology provides a straightforward fix for these problems – if we have the political will to bring our election systems into the 21^st century.   It should be the government’s responsibility to automatically register citizens to vote, by compiling – from databases that already exist – a list of all eligible residents in each jurisdiction.   Of course, these lists would be used solely to administer elections – and would protect essential privacy rights.

So Holder thinks that overburdened, cash-strapped governments can extract accurate registration data while protecting each individual’s privacy rights.  (You trust, Big Sis, don’t you?)  He thinks that registering to vote and casting a ballot are so important that ordinary citizens can’t be counted on to do the process themselves.  And he believes, along with his liberal activist friends at the ACLU and ACORN, that the reason for low voter turnout after decades of federal approval of political map drawing, “public interest” lawsuits filling the court system, and Motor Voter laws that automatically register licensed drivers to vote is not enough government control over who votes and how often.

You’ve got to hand it to big government liberals like Holder: at least he’s consistent.

The seriousness of Eric Holder’s failings as U.S. Attorney General came to a well-deserved head yesterday during tough questioning before the Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee.  Though Quin has spotlighted several other kinds of abuses worthy of investigation by Congress, the Judiciary Committee’s focus was on the growing number of lies and distortions given by Holder’s Justice Department to congressional investigators about the Fast and Furious operation that let over 2,000 guns intentionally “walk” into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

Under withering questions from Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R- WI) about what it means to lie to Congress, Holder tried to dodge:

Rep. Dan Lungren (R-CA) drew Holder’s attention to internal emails showing anti-gun rights bureaucrats and political appointees speculating about using the failure of Fast and Furious fiasco as an after-the-fact reason to extend gun control regulations:

Most disturbingly, Holder acknowledged that no one in the Justice Department knows how many guns are actually out there, but that the repercussions will be felt “for years” in both the United States and Mexico.

For all his failures as Attorney General, the Fast and Furious scandal should be the one that brings Eric Holder’s tenure to an abrupt end.  President Barack Obama should clean house at the Justice Department over the Christmas break by firing Holder and those lieutenants involved in the serial lying to Congress.  If not, House Republicans should explore impeachment proceedings against Holder.

As I said in my column this week, Holder’s statements and actions amount to perjury and obstruction of justice.  In his misleading testimony before Congress and in numerous refusals to share information that when shared was later acknowledged to be false, Holder has proven his reputation and career are too intertwined with Fast and Furious to make him an unbiased administrator searching for the truth. Most importantly, he’s proven he won’t tell the truth when asked under oath. If an everyday American must face consequences for perjury and obstruction of justice, so too should the Attorney General.

How’s this for a breach of the public’s trust?  From Judicial Watch:

The Obama Administration has abruptly sealed court records containing alarming details of how Mexican drug smugglers murdered a U.S. Border patrol agent with a gun connected to a failed federal experiment that allowed firearms to be smuggled into Mexico.

This means information will now be kept from the public as well as the media. Could this be a cover-up on the part of the “most transparent” administration in history? After all, the rifle used to kill the federal agent (Brian Terry) last December in Arizona’s Peck Canyon was part of the now infamous Operation Fast and Furious. Conducted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), the disastrous scheme allowed guns to be smuggled into Mexico so they could eventually be traced to drug cartels.

Instead, federal law enforcement officers lost track of more than 1,000 guns which have been used in numerous crimes. In Terry’s case, five illegal immigrants armed with at least two semi-automatic assault rifles were hunting for U.S. Border Patrol agents near a desert watering hole just north of the Arizona-Mexico border when a firefight erupted and Terry got hit.

The report goes on to say that Border Patrol officials have been kept out of the loop on why the Mexican national charged with killing Terry has yet to be tried almost a year after the murder.

Just before the court documents were sealed, the Washington Times published an article showing why U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and others responsible for the Fast and Furious scandal want the details of Terry’s murder under wraps:

A now-sealed federal grand jury indictment in the death of Border Patrol agent Brian A. Terry says the Mexican nationals were “patrolling” the rugged desert area of Peck Canyon at about 11:15 p.m. on Dec. 14 with the intent to “intentionally and forcibly assault” Border Patrol agents.

At least two of the Mexicans carried their assault rifles “at the ready position,” one of several details about the attack showing that Mexican smugglers are becoming more aggressive on the U.S. side of the border.

According to the indictment, the Mexicans were “patrolling the area in single-file formation” a dozen miles northwest of the border town of Nogales and — in the darkness of the Arizona night — opened fire on four Border Patrol agents after the agents identified themselves in Spanish as police officers.

Two AK-47 assault rifles found at the scene came from the failed Fast and Furious operation.

Imagine if some corrupt machine politician tried to keep in the dark a metropolitan police department on why politically appointed prosecutors were delaying justice for a mafioso cop-killer and sealing his records.  The cops – and the public – wouldn’t stand for it.  Neither should the Border Patrol and the American people.

H/T: Mark Hemingway at the Weekly Standard

It’s official: Eric Holder is now a campaign issue.  GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry says that because of Holder’s false statements about his knowledge and oversight of the Fast and Furious fiasco, the U.S. Attorney General should resign or be fired immediately.

This is a welcome development to those of us at CFIF who have been calling for Holder’s ouster for quite a while.  With the Solyndra scandal looking increasingly likely to take down Energy Secretary Steven Chu, it would be a shame if by comparison Holder held onto his job since someone actually died under his watch.

At least they gave him a chance.  Only after watching U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s defiant responses to congressional interrogators did the parents of the late Brian Terry say that Holder needs to go.

Both parents want Holder to resign, citing his response to a question from Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who asked if Holder thought it was his responsibility to have known about Operation Fast and Furious.

“There are 115,000 employees in the Department of Justice,” Holder said. “I cannot be expected to know the details of every operation on a day-to-day basis.”

To which Kent said: “Holder says he has 115,000 employees. That is his job. If he can’t handle his job, he should get out of it.”

Indeed.

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

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

So now the Daily Caller reports that 17 congressman have called for the scalp (figuratively speaking) of Attorney General Eric Holder. To which my question is, why only 17?!?!?

World Net Daily reports that a rediscovered C-SPAN video shows Eric Holder’s deputy linking the un-stimulating Recovery Act to funding for Project Gunrunner, a sister program to ATF’s Fast and Furious ‘gun-walking’ scheme to track guns sold to Mexican drug cartels.

Here’s the money quote from Deputy Attorney General David Ogden:

“Attorney General Holder and I are taking several new and aggressive steps as part of the administration’s comprehensive plan. Those steps include the following: DOJ’s Drug Enforcement Administration, which already has the largest U.S. drug enforcement presence in Mexico with 11 offices in that country, is placing 16 new DEA positions in southwest border field positions .., uh, field operations, specifically to target Mexican trafficking and associated violence,” he said.

“The DEA is also deploying four new mobile enforcement teams to specifically target Mexican methamphetamine trafficking both along the border and in U.S. cities impacted by the cartels,” he continued.

“DOJ’s bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is increasing its efforts by adding 37 new employees and three new offices, using $10 million in Recovery Act funds and redeploying 100 personnel to the southwest border in the next 45 days to fortify its Project Gunrunner, which is aimed at disrupting arms trafficking between the United States and Mexico,” he said.  (Emphasis added)

The date of the press conference: March 24, 2009.  That’s fifteen months prior to the June 2010 memos that earlier this week showed Holder lying to Congress about when he was first aware of the ATF programs.

Holder has no credibility left.  It’s time to fire him, immediately.

With the unwashed masses “occupying” Wall Street and other financial centers throughout the country, Community-Organizer-in-Chief Barack Obama is trying to convince the protesters of crony capitalism that their grievance is really his.  From today’s Wall Street Journal:

Asked about the demonstrations that have spread to cities across the U.S., Mr. Obama empathized with protesters’ frustrations without embracing the movement: “The American people understand that not everybody has been following the rules; that Wall Street is an example of that.”

Haven’t been following the rules? How’s this for a list of people not following the rules:

• Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner fails to pay federal income taxes while working at the taxpayer-supported International Monetary Fund

• Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius grants over 1,000 ObamaCare waivers – many of them to unions

• Energy Secretary Steven Chu rubber stamps another taxpayer subsidy to Solyndra after the company defaulted on a $535 million loan (the company couldn’t get sufficient venture capital funding but did grease the skids to get taxpayer money thanks to an Obama fundraiser – who was also an investor – pulling strings)

• Attorney General Eric Holder lies to Congress about allowing a criminally stupid ‘gun-walking’ program at ATF to continue that sends 2,000 guns to Mexican drug cartels, killing a Border Patrol Agent

• Education Secretary Arne Duncan violates the No Child Left Behind law by unilaterally issuing waivers that require recipients to accept White House dictated regulations that cannot get through Congress – an unheard of abuse of the waiver process

I could go on, but I think the point is made.  The American people are viscerally aware of a politically connected elite waging war on the rule of law.  But it’s the Tea Party, not those squatting outside America’s nodes of commerce, that has identified the biggest threat to prosperity.  It’s time to occupy the White House and the Cabinet with people who not only respect the law, but also know how to grow the economy in a real, free market fashion.

Tracy Schmaler, top spokesman at the Eric Holder (in)Justice Department, has a hair-trigger temper that doesn’t even seem to need a good reason to go off. At The American Spectator today, I described my first encounter with her.  It didn’t even end with her yelling at me on the phone; it almost started that way.

Now comes Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News to tell a similar story:

In between the yelling that I received from Justice Department yesterday, the spokeswoman–who would not put anything in writing, I was asking for her explanation so there would be clarity and no confusion later over what had been said, she wouldn’t put anything in writing-…. Well the DOJ woman was just yelling at me. The guy from the White House on Friday night literally screamed at me and cussed at me. [Laura: Who was the person? Who was the person at Justice screaming?] Eric Schultz. Oh, the person screaming was [DOJ spokeswoman] Tracy Schmaler, she was yelling not screaming.

I’m not sure what the difference is between yelling and screaming, but either one is highly unprofessional, especially coming from a press secretary.

I’ve heard a number of similar stories about Ms. Schmaler. She gets furious awfully fast. I guess that’s what happens when you don’t have the truth to rely on.

It certainly looks like U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder lied to Congress when he said on May 3^rd of this year that “I’m not sure of the exact date, but I probably heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the last few weeks.”  The most generous accounting would limit Holder’s knowledge of the international gun scandal to no earlier than the beginning of 2011.

Not so reports CBS News.

Yet internal Justice Department documents show that at least ten months before that hearing, Holder began receiving frequent memos discussing Fast and Furious.

Specifically, memos dating from July, October, and November of 2010.  Spinners at Holder’s Department of Justice are trying to cover their boss by saying he misunderstood the question about when he first heard about Fast and Furious and its criminally negligent gun-walking element.

Spare us the feigned stupidity, Mr. Attorney General.  Among your many derelictions of duty, the gun-walking scandals offer the strongest rationale for your resignation.  Failing that, it may be time to consider impeachment proceedings.