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Posts Tagged ‘justice’
August 26th, 2014 at 7:57 pm
DOJ: We Have Lois Lerner’s “Lost” Emails

Apparently, you can lie to Congress but not to Judicial Watch.

The conservative watchdog organization is publicizing an admission by the Department of Justice that government officials can access emails reportedly lost in a hard drive crash.

The messages – correspondence to and from former IRS manager Lois Lerner – have been sought by congressional investigators seeking more information about the agency’s targeting of conservative advocacy groups filing for tax-exempt status.

In sworn testimony, IRS officials have told members of Congress that thousands of emails sent from Lerner’s government account could not be retrieved because a back-up system had also been erased.

But now attorneys at the DOJ are singing a different tune.

“Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said Justice Department lawyers informed him that the federal government keeps a back-up copy of every email and record in the event of a government-wide catastrophe,” reports the Washington Examiner.

That includes Lerner’s IRS emails.

But don’t expect them to be produced anytime soon. The DOJ is claiming that the newly revealed back-up system would be “too onerous to search,” but did say that Treasury Department inspectors are looking into it.

While the litigators wrangle, we’re left with yet more evidence that the Obama administration doesn’t mind playing fast and loose with the truth – even under oath.

The House of Representatives already voted back in May to hold Lerner in contempt of Congress for refusing to testify; making her the second administration official after Attorney General Eric Holder to receive such a dishonor.

If it’s true that top IRS brass lied under oath to Congress about the whereabouts of Lerner’s potentially damaging emails, one wonders what message House leadership would send to this latest act of executive defiance.

August 21st, 2014 at 1:38 pm
Judge Orders Release of Fast and Furious Documents

Soon the American people may finally get some clarity about the Fast and Furious scandal.

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled that the Department of Justice must provide a list of documents related to the gun-running scheme that it says are protected by executive privilege. The list will be turned over to investigators at the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA).

Disclosing the list will allow House investigators to challenge DOJ’s privilege claim for shielding each document, a case-by-case process that will likely result in at least some transparency into the murky program that enabled Mexican drug cartels to kill a U.S. Border Agent and scores of Mexicans.

H/T: National Review Online

April 26th, 2014 at 5:57 pm
Bad News: Holder Says He’s Staying

Any hopes the GOP had that Kathleen Sebelius’ resignation as HHS Secretary might convince fellow Obama Cabinet member Eric Holder to do the same were quashed on Friday.

“The Attorney General does not plan to leave before the mid-terms,” said a Justice Department official. “That does not mean that he is definitely leaving after the mid-terms, just that he is at least staying through that time.”

Prior to Sebelius taking the fall for ObamaCare’s disastrous rollout, it was Holder who was the face of bureaucratic scandal. Though voted in Contempt of Congress by the House of Representatives, Holder continues to stonewall investigators on details surrounding the “Fast and Furious” program that led to the deaths of at least one American and dozens of Mexicans.

Credit Sebelius with this much – At least the department she ran wasn’t responsible for killing anyone on her watch.

July 25th, 2013 at 5:02 pm
Holder Can’t Wait to Revive Stricken Piece of Voting Rights Act

Less than a month after the Supreme Court lifted an outdated “preclearance” formula off the backs of states like Texas, Eric Holder’s Justice Department is trying to reinstate the restrictions by inviting judicial activism.

The move comes in response to the Supreme Court’s invalidation of a coverage formula in Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Previously, states with a history of racial discrimination had to seek Justice Department approval – preclearance – before enacting any changes to their election laws. The problem for states like Texas is that the formula for deciding which jurisdictions are required to submit to preclearance hasn’t been updated in decades, making it virtually impossible to get out from under the federal government’s thumb.

In striking down Section 5’s coverage formula, the Court said that Congress is free to create a new formula based on current data. But with the legislative branch divided, few think any action is imminent.

And so, in keeping with the Obama administration’s motto “We Can’t Wait,” Attorney General Holder announced today that his department won’t wait for Congress to update the law. Instead, lawyers at Justice are filing lawsuits against Texas and other jurisdictions seeking to reinstate preclearance on a case-by-case basis.

The cost to taxpayers will be huge, since both sides of the “v.” are government employees. Each federal judge hearing a case will act as a mini-Congress by making factual findings before crafting a rule of law to determine the outcome. Of course, these decisions will be litigated up the lengthy federal appellate chain; all the way to the Supreme Court, if possible.

What makes this an affront to the constitutional design of separation-of-powers is the deliberate intent of one arm of the executive branch to invite members of the judiciary to make laws that Congress will not pass.

Granted, for well-connected attorneys like Holder it’s cheaper to litigate the Left’s pet projects on the taxpayer’s dime rather than as a private lawyer working pro bono. But as Texas Republican Governor Rick Perry said in response, Holder’s actions really amount to “utter contempt for our country’s system of checks and balances.”

June 6th, 2013 at 1:44 pm
House GOP’s Move after Holder Misses Deadline

Readers know we’ve taken an interest in Eric Holder’s, at best, misleading testimony to Congress about his role in the James Rosen search warrant because, most likely, it’s the clearest evidence yet that the Attorney General should be removed from office.

But to find out whether Holder perjured himself, Congress needs to know all the facts. That means getting Holder to clarify his conflicting statements about whether he intended to prosecute Rosen as a criminal, or just allege the accusation as a smokescreen to get unprecedented – and unlawful – access to the Fox News reporter’s personal communications.

Holder made his misleading statement under oath on May 15. The Judiciary Committee gave him until the close of business yesterday (June 5) to clarify. With that deadline now passed, it’s up to House Republicans to make the next move. For the sake of the truth, it better be good.

May 31st, 2013 at 6:57 pm
DOJ Defends AG Holder, Says No Perjury Committed

Officials at the Department of Justice say boss Attorney General Eric Holder did not commit perjury when he lied to Congress under oath.

Okay, that’s a little unfair (but only a little).

Here’s the way CNN phrases it: “Attorney General Eric Holder’s sworn testimony before lawmakers this month was ‘accurate and consistent with the facts,’ a Justice Department spokesman stressed late Thursday.”

Apparently, those facts are these: Since Holder and DOJ are not intending to prosecute Fox News reporter James Rosen as a co-conspirator in a national security leak investigation, Holder was telling the truth when he said under oath that prosecuting journalists “is not something I’ve ever been involved in, heard of, or would think would be wise policy.”

But as I said yesterday knocking down a similar argument, that’s fallacious. There is zero chance a federal judge would have approved of the Rosen search warrant had investigators not labeled him a co-conspirator, implying that he too would be prosecuted.

Wrong too is any idea that anyone in the Justice Department is going to say or do anything to question their boss’s fitness for office.

That job belongs to Congress. And, if the evidence they uncover convinces a majority that Holder is unfit to be Attorney General, they should impeach him.

May 30th, 2013 at 4:30 pm
Carney Can’t Save Holder’s Misleading Testimony to Congress

Yesterday a reporter read Attorney General Eric Holder’s recent congressional testimony to White House spokesman Jay Carney.

Responding to a question last week about prosecuting journalists as co-conspirators under the Espionage Act of 1917, Holder told a House committee: “In regard to potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material – this is not something I’ve ever been involved in, heard of, or would think would be wise policy.”

Unfortunately, it came to light soon after that Holder was, in fact, involved in potentially prosecuting a journalist for espionage – James Rosen of Fox News, three years before he made the statement above to Congress.

And yet, in full spin mode and with a straight face, Carney said, “Clearly what the attorney general said is accurate.”

The Hill summarizes Carney’s position as, “media reports indicate that no prosecution of Rosen is being contemplated, and that therefore Holder’s statement regarding potential prosecution is correct.”

But Carney’s characterization changes the timeline. Holder said it’s “not something I’ve ever been involved in,” meaning Holder was never involved in potentially prosecuting a journalist. That’s clearly false. What Carney is trying to do by stressing the current reality that no prosecution is pending is to make it seem like Holder’s failure to prosecute now renders his previous support irrelevant.

Nice try, Jay, but it won’t fly with Congress or the American people.

As I wrote in my column this week, if Holder can’t be trusted to tell the truth under oath – and his track record proves he can’t – then he is unfit for the office he holds. If he won’t step down voluntarily, then Congress will be under the duty to investigate and, if necessary, impeach.

May 30th, 2013 at 2:29 pm
Press Boycotts Holder’s Off the Record Discussion of First Amendment

It looks like there’s at least one crack emerging in the mainstream media’s impenetrable defense of the Obama administration.

The heads of the Associated Press, New York Times, Huffington Post and CNN will not attend an off-the-record meeting with Attorney General Eric Holder to discuss new guidelines for conducting leak investigations involving journalists, reports CNN’s Political Ticker.

Their absence will deprive Holder of a much needed credibility boost as he tries to rehabilitate his standing among the media’s power brokers.

The Attorney General is already reeling from two trust-destroying revelations. First, that he stepped aside to allow subordinates at the Department of Justice to go on a fishing expedition by subpoenaing “thousands and thousands” of phone calls from the AP in an unprecedented attempt to identify the source of a leak. Second, that he personally signed off on a search warrant of James Rosen that called the Fox News reporter a “co-conspirator” for gathering information.

Now, with these pillars of the liberal media establishment boycotting Holder’s secret confab, it looks like the AG needs to do the one thing he hates most: Speak candidly in public.

May 28th, 2013 at 6:00 pm
Senate Republicans Petition Supreme Court to Smack Down Obama’s NLRB Appointments

It looks like there could be a Supreme Court showdown over whether President Barack Obama violated the Constitution when he appointed members to the National Labor Relations Board back in January.

All 45 Senate Republicans have filed a friend of the court brief asking the justices to uphold the D.C. and Second Court’s rulings that the president did just that. The Obama administration, of course, disagrees and wants to high court to reverse.

The constitutional question to be answered is whether the Senate or the President gets to decide when the former is in recess, and thus when the President can make recess appointments to bypass the Constitution’s advice and consent requirement.

Important? You betcha.

As the NLRB case shows, if the President gets to decide when the Senate is in recess then the advice and consent requirement becomes effectively a voluntary procedural hoop that the President can choose to ignore whenever a nominee can’t get the necessary votes for confirmation. Such a development would effectively nullify the Senate’s only real quality control measure in staffing the executive branch.

There’s also an added bonus. If the Court accepts the case, it will be one of the few decisions that deal with actual constitutional text, instead of the “penumbras” and other implied meanings that the justices have imported over the years.

Then again, that may be why this case gets snubbed.

H/T: Politico

May 22nd, 2013 at 7:25 pm
Bush AG Mukasey: DOJ Could ‘Redeem’ Itself with IRS Investigation

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey says appointing a special prosecutor to investigate the IRS scandal would be a bad idea because the investigator would still report to the President.

Better, Mukasey said, for congressional investigations to continue, with a potentially ironic assist from one of the most corrupt divisions in the Department of Justice.

“Ironically, if you decide to have a criminal investigation, I would think that perhaps the proper entity to investigate is the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, which has been charged politicizing the way it enforces the law and would have an excellent opportunity to redeem itself and get out from under those charges if it were to conduct an impartial investigation,” Mukasey added.

Though I’m a big fan of Mukasey, particularly his tenure as AG, I just don’t see how the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division gets near this case. In order to prove Mukasey right, the Division would have to conclude in its investigation that major wrongdoing occurred, recommending resignations, fines or criminal charges. Anything less and the Division will be accused of rolling out a whitewash to cover for the Obama administration.

This doesn’t even mention the fact that the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, as the Mukasey quote alludes to and our own Quin Hillyer has argued, is a breeding ground for corrupt applications of the law. How these legal weasels can be trusted with playing such a sensitive investigation straight is beyond me.

No, the closest we’ll get to an independent arbiter on any of the Obama scandals will be the federal judiciary, and even then there’s no guarantee. Best for the House to continue exercising its oversight responsibilities until they find some smoking guns.

H/T: The Daily Caller

March 14th, 2013 at 5:16 pm
A Full Round-Up on Perez and the DoJ — w/ an Exclusive

This has some really important stuff in it. Please read.

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November 8th, 2012 at 3:47 pm
Holder Sounds Like He’s Leaving

Sounds like the Contempt of Congress citation and ongoing Fast and Furious litigation is getting to the Attorney General:

“That’s something that I’m in the process now of trying to determine,” Holder said. “I have to think about, can I contribute in a second term?”

“[I have to] really ask myself the question about, do I think there are things that I still want to do? Do I have gas left in the tank? It’s been an interesting and tough four years, so I really just don’t know,” Holder told [a group of law] students.

If Alberto Gonzalez can be hounded into resigning for firing federal prosecutors who work for him, then Eric Holder can be shown the door for hiding his role in a gun-walking program that killed dozens of Mexicans and at least one American Border Patrol agent.

Assuming Holder leaves, the next question is whether Obama can find his version of Michael Mukasey to replace him.

If so, it would be one of a series of smart moves the President could do to get his second term off to a bipartisan start.

H/T: CBS News

April 10th, 2012 at 11:57 am
Criminal-Justice-Related, Racial Double-Standard — Against Whites

Today at The American Spectator I blogged at length about how Eric Holder’s Justice Department uses flagrant racial double-standards in enforcing the law.

The same habit infects the news media, and apparently some police departments as well: If the perpetrators are black, it is A) not news, and B) sometimes not investigated, much less prosecuted. J. Christian Adams has a new example here. In this case, a motorist was targeted by a black biker gang. Result: Nada. Adams writes:

Boyd tells me he contacted the crime beat reporter at the Birmingham News and told her about his story. “Not newsworthy,” was her response. Boyd also tells me that law enforcement officials told Boyd they “don’t mess with the Outcasts of Alabama.”  Comforting.

Had the attackers been the Confederate Hammerskins, and the victim been different, we all know (at a minimum) the Birmingham News would have covered the story. DOJ lawyers would be checking on the contract air carrier from Washington to Birmingham. I’ll wager even Soledad O’Brien would have spent at least one show on the attack.

It is precarious when the law, and attention from the media, are so out of balance. When state law enforcement officials flinch from prosecutions of the black Outcasts of Alabama, and national media organizations ignore some violence while elevating other incidents to month-long stories, the rule of law suffers.

Shame on the Birmingham News. Shame on any police who don’t follow up on such cases. Shame on all of us for letting race affect how we deal with important issues and events, in any direction.

December 1st, 2011 at 2:31 pm
Sealed Fast and Furious

I am so glad Ashton posted this latest outrage from the flagrantly corrupt, thuggish, Obama/Holder (In)Justice Department. If a Republican administration had done this, every editorial page in the United States — EVERY ONE — would have been yelling bloody murder about the trampling of the public’s right to know, etc.  Every major newscast would be lead with this story. Cue the dramatic music about the cover-up indicating that a crime MUST have been committed, and cue the race for someone to append the most clever “-Gate” ending as a name for the scandal.  But if Obama does it…. yawn.

This is serious. It appears criminal. And it must not stand. Go back and read Ashton’s post and the backup documentation. It’s an outrage.

October 10th, 2011 at 12:26 pm
Holder Must Go

I join Ashton in saying that Eric Holder must go. I just think that he needs to take the whole Obama team down with him, for massive corruption. Holder and his ilk are race hustlers.  They violate the law with impunity, on more fronts than one might have possibly imagined.

The GOP presidential candidate who first makes an effective issue of all this will gain some real momentum in the race.  The rotten underbelly of the Obama/Holder Justice Department is just now being uncovered. There is a lot more rot still to come to light.

October 6th, 2011 at 11:09 am
Muff ins and More

Yet another scandal at the Obama/Holder Department of (in)Justice.  I heard about this more more than a year ago, but regret that I never followed up personally, having not been able to figure out how to find the relevant documents without outrageous rigmarole. All credit to Chuck Neubauer of the Washington Times for getting the story, and to Sen. Chuck Grassley for pursuing the truth:

[N]ow it’s a Justice Department official using taxpayer funds to “facilitate a physical relationship with a woman in Florida.”… Sen. Chuck Grassley, in a Sept. 28 letter, asked Mr. Holder to explain why the supervisor, Darryl Foster, apparently did not have to reimburse the government for money he spent on trips to meet with the Miami woman, including hotels and rental cars…. Sources said Mr. Foster made more than 10 taxpayer-paid trips to Miami in 2008 alone. His female friend was identified only as the president of an organization. Mr. Grassley called the relationship a possible conflict of interest because Mr. Foster was able to approve government contracts for the woman’s organization.

Here’s a new piece of information; I hesitate to report it because it is not quite adequately sourced by ordinary journalistic standards (even though, from my understanding of how DoJ works, the info seems almost certain to be true)…. so I’ll phrase it as a question: Is it true that the supervisor who approved Foster’s trips or refused to discipline him for them, or both, was Steve Rosenbaum, who is the same, court-disciplined, ideological crusader who, along with the now-departed Loretta King, was most directly responsible for forcing the dismissal of the famous voter-intimidation case against New Black Panthers?

And a second question, and two more after that: After Foster was caught with his hand in the muffins, so to speak was Civil Rights Division chief Thomas Perez –that notorious dissembler — responsible for deciding on Foster’s job status going forward? If so, why was Foster still allowed to continue as an official at DoJ? And what, if anything, was Loretta King’s role in advising on the decision or non-decision to do anything about Foster? (Remember that King served in an acting capacity in Perez’ job before Perez was confirmed by the Senate.)

October 5th, 2011 at 10:23 am
Another Civil Rights Hero Calls Out Obama’s Race Hustlers

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.

September 7th, 2011 at 11:32 am
McCarthyism Against Obama is A Good Thing

No, not Joe McCarthy. Andrew McCarthy. In an absolute tour de force at the New Criterion magazine, McCarthy — the prosecutor who put the parking lot bombers of the World Trade Center (1993) in jail — outlines the manifold abuses of law of Barack Obama and his Justice Department consiglieres, especially Attorney General Eric Holder. In doing so, he broadens and deepens and updates a piece I did last fall for The American Spectator — but with an extra dose of authoritativeness I could not match.

Writes McCarthy:

In flagrant violation of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law, the Department of Justice now practices racial discrimination in enforcing, and in choosing not to enforce, the federal civil rights statutes. These laws, enacted to safeguard our basic liberties, are not invoked when the victims are white and the lawbreakers are black. The most brazen example of this noxious policy—but far from the only one—is the Department of Justice’s astounding decision to drop a voter intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party even though Justice had already won the case.

As McCarthy explains, for Obama and his Alinskyite allies,

Lawfulness and lawlessness, thuggishness and regular politics—we’re not to divine any moral or ethical differences. They are just different “approaches” to empowerment. They only “seem” to be “divergent.” It may be important to maintain the veneer of respect for legal processes, but it is just as legitimate to stretch or break the rules whenever necessary to achieve the desired outcome—social justice being a higher form of legitimacy than society’s rule of law. Separatism, menacing, and civil disobedience: none of these is beyond the pale; they are simply choices on the hard power menu Obama “bridges” with soft power (i.e., the system’s mundane legal and political processes).

Again, read the whole thing.  Great stuff. Scary, but oh-so-important for us to understand what we’re facing in the Oval Office.

August 25th, 2011 at 10:37 am
If Only DoJ Would Protect Sarah Palin This Way

A man shot a grizzly bear in self-defense. A real grizzly, not Mama Grizzly Sarah Palin. If it had been the latter, I have no doubt Eric Holder wouldn’t be too concerned. As it is, though, the Justice Department is prosecuting the man to the full extent of the law (or, one could argue, far beyond what the law can reasonably be interpreted to mean).  This is, in a word, sick. Demented. Twisted beyond all recognition. The DoJ’s Wendy Olson should be the one on trial for prosecutorial abuse, not the one putting the Idaho rancher on trial for protecting his own children. She also should be permanently ostracized from polite society. Sneered at, scorned, ignored, isolated, publicly disdained. And, when she no longer has Holder and President Obama around to give her a job, she should be professionally scorned as well. Maybe even asked to go live with the grizzlies — as long as she might last.

June 3rd, 2011 at 5:02 pm
More on DoJ Hiring Scandal

Herewith, some updates to my post earlier today on what should be (but isn’t being treated as) a major scandal at the Justice Department. Updates (or, rather, links to other important coverage with great information) are here, here, and here.