Friends in High Places
The Obama Justice Department went to bat for the New Black Panther party—and then covered it up
By Jennifer Rubin
http://weeklystandard.com/articles/friends-high-places

The case is straightforward. On Election Day 2008, two members of the New Black Panther party (NBPP) dressed in military garb were captured on videotape at a Philadelphia polling place spouting racial epithets and menacing voters. One, Minister King Samir Shabazz, wielded a nightstick. It was a textbook case of voter intimidation and clearly covered under the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

A Department of Justice trial team was assigned to investigate. They gathered affidavits from witnesses—one of the poll watchers was called a “white devil” and a “cracker.” A Panther told him he would be “ruled by the black man.” The trial team, all career Justice attorneys and headed by voting section chief Chris Coates, filed a case against the two Panthers caught on tape. Malik Zulu Shabazz, head of the national NBPP, and the party itself were also named based on evidence the party had planned the deployment of 300 members on Election Day and on statements after the incident in which the NBPP endorsed the intimidation at the Philadelphia polling station.

The trial team quickly obtained a default judgment—meaning it had won the case because the New Black Panther party failed to defend itself. Yet in May 2009, Obama Justice Department lawyers, appointed temporarily to fill top positions in the civil rights division, ordered the case against the NBPP dismissed. An administration that has pledged itself to stepping-up civil rights enforcement dropped the case and, for over a year, has prevented the trial team lawyers from telling their story.

The Panthers like to tout their “victory” and parrot the Obama Justice Department’s line that the case was unmeritorious. The party held a national convention in Atlanta over Memorial Day weekend (sponsored and attended by the once mainstream Southern Christian Leadership Conference and a grab bag of socialist and anti-Semitic figures). Its website boasts: “The New Black Panther Party has been embroiled in a battle between Republican Congressmen and the U.S. Department of Justice over a ‘voter intimidation’ scandal for the last 18 months. During these 18 months right wing and Republican Newspaper and Electronic media have gone to exhaustive lengths to discredit and slander the New Black Panther Party and its Chairman and Attorney Malik Zulu Shabazz.”

But on June 4, J. Christian Adams, a veteran lawyer in Justice’s voting section and a key member of the trial team, resigned. His reasons were spelled out in a letter that also noted that the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which was investigating the dismissal, had subpoenaed him and Coates, but their superiors, in violation of federal law, had ordered them not to testify. He noted that “the defendants in the New Black Panther lawsuit have become increasingly belligerent in their rhetoric toward the attorneys who brought the case. .  .  . Their grievances toward us generally echo the assertions [by Justice Department officials] that the facts and law did not support the lawsuit against them.” Coates, too, has left the Voting Section, moving to South Carolina to work in the U.S. attorney’s office. Last Friday, the civil rights commission’s general counsel, David Blackwood, announced that he had received an email from Christian Adams’s attorney stating that Adams is now available to provide information to the commission. Commissioner Todd Graziano said they would schedule Adams’s appearance at a public hearing as soon as possible as the commission had been seeking his testimony for many months.

With Adams’s resignation and letter, a clearer picture is finally emerging of what led to the dismissal of the case, the actions of DoJ political appointees, the department’s misrepresentations about the case, and the Obama administration’s approach to civil rights enforcement.

Based on documents obtained by The Weekly Standard and interviews with Justice personnel, we now know far more about the sequence of events surrounding the dismissal. The then-acting assistant attorney general for civil rights, Grace Chung Becker, signed off on the case as the Bush administration was leaving office in January 2009. She confirms that the decision to file the case was an easy one. In response to my questions, she was emphatic that this was a serious case of voter intimidation. The trial team, which also included attorneys Robert Popper and Spencer Fisher, conducted its investigation and on January 8, 2009, filed suit against the NBPP. As the Panthers did not respond to the lawsuit, the department had a slam-dunk victory.

The trial team was poised to enter a default judgment in late April 2009. An order for a default of judgment was drafted and sent to the voting section management. On the morning of April 29, the acting deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights, Steven Rosenbaum, sent an email to Coates about the case. It was the first indication by any department official that something was amiss. “I have serious doubts about the merits of the motion for entry of a default judgment and the request for injunctive relief,” Rosenbaum, an Obama appointee, wrote. “Most significantly, this case raises serious First Amendment issues, but the papers make no mention of the First Amendment.” Rosenbaum asked Coates a series of questions—whether “the defendants make any statements threatening physical harm to voters or persons aiding voters,” for example, and what was the “factual predicate for enjoining the Party, as opposed to individual defendants”—which indicated that he was not familiar with the case and had not read the detailed memorandum accompanying the draft order.

The trial team was surprised by the email and answered Rosenbaum point by point in a response sent that same evening. They corrected his misstatements and explained in answer to his First Amendment concerns, “We are not seeking to enjoin the making of those (or any) statements. We plan to introduce them as evidence to show that what happened in Philadelphia on Election Day was planned and announced in advance by the central authority of the NBPP, and was a NBPP initiative.” They pointed out that dressing in military garb did not raise First Amendment concerns when “used with the brandishing of a weapon to intimidate people going to the polling station.” They concluded: “We strongly believe that this is one of the clearest violations of Section 11(b) [of the Voting Rights Act] the Department has come across. There is never a good reason to bring a billy club to a polling station. If the conduct of these men, which was video recorded and broadcast nationally, does not violate Section 11(b), the statute will have little meaning going forward.”

The trial team assumed that Rosenbaum was simply confused about the applicable law. The notion that this was a problematic case would have been outlandish. With video evidence, multiple witnesses, and clear case law, it was one the easiest cases on which any of the trial team attorneys—who had more than 75 years of collective experience—had worked.

After sending the response, Coates and Robert Popper met with Rosenbaum and the then acting assistant attorney general for civil rights, Loretta King. People familiar with the discussions describe “two days of shouting.” The trial team now knew that DoJ political appointees were serious about undermining the case by using whatever arguments they could dream up, including First Amendment concerns. The team prepared a detailed memo dated May 6 explaining the factual and legal basis for the case. In 13 pages, the attorneys meticulously analyzed the law and the facts and rebutted any notion that the First Amendment could insulate the Panthers. The memo made clear that Rosenbaum’s and King’s arguments for dismissing the case were spurious. Rosenbaum and King, for example, argued that legal precedent involving protestors at abortion clinics would undermine the case. The trial team pointed out, however, that these cases were either inapplicable or actually supported the issuance of an injunction when there was a significant government interest (such as the protection of voting rights) at stake.

The arguments continued after the May 6 memo was submitted. During one meeting in a conference room on the 5th floor of the Main Justice building, Coates became so exasperated he threw the memo at Rosenbaum who had admitted not reading the trial team’s detailed briefing on the issues.

Rosenbaum and King sent a request to the appellate section asking their opinion of the case. The appellate attorneys sided with the trial team on May 13. Coates announced this to his team with the words “Good news.” They all agreed it would be unthinkable for their superiors to nix the case. They were wrong. On May 15, Coates received an order to dismiss the case against everyone but the baton-menacing Shabazz. And they were ordered to scale back the injunction against him to cover only the display of a weapon within 100 feet of a Philadelphia polling place until 2012. (No other behavior was enjoined.)

The actions of King and Rosenbaum were unprecedented in the collective experience of the trial team. They were not alone in that assessment. A former associate attorney general for the civil division Greg Katsas testified before the civil rights commission on April 23, 2010, and termed the Panthers’ actions a blatant case of voter intimidation. He said it was a “straightforward and overwhelmingly strong case” and that the Panthers’ conduct was “egregious and intentional.” As for the party itself and its leadership, Katsas said that under “general principles of agency law” they were liable.

From the onset, Justice has denied that any political appointees were involved in the decision to dismiss the case. This line was repeated in multiple letters to and face-to-face meetings with Republican representatives Frank Wolf and Lamar Smith and in statements to the media. We now know that this is incorrect. In interrogatory answers supplied to the civil rights commission, the department acknowledged that Attorney General Eric Holder was briefed on the decision to dismiss the case and that the number three man in Justice, Associate Attorney General Tom Perrelli, was consulted as well. Katsas testified, “Certainly DoJ’s decision to abandon all claims against the party, Malik Shabazz, and Mr. Jackson [the second polling place intimidator], despite their refusal to even defend the case, would have qualified as important enough for the leadership of the Civil Rights Division to raise with [Perrelli].” The same is true of the decision to seek only a narrow injunction against the billy club-wielding defendant. He notes that the filing of the case may have been routine, but the decision to dismiss it was so extraordinary that someone of Perrelli’s rank must certainly have played an “active role.”

The department is, moreover, trying to characterize King and Rosenbaum, who instructed the trial team to dismiss the case, as “career attorneys with over 60 years of experience.” It is true that they both served in career positions at Justice in the past. But under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, as soon as someone is appointed to fill a political position—as Rosenbaum and King were early in the Obama administration—they are political appointees.

Neither King nor Rosenbaum has directly worked on a voting rights case since the mid-1990s and both have received sanctions of hundreds of thousands of dollars by federal court judges for bringing unmeritorious cases and for failing to respond to court orders. In January 2010, a federal court judge in Kansas fined King and Rosenbaum for failing to respond to interrogatories in a housing discrimination case. Former civil rights division attorney Hans von Spakovsky has written: “That particular sanction is also very unusual—I have never seen a sanction order directed at individual lawyers that specifically says their employer is not responsible for paying the costs. .  .  . During the Bush administration, when liberals claim there was politicization going on in the division, I am not aware of a single such sanction.” King and the Justice Department were also ordered to pay $587,000 in attorneys’ fees and fines for bringing an unmeritorious claim during the Clinton administration in Johnson v. Miller. (In that case the court also took DoJ and King to task for allowing the ACLU to unduly affect the litigation decisions of the department.)

The administration’s internal investigation also appears to have been fraudulent. Under ongoing pressure from Representatives Smith and Wolf, an investigation by the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) was finally ordered to commence in July 2009. Until a few days before Adams’s resignation, however, none of the trial team had been interviewed by OPR investigators.

Furthermore the department has been less than candid in congressional testimony. In December 2009, Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez testified before the House Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties, and he either did not understand the case fully or chose to disregard the documentation the trial team had put together. Perez said, for example, that Shabazz had received the “maximum penalty.” An experienced voting rights lawyer scoffs at the statement. “The maximum penalty is Leavenworth.” Perez then suggested that the attorneys on the trial team might have violated Federal Rule 11, which prohibits lawyers from bringing frivolous actions. The trial team was angered at the public insinuation that they had been derelict in their professional responsibilities.

In written responses to the civil rights commission, the Justice Department has claimed there was no evidence of involvement by outside groups—specifically the NAACP. Yet there is substantial reason to doubt this assertion. An attorney for the NAACP, Kristen Clarke, has admitted that she spoke to department attorneys about the case and shared the complaint with others. (In a deposition she also said that a department lawyer sent her news clippings of the case.) She spoke to a voting section attorney Laura Coates (no relation to Chris Coates) about the case at a Justice Department function. Clarke asked Coates, who she assumed was sympathetic, when the Panther case was going to be dismissed. The comment suggested that the NAACP had been pushing for such an outcome, and Coates reported the conversation to her superiors. Under oath in a deposition with the civil rights commission, however, Clarke denied six times that she had any conversations with Justice Department attorneys. When shown an email from a department attorney to her calling a Washington Times report on the NBPP case nothing but “lies” and declaring “This is CC’s doing” she incredibly denied (despite her long association with him) that she understood the reference was to Chris Coates.

While the interference by political appointees in the NBPP case has been egregious, there is a critical issue with implications far beyond this single case: Whether the attorneys who populate the civil rights division of the Justice Department believe that civil rights laws exist only to protect minorities from discrimination and intimidation by whites. In a farewell address to his colleagues before his reassignment to a U.S. attorney’s office, Coates spoke about this widespread sentiment and why it was antithetical to the department’s mission to seek equal enforcement of federal laws.

Former voting rights attorneys confirm that the belief is omnipresent in the Justice Department. DoJ attorneys openly criticized the Panther case, objecting not to any lack of evidence or to the legal arguments but to the notion that any discrimination case should be filed against black defendants. There are instances of attorneys refusing to work on cases against minority defendants. In 2005, for example, Coates pursued, filed, and won a case (upheld on appeal to the Fifth Circuit in 2009) of egregious voter discrimination by black officials in Noxubee County, Mississippi. Colleagues criticized Coates for filing the case and refused to work on it

Liberal civil rights lawyers argue that because “a history of official discrimination” can be one subsidiary factor in voting cases it “wipes out every other factor” and prohibits cases from being brought against blacks. And further, that since “socio-economic” factors can be considered in determining whether voting discrimination has occurred, these cases cannot be brought against black defendants until there is economic parity between blacks and whites. Such attorneys use phrases like “traditional civil rights cases” and “traditional civil rights victims” to signal that only minority victims and white perpetrators concern them. Justice sources tell me that career attorneys have been “assured” that cases against minority defendants won’t be brought. In testimony before the civil rights commission, Thomas Perez denied he was aware of any such conversations or sentiments.

To date the Democratic Congress has exercised virtually no oversight over either the Panther case or the department’s civil rights enforcement approach generally. The OPR investigation shows no sign of completion. Neither Holder nor Perrelli has been questioned in depth about his participation in the case or about the allegations that Justice attorneys don’t intend to enforce civil rights laws against anyone other than white defendants.

Smith and Wolf, who just this week fired off two-dozen questions to Attorney General Eric Holder, continue to pursue the case, but without Democratic support they cannot subpoena either witnesses or documents. That may change after the November election. If the House of Representatives or Senate flips to Republican control and new committee chairmen decide to engage in actual oversight, Perrelli and Holder may find themselves forced by subpoenas to tell the complete NBPP story and explain why Obama’s Justice Department believes the civil rights laws exist only to protect citizens of certain races.


Inside The Black Panther Case:  Anger, Ignorance And Lies
By J. Christian Adams
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jun/25/inside-the-black-panther-case-anger-ignorance-and-/

On the day President Obama was elected, armed men wearing the black berets and jackboots of the New Black Panther Party were stationed at the entrance to a polling place in Philadelphia. They brandished a weapon and intimidated voters and poll watchers. After the election, the Justice Department brought a voter-intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party and those armed thugs. I and other Justice attorneys diligently pursued the case and obtained an entry of default after the defendants ignored the charges. Before a final judgment could be entered in May 2009, our superiors ordered us to dismiss the case.

The New Black Panther case was the simplest and most obvious violation of federal law I saw in my Justice Department career. Because of the corrupt nature of the dismissal, statements falsely characterizing the case and, most of all, indefensible orders for the career attorneys not to comply with lawful subpoenas investigating the dismissal, this month I resigned my position as a Department of Justice (DOJ) attorney.

The federal voter-intimidation statutes we used against the New Black Panthers were enacted because America never realized genuine racial equality in elections. Threats of violence characterized elections from the end of the Civil War until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Before the Voting Rights Act, blacks seeking the right to vote, and those aiding them, were victims of violence and intimidation. But unlike the Southern legal system, Southern violence did not discriminate. Black voters were slain, as were the white champions of their cause. Some of the bodies were tossed into bogs and in one case in Philadelphia, Miss., they were buried together in an earthen dam.

Based on my firsthand experiences, I believe the dismissal of the Black Panther case was motivated by a lawless hostility toward equal enforcement of the law. Others still within the department share my assessment. The department abetted wrongdoers and abandoned law-abiding citizens victimized by the New Black Panthers. The dismissal raises serious questions about the department's enforcement neutrality in upcoming midterm elections and the subsequent 2012 presidential election.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has opened an investigation into the dismissal and the DOJ's skewed enforcement priorities. Attorneys who brought the case are under subpoena to testify, but the department ordered us to ignore the subpoena, lawlessly placing us in an unacceptable legal limbo.

The assistant attorney general for civil rights, Tom Perez, has testified repeatedly that the "facts and law" did not support this case. That claim is false. If the actions in Philadelphia do not constitute voter intimidation, it is hard to imagine what would, short of an actual outbreak of violence at the polls. Let's all hope this administration has not invited that outcome through the corrupt dismissal.

Most corrupt of all, the lawyers who ordered the dismissal - Loretta King, the Obama-appointed acting head of the Civil Rights Division, and Steve Rosenbaum - did not even read the internal Justice Department memorandums supporting the case and investigation. Just as Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. admitted that he did not read the Arizona immigration law before he condemned it, Mr. Rosenbaum admitted that he had not bothered to read the most important department documents detailing the investigative facts and applicable law in the New Black Panther case. Christopher Coates, the former Voting Section chief, was so outraged at this dereliction of responsibility that he actually threw the memos at Mr. Rosenbaum in the meeting where they were discussing the dismissal of the case. The department subsequently removed all of Mr. Coates' responsibilities and sent him to South Carolina.

Mr. Perez also inaccurately testified to the House Judiciary Committee that federal "Rule 11" required the dismissal of the lawsuit. Lawyers know that Rule 11 is an ethical obligation to bring only meritorious claims, and such a charge by Mr. Perez effectively challenges the ethics and professionalism of the five attorneys who commenced the case. Yet the attorneys who brought the case were voting rights experts and would never pursue a frivolous matter. Their experience in election law far surpassed the experience of the officials who ordered the dismissal.

Some have called the actions in Philadelphia an isolated incident, not worthy of federal attention. To the contrary, the Black Panthers in October 2008 announced a nationwide deployment for the election. We had indications that polling-place thugs were deployed elsewhere, not only in November 2008, but also during the Democratic primaries, where they targeted white Hillary Rodham Clinton supporters. In any event, the law clearly prohibits even isolated incidents of voter intimidation.

Others have falsely claimed that no voters were affected. Not only did the evidence rebut this claim, but the law does not require a successful effort to intimidate; it punishes even the attempt.

Most disturbing, the dismissal is part of a creeping lawlessness infusing our government institutions. Citizens would be shocked to learn about the open and pervasive hostility within the Justice Department to bringing civil rights cases against nonwhite defendants on behalf of white victims. Equal enforcement of justice is not a priority of this administration. Open contempt is voiced for these types of cases.

Some of my co-workers argued that the law should not be used against black wrongdoers because of the long history of slavery and segregation. Less charitable individuals called it "payback time." Incredibly, after the case was dismissed, instructions were given that no more cases against racial minorities like the Black Panther case would be brought by the Voting Section.

Refusing to enforce the law equally means some citizens are protected by the law while others are left to be victimized, depending on their race. Core American principles of equality before the law and freedom from racial discrimination are at risk. Hopefully, equal enforcement of the law is still a point of bipartisan, if not universal, agreement. However, after my experience with the New Black Panther dismissal and the attitudes held by officials in the Civil Rights Division, I am beginning to fear the era of agreement over these core American principles has passed.

J. Christian Adams is a lawyer based in Virginia who served as a voting rights attorney at the Justice Department until this month.

Sal: There's been another bombshell emerge from J. Christian Adams' testimony before the US Commission on Civil Rights.  Apparently, Julie Fernendez, Holder's Deputy Assistant Attorney General, told the members of the Voting Rights section that the DOJ would not support the enforcement of the purging of felons, the relocated, illegal immigrants and the deceased from voter rolls.


Who Will Investigate the Investigators?
Another voter fraud scandal involving the Justice Department..
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703636404575353052562578046.html

J. Christian Adams,, a former career Justice Department lawyer who resigned recently to protest political interference in cases he worked on, made some news yesterday in testimony before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

As expected, he claimed that Associate Attorney General Thomas Perrelli, an Obama appointee, overruled a unanimous recommendation by six career Justice attorneys for continued prosecution of members of the New Black Panther Party on charges of voter intimidation in an incident I detailed here yesterday. But Mr. Adams leveled an even more explosive charge beyond the Panther case. He testified that last year Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes made a jaw-dropping announcement to attorneys in Justice's Voting Rights section. She said she would not support any enforcement of a key section of the federal "Motor Voter" law -- Section 8, which requires states to periodically purge their voter rolls of dead people, felons, illegal voters and those who have moved out of state.

According to Mr. Adams, Justice lawyers were told by Ms. Fernandes: "We're not interested in those kind of cases. What do they have to do with helping increase minority access and turnout? We want to increase access to the ballot, not limit it."

If true, Ms. Fernandes was endorsing a policy of ignoring federal law and encouraging potential voter fraud. Ms. Fernandes was unavailable for comment yesterday, but the Justice Department has issued a statement accusing Mr. Adams of "distorting facts" in general and having a political agenda.

But there is some evidence backing up Mr. Adams. Last year, Justice abandoned a case it had pursued for three years against Missouri for failing to clean up its rolls. When filed in 2005, one-third of Missouri counties had more registered voters than voting-age residents. What's more, Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan, a Democrat who this year is her party's candidate for a vacant U.S. Senate seat, contended that her office had no obligation to ensure individual counties were complying with the federal law mandating a cleanup of their voter rolls.

The case made slow but steady progress through the courts for more than three years, amid little or no evidence of progress in cleaning up Missouri's voter rolls. Despite this, Obama Justice saw fit to dismiss the case in March 2009. Curiously, only a month earlier, Ms. Carnahan had announced her Senate candidacy. Missouri has a long and documented history of voter fraud in Democratic-leaning cities such as St. Louis and Kansas City. Ms. Carnahan may now stand to benefit from voter fraud facilitated by the improperly kept voter rolls that she herself allowed to continue.

Mr. Adams' allegations would seem to call for the senior management of Justice to be compelled to testify under oath to U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. But Justice is making none of its officials available and is refusing to enforce subpoenas issued by the commission. The more this story develops, the more it appears Justice is engaged in a massive coverup of its politicization of voting rights cases.


Sal: Here is J. Christian Adams' own comments concerning this pertion of his testimony before the US Commission on Civil Rights:

Lawlessness at the DOJ: Voting Section Told Not To Enforce Purging the Dead or Ineligible from Voting Rolls
It's not just the New Black Panther case: in November 2009, political appointee Julie Fernandes told a packed room of Voting Section employees to simply ignore this provision of the "Motor Voter" law.
By J. Christian Adams
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/lawlessness-at-the-doj-voting-section-told-not-to-enforce-purging-the-dead-or-ineligible-from-voting-rolls/?singlepage=true

I was at the Voting Section of the Justice Department for over five years. This office is responsible for enforcing most federal election laws which do not involve criminal matters. My previous articles at Pajamas Media have spoken of the DOJ’s lawless abandonment of race-neutral enforcement of voting laws, and other outrageous conduct. I will continue to publish here at Pajamas Media more instances of failure to enforce the law equally by the Department.

One such instance relates to the Motor Voter law, and will shock Americans who care about integrity in the electoral process.

The “Motor Voter” law was passed in 1993 to promote greater voter registration in the United States. It did this — most Americans now know from visits to the DMV — by requiring states to offer voter registration materials whenever someone had contact with a variety of state offices. These included welfare offices, social service agencies, and motor vehicle departments.

A lesser-known provision also obliged the states to ensure that no ineligible voters were on the rolls — including dead people, felons, and people who had moved. Our current Department of Justice is anxious to encourage the obligations to get everyone registered, but explicitly unwilling to enforce federal law requiring states to remove the dead or ineligible from the rolls.

In November 2009, the entire Voting Section was invited to a meeting with Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes, a political employee serving at the pleasure of the attorney general. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss Motor Voter enforcement decisions.

The room was packed with dozens of Voting Section employees when she made her announcement regarding the provisions related to voter list integrity:

"We have no interest in enforcing this provision of the law. It has nothing to do with increasing turnout, and we are just not going to do it."

Jaws dropped around the room.

It is one thing to silently adopt a lawless policy of refusing to enforce a provision of federal law designed to bring integrity to elections. It is quite another to announce the lawlessness to a room full of people who have sworn an oath to fairly enforce the law.

Worse yet, it is a broken campaign promise by Barack Obama, and I’m sure he would not be happy to have heard the announcement. After all, his Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez has been traveling around the country bashing the Bush-era Department of Justice. Perez says as often as he can:

"Those who had been entrusted with the keys to the division treated it like a buffet line at the cafeteria, cherry-picking which laws to enforce."

Yet at this meeting, Ms. Fernandes openly relished her time at the buffet line in the Voting Section cafeteria.

The problem with this sort of lawlessness, apart from the fact that it is becoming a trend in this administration, is that it nullifies the important compromise that Congress reached in 1993. Greater access to registration came by turning welfare agencies into voter registration offices, but the law also included provisions to ensure greater integrity. It is a dangerous development for our electoral system when one part of that compromise is tossed overboard by a bureaucrat.

It will be impossible for this purportedly transparent administration to deny this direction was given. There were dozens of good people in the room that I know care more about the truth than about saving Ms. Fernandes’ career.

Plus, the cases the Justice Department has brought — or not brought — corroborate the account: the Department has not filed a single case under the Motor Voter provision where there are problems.

Are there problems with list integrity? Yes, but that’s a story for another article. Even worse than not bringing cases, the Holder Justice Department has dismissed a case against Missouri that the previous administration had started. In many places in Missouri, there are more voters than humans with a heartbeat old enough to vote. Instead of fully litigating the case to a favorable outcome, the DOJ made it go away, nicely, quietly, completely. Sound familiar?

The blame-Bush instincts of this administration will no doubt lead to talk about all the cases the Bush DOJ didn’t bring to open up public welfare agencies to voter registration. Good luck. I’d suggest citizens go online and see the Section 7 NVRA, or “Motor Voter,” cases that were commenced under the Bush administration. Bush brought voter registration cases under Motor Voter against Arizona and Illinois.

This Justice Department, in contrast, has “cherry picked” which parts of Motor Voter law they will enforce. You wouldn’t think it has anything to do with politics or the upcoming elections, would you?

J. Christian Adams is an election lawyer who served in the Voting Rights Section at the U.S. Department of Justice.


Sal: Here is the complete transcript of J. Chrtistian Adams' 7/6/10 testimony before the US Commission on Civil Rights investigating DOJ actions in the New Black Panther Party case.  It's 131 pages, but it makes for fascionating reading:

http://pajamasmedia.com/files/2010/07/NBPP-Hearing-Transcript-7-6-10.pdf


Sal: And here are some more videos of the big brother of your favorite 'peaceful poll watcher'...

Malik Shabazz incriminates himself in black panther case
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JunrpGf5QRc

Leader of Black Panthers Threatens War with Tea Party, RNC, Glenn Beck, Congress
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nc0l_a5yt-c

Sal:  Here is Malik Shabazz, the New Black Panther Party boss against whom the Obama DOJ dropped charges in an already won voter intimidation case, praising Osama Bin Laden, just 6 months after 9-11:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8uMM58a6SE


The Ike Brown Case: Is the DOJ About to Fail Another Race-Based Test?
Will the DOJ once again show hostility towards race-neutral protection of voting rights?
By J. Christian Adams
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-ike-brown-case-is-the-doj-about-to-fail-another-race-based-test/?singlepage=true

Coming soon: an unavoidable decision about race-neutral enforcement of voting laws.

Last week, I testified under oath that pervasive and open hostility exists within the Justice Department towards race-neutral enforcement of voting rights laws. This week, we will all learn a great deal more about the Justice Department’s unwillingness to enforce voting laws equally and in a racially fair way.

To the many who know firsthand of the existence of this hostility, the Department’s current denials seem absurd, if not deceitful. I have urged the advocates of these positions — of which there are many inside and outside the DOJ — to come forward and openly engage in this debate so millions of Americans can hear their arguments for why all Americans should not be protected under the Voting Rights Act by the Justice Department. So far, silence. Even the NAACP registered a “no comment” to a Philadelphia Inquirer columnist last week. We know what that usually means.

But this week we should get some clarity. And I’ll wager that Americans aren’t going to like what they hear.

This story hails from rural east Mississippi: majority black Noxubee County is home to Ike Brown, one of the most lawless purveyors of racial discrimination the nation has seen in decades. (I have written in greater detail about the racially motivated lawlessness Brown used to victimize minority white voters in the county.) Brown canceled ballots cast by white voters. He stuffed the ballot box with illegal ballots supporting his preferred black candidates. He deployed teams of notaries to roam the countryside and mark absentee ballots instead of voters. He allowed forced assistance in the voting booth, to the detriment of white voters. He threatened 174 white voters by declaring that if they tried to participate in an election, he might challenge them and not let them vote. He publicized the 174 names.

Brown ran the primary elections because he is the Democratic Party chairman. At the trial, a woman on Brown’s list testified that she was too afraid to vote because she thought she might be arrested.

The federal court found that the publication of the list of 174 names was an illegal form of intentional racial discrimination. The United States district court held:

"The question is whether Brown’s action with respect to this list of 174 voters was actuated by these party loyalty concerns or whether this was pretext for a true purpose to discourage white voters from coming to the polls, or some combination of the two. The court has carefully weighed the evidence and finds that while party concerns were a factor in Brown’s actions, race played a role as well. … In sum, the court is of the opinion that Brown had the names of these white voters published in part because of party loyalty concerns, but also as an attempt to discourage white voters from voting in the 2003 Democratic primary."

Brown’s overall behavior was so outrageous that the court stripped him of all authority to run elections until 2012, and gave the power to a former justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court as a special administrator. The remedy was unprecedented, but upheld on appeal because of the brazen lawlessness of Ike Brown.

Fast forward to 2010, to the Eric Holder Justice Department.

Every change in voting in Mississippi must be submitted for approval to the DOJ voting section — where I worked for five years — under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Section 5 gives the DOJ power to object to any change motivated by a discriminatory racial intent or with a discriminatory racial effect in nine states and portions of seven. Changes to the law in 2006 made it clear that any discrimination would suffice to trigger an objection under the act.

Right now, the Holder Justice Department has a submission from Ike Brown to allow him to do precisely the same thing he tried in 2003 — prevent people from voting based on their party loyalties.

The Department must decide this week if white victims are worth protecting, by imposing an objection to the same behavior a federal court has already ruled was motivated by an illegal racial intent. If the races were reversed in this submission, there is zero doubt the DOJ would object to the proposal.

Alas, the races aren’t reversed, and I predict there is zero chance that the DOJ will object to Brown’s submission.

Why? For the same reasons I testified about to the United States Civil Rights Commission: there is an open and pervasive hostility within the DOJ towards using the voting laws to protect all races. Instead, the laws are viewed by many in the DOJ — particularly by the political leadership, such as Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes — only as tools to protect national racial minorities and increase their voter turnout.

I also have some inside information.

I have spoken with the victims of Brown’s past illegal behavior in Mississippi, and the DOJ hadn’t even bothered to contact any of them. In a Section 5 submission involving an African-American minority, it is standard DOJ practice to make extensive contacts with the minority community. That hasn’t happened since Brown submitted his scheme for approval on May 14, 2010. No calls, no emails, no nothing out of Justice. No concern, most likely.

In fact, the same white voters who were victimized by Brown in 2003 have begged the DOJ in multiple letters to interpose an objection to Brown’s request to bar people from voting.

Even worse for the Department, Brown told one person last month that he explicitly chose a cutoff date (where if you voted for a Republican before a certain date you could still vote in a Democratic primary) because it would preserve the ability for a number of specific black individuals to continue to participate. Does the DOJ know about this nakedly racial motivation? No — because they didn’t even do the analysis under Section 5.

So here are the choices the Department has available by July 13:

"They could object to the submission, which is the right thing to do. This would demonstrate they are at last willing to enforce Section 5 with racial fairness regardless of the race of the victim. All this option requires is a letter."

"They could officially ask for more information, but this only extends the clock for 60 days and the same decision will need to be made eventually."

"They could make a “no determination” ruling. This means that the matter isn’t ripe for a decision because Brown is not running the elections until 2012. Of course this is a cop-out, because Brown will be running elections with this scheme as a party rule once he resumes control. A “no determination” letter would have the same effect as approval, and leave the victims without any protection."

"A final option would be to ask the federal court judge under a different part of the law to stop Brown from implementing the scheme to bar voters from voting. But if it isn’t ripe to object, then it isn’t ripe to sue either. Worse — talk about cost! This would require travel, a hearing, witnesses, and many other costs to the Department. What about those oft-cited resource concerns? Worse yet, there is a risk the DOJ will not win. Judge Tom Lee is a cautious jurist, and he may not wade into a mess with so many uncertainties. Add a contentious tangle in other Mississippi courts about challenges to party loyalty oaths, and you can see why a lawsuit or court action seems like a bad idea. It certainly is not designed to help the voters with a high certainty of a favorable outcome."

Bottom line, if this Justice Department was truly interested in enforcing the law in a race neutral fashion, they could stop Brown’s discriminatory scheme for the cost of a postage stamp. A simple objection letter would prevent him from implementing a practice Judge Lee already has found to violate the law. Any other choice by Holder this week, other than an objection letter, will broadcast DOJ’s disdain toward equal enforcement of the voting laws.

Not only has the Department never lodged an objection under Section 5 to a plan which discriminates against a white minority, they don’t even conduct the analysis. The DOJ will not be able to produce a single document over the 45-year history of the Voting Rights Act where the bureaucrats even considered this possibility.

In the now famous going-away speech of former voting section chief Christopher Coates, he demonstrated the danger of this policy:

"Since many minority officials are now involved in the administration of elections in many jurisdictions, it is imperative that they believe that the anti-discrimination and anti-intimidation provisions of the Voting Rights Act will be enforced against them by the Justice Department, just as it is imperative that white election officials believe that Justice will enforce the provisions of the Voting Rights Act against them. I fear that actions that indicate that the Justice Department is not in the business of suing minority election officials, or not in the business of filing suits to protect white voters from discrimination or intimidation, will only encourage election officials, who are so inclined, to violate the Voting Rights Act."

"The third reason for race-neutral enforcement of the Voting Rights Act so that all persons are protected from discrimination or intimidation regardless of their race is that fair enforcement of the VRA is important for its very survival. America is increasingly a multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural society. For such a diverse group of people to be able to live and function together in a democratic society, there have to be certain common standards that we are bound by and that protect us all. In fact, as we become more diverse, it is even more important that our national standards of non-discrimination are enforced by the federal government."

Coates mentions something important that opponents of race-neutral enforcement of the Voting Rights Act should hear loud and clear.

If the DOJ does not start to use Section 5 to protect a victimized white minority, as they can this week in Noxubee County, then the constitutionality of the law is jeopardized. If no objection to Brown’s scheme is interposed, the three separate plaintiffs currently suing Holder to have Section 5 declared unconstitutional in other cases should do extensive discovery against the voting section and their unwillingness to enforce Section 5 to protect all racial minorities, regardless of their race. The plaintiffs should introduce this hostility into the case record as part of their constitutional challenges to Section 5, so that Justices Alito, Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and most importantly, Kennedy, can learn firsthand how the voting section does not equally enforce the law to protect all types of racial minorities.

Or, even better, the DOJ voting section can issue an objection this week to Brown’s racially discriminatory scheme. The DOJ lawyers defending the constitutionality of Section 5 from three separate attacks would probably thank you.

Patriots of all races gave their lives to enshrine racial equality in this country, via the 14th and 15th Amendments and then during the Civil Rights movement. The beneficiaries of these sacrifices should not be limited, either. The Department should undergo a searching examination as to why they are unwilling to enforce voting laws in a racially fair fashion and change course.

Let’s get one thing straight: enforcing voting laws in a racially unfair way is not necessarily racist. Just because some are hostile to equal enforcement of the law does not mean that racism lurks in their hearts. Judge Alex Kozinski wrote of this distinction in a voting rights case, Garza v. Los Angeles. Simply, one can take actions which intentionally harm someone because of their race even if the actor does not hold racial animus in their heart towards that race. The intentional action, such as not equally enforcing the law, is racially discriminatory, even if it is not motivated by racism. Thus, I have never claimed that the unequal enforcement of these voting laws means anyone at the Justice Department is racist, as some have lazily characterized my columns. This is obviously a rhetorical snare laid by the defenders of the Department’s unequal enforcement policies — a snare Judge Kozinski’s thoughtful opinion allows reasonable people to entirely avoid.

Inside and outside the DOJ, some will snicker at the notion that the provisions of Section 5 should be used to protect whites and Asians when they are in the minority in a covered jurisdiction. Please snicker so the rest of America can hear you. It’s time you engage the debate, or else you are about to lose it badly without ever having spoken up.

J. Christian Adams is an election lawyer who served in the Voting Rights Section at the U.S. Department of Justice.

Sal: Here's more on the Ike Brown case:

Unequal Law Enforcement Reigns at Obama’s DOJ
Earlier this month, I resigned from the DOJ after bringing the New Black Panther voter intimidation case. Longstanding biases within the Civil Rights Division are hostile to a race-neutral enforcement of some civil rights laws.
By J. Christian Adams
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/j-christian-adams-you-deserve-to-know-%e2%80%94-unequal-law-enforcement-reigns-at-obamas-doj-pjm-exclusive/?singlepage=true

Soon after his confirmation, Attorney General Eric Holder labeled us a nation of cowards, a people supposedly unwilling or afraid to discuss race. Based on my experience as an attorney at the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department, Holder has far more to fear from that discussion than do the rest of us.

If we had that frank, truthful discussion about race, we’d learn that the Obama administration doesn’t believe some civil rights laws protect every American. The Bush Civil Rights Division was willing to protect all Americans from racial discrimination; during the Obama years, the Holder years, only some Americans will be protected. Americans have a right to know and judge the racial policies of the administration they elected in 2008.

The dismissal of the voter intimidation lawsuit against armed New Black Panthers in Philadelphia is the most prominent example of this hostility toward race-neutral enforcement of civil rights laws. But that dismissal is far from the only manifestation of the beliefs infesting the Department. Many other cases and decisions — some of which I will detail below — are in question and deserve scrutiny.

On Election Day 2008, armed men wearing the uniforms and jackboots of the New Black Panther Party were posted in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, at the entrance to a polling site. They brandished a weapon and intimidated voters. After the election, the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice brought a voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party and these armed thugs. I, and other Justice lawyers, obtained an entry of default after the defendants ignored the case against them.

Before a final judgment could be entered, however, our superiors ordered dismissal of the claims.

Congress has sought answers from the Department about why the Black Panther case was dismissed. The Department has repeatedly claimed the “facts and law” did not support the case — which of course is false. Others have speculated about a White House involvement. But I believe the best explanation for the corrupt dismissal of the case is the profound hostility by the Obama Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department towards a race-neutral enforcement of civil rights laws.

This hostility was — and is — on open display within the Department of Justice.

Example after example exists where this dirty little secret manifested itself within the Department and affected Department policy.

Attorney General Holder and his political appointees have traveled the country claiming that they have “reopened” the Civil Rights Division. The Civil Rights Division is “back in business,” they announce, without a sniff of media scrutiny. In time, statistics and other information will present truth to this lie, as the Bush Civil Rights Division had a more robust civil rights agenda than the Obama Civil Rights Division. During the Bush years, the Civil Rights Division brought more cases in many areas of the law, particularly voting rights.

Race-neutral enforcement of civil rights law is a principle nearly all Americans agree with. Equality before the law has been cherished since the founding, and a bloody Civil War sacrificed generations of treasure and life to enshrine race equality into constitutional law.

Two obvious examples of the Obama administration’s hostility toward race-neutral enforcement of the civil rights laws:

The Department recently filed a brief supporting the use of race-based preferences at the University of Texas. Holder’s DOJ wants Texas to be able to give extra admissions credit to the skin color of certain college applicants. Of course some races won’t get the benefit of these racial preferences, while the political allies of the administration will.

In New Haven, Connecticut, the Holder Justice Department took the side of those who wanted to racially discriminate against white and Hispanic firefighters seeking promotion. Not surprisingly, the Supreme Court rejected the position of the Civil Rights Division. (It is no accident, incidentally, that senior Department attorney Steven Rosenbaum was involved in the formation of the Department’s racially biased approach in New Haven, just as he was involved in the dismissal of the New Black Panther case when he was acting deputy assistant attorney general, a political position in the Civil Rights Division.)

It wasn’t always this way.

The Bush Justice Department never filed briefs advocating racial discrimination. In fact, the Bush Justice Department was willing to protect all citizens under the civil rights laws, and brought a handful of cases protecting non-traditional racial minorities. Some pejoratively call these cases “reverse discrimination” lawsuits. Of course “reverse” discrimination does not exist: every species of racial discrimination is just that — racial discrimination. Implying a condition precedent, reversing something else, makes “reverse” discrimination at best a subset of some more legitimate wrong. At worst, the term is a historic reminder of whose ox got gored first.

It lessens the evil of the discrimination, an evil the Constitution bans without equivocation.

I worked closely with the former chief of the Voting Section, Christopher Coates, during my time at the Justice Department. He was a voting rights giant. He brought cases to stop racial discrimination as far back as 1976, just a decade after passage of the Voting Rights Act. Coates was a former attorney with the ACLU, and while at Justice, he was instrumental in bringing the case against the New Black Panther Party.

Because he believed in race-neutral enforcement of the civil rights laws, his powers as voting section chief were slowly sucked away by the Holder Justice Department.

Eventually made an intentionally powerless figurehead, Coates was transferred to South Carolina to work in the U.S. Attorney’s Office. His courageous going-away speech to the entire Voting Section and to the deputy assistant attorney general left little doubt about the “change” at Justice:

"I have never assumed that I was entitled to ignore that clear language in federal law and therefore ignore incidents where evidence showed white voters were discriminated against or where the wrongdoers were themselves members of a minority group. … I have had many discussions concerning these cases. In one of my discussions concerning the Ike Brown case, I had a lawyer say he was opposed to our filing such suits. When I asked why, he said that only when he could go to Mississippi and find no disparities between the socioeconomic levels of black and white residents, might he support such a suit. But until that day, he did not think that we should be filing voting rights cases against blacks or on behalf of white voters."

"I believe that one of the most detrimental ways to politicize the enforcement process in the Voting Section is to enforce the provisions of the Voting Rights Act only for the protection of certain racial or ethnic minorities; or to take the position that the Voting Section is not going to enforce certain provision of any of the voting statutes the Voting Section has the responsibility to enforce. Such decisions carry with them obvious, enormous implications for partisan political struggles."

Coates was not issuing a hypothetical warning for some future dereliction of the Department’s duty. The danger had already arrived.

United States v. Ike Brown

Coates and I learned about the hostility towards equal enforcement of the civil rights laws long before United States v. New Black Panther Party. Coates brought, and we won, the case of United States v. Ike Brown arising out of Mississippi.

Brown was the head of the Democratic Party in Noxubee County, a majority black county. The party ran the Democratic primaries, which served as de facto general elections, and Brown made no secret about his desire to see every government office in the county held by a black officeholder. Brown ran a Tammany Hall-style political operation. During one election, he literally stuffed illegal ballots he knew were marked for black candidates through an optical scanner in front of a crowd of angry citizens shouting provisions of Mississippi law at him.

“You ain’t dealing with Mississippi law, this is Ike Brown’s law,” he replied.

Brown organized teams of notary publics to roam the county collecting absentee ballots. In many cases, the notaries cast the ballots themselves instead of the voters.

Brown took absentee ballots to his home the night before the election, and put yellow sticky notes on them instructing compliant poll workers — whom he chose — why the ballots of white voters should be rejected. The poll workers complied, and canceled their votes.

Brown imported ineligible black candidates from outside the county to run against white incumbents.

He allowed squads of “assistors” to pollute the voting sites and impose “assistance,” telling black voters how to vote inside the booth — in many cases marking the ballots for the voters. During one election, teams of federal observers counted hundreds of verified examples of illegal assistance. Brown lawlessly disqualified white candidates from running for office. He published the names of 174 white citizens in the newspaper, and said they would be subject to challenge if they tried to vote.

Ike Brown institutionalized racial lawlessness, and brazenly victimized white voters during the 2003 and 2007 elections. And yet, many in the Voting Section never wanted the Department even to investigate the matter.

They voiced explicit opposition to Coates about investigating the discrimination. Superiors were reluctant to recommend to political appointees approval of a lawsuit. After the case was filed, the hostility continued. Most attorneys — except one brave woman — refused to work on the matter with Coates. Hostility pervaded the Voting Section, directed at Coates personally and also towards the theory of the case.

I also encountered open skepticism about the Ike Brown case after I was assigned to work on it in 2005. All manner of reasoning was offered to me regarding why the case should not have been brought.

Some said that unless whites were victims of historic discrimination, they shouldn’t be protected. Voting Rights lawyers will recognize this as an argument grounded in Senate Factor One of the Supreme Court’s Gingles v. Thornburg jurisprudence. Other lawyers grounded their objections in Senate Factor Five, which speaks generally of educational and economic differences between races. Because whites were better off than blacks in Mississippi, no lawsuit should be allowed to protect whites, they argued.

Of course, all of these lawyers knew that the settled law was directly contrary to their reliance on the Senate Factors. No Senate Factor can serve as a veto on any case. But they sought mightily to ground their hostility in some sort of legal theory.

There were more sinister explanations for the hostility. During a deposition I did of a black elected official in Noxubee, he agreed that racially discriminatory behavior against whites occurred:

“But you got to understand,” he admitted saying, “now it’s payback time.”

Before the trial, article after article appeared in the New York Times and other newspapers critical of the decision to bring the Ike Brown case. ABC News presented it as a classic man-bites-dog story. Even National Public Radio traveled to Noxubee to do a story suspicious of the Bush administration’s decision to sue Ike Brown. The benefit of hindsight makes the national media effort to demean the case, and the hostility from the civil rights community, look laughable and petty. We won the case, and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the decision in two historic opinions.

Not surprisingly, Ari Shapiro at NPR never did a follow-up story. ABC News fell silent, too.

Election rigging … the good kind

Ike Brown was the worst example, though surely not the only one.

Down along the Big Muddy south of Natchez is Wilkinson County, Mississippi. All sorts of electoral mischief took place there throughout 2007, ultimately resulting in the home of a white candidate for county supervisor being doused with gasoline and burned to the ground. Others who complained about election misconduct were promptly arrested by the sheriff. Even though some of the accused wrongdoers were black, the Bush Civil Rights Division flooded the county with observers and brought calm to the election process.

Over in Alabama, Perry County had the Yellowhammer State’s answer to Ike Brown. This majority black county also had pervasive forced “assistance” occurring at the polls. Of course, the effect of racially motivated stuffing of the ballot box via forced “assistance” is the dilution of the votes of white voters, and the denial of votes of black voters who were improperly assisted. The Bush Justice Department was willing to investigate the claims and monitor elections there. But many within the Department were opposed to closely monitoring this forced assistance.

They reasoned that higher rates of illiteracy in the black community merited assistors entering the polling booth and casting ballots for voters — one after another, hundreds of them. Of course, when the volume of assistance bears no relation to illiteracy rates, reasonable people understand what is going on. Worse, when assistance is imposed, it isn’t assistance; it’s a tool for a partisan cause.

Some in the Department acknowledged that the end result was the likelihood of more black elected officials (at the expense of electing white officials), and on this basis were willing to turn a blind eye to the violations.

Perry wasn’t the only place in Alabama this racially motivated rigging of elections occurred. Hale County was also victimized. The Department’s opponents of race-neutral enforcement of the civil rights laws were particularly obstructionist in Hale. But some courageous lawyers persisted, and sought to ensure federal election observers memorialized all of the racially motivated illegal assistance and vote denial.

It will be interesting to see how much attention the Obama Justice Department devotes to Perry County, Hale County, and Noxubee County given the long history of vote dilution and denial through forced assistance of minority voters. Given the attitudes of some career lawyers expressed during the Bush administration, I suspect very little. Any attention they do give to these places will likely be to assure the wrongdoers that new management has arrived in Washington, that the Civil Rights Division is back in business, indeed.

Most remain rightfully disgusted by America’s long history of slavery and segregation. The idea that the civil rights law would be used against the original beneficiaries extremely agitates them. These employees of the Department oppose race-neutral enforcement of the law on these grounds. While the “original beneficiary” argument against a race-neutral application of the civil rights laws may have emotional appeal, it is legally and ethically bankrupt.

“You are about to be ruled by the black man, cracker.”

The day after the Black Panthers intimidated voters in Philadelphia, I heard Department of Justice employees speaking in the hallways making light of the intimidation: “No big deal,” one said. “Just a media generated event,” said another, echoing the familiar excuses of the southern segregationists in the 1960s when a New York Times reporter was sniffing about town.

I never dreamed that these amateur and uninformed assessments would evolve into official policy.

Other employees voiced opinions that the case should not be brought against the New Black Panthers. The Panthers did good work in the 1960s, right? Wrong, the New Black Panthers are a different, more dangerous, anti-Semitic separatist group. But it was an isolated incident, right? Wrong, but even if that were true, the behavior was still illegal.

In hindsight, it was not an accident that these early informal arguments echoed the eventual justifications used to dismiss the case, and then ultimately the spin given to the public, leaked to sycophantic amateur blogs such as Main Justice. The liberal echo chamber within the Civil Rights Division was talking about the case, mostly to each other. But attorneys who were working hard to investigate and prove the case weren’t part of the discussion. We were part of the problem. And we didn’t realize how extensive the hostility toward the New Black Panther case had already become.

Contrary to the views of some conservatives, racial discrimination still exists. A black motorist pulled over by the police is likely to have a different experience than a similarly situated white motorist. Without question, some apartment complexes and dining establishments still treat blacks differently from whites. The Department of Justice’s undercover housing testing program demonstrates this fact over and over again.

Some leading conservatives also are wrong when they argue that voting has become post-racial in America, that race no longer is an important factor in electoral outcomes. It is possible to calculate voting behavior and ascertain who black voters chose and who white voters chose in any given election. The statistical methods which allow us to peer into private choices inside the voting booth are beyond the scope of this discussion, but it is without doubt that racially polarized voting still determines election outcomes in America. Race continues to negatively affect traditional minorities, whether during traffic stops or a statewide campaign for office.

Yet after the proliferation of race-based preferences in college admission or hiring, minorities may in fact now enjoy an advantage in some places. This is particularly true in large institutions with aggressive “affirmative action” policies. Abundant data show that Asians, in particular, are victimized in university admissions by a race-based thumb on the scales. Our nation has struggled to find the right balance to remedy past discrimination. In some areas we do better than others, but the correct approach is never simply to leverage the outcome reflexively as much as possible in only one direction.

The massive engine of federal government should not be used to leverage outcomes as far as possible for only national racial minorities, but that is exactly what is happening. Indeed, many of the advocates of limitless leveraging of government power for the benefit of traditional national minorities view this as a backdoor way to achieve reparations for slavery and discrimination. If the American public won’t tolerate monetary reparations, which they won’t, then a one-way approach to civil rights laws is seen as the next best alternative for their unpopular agenda. Best of all, hardly anybody notices.

Because few Americans understand the hyper-technical components of civil rights law, such as disparate impact theory, regression analysis, and redlining cases, this litigation-based substitute for reparations has been largely successful and almost entirely free from broad public scrutiny. To the extent the public is aware of the activities of civil rights litigation, it is packaged to them as part of the noble and seemingly endless effort to escape the nation’s unjust past.

This aggressive one-way approach toward the civil rights laws is central to understanding why the voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party was dismissed by the Obama Justice Department. To some, the civil rights laws are not meant to protect all Americans, they are meant to protect certain Americans. Naturally the universal protections that apply to all Americans in the 14th and 15th Amendments are no barrier to one-way enforcement when you control the mechanics of the federal bureaucracy. After all, few will ever know about the civil rights cases this administration refuses to bring. A perk of being in charge is deciding what is the best use of government resources, and what is the best exercise of prosecutorial discretion.

Americans have the right to know, however, whether or not this administration harbors hostility towards a race-neutral enforcement of the civil rights laws. The firsthand experience of many within the Justice Department leaves no doubt about this insidious attitude.

Some activists may claim this is much ado about nothing. This view is shortsighted: it is hard to imagine what would erode support for the civil rights laws more than the idea that many of us aren’t protected. Equal enforcement of the law vests all of us in the mission of equality. Protecting everyone seems a small price to pay for civil rights organizations to preserve the popularity of their agenda. Failing to protect everyone only fuels hostility to their agenda.

Refusing to enforce the law in a race-neutral manner is a curable malaise. The Department of Justice can still redeem itself — it might start by refiling the lawsuit against the dismissed defendants in the New Black Panther Party case. It ought to abandon its advocacy of race-based preferences in future cases. And it should be willing to diligently pursue investigations and cases no matter the race of the victim or the perpetrator, especially in voting rights cases.

If they don’t, Americans have the right to know and judge this administration’s neglect of our civil rights.

J. Christian Adams is an election lawyer who served in the Voting Rights Section at the U.S. Department of Justice.



Sal: a more complete summation of Christopher Coates' remarks:
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MGExODhjOWY2NTMyN2M3ZGFjNjY0MzhhZTEyMjU5NmY

Without question, the most controversial cases I have been involved in during my time in the Voting Section were the prosecution of the Voting Rights Act cases in Noxubee County, Mississippi, against Ike Brown, and in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania against the New Black Panther Party.

Many people inside and outside the Civil Rights Division have criticized me for those cases. Some said I only filed those cases because I wanted to curry favor with the Bush administration. I want to take a few minutes before I leave the Voting Section to respond to that criticism.

I actively participated in the prosecution of those two cases for four reasons. The first is that a plain reading of the statutory language of the Voting Rights Act indicates that it is aimed at protecting all American voters from racial discrimination and voter intimidation, and is not limited to protecting only racial-minority or language-minority voters. When Congress reenacted Section 5 in 2006 it specifically added language that prohibits voting changes that diminish the ability of "any citizens of the United States," on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority, to elect candidates of choice.

Before I became a DOJ attorney, I read the Voting Rights Act to protect all voters; but especially as a government lawyer, I have never assumed that I was entitled to ignore that clear language in federal law and therefore ignore incidents where evidence showed white voters were discriminated against or where the wrongdoers were themselves members of a minority group.

All but two of the many cases I have participated in while at Justice have been on behalf of racial, ethnic, or language-minority voters; but when I came across the egregious circumstances in Noxubee County and in Philadelphia, I was not willing to look the other way just because the victims were white and the wrongdoers were black.

The second reason I supported the prosecution of these two cases is because the race-neutral enforcement of the Voting Rights Act is imperative to the holding of racially fair elections. As a very practical enforcement matter, the fact that the department did not bring Voting Rights Act enforcement actions to protect white voters and against minority election officials in the first decades after the enactment of the Voting Rights Act is not relevant: There were only a small number of minority poll officials in those first few decades. Fortunately, that racially unfair situation has changed dramatically, and today many jurisdictions have minority election officials in numbers close to the minority percentage in the various places where they serve. For example, when we filed the case in Noxubee, almost all of the poll and election officials were black.

As anyone knows who has observed human behavior, all races have their bad apples. Sometimes members of minority groups — like Ike Brown in Noxubee — violate the anti-discrimination provisions of the Voting Rights Act. Having worked in the Voting Section and responded to many complaints filed by voters, I know that the racially discriminatory and intimidating behavior that occurs in the voting area is not committed just by whites, although whites certainly commit their share, and that some of these outrages are committed by members of minority groups.

Since many minority officials are now involved in the administration of elections in many jurisdictions, it is imperative that they believe that the anti-discrimination and anti-intimidation provisions of the Voting Rights Act will be enforced against them by the Justice Department, just as it is imperative that white election officials believe that Justice will enforce the provisions of the Voting Rights Act against them. I fear that actions that indicate that the Justice Department is not in the business of suing minority election officials, or not in the business of filing suits to protect white voters from discrimination or intimidation, will only encourage election officials, who are so inclined, to violate the Voting Rights Act.

I cannot imagine that any lawyers who believe in the rule of law would want to encourage violations of the Voting Rights Act by anyone, whether the wrongdoers are members of a minority group or white people.

The third reason for race-neutral enforcement of the Voting Rights Act so that all persons are protected from discrimination or intimidation regardless of their race is that fair enforcement of the VRA is important for its very survival. America is increasingly a multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural society. For such a diverse group of people to be able to live and function together in a democratic society, there have to be certain common standards that we are bound by and that protect us all. In fact, as we become more diverse, it is even more important that our national standards of non-discrimination are enforced by the federal government.

One of these most basic standards is equal protection under the law. When that is violated, America does not live up to the true meaning of its creed. When it is followed, the country functions the way it was intended to. For the Department of Justice to enforce the Voting Rights Act only to protect members of certain minority groups breaches the fundamental guarantee of equal protection, and could substantially erode public support for the Voting Rights Act itself.

My fourth reason for this kind of law enforcement is very simple: Selective enforcement of the law, including the Voting Rights Act, on the basis of race is just not fair and does not achieve justice.

I have had many discussions concerning these cases. In one of my discussions concerning the Ike Brown case, I had a lawyer say he was opposed to our filing such suits. When I asked why, he said that only when he could go to Mississippi (perhaps 50 years from now) and find no disparities between the socioeconomic levels of black and white residents, might he support such a suit. But until that day, he did not think that we should be filing voting-rights cases against blacks or on behalf of white voters.

The problem with such enforcement is that it is not in compliance with the statute enacted by Congress. There is simply nothing in the VRA itself or its legislative history that supports the claim that it should not be equally enforced until racial socioeconomic parity is achieved. Such an enforcement policy might be consistent with certain political ideologies, but it is not consistent with the Voting Rights Act that Justice is responsible for enforcing.

Some who criticized the two cases about which I speak claim that they are not opposed to protecting the rights of white voters, but question using the resources of the Voting Section in that manner. I question the validity of that criticism. Given the number of cases the Voting Section has filed during the past 40 years on behalf of racial minorities, I do not understand why a mere two cases on behalf of white voters would have raised the ire of most of the critics of the Ike Brown and New Black Panther Party cases to the level that has been observed. Those critics are not motivated primarily by resource concerns, but rather, in my opinion, by a strongly held but erroneous view that the work of the Civil Rights Division in its enforcement of the VRA should be limited to protecting racial-, ethnic-, and language-minority voters. The resource issue is a red herring raised by those who want to continue to enforce the Voting Rights Act in a racially biased fashion and to turn a blind eye whenever incidents arise that indicate that minority persons have acted improperly in voting matters.

A lot has been said about the politization of the Civil Rights Division. I believe that one of the most detrimental ways to politicize the enforcement process in the Voting Section is to enforce the provisions of the Voting Rights Act only for the protection of certain racial or ethnic minorities; or to take the position that the Voting Section is not going to enforce certain provision of any of the voting statutes the Voting Section has the responsibility to enforce. Such decisions carry with them obvious, enormous implications for partisan political struggles.

While in the Voting Section, I have faithfully worked to enforce all of the voting statutes we are charged with enforcing without regard to the race or ethnicity of the alleged wrongdoers or the victims.

During the early part of the Bush administration, I championed the filing of traditional vote-dilution cases on behalf of African Americans, and argued strenuously with officials that such suits should be filed. During the Bush administration, we were given approval to continue the prosecution of two major pieces of vote-dilution litigation that were filed during the Clinton administration. One was a suit in Blaine County, Montana, on behalf of American-Indian voters that resulted in a ruling upholding the constitutionality of Section 2 of the VRA by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The second suit was against Charleston, South Carolina, filed only three days before the Bush administration came into office. I got approval to continue that suit, as well, on behalf of black voters, and we won the case. After I became principal deputy of the Voting Section in 2005, I successfully pushed for the filing of voting dilution cases in Osceola County, Florida; Port Chester, New York; and Euclid, Ohio — all on behalf of racial minorities.

But when I came across the outrageous activities in Noxubee County and Philadelphia, I championed the filing of Voting Rights Act suits there as well for the reasons I have outlined today. I did my best to enforce all of our voting statutes for all Americans, and I leave here with my soul rested that I did the right thing to the best of my ability.


‘Downgrading’ Voter Intimidation
Hans A. von Spakovsky
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZTA4M2NmNzY5N2FkZGEyMGI4ODkwNjYyNzgxYTAzMDQ=

I was on vacation with my family in Yellowstone National Park when the New Black Panther voter intimidation case exploded into the headlines with the congressional testimony of former Department of Justice career lawyer J. Christian Adams. This story has been in the public domain for a year, but the reaction to Adams’s testimony was eerily similar to the many geysers I saw venting steam into the atmosphere in Yellowstone.

Adams confirmed many of the details that I have reported for National Review over the past year, and Megyn Kelly of FOX News has done an outstanding job further exposing the sordid and frankly infuriating particulars of the politically biased and pernicious actions taken by the political leadership at the DOJ, as well as the hateful, racist, and anti-Semitic views of the members of the New Black Panther Party. I will have more comments on Adams’s testimony, but first I wanted to comment on the latest excuse (and tired old refrain) that has been conjured up over the past two days: It was the fault of the Bush administration. (I kid you not.)

Yes, the latest claim, according to Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Journal Constitution and others, is that the “charges against the New Black Panthers were downgraded by the Bush Department of Justice [inasmuch as] the decision not to file a criminal case occurred before Obama was even in office.” This “downgrade” talking point is apparently supposed to excuse the Obama administration’s decision to dismiss virtually the entire civil voter intimidation case and to neuter the injunction sought against the one remaining defendant so substantially that what was left was little more than a minor annoyance.

These claims by a nonlawyer betray a fundamental ignorance of the difference between civil and criminal prosecutions and a total misunderstanding of how things work at the Justice Department and the Civil Rights Division. First of all, although the Civil Rights Division has a Criminal Section, the vast majority of its voting-rights prosecutions are civil cases conducted by the division’s Voting Section. Whenever someone violates the Voting Rights Act and does so in a way that is potentially both a civil and a criminal violation, the division must decide whether to proceed first with a civil or a criminal case. With most voting cases, the decision is usually to go with a civil case, particularly if there are elections coming up in the near future. That is because civil cases have a lower burden of proof and give the government the opportunity to obtain almost immediately a temporary injunction to stop the defendants from engaging in the same wrongful behavior as the case winds its way through the federal courts.

Criminal cases can take longer to develop, particularly since the government usually has to convene a federal grand jury to return an indictment. Also, criminal cases focus like a laser beam on individual defendants, whereas civil cases can include an organizational defendant (like the NBPP).

The focus for the Civil Rights Division is always on the best way to get the remedy that is needed to stop and prevent the recurrence of the voter intimidation or other wrongful behavior as soon as possible. In this particular case, when the decision was being made in January of 2009, the division knew there was going to be another election in May in Philadelphia. The fastest to way to make sure there would be no thugs in paramilitary uniforms and jackboots smacking batons into their fists at polling places in the upcoming election was to file a civil complaint and obtain a restraining order against the individual defendants and the New Black Panther Party. In fact, one of the defendants dismissed from the case was once again credentialed as a Democratic poll watcher in the May election.

Once the division obtained a judgment and an injunction in the civil case, they could have decided to further pursue a criminal prosecution against the individual New Black Panthers, but the number one priority had to be getting a civil injunction as expeditiously as possible before the next election.

On the other hand, Adams also testified that some radical career lawyers shared the apparent view of the Obama political appointees that no civil-rights cases of any kind should be brought against blacks. If that factored into any decision the career lawyers made not to initiate a criminal investigation of the NBPP actions (it looks criminal to me — just watch the video and judge for yourself), that supports Adams’s most significant testimony. It would be damning regardless of which administration it occurred under. So, this left-wing excuse (that criminal charges weren’t also brought) may strongly support what the Civil Rights Commission is now trying to focus on — and what the DOJ is desperately trying to cover up.

Indeed, the person who would have been responsible for making a recommendation on whether to file a subsequent criminal charge against the individual New Black Panther defendants was Mark Kappelhoff, the “career” chief of the Criminal Section and a former ACLU lawyer. Besides being a big contributor to Democratic candidates like Barack Obama and John Kerry, as well as the DNC, Kappelhoff was considered such a liberal loyalist that he was moved into the political position of chief of staff to the acting assistant attorney general for civil rights by the Obama transition team almost as soon as they came in the door.

Sources tell me that Kappelhoff never recommended a criminal case against the baton-yielding thugs, so the claim that the Bush administration is somehow responsible for “downgrading” this case is complete nonsense. This is no surprise, given Kappelhoff’s very liberal ideology, and given his associations: In this photo, taken at a dinner of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights in May of 2009, he can be seen to the right of Julie Fernandes, the deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights who is now at the center of controversy. Christian Adams testified under oath last week that Fernandes said that no voting-rights cases of any kind would be brought against minorities during this administration by the Civil Rights Division and that Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act, which requires states to delete ineligible voters who have died or moved away from their voter registration list, will not be enforced. Given the action of the career criminal section in CRD, it is unreasonable to expect the Bush political appointees to initiate a criminal investigation of their own in the waning days of the administration when the civil suit was being filed.

Yet Kappelhoff and the Obama administration could make the decision today to indict the members of the New Black Panther Party, since they are still well within the applicable criminal statute of limitation. But you can rest assured that they will not do so. It is more important to them to block the investigation of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and to creatively excuse what they have done in this case, which was throw away the opportunity to obtain an exhaustive and wide-ranging permanent injunction against the NBPP in the civil case, which would have ensured that what happened in Philadelphia in November of 2008 never happened again at any polling place anywhere in the country.

Another point: These same liberals are making the false claim that the Bush administration failed to file similar charges against members of the Minutemen, “one of whom allegedly carried a weapon while harassing Hispanic voters in Arizona in 2006.” “Allegedly” is the correct term to use: While I was not at the Justice Department in 2006, I have talked to sources inside the Civil Rights Division who were and who have first-hand knowledge of the facts of this matter. The Voting Section sent lawyers to Arizona to investigate these allegations. They were told that the people in question (who were apparently there with some sort of English-only petition) did not enter the polling place and stayed outside the state-imposed limit around polling places where campaigning is forbidden. No one (including Democratic poll watchers) saw them talking to any voters while they were there — nor could the lawyers find any evidence that they prevented or discouraged anyone from entering the polling place (which is directly contrary to the witnesses in the NBPP case, who testified that they saw voters approaching the polls turn around and leave when they saw the Panthers blocking the entrance to the polling place).

The Voting Section was not able to make any recommendations to move forward with a lawsuit because the career lawyers assigned to the case could not find any evidence to support the claims being made. In fact, the Voting Section even referred the case to the criminal section (headed up by Mr. Kappelhoff, the trusted Obama confidant), who also declined to do anything about it. There was no viable case to be “dismissed” by the Bush administration. Some of the individuals pressing this preposterous comparison are the same militant partisans who masqueraded as career civil servants for many years in the Civil Rights Division but whose true political colors were always on full display. These individuals are as unworthy of credibility as their absurd allegations.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, at its last hearing, Civil Rights Commissioner Todd Gaziano (who is also my colleague at the Heritage Foundation) expressed particular interest in securing testimony from the individual who would know the most about the Arizona case the liberals keep mentioning: Chris Coates, the former Voting Section chief, whom the Commission has subpoenaed. The department has ordered Mr. Coates not to comply with the lawful subpoena because he would tell too many inconvenient truths the Holder DOJ would prefer to keep bottled up. Here’s hoping that Congress may finally be able to help and apply more pressure on DOJ to stop stonewalling the commission’s investigation.

Hans A. von Spakovsky is a former commissioner on the Federal Election Commission and a former counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Justice Department.


Justice Department Continues to Act in Non-Race-Neutral Fashion
Yet more proof that the DOJ doesn't want whites and Asians, when they are the discriminated-against minority, to be protected under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.
by J. Christian Adams
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/justice-department-continues-to-act-in-non-race-neutral-fashion/?singlepage=true

On July 13, the Department of Justice blew an opportunity to put to rest the issue of whether they are willing to enforce the Voting Rights Act in a race-neutral fashion by objecting to a request by a proven discriminator to further discriminate. I wrote about this pending request at Pajamas Media. At the time I noted:

"Bottom line, if this Justice Department was truly interested in enforcing the law in a race-neutral fashion, they could stop Brown’s discriminatory scheme for the cost of a postage stamp. A simple objection letter would prevent him from implementing a practice Judge Lee already has found to violate the law. Any other choice by Holder this week, other than an objection letter, will broadcast DOJ’s disdain toward equal enforcement of the voting laws."

The reason they did not resolve this with a postage stamp, and send an objection letter, is because they do not want whites and Asians, when they are the discriminated-against minority, to be protected under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

Sadly, the Department did not object to the submission and therefore refused to protect the white minority in Noxubee County in the least costly, most powerful way possible — a simple letter objecting to the proposal. Why? Because it is high heresy to include discriminated-against whites within the protections of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. This attitude is common knowledge within the voting section.

On July 12, it silently sent a “no determination” letter, effectively a cop-out against using Section 5 to protect  the white minority in Noxubee County. I am told by a news outlet that the supposedly transparent administration played hide the ball for almost 24 hours, not providing the letter to the public.

There’s more. On July 13, it filed a motion to extend for a few years a remedy in the civil court case the Bush administration brought in 2005 and won in 2007. The order seeks to extend the remedy until after the next presidential election. This means the Department will never have to roll up their sleeves and monitor what Ike Brown, their political friend, is doing in Noxubee.

Amazingly, the Department is also seeking an order from the federal court to prevent Ike Brown, the discriminator, from making any more inconvenient submissions to the Obama Justice Department which might reveal the hostility toward equal enforcement of the law. Simply put, they are asking the court to prohibit Brown from sending any more submissions under Section 5.  Not only would this go beyond the powers of the court to order, it is a naked play to avoid facing the issue of unequal enforcement for the remainder of the first, and maybe last, term of the Obama administration. If Brown can’t file submissions to the DOJ, the DOJ won’t have to take the side of the white victims. This is unnecessary and shamefully transparent.

Don’t forget, this court effort is the relic of a Bush administration case. It’s one thing to file a motion in a successful case the previous administration brought and won; it’s quite another to bring cases of the same sort in the future. There is next to no chance this Justice Department will bring these voting cases, even though they exist.

This unnecessary request to prevent Ike Brown from making any further submissions will allow the Department to conveniently avoid any public litmus test of their attitude about who is protected by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. If Brown can’t make any more submissions to the DOJ, then the DOJ won’t have to confront the issue of whether his victims are protected under Section 5. This is one of the most novel forms of “prior restraint” I’ve ever seen.

I wrote in my previous Pajamas Media piece that it would be intellectually disingenuous to both issue a “no determination” ruling on the submission while at the same time filing a federal court motion to deal with the substance of the submission.  Here’s why. The no determination letter said that Brown can’t make the submission because he doesn’t run the elections after he was temporarily stripped of that power.  It isn’t ripe for him to submit the rule, they say. Yet he will regain that power.  And worst of all for the DOJ, they now are marching into court claiming the issue is ripe for the court to decide. Yikes.

Simply put, the Department is trying to dodge the central issue of whether they will use Section 5 to protect a white victim in an obviously clumsy way. Many sycophantic media will no doubt trumpet this as proof positive that the DOJ will protect the white minority in Noxubee. But if you consider the fact that this is the most contorted, most expensive way possible to do it, you’d see that the real motive is to avoid expanding Section 5 to protect a white or Asian victimized minority. What happened to all those “resource concerns” we’ve heard so much about?

The media should plainly ask Attorney General Eric Holder: Does the voting section consider the whites in Noxubee County to be protected under Section 5? Will the voting section conduct a Section 5 analysis in these circumstances?  Let me predict the Department’s answers: no and no. They just will avoid answering the questions, and if they do answer, they will not answer with candor, for they know the firestorm that would erupt.

This is another one of the issues which former Section Chief Christopher Coates would have much to say if the Department would only allow him to comply with the subpoena from the United States Commission on Civil Rights.  The vigor with which the Department is resisting his appearance should give you a clue about what his testimony is likely to be.

It is also noteworthy that this action occurred only after significant media attention to the DOJ’s unwillingness to enforce the law in a race-neutral fashion. I have spoken with many individuals in Noxubee County, and DOJ interest first appeared only on July 1 — six weeks after Ike Brown’s submission and four days after Pajamas Media published the story on the unwillingness to enforce the law equally. For six weeks, there was silence until Pajamas Media exposed the story. The court filing is a defensive play that would have never occurred otherwise. It is beyond a shadow of a doubt that the interest in pursuing this course of action was only in response to the outrage their unfair policies have sparked around the nation. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but we should recognize it for what it is: the good that comes from sunshine exposing corrupt policies.

Above all, the Department continues to refuse to enforce Section 5 in a race-neutral fashion. It was unwilling to object to a scheme of Ike Brown to block access to the polls which a federal court has already found to be illegally motivated by racial intent. Yet it still blocks Georgia’s efforts to ensure that non-citizens are not on the voter rolls. As I wrote in a previous piece, the Department is abandoning law abiding citizens and abetting wrongdoers in many of these decisions.

For now, the Department has deployed a strategic feint that allows it to avoid the core issue of equal enforcement, carries enormous risk if the judge does not agree, and costs a whole lot more than that postage stamp for the objection letter they never sent.

J. Christian Adams is an election lawyer who served in the Voting Rights Section at the U.S. Department of Justice.