Heritage Senior Legal Fellow Hans von Spakovsky has been closely following the politicization of the Obama Justice department under Attorney General Eric Holder, most recently covering the decision by Obama political appointee Associate Attorney General Thomas J. Perrelli to dismiss a voter intimidation lawsuit against the New Black Panther Party. The left has been largely silent about the rank hypocrisy of this decision, but that is slowly changing. Professor of Political Science and Law at Vanderbilt University Carol Swain writes at The Huffington Post:
In case you missed the story, last November 4th a polling precinct in Philadelphia, PA was patrolled by an organization called the New Black Panther Party, a Marxist group that in 2000, was listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a racial hate group. Video footage shot in 2008, show Black Panther precinct workers intimidating white voters.
…
The SPLC has been mum on the issue, despite the fact that in 2000, it included the New Black Panther Party among its annual list of hate groups. In fact, what is most shocking is that the SPLC has spent far more resources hounding conservative organizations, such as the Center for Immigration Studies, and prominent citizens like CNN’s award-winning anchor Lou Dobbs, than it has protecting the civil rights of American voters, which includes white people as well as black.
…
There is a name for what has happened. It is called “mission creep.” Mission creep occurs when an organization strays beyond its original purpose and engages in actions antithetical to its goals. Rather than monitoring hate groups, the Southern Poverty Law Center has become one.
The Washington Times has published more follow-up stories today and yesterday about the Justice Department’s dismissal of a voter intimidation lawsuit against the New Black Panther Party (a racist hate group according to the Southern Poverty Law Center) – despite the fact that the defendants defaulted and failed to answer the complaint. The new revelation is that Associate Attorney General Thomas J. Perrelli approved the dismissal. He is the No. 3 official at Justice and is a political appointee who raised $500,000 for President Obama’s campaign.
There is no doubt that this was one of the worst cases of voter intimidation the Department has seen in decades, but it was against militant black defendants, not white defendants. This is exactly the kind of situation that upsets the traditional civil rights community, which does not believe that federal voting rights laws should be used to protect white voters. The Department’s weak and belated explanation for the dismissal of this suit is frankly absurd.
The Department’s spokeswoman says that “the facts and the law did not support pursuing the claims.” Really? Then why is the Department refusing to allow the trial team who actually investigated the “facts and the law” or the chief of the Voting Section who supervised the investigation to brief members of Congress? We all know why – because those lawyers would dispute the spurious claim being made by their political superiors.
Justice even sent a letter to Cong. Lamar Smith claiming that one of the defendants was dismissed because he was a resident of the building in which the polling place was located, a “fact” that is completely false. The Department’s own pleadings publicly filed in court in Philadelphia, as well as a poll watcher certificate issued to the defendant by the Democratic Party, show that that this defendant did not live at the polling place (a senior living center). This basic factual error shows just how unimportant the real facts were to those dismissing the case. And that defendant, whose MySpace page lists one of his general interests as “Killing Crakkkas,” was dismissed just in time to be reappointed as a poll watcher for the May 19 primary in Philadelphia!
To try to bolster this political decision, the acting head of the Civil Rights Division even ordered the Appellate Section in the Division to review the Voting Section’s work, something totally unprecedented. She must have been sorely disappointed when, in direct conflict to what the Department is now claiming, the Appellate Section provided an opinion that the case was completely justified. The acting head, by the way, although a career lawyer, is in a political position under the Vacancy Reform Act and was appointed by President Obama. I worked with her for four years when I was in the Civil Rights Division. She talked about resigning when I was there to run as a Democratic candidate in Maryland and is as political as any political appointee at Justice.
The message from the Justice Department with this dismissal is that if you are a member of a black hate group, you can intimidate, threaten, and hurl racial epithets at white voters and poll watchers, and the Justice Department will give you a pass. We all know that if it had been the Ku Klux Klan or the Aryan Brotherhood at the polls in Philadelphia acting in this manner towards black voters, Associate Attorney General Perelli and Attorney General Holder would never have even considered dismissing the case. They would be bragging in the press about their pursuit of a civil injunction against all of these defendants, and would be pressing the Criminal Division at Justice to indict them on criminal charges.