Since Eric Holder took the reins as Attorney General, the Justice Department has hired 15 career attorneys in the Civil Rights Division’s Employment Litigation Section. Every one of them boasts stellar left-wing ideological credentials. All have either associated themselves with prominent Democrats, worked for left-wing legal organizations, or staked out left-wing positions on controversial issues. The complete political uniformity of this section aligns with DOJ’s hiring in four other sections of the Civil Rights Division. The Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky has been documenting the left-wing dominance of the division …
Friday’s testimony before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights by Christopher Coates — a career Justice Department lawyer and supervisor — knocked down the Potemkin Village that the Obama administration has built to obscure why Justice officials dismissed a voter-intimidation case against two members of New Black Panther Party in Philadelphia. Coates, former chief of the Voting Section in the Civil Rights Division, testified that Justice officials purposefully dropped the New Black Panthers case because they didn’t want to enforce the Voting Rights Act against minority defendants accused of violating …
The news that Christopher Coates, former chief of the Justice Department’s Voting Section, is set to testify Friday before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is crucial to the panel’s investigation of allegations that the Obama administration has not enforced the nation’s civil rights laws in a race-neutral manner. The testimony by Coates, a career government lawyer, is expected to shed light on whether DOJ: Discriminated against white voters in dismissing the voter-intimidation case against two members of the New Black Panther Party and the party itself that arose from …
Stunning new developments in the New Black Panther Party (NBPP) voter-intimidation scandal indicate that high-level Justice Department officials have been misleading the public and Congress. Indeed, they may also have committed perjury before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Judicial Watch recently filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit requesting documents related to the case, and today it released a log produced by the Justice Department of e-mail communications and other documents that Justice is withholding from disclosure on purported privilege grounds. The log details numerous discussions and legal …
The Washington Times lead editorial yesterday was about the Justice Department enabling voter fraud — just in time for the November elections. This is due to the Department’s refusal to enforce the part of Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act that requires states to remove ineligible voters from their registration rolls — people who have died or moved away, and felons who have not yet had their voting rights restored. The longer such names remain on a registration list, the greater the chances that a fraudulent vote will …
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 testimony of former Department of Justice career lawyer J. Christian Adams before the Civil Rights Commission. 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 …
I previously reported for National Review Online on the memorable going-away speech by Christopher Coates, the former career head of the Voting Section in the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, who had been relieved of his post and “transferred” to South Carolina by the division’s new political leadership. Coates’s frankness and willingness to call out those who had criticized him for trying to enforce the Voting Rights Act in a race-neutral manner surprised and shocked the other career lawyers in the section, particularly since such evenhandedness runs …
For the last nine months, the Justice Department has been stonewalling requests for more information about its dismissal of the voter-intimidation case against the New Black Panther party. The department has denied requests for information about the case from newspapers and members of Congress, and is refusing to comply with subpoenas issued by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. But that’s not the only case where the Justice Department has been reluctant to show its work. This week, a federal district court in Kansas imposed sanctions on the same Civil …
The Washington Time’s lead story today is about the Justice Department’s objection to a change of elections in Kinston, North Carolina. Why is this an important story? Because it is another worrisome sign of how the Holder Civil Rights Division is using the Voting Rights Act to benefit a political party instead of to protect voters. Kinston is a majority black town, and in November of 2008 its citizens voted 2 to 1 to change their city council elections from partisan to nonpartisan. It is also a one party town …
