Jack Cashill:
In setting out to write my book “You Lie!” my initial goal was to chronicle Barack Obama’s major deceptions. In doing so, alas, I ended up writing the history of the presidency.
Among the boldest of the deceptions was the canard that Obama’s would be a post-racial presidency. Barack Obama, after all, seemed just too white to play the race card effectively. That much Obama knew himself. He also knew if he did not meet the needs of the soi-disant civil rights movement, its veteran profiteers might just make good on Jesse Jackson’s threat “to cut his nuts off,” at least figuratively.
To keep the demagogues out of their knife drawers, Obama appointed Eric Holder attorney general. A Ron Brown protégé, Holder came of age in the minority huckster wards of D.C., the most relentlessly corrupt slice of political America since Boss Tweed hung up his Tammany money belt more than a century earlier.
Holder did not disappoint. In his very first public act as attorney general, he showed his cronies that Obama was more anxious about keeping them happy than he was about faithfully executing the laws of the land. When the media let them get away with this, they knew they could get away with anything, and they were right.
The details of the case are evil enough to outrage just about every American outside of a major media newsroom. On Election Day 2008, two New Black Panthers in paramilitary gear intimidated would-be voters at a Philadelphia polling place. One carried a nightstick. Both were abusive. “You are about to be ruled by the black man, cracker!” one of them yelled at a white voter. Bartle Bull, a former civil rights lawyer and a onetime publisher of the left-wing Village Voice, was among the witnesses to see and hear this.
Given what Bull and others reported, much of which was captured on video, the Justice Department filed a civil lawsuit against the New Black Panther Party and three of its members for violating the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The DOJ filed the suit two weeks before Obama was inaugurated in January 2009.
Bull submitted an affidavit in support of the lawsuit. J. Christian Adams, one of the six career attorneys involved, called the Panthers’ actions, “the simplest and most obvious violation of federal law I saw in my Justice Department career.” None of the accused filed any response, and it appeared that the Department of Justice would prevail by default.
In February 2009, Holder assumed office. In March, the Senate confirmed Obama’s appointee Thomas Perrelli as associate attorney general. In May 2009, Perelli, or someone under him, overruled the six career attorneys and let the Panthers walk. To what degree Obama involved himself in this case will likely never be known. Clearly, though, all participants understood that in the Obama-Holder DOJ, race would trump justice.
Thomas Perez, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, would testify that the “facts and law” did not support the original lawsuit. Adams and other attorneys vehemently rejected that argument. “That claim is false,” said Adams. “If the actions in Philadelphia do not constitute voter intimidation, it is hard to imagine what would.”
