John Fund & Hans A. von Spakovsky:
Departing attorney general Eric Holder’s claim this week in a press conference that there has “been no politicization” of the Justice Department under him makes it appear as if he is living in a Potemkin-like state of denial in the main Justice building. Holder went so far as to claim that he had been forced to clean up the department he took over from the Bush administration. “You want to look at a Justice Department that’s been politicized, you look at the one I inherited,” he claimed.
When we were researching our recent book on Holder’s six-year tenure at Justice, we talked to numerous career employees who were shocked at how much further Holder had gone than any previous administration in politicizing Justice. One longtime lawyer in the Civil Rights Division told us that Holder had
racialized and radicalized the Division to the point of corruption. They embedded politically leftist extremists in the career ranks who have an agenda that does not comport with equal protection or the rule of law; who believe that the ends justify the means; and who behave unprofessionally and unethically. Their policy is to intimidate and threaten employees who do not agree with their politics, and even moderate Democrats have left the Department because they were treated as enemies by administration officials and their lackeys.
Holder said that the “notion” that DOJ has been politicized is “totally inconsistent with the facts.” But the facts show that the politicization started almost immediately, such as when political appointees at Justice ordered the dismissal of the New Black Panther Party voter-intimidation case at the beginning of 2009 because they did not want to enforce the Voting Rights Act against black defendants, ending the race-neutral enforcement of the law.
It was pure politics that dictated the policy that no cases be filed under the National Voter Registration Act to enforce the requirement that states maintain the accuracy of their voter rolls. It was pure politics when Holder rejected the opinion of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel — an opinion held since the Kennedy administration — that legislation intended to give the District of Columbia a voting member of Congress is unconstitutional.
Holder could make better use of his time reading the report released by his own Inspector General (IG) in 2013 about the Civil Rights Division. It is a disturbing, sad commentary on the mismanagement and misbehaver of the people who work there, problems that were greatly exacerbated by the present administration. Holder complained about hires “for political reasons” during the Bush administration.
Yet he fails to acknowledge that the hiring in the career ranks of that division has been 100 percent, unapologetically political during his tenure, as outlined in a series of articles that looked at the résumés of everyone hired there. Justice’s own IG found that one office in the division “passed over candidates who had stellar academic credentials with some of the best law firms in the country” in order to hire others they preferred, a majority of whom came from just five advocacy organizations that are political allies of the Obama administration.
Holder claims that his people have been “dedicated to doing things only on the basis of the facts and the law.” That is certainly not what a number of federal judges have thought about the abusive cases that Justice has brought under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act with the intention of intimidating the pro-life movement. Many of these prosecutions have been thrown out for lack of evidence and for violating the First Amendment rights of peaceful protesters. A Florida case that was dismissed led the judge to wonder whether the prosecution was the “product of a concerted effort between the government and the [abortion clinic] . . . to quell [the defendant’s] activities rather than to enforce the statute.” In other words, the judge believed the defendant had been targeted for her political beliefs.
Holder is obviously from the Obama school that teaches all you have to do is deny the blatantly obvious and everyone will disbelieve their lying eyes and ears and accept your version of reality.
@Bill:
It seems our MSM, (ahem, and certain unnamed trolls who lurk here,) are of the same school of thought.
@Ditto: Yeah, notice all the coverage of the civil rights violations investigations that come up emply?