It looks like this might be the first official Obama Scandal to “grow legs” as journalists say. The story has gone viral and simply will not go away.
Fox News reports: “In emotional and personal testimony, an ex-Justice official who quit over the handling of a voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party accused his former employer of instructing attorneys in the civil rights division to ignore cases that involve black defendants and white victims. J. Christian Adams, testifying Tuesday before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, said that over and over and over again, the department showed hostility toward those cases. He described the Black Panther case as one example of that — he defended the legitimacy of the suit and said his blood boiled when he heard a Justice official claim the case wasn’t solid. ‘It is false,’ Adams said of the claim. ‘We abetted wrongdoing and abandoned law-abiding citizens,’ he later testified.”
Could there actually be such a thing as a lawyer with a conscience? Will wonders never cease? The Black Panther Case involved a glaring violation of campaign laws and voter intimidation. Now if only the justice system could prosecute the millions of cases of “hate crimes” in which Blacks attack or rape a victim because the victim is White.
Fox goes on: “The department abandoned the New Black Panther case last year. It stemmed from an incident on Election Day in 2008 in Philadelphia, where members of the party were videotaped in front of a polling place, dressed in military-style uniforms and allegedly hurling racial slurs while one brandished a night stick. The Bush Justice Department brought the first case against three members of the group, accusing them in a civil complaint of violating the Voter Rights Act. The Obama administration initially pursued the case, winning a default judgment in federal court in April 2009 when the Black Panther members did not appear in court. But then the administration moved to dismiss the charges the following month after getting one of the New Black Panther members to agree to not carry a deadly weapon near a polling place until 2012.”
I guess he’ll need his deadly weapons to intimidate White voters in 2012, but he did agree to sit out this November’s elections. That’s mighty White of him.
The Fox article continues “The Civil Rights Commission, which subpoenaed Adams, has been probing the incident since last year. Adams said he ignored department directives not to testify (he was ordered by the Department of Justice not to testify before a Congressional body? Is anybody going to investigate that?) and eventually quit after he heard Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez testify that there were concerns the Black Panther case was not supported by the facts. Adams has described the case as open-and-shut and said Tuesday that it was a very low moment to hear Perez make that claim. But he described the department’s hostility toward that and other cases involving black defendants as pervasive. Adams cited hostility in the department toward a 2007 voting rights case against a black official in Mississippi who was accused of trying to intimidate voters. Adams said that when the Black Panther case came up, he heard officials in the department say it was no big deal and media-generated and point to Fox News as the source.”
If one of us refused to testify before the Civil Rights Commission, would the case quietly be dropped or would we be hit with every penalty in the book for ignoring a subpoena?
