Free Republic

NEW YORK — November 2 is not here yet, but polling problems have begun. From possibly malfunctioning ballot gear to potential fraud, the 2010 mid-term vote is marred even before Election Day has dawned. •Like jurors who deliberate before a trial concludes, some Nevadans who have tried voting early for Republican Senate nominee Sharron Angle instead have seen Democrat Harry Reid’s name appear on their electronic voting machines. Some voters have complained about this apparent glitch, but how many others unwittingly have miscast their ballots? Intriguingly, these machines are maintained in Las Vegas by members of the Service Employees International...

A regularly scheduled "business meeting" of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on Friday turned into a fiery shout fest -- finger-pointing and all -- over whether the Justice Department was "stonewalling" their investigation into a controversial voting rights case, whether that investigation has been fruitful, and whether the commission can even fulfill its mission anymore. For more than a year, the commission has been looking into why the Obama administration reversed course on a federal lawsuit against two members of the New Black Panther Party, who were videotaped outside a Philadelphia polling station on Election Day 2008. The two...

South Carolina adopted a perfectly reasonable method to stop the spread of HIV and AIDS in its prison  population: isolating those with the disease from the rest of the prison  population. Unsurprisingly, the demented P.C. crowd at the Department of Justice want to put a halt to that. J. Christian Adams writes in the Washington Examiner: Two unpleasant topics of conversation most of us avoid are the epidemic of HIV/AIDS among prison inmates and a variety of sometimes violent events resulting in transmission of the disease. Some states long ago implemented policies to protect the uninfected part of the prison...

Abigail Thernstrom is wrong to belittle this shocking episode. Forget about the New Black Panther Party case,” writes Abigail Thernstrom. It’s “very small potatoes.” She is suddenly upset over the “overheated rhetoric filled with insinuations and unsubstantiated charges” about the case that she grudgingly admits may “perhaps” have been a civil-rights violation. So she has explained in an NRO op-ed. Naturally, her “conservative dissent” has been seized on by the “nothing to see here” Left, which can now get back to its preferred big-potatoes-diet of Bristol Palin, Karl Rove subpoenas, and leaking classified information. It was just a year ago,...

I have nothing personal — I don’t know the man and wish him well — against the Washington Post’s ombudsman Andrew Alexander, when I say he shouldn’t have his job. I don’t think the Post — or any newspaper or news website, for that matter — should have an ombudsman.Ombudsmen perform a dubious task, prolonging the pretense that such media outlets are unbiased. They are not, they cannot be and, in the final analysis, they shouldn’t be. They are written by humans, a uniformly biased group, whether they admit it to themselves or not, for whom objectivity is almost...

By now, the default judgment about the Barack Obama-Eric H. Holder Jr. Justice Department is that it discriminates intentionally on the basis of race. By the precise definition used in the American Heritage dictionary, the department is racialist. The Justice Department hasn't seriously contested the accusation of racialism. Recently resigned whistleblowing attorney J. Christian Adams has made credible charges, backed by at least five former colleagues, that the department's Civil Rights Division has adopted a policy of refusing to enforce civil rights laws on behalf of whites victimized by minority perpetrators. Mr. Adams cited an incident from November in which...

Recent testimony before the the U.S. Civil Rights Commission from a former Justice Department lawyer has “raised serious concerns as to whether the Civil Rights Division’s enforcement policies are being pursued in a race-neutral fashion,” the panel’s chairman wrote in a letter to the head of DOJ’s Civil Rights Division Wednesday.J. Christian Adams, former trial attorney, testifies before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. (photo by Channing Turner / Main Justice) In a letter to Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Thomas Perez, Chairman Gerald A. Reynolds highlighted several statements by former DOJ lawyer J. Christian Adams, who testified...

Yet more proof that the DOJ doesn't want whites and Asians, when they are the discriminated-against minority, to be protected under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. On July 13, the Department of Justice blew an opportunity to put to rest the issue of whether they are willing to enforce the Voting Rights Act in a race-neutral fashion by objecting to a request by a proven discriminator to further discriminate. I wrote about this pending request at Pajamas Media. At the time I noted: Bottom line, if this Justice Department was truly interested in enforcing the law in a...

Editor’s Note: This piece was co-authored by Ken Blackwell.A situation involving voter intimidation caught on tape has now exploded, as a Justice Department lawyer resigns to be able to tell the truth to the American people that the Obama-Holder Justice Department is allowing voting-rights violations to go unpunished for political reasons. Those responsible must be made to answer for their betrayal of the public trust. The Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has a noble mission: Make sure that no eligible citizen is denied their rights, especially the right to vote. That mandate has a special...

Accusations that the Voting Section of the Department of Justice is poisoned by politics are not new and neither are its loudest critics.  In the fall of 2007, those declaring that the George W. Bush Administration used the Voting Section to achieve a political purpose got their day in “court.”  On October 30, 2007, former Voting Section Chief John Tanner testified to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties.  He was called to testify following his decision to pre-clear a law in Georgia requiring that voters present photo identification at the polls.[1]  He stated that...

Whistleblower J. Christian Adams says the DOJ has a mandate not to enforce the law that ineligible voters must be taken off registration rolls. VIDEO

Complete title: Lawlessness at the DOJ: Voting Section Told Not To Enforce Purging the Dead or Ineligible from Voting Rolls It's not just the New Black Panther case: in November 2009, political appointee Julie Fernandes told a packed room of Voting Section employees to simply ignore this provision of the "Motor Voter" law. I was at the Voting Section of the Justice Department for over five years. This office is responsible for enforcing most federal election laws which do not involve criminal matters. My previous articles at Pajamas Media have spoken of the DOJ’s lawless abandonment of race-neutral enforcement of...

Justice: A former top official charges the Justice Department with practicing racial politics and selective prosecution in the Black Panther voter-intimidation case. Are we a "nation of cowards," or is it just Holder's DOJ? In February, on the occasion of Black History Month, Attorney General Eric Holder called the United States a "nation of cowards" regarding discussions of race even as his department was failing to prosecute one of the clearest cases of voter intimidation in American history because the defendants were black militants, members of the New Black Panther Party. Holder said that "we, average Americans, simply do not...

Former DOJ employees want to go on record praising Adams' outstanding work record, and — pay attention, DOJ press liaisons — maybe corroborate Adams' charges about DOJ hostility to race-neutral law enforcement. (Check back here for updates in the hours and days ahead, as PJM posts additional statements.)Several former DOJ employees have been in contact with Pajamas Media, interested in publicly supporting J. Christian Adams as he comes forward about the DOJ’s failure to enforce the country’s laws from a race-neutral perspective. These former DOJ employees have expressed a willingness to go on record regarding Adams’ professionalism, excellent performance, and...

Today I testified to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights pursuant to a subpoena investigating the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation dismissal. I would rather no such obligation had arisen.My previous Pajamas Media article comprised much of what I was willing to testify about. In that article, I detailed specific instances of hostility being expressed towards a race-neutral enforcement of civil rights laws, and in particular laws regarding voting and elections.To the many that have experienced the hostility firsthand, denials of its existence seem preposterous.To the many who expressed such hostility, often thoughtful but wrong, it would be...

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...

J. Christian Adams was proud to be a Department of Justice attorney. He believed he was serving his country by prosecuting those who wished harm on others. He strongly believed in what he did. To this DoJ official, his profession wasn’t a job but a calling. Until earlier this month when he suddenly resigned. The reason? His superiors told him to drop a case against the New Black Panther Party, even though the “case was the simplest and most obvious violation of federal law I saw in my Justice Department career.” Reading Adams’ account of what happened, I can only...

On the day President Obama was elected, armed men wearing the black berets and jackboots of the New Black Panther Party were stationed at the entrance to a polling place in Philadelphia. They brandished a weapon and intimidated voters and poll watchers. After the election, the Justice Department brought a voter-intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party and those armed thugs. I and other Justice attorneys diligently pursued the case and obtained an entry of default after the defendants ignored the charges. Before a final judgment could be entered in May 2009, our superiors ordered us to dismiss the...

The former Civil Rights Division lawyer who quit the Justice Department after he was denied permission to speak about his work on a controversial voter intimidation case will testify before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights next month.J. Christian Adams at a Federalist Society meeting in Washington in November (Photo by Ryan J. Reilly / Main Justice). J. Christian Adams, the lead attorney on a voter intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party in Philadelphia, resigned from the Justice Department on June 4.Adams’ lawyer said earlier this month that his client planned to cooperate with the commission.The...

Something is wrong with a Justice Department that treats its own attorneys worse than it treats civil-rights violators those attorneys would prosecute. On Friday, after evasive testimony by Justice official Thomas E. Perez to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, department attorney J. Christian Adams resigned in obvious disgust at the deep-sixing of a voter intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party. Mr. Adams and Justice's former voting rights section chief, Christopher Coates, are the two attorneys most responsible for pursuing the case against the Black Panthers videotaped in menacing poses outside a Philadelphia polling place on...