Tuesday 29 June 2010

ADAMS: Inside the Black Panther case

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 case.

The New Black Panther case was the simplest and most obvious violation of federal law I saw in my Justice Department career. Because of the corrupt nature of the dismissal, statements falsely characterizing the case and, most of all, indefensible orders for the career attorneys not to comply with lawful subpoenas investigating the dismissal, this month I resigned my position as a Department of Justice (DOJ) attorney.

The federal voter-intimidation statutes we used against the New Black Panthers were enacted because America never realized genuine racial equality in elections. Threats of violence characterized elections from the end of the Civil War until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Before the Voting Rights Act, blacks seeking the right to vote, and those aiding them, were victims of violence and intimidation. But unlike the Southern legal system, Southern violence did not discriminate. Black voters were slain, as were the white champions of their cause. Some of the bodies were tossed into bogs and in one case in Philadelphia, Miss., they were buried together in an earthen dam.

Based on my firsthand experiences, I believe the dismissal of the Black Panther case was motivated by a lawless hostility toward equal enforcement of the law. Others still within the department share my assessment. The department abetted wrongdoers and abandoned law-abiding citizens victimized by the New Black Panthers. The dismissal raises serious questions about the department's enforcement neutrality in upcoming midterm elections and the subsequent 2012 presidential election.

Source: Washington Times

Tuesday 1 June 2010

White House can't get its Sestak story straight

Did you hear the one about how President Obama got Slick Willie Clinton to offer second-term Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak an unpaid appointment to an obscure White House advisory panel in return for dropping his primary challenge to incumbent Sen. Arlen Specter? Obama and his Chicago boys are still guffawing over how all the chumps in the media reported that one with a straight face. Hey, it's a just another reason why running a gangster government is nothing but laughs for the Obama crew in the White House.

The reality is that nobody outside the White House gang and its congressional confederates is laughing about this one. It is simply illegal to offer a job to anybody in return for doing something designed to influence a congressional election, so the White House story fails both the legal and the giggle test. In the first place, nobody can seriously believe that a wizened con man like Bill Clinton would agree to offer such rotten bait to a deep-water fish like Sestak, a former three-star admiral. When the job offer was originally made to Sestak in February, it was done because he clearly represented a serious threat to Specter's bid for the Pennsylvania Democratic senatorial primary less than a year after turncoat Arlen bolted the Republican Party. It is ludicrous to believe that the prospect of a presidential appointment to an unpaid federal advisory panel of little stature and less consequence would persuade Sestak to give up his dream of moving up from the House to the Senate. Clinton must have known this beforehand.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/White-House-can_t-get-its-Sestak-story-straight-95277519.html#ixzz0pbj4nnEM

Source: Washington Examiner