03/29/2011
I continue to be stupefied by the Department of Justice’s abandonment of the Black Panther voter intimidation case. Like so many other racial double-standard outrages, it was news briefly, then seemed to slip into the MSM’s rearview mirror.[ Dispute over New Black Panthers case causes deep divisions, By Jerry Markon and Krissah Thompson, Washington Post, October 22, 2010]
But it did get back in the news cycle recently, thanks J. Christian Adams,[ElectionLawCenter.com,] the Civil Rights Division attorney who bravely resigned in protest over the matter,[See resignation letter]and Attorney General Eric Holder, who tellingly claimed that focus on the case insulted "my people".
Adams is now touring the country to speak about the case. I heard him recently at a Federalist Society event in the northeast. He also spoke at the Accuracy In Media Conference on March 16, and he’s a regular target of attacks by Media Matters. [Right-Wing Ex-DOJ Lawyers Begin New Black Panthers Damage Control, by Matt Gertz, March 18, 2011, and many more. ]
White advocates hoping for something a little meatier than the usual mouthings about equality will be disappointed in Adams. He flatly states that we're a nation of "diversity" and need to make that work.
Still, Adams is notable. To my knowledge, he is the first man publicly to resign a government post over the mistreatment of whites by high-powered black officials. And in fine whistleblower form, he’s talking openly about it, including testimony before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Adams, by the way, is a Virginia lawyer who spent five years at DOJ. While there, he litigated Voting Rights Act case involving Hispanic, black and white victimization, including the notorious Ike Brown case, involving white voter intimidation and fraud in Mississippi’s notorious black-majority Noxubee County.
The Holder Justice department seems not to care — The Ike Brown Case: Is the DOJ About to Fail Another Race-Based Test?, by J. Christian Adams, July 11, 2010]
Adams told the audience that Brown threatened white voters by telling them "if you try to vote, it will be hard." Charming, eh? [Diversity is Strength! It’s Also…"Jim Snow" Disenfranchisement Of Whites, By Nicholas Stix, May 12, 2009]
Adams dished a little dirt on current voting rights activity at DOJ, telling us that while enforcement of a provision to register voters on welfare rolls was being aggressively enforced, the provision requiring clearing rolls of dead voters was being ignored.
No need to get out your calculators to see who that benefits: blacks and Democrats. The Obama administration apparently sees the DOJ as a crucial part of its get-out-the-vote effort in 2012.
The inside skinny on the Black Panther case:
First, the case involved the New Black Panther Party, which is a different set of characters from the Black Panther Party of the 1960s (founded by Khalid Muhammad in 1995 and even more radical, Adams says). Following the nationwide exposure of the club-wielding Panther on YouTube, a civil suit was filed on January 8, 2009 that named the New Black Panther Party, president Malik Zulu Shabazz, and the two clowns in the video. It sought an injunction against Black Panther patrols in front of polling places nationwide.
Nobody ever answered the suit — meaning that it would normally have been decided by default.
Interestingly, the Panthers may actually have had a lawyer, Adams said — Michael Coard, the "angriest black man in America".
Good choice to defend the Panthers, I guess. The Justice Department was in communication with him about the case following filing of the suit, and noted as much in footnotes in subsequent filings for default (as in, "Judge, it’s not like we're going for default against someone without an attorney.").
Adams never said as much, but it strikes me that Coard, through alternate communication channels, may have known that DOJ higher-ups were going to quash the suit, and not to worry. Or, he just wasn’t worried about an injunction against polling place patrols … nobody was asking for money, for goodness' sake.
Ultimately, the DOJ did get an injunction, just one much smaller than hoped for: against the club wielder in the video alone, and only in Philadelphia, and only through 2012.
The intimidation was plain to see, Adams said, and statutorily would have been easy to show. Previously, the anti-intimidation clause of the Voting Rights Act had a "mens rea" element, meaning it had to be shown that the intimidators meant to intimidate. So, if a Klansman showed up to a polling place and scared off black voters, there was no liability if the Klansman didn’t actually mean to scare anyone and just happened to show up to polling places in his robes because it was a little chilly that day.
Currently, resulting intimidation is all that’s needed.
Was there intimidation on Fairmount Street?
A man named Chris Hill said the polling place was blocked by the Panthers in the video. A black couple working for the Republicans said they were afraid of the Panthers after hearing yells about being race traitors. And "cracker" was being yelled.
If that’s not intimidation, Adams said, I don’t know what is.
But the case simply didn’t fit the personal racial agenda of some DOJ lawyers. Adams heard this directly from lawyers there: "I didn’t join the Civil Rights Division to sue African-Americans".
All of which creates, in Adams' word, a climate of lawlessness at DOJ. The word definitely applies "to this particular Justice Department at this particular time", Adams said.
At the event I attended, two black law students sought to confront Adams — neither successfully. One asked whether "my people" could be interpreted in different ways (not really, Adams suggested). Another huffed that the New Black Panther Party was not as bad as the Ku Klux Klan (not true, Adams said, unless you're talking about the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s).
Asked whether his courageous stand has had any negative consequences for him, Adams said: "No, I've been having a great time … some random hugs from people I don’t know, which is a little creepy."
I know where those hugs are coming from — they're coming from white people who've been wasting for years for an honest man in the Civil Rights Division.
As he wrapped up, Adams said that we in America are at a "fork in the road", with a decision about whether to follow the path of true, color-blind diversity, or Eric Holder’s spoils system for "my people".
But the problem is that we are not at a fork in the road. We're way past it. The real fork in the road was between the path of a homogenous, predominately white America on the one hand, and a "multicultural America" with whites in the minority on the other.
We embarked on the multiracial route. And we're now reaping the benefits: lawlessness from the highest levels of government, dispossession of the traditional white majority, and chaos and mendacity all around.
If Adams wants to face up to more hard issues, he should be asking why American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor can’t talk about "his people".
Anonymous Attorney really wants to be anonymous, but email will be forwarded to him. Put "Anonymous Attorney" in the subject line.
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