02/03/2011
Jennifer Rubin’s Washington Post Blog might better have been called "The Fix Is In":New Black Panther Party case: The facts are inShe has a good deal about Abigail Thernstrom’s peculiar behavior. Thernstrom, according to the report [PDF]By Jennifer Rubin
01/27/2011
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights came out in December with a draft of its interim report on the New Black Panthers Party scandal. Earlier today a final report was posted on the commission’s website, and with it, a flurry of rebuttals and separate statements from a number of the commissioners. The import of these statements should not be minimized.
The statements indicate several points: 1) the New Black Panther Party case brought by career Justice Department employees was meritorious on the law and the facts; 2) there is voluminous evidence of the Obama administration’s political interference in the prosecution of the New Black Panther Party case; 3) there is ample evidence that the Obama administration directed Justice Department employees not to bring cases against minority defendants who violated voting rights laws or to enforce a provision requiring that states and localities clean up their voting rolls to prevent fraud; 4) the Justice Department stonewalled efforts to investigate the case; and 5) vice chairman Abigail Thernstrom has, for reasons not entirely clear, ignored the evidence and tried to undermine the commission’s work.[More]
The Vice Chair strongly supported this investigation until the day she changed her mind and stormed out of a Commission meeting over what she evidently perceived as a personal slight, and the personal slight didn’t even have anything to do with the New Black Panther Party (NBPP) investigation. After that she opposed the Commission’s majority on almost every subject and called the NBPP matter we were investigating "very small potatoes" which did not merit the time the Commission was devoting to it. Her attendance at meetings dwindled as she participated in less than 45% of the official meetings and events of the Commission in 2010. On those occasions she did attend, she strongly criticized the NBPP investigation … .Thernstrom is the neoconservative appointee on the board, appointed by President Bush in the hope of restoring some kind of sanity to the Civil Rights Commission, which has previously featured savants like Mary Frances Berry, who is widely quoted as saying"Civil rights laws were not passed to protect the rights of white men and do not apply to them".We are baffled by the Vice Chair’s repeated assertions that the investigation has uncovered no evidence of wrongdoing. The sworn testimony of Adams and Coates and the affidavits of Bowers and von Spakovsky are exactly that.
However, Abigail Thernstrom doesn’t seem to be much of an improvement. The report of her behavior won’t surprise the VDARE.com reading public much. After she published an Op-Ed in NRO trying to dismiss the whole thing, I blogged Abigail Thernstrom In NRO Say "Forget About" Panthers With Billy Clubs, Concentrate On Something More Boring.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.