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Getbig Main Boards => Politics and Political Issues Board => Topic started by: George Whorewell on December 14, 2010, 05:53:56 PM
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As much as I think that Barrack Hussein Obama is a disgrace as a president, he is at least (it appears anyway) beholden to the will of the people in some respects. Opinion polls matter, elections matter and no president wants to cement his legacy as a one termer when he is barely through his first two years in office.
However, the Obama administration appointees have been a comedy of criminals, radicals, buffoons and incompetent slobs that are as suited to positions of power as autistic gerbils.
Eric Holder is by far the worst of the bunch. Partially because of the prestige of his office, partially because he's a drama queen that loves posing for the camera and mostly because he is a hideously immature partisan hack that I wouldn't let scrub my toilet, let alone preside over the highest legal position that the government has to offer.
His latest disaster ( Count the many; trying to forcefeed the KSM trial to NYC, suing Arizona for enforcing federal immigration law, dismissing the case against the Black Panthers in the voter intimidation debacle for no good reason except for the defendants being black, having the terrorist who participated in butchering several hundred people at the American Embassy in Africa get acquitted on all but one count, calling Americans cowards on race, etc. etc.) involves one of the most ridiculous cases of pandering to the Arab Muslim Nazi's in this country that I have ever seen in my lifetime. A public school teacher decided to take a Hajj to Mecca in the middle of the school year for three weeks. The school said three weeks was too long. The woman decided to go to the EEOC who contacted Justice and now the brilliant Eric Holder is suing the school district on behalf of this camel turd for an ungodly amount of money. I'm posting the link from Huffington because even the douchebag libs who post there think this is a disgrace.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/14/berkeley-school-sued-by-u_n_796578.html
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Holders record w the clinton admn alone should have earned him a spot in gitmo.
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Holders record w the clinton admn alone should have earned him a spot in gitmo.
careful - lots of "repubs" here who voted that bag of shite into office with the cigar president they loved.
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This ghetto marxist needs a jail cell.
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Again - Fuck you whoever voted for this.
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Stick with GW.
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I can't believe Barry is still blindly loyal to Holder. This guy's poison. Needs to dump him immediately.
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I can't believe Barry is still blindly loyal to Holder. This guy's poison. Needs to dump him immediately.
Holde® i§ the bag man.
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I can't believe Barry is still blindly loyal to Holder. This guy's poison. Needs to dump him immediately.
That would involve Barry admitting he was wrong about something and the 4th greatest president in American history is never wrong.
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That would involve Barry admitting he was wrong about something and the 4th greatest president in American history is never wrong.
Holder is there to provide cover for Obamas crimes.
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That would involve Barry admitting he was wrong about something and the 4th greatest president in American history is never wrong.
That's a good point. His ego would need to notch down.
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December 22, 2011
Eric Holder, Fear and Intimidation
Aaron Gee
This past weekend, Attorney General Eric Holder attempted to intimidate his critics by accusing them of racism. Under the Attorney General's watch more than a thousand weapons have been walked across the border by the ATF and more than 300 people are dead as a direct result. Even Holder himself admits that the 'Fast and Furious' guns will be used in more crimes. Innocents on both sides of the border have more to fear.
The mixture of fear and intimidation has existed since Holder's first days in office. Who can forget his first major speech after confirmation? In that speech the Attorney General said "Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards". Shortly thereafter the AG dropped the voter intimidation case against a New Black Panthers Party member that stood outside a polling station hurling racial slurs and carrying a night stick.
The same DOJ that is suing the state of Arizona for daring to enforce immigration laws is led by a man that admitted that he hadn't read the law in question. With that fact in hand the entire idea to sue can only be interpreted as an attempt to intimidate the state legislature. More fear for people that live on the border and whose lives are directly impacted by the various illegal drug and human traffickers.
A new example of intimidation came on Wednesday as Attorney's from the DOJ sent formal requests to WordPress to freeze logs and records from 3 climate-skeptic blogs. One of the blogs, ClimateAudit.org, is authored by the Canadian whose research proved that the famous "Hockey Stick" was bogus. The DOJ's case revolves around a second dump of emails known as Climategate 2.0 which has shown climate scientists engaging in certainly unethical and perhaps criminal behavior -- case of the DOJ going after the whistle blowers.
We can expect more intimidation from the DOJ and the people looking for the department to uphold the law have much to fear. Holder's DOJ has hired nothing but political ideologues in every DOJ section from Employment to Voting (including litigators). With the 2012 election looming, the selection of such hardened ideologues is troubling, especially in light of the New Black Panther voter intimidation case.
From ignoring and refusing to honor Freedom of Information Requests to refusal to enforce laws that are on the books, the Attorney General has fallen from an office entrusted to be the chief law enforcement officer of the Federal Government to a politically motivated strong arm of the Obama administration. Enough! No more fear and intimidation from our government officials. It's time for Eric Holder to resign and for Congress to clean house at the DOJ.
Aaron Gee is a U.S.-based IT consultant who started the blog foundingideals.com.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2011/12/_eric_holder_fear_and_intimidation.html at December 22, 2011 - 08:23:51 AM CST
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Obama/Holder and those that vote for these two ghetto grifters deserve public humiliation.
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Breaking: Confessions of Perjury inside the DOJ
big government ^ | 12/22/11 | J. Christian Adams
Today, PJ Media breaks a bombshell that an employee in the federal Department of Justice (DOJ) Voting Section, where I used to work, has admitted to lying three times under penalty of perjury during a DOJ Inspector General’s investigation.
The revelation may well affect congressional redistricting, because of the key role Voting Section staff play in approving state legislative plans, including the staffer in question.
For example, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott might use these allegations of perjury involving Texas redistricting to fight the ongoing redistricting litigation. Impeachment of a different sort–that of a testifying witness–is his for the taking.
The wide ranging DOJ Inspector General investigation is examining the harassment of conservative leaning DOJ employees who were willing to enforce civil rights laws equally against all wrongdoers, such as the New Black Panther party. You read that right–the harassment of employees who were willing to enforce the law against the New Black Panther Party.
(Excerpt) Read more at biggovernment.com ...
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http://floydreports.com/did-eric-holder-provide-explosives-to-timothy-mcveigh/ (http://floydreports.com/did-eric-holder-provide-explosives-to-timothy-mcveigh/)
Did Eric Holder Provide Explosives to Timothy McVeigh?
December 20, 2011
by Doug Book
Documents obtained by Salt Lake City attorney Jesse Trentadue in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit show then-Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder authorized members of the FBI to provide explosives to Oklahoma City bombing criminals Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols immediately prior to the April 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building.
Holder had authorized the FBI to provide the explosives to McVeigh and Nichols in conjunction with a Clinton administration undercover operation named PATCON, an acronym for “Patriot Conspiracy.” As Jesse Trentadue describes it, “PATCON was designed to infiltrate and incite…militia and evangelical Christians to violence so that the Department of Justice could crush them.” [1]
Both Waco and Ruby Ridge are now known to have been PATCON-inspired, Department of Justice plots.
Shortly after the Oklahoma City bombing, Holder instructed FBI agents to recover from Terry Nichols any remainder of the explosives the Bureau had provided him and McVeigh. To the chagrin of Eric Holder, the explosives were later discovered by another agency, complete with the fingerprints of Nichols, McVeigh, and two FBI agents. Holder had reportedly offered Nichols respite from the death penalty for his cooperation in recovering the explosives. Obviously, the Deputy Attorney General considered covering up his criminal complicity in the bombing a good deed eminently worth sparing Nichols his just punishment for the murders of 168 innocent Americans.
Jesse Trentadue accidentally came across PATCON while investigating the murder of his brother Kenneth at the hands of the Clinton Department of Justice. An FBI informant familiar with the Oklahoma City bombing story, Kenneth was found hanged in his cell after having been jailed by the FBI. Though an official FBI report had listed Kenneth as a suicide, it was obvious that he had been severely beaten and had his throat cut.
Upon Jesse taking the federal government to court, a federal judge ruled that the FBI had not only lied about Kenneth Trentadue’s death, the Bureau was also found guilty of having destroyed evidence concerning the case. In 2001 the Trentadue family was awarded $1.1 million, $250,000 of which remains a reward for information leading to the conviction of Kenneth Trentadue’s killers.
In late November, Newsweek magazine was to run a story revealing the history of PATCON, including the Oklahoma City bombing, the part played by Eric Holder, the FBI-initiated killings at Waco and Ruby Ridge, and the subsequent murder of Kenneth Trentadue. But as Mike Vanderboegh, owner of the Sipsey Street Irregulars blog reports, Newsweek senior editor Tina Brown was “convinced” by members of the Clinton and Obama administrations to remove certain information from the lengthy R M Schneiderman article. Although originally approved for publication by Newsweek editor John Solomon, the article which finally appeared in the magazine had been cut to pieces, undoubtedly providing great relief to Holder, Clinton, Clinton Attorney General Janet Reno, and many other current and former members of the Department of Justice.
It hardly needs pointed out that this and other extraordinary stories of corruption and facilitation of murder by the Clinton and Obama administrations stink to high heaven. A number of links for further reading have been provided below. Rest assured that we at CoachIsRight.com will continue to pursue the stories of PATCON, Fast and Furious, and any other examples of executive branch corruption.
It’s doubtful we will want for material.
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I read about this. If this attorney has these records - he needs to make hundreds of copies and hire a bodyguard asap. Otherwise - he will get the Ron Brown / Vince Foster treatment.
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Holder's Voter ID Fraud
The AG invents fears of ballot suppression.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203893404577100313135266898.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop#articleTabs%3Dcomments
The Obama Administration's re-election mobilization continues: Witness Eric Holder's attempt to play the race card and perhaps twist the law in a campaign against voter identification laws.
In the Attorney General's telling, the movement in the states to require voters to show some ID is a revival of minority disenfranchisement a la Jim Crow. A growing number of minorities, he said in a speech last week, are now worried about "the same disparities, divisions and problems" that beset the country in 1965 and "many Americans, for the first time in their lives . . . now have reason to believe that we are failing to live up" to the promise of democracy for all.
If you haven't heard about this national crisis, perhaps that's because you don't travel in Mr. Holder's political circles. He is merely repeating the howls of groups like the NAACP and the George Soros-funded Brennan Center, which claim without evidence that voter ID laws hurt minorities.
The NAACP even petitioned the United Nations this month for a human-rights ruling on what President Benjamin Jealous called a "tidal wave of assaults on the right to vote." He meant in America, not Cuba or North Korea. The American Civil Liberties Union has sued to challenge a voter ID law in Wisconsin.
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U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder
.Mr. Holder's remarks are especially notable because they come as the Justice Department is reviewing voter ID laws in Texas and South Carolina for "preclearance" under the Voting Rights Act. The states' plans require voters to present photo ID like a driver's license or passport to vote, a measure endorsed by the Commission on Federal Election Reform headed by President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker in 2005 to protect the integrity of the ballot.
Mr. Holder says the Civil Rights Division led by Thomas Perez will review the policies and impartially "apply the law." If that's true, Mr. Perez's job should be easy: In 2005, Justice approved a nearly identical law in Georgia. In 2008's Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, the Supreme Court likewise ruled 6-3 that an Indiana law requiring photo ID at the ballot box was constitutional.
The court's liberal lion, then-Justice John Paul Stevens, wrote for the majority that Indiana's law "is unquestionably relevant to the State's interest in protecting the integrity and reliability of the electoral process." Indiana offered free voter ID cards to all citizens, so the inconvenience of picking up an ID at the Department of Motor Vehicles wasn't an undue burden and was reasonably balanced by the state's interest in reducing fraud, Justice Stevens wrote.
That isn't good enough for Mr. Holder, who says his department's priority is to "expand the franchise." But expand it for whom, exactly? The vast majority of voters already have the necessary photo ID, which they need to get through airport security or register for a grocery-store savings card.
Plaintiffs put up by liberal lawsuit shops routinely claim that ID laws endanger the rights of hundreds of thousands, but lawsuits in Indiana and Georgia were dismissed because they couldn't produce a single eligible voter who'd been turned away due to the ID requirement. Turnout has risen in states that have passed the voter ID laws, with no adverse impact on minorities.
In his speech, Mr. Holder highlighted historical attempts to keep voters away from the polls to "gain partisan advantage." But in a case of more recent history, in 2009, Mr. Holder's department dropped a voter intimidation case against the Black Panther Party, in which members stood outside a polling place brandishing nightsticks and threatening voters. Civil-rights lawyer Bartle Bull saw the Panthers in action and called it "the most blatant form of voter intimidation I've ever seen."
Thirty states now require some form of ID at the polls, and one goal of Mr. Holder's attack is to intimidate other states that want to toughen their laws. He's probably also signaling that Justice will strike down the Texas and South Carolina statutes. This would please the Democratic Party's left while not-so-subtly inventing a threat of Republican racism to drive minority turnout in 2012. Mr. Holder's voter ID alarums are one more reason he's earning a reputation for politicized, partial justice.
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Congressman trumps Holder’s race card, asks if Mexican gun-walking deaths were ‘racially motivated’
The Daily Caller ^ | 12/23/2011 | Matthew Boyle -
Posted on December 23, 2011 8:30:45 PM EST by george76
Arizona Republican Rep. Paul Gosar told The Daily Caller that Attorney General Eric Holder’s race-card play to attack his critics is “absolutely horrendous.” But Gosar said he thinks race may have played a role in the Department of Justice’s execution of Operation Fast and Furious — but in a different way from how Holder is framing it.
“He [Holder] brought up the race card, and while I think it’s absolutely horrendous that he would bring up the race card, in Fast and Furious, we were in fact impugning the Mexican people,” Gosar said in a phone interview. “About 300 people have lost their lives.”
“When the attorney general brings up the race card, he’d better be very, very careful — particularly for the Hispanics and what’s happened to them,” Gosar adds. “He’s been very insensitive, not only to the [U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian] Terry family in making an apology and making it very public, but where’s the apology to the Mexican government and the families of the victims in Mexico?”
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At least 300 people in Mexico were killed with Fast and Furious weapons, as was Border Patrol agent Brian Terry. The identities of the Mexican victims are unknown. Allegations have surfaced that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jaime Zapata was also killed with Fast and Furious weapons.
Sixty-two congressmen, two senators, two sitting governors and every major Republican presidential candidate have demanded Holder’s ouster over the resulting scandal. And 85 congressmen have signed a House resolution of “no confidence” in Holder as the nation’s top law enforcement officer.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Government; Mexico; News/Current Events; US: Arizona; US: California; US: New Mexico; US: Texas; Click to Add Topic
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Krauthammer: Eric Holder ‘one of the most incompetent attorneys general in US history’
Published: 1:47 PM 12/24/2011 | Updated: 4:08 PM 12/24/2011
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Last week, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder suggested racism was behind the attacks he was facing for the missteps his Department of Justice has made.
On Friday’s “Special Report with Bret Baier” on the Fox News Channel, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer explained what he thought was the rationale behind this charge from Holder: It’s a defensive tactic for his political troubles.
“It’s clearly a cheap shot of an attorney general who is in political trouble,” Krauthammer said. “The reason he is, he is one of the most incompetent attorneys general in U.S. history. He is the guy who brought on gratuitously the fiasco of the KSM [Kalid Sheikh Mohammed] trial in New York that even Democrats rebelled against. He is the guy who has led a department that has been either totally ignorant or disingenuous or worse on the Fast and the Furious scandal.”
Krauthammer said this use of the race card was dangerous, particularly when it could stoke “racial animosity.”
“And now he plays the race card,” Krauthammer continued. “I think it’s, to use his word a cowardly use of the race card and it’s unbecoming. It also is dangerous in a country where it can stoke that kind of racial animosity. He shouldn’t be using it. I say it with all due respect. Merry Christmas, Mr. Attorney General.”
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Admitted Liar and Document Leaker Retains Key DOJ Job
godfatherpolitics.com ^ | Dec 27, 2011 | Giacomo
Posted on December 27, 2011 10:14:25 PM EST by Iam1ru1-2
The Department of Justice Inspector General has been conducting an investigation in the leaking of sensitive documents from back in 2005-2007. Some of the documents that were leaked to the leftist Washington Post included confidential attorney-client records along with other confidential personnel information and highly sensitive legal papers.
On more than one occasion, the DOJ investigation led to career DOJ Civil Rights Division Voting employee Stephanie Celandine Gyamfi. The first two times Gyamfi was interviewed by the investigators, she denied having any knowledge of the document leaks. Digging deeper, the investigators found incriminating evidence implicating Gyamfi, prompting them to interview her a third time.
During the third interview session, Gyamfi again denied any involvement or knowledge of the document leaks. Then she was presented with e-mails that revealed her role in the leaked documents. At this time she supposedly broke down in tears and confessed that she had been lying to protect other DOJ employees.
To date, Gyamfi has not been disciplined for lying to investigators or for her role in leaking the classified information. Worse yet is that she remains at her job with the DOJ where she is involved with the government review of the congressional redistricting in Texas. Oh yeah, did I mention that some of the documents and information she helped to supply to the Washington Post apply to Texas and its political redistricting?
If Gyamfi worked for any private company, she would have been terminated on the spot and possibly charged with criminal actions for leaking sensitive company documents to an outside source. If she were a Republican, I’m sure she would have been dismissed and escorted out of the building.
Career employee with civil service protection or not, US Attorney General Eric Holder has the authority to take action against Gyamfi up to and including termination on grounds of her committing perjury and for illegally leaking the documents to the Washington Post. But one has to wonder why Holder or any of her supervisors have not taken any disciplinary actions against her.
Oh, that’s right. This is the United States Department of Justice. This is the organization that is supposed to set the example for obeying and defending the laws of the land. They would never do anything illegal or tolerate an employee who did anything illegal, would they?
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US reviewing anti-Muslim school bias complaint
wtov9.com ^ | 12-27-11 | AP
PITTSFIELD TOWNSHIP, Mich. —
The U.S. Attorney's Office in Detroit is reviewing a religious discrimination complaint against a community for denying a zoning change request to allow construction of a Muslim school.
The Michigan Islamic Academy wants to build at a 26-acre site in Washtenaw County's Pittsfield Township.
"We are reviewing the matter and whether to proceed with a formal investigation," Assistant U.S. Attorney Judith Levy told The Detroit News (http://bit.ly/soyS41 ) for a story Tuesday.
On Oct. 26, the township board rejected the request, following an earlier rejection by the township planning commission. School officials say the 200-student school is too big for its location in nearby Ann Arbor.
Township Supervisor Mandy Grewal said the decision isn't based on religion.
"We are an open, respectful and diverse community here in Pittsfield Township" Grewal said after the October decision. "We have a track record, most recently the planning commission approved a mosque."
The Council on American-Islamic Relations said the decision violated the First Amendment right of religious freedom, and it asked the Justice Department to investigate.
"We believe this is a blatant violation of the (school's) constitutional right to open the school on their property," said Lena Masri, a lawyer for the group.
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Voter ID: Holder Looks Through Race-Colored Glasses
http://news.investors.com/Article/596128/201112281903/eric-holder-blocks-voter-id-in-south-carolina.htm
Posted 12/28/2011 07:03 PM ET
Suffrage: Fresh from using his race as a defense in the Fast and Furious scandal, the attorney general blocks South Carolina's voter photo ID law as discriminatory. Tell that to the Department of Motor Vehicles.
The Palmetto State can't seem to catch a break from this administration. First, the right-to-work state gets harassed by the National Labor Relations Board over Boeing's expansion into a new plant.
Now the Justice Department has blocked a voter ID law passed in May and signed by Gov. Nikki Haley.
Both federal actions, along with a Justice Department investigation into Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, have the unstated goal of rallying to the president's re-election banner consisting of various components of the Democratic base — from unions to African-Americans to Hispanics, all of whom need to be protected from those racist, anti-immigrant and anti-union Republicans.
Once again playing the race card, the Justice Department, which under Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act gets to review any changes to the election laws of 16 states including South Carolina until the end of time, has judged, without any factual evidence, the Palmetto State's new law to be discriminatory.
In a letter Friday to Havird Jones, South Carolina assistant deputy attorney general, the Justice Department said the law, which requires a voter to present a South Carolina driver's license or other photo ID such as a passport, military ID or a voter registration card with a photo issued by South Carolina election officials, would "significantly" burden nonwhite voters.
According to the Justice Department, roughly 10% of blacks registered to vote don't have photo IDs compared with 8.4% of whites.
This represents a "discriminatory effect" in its view, a view that ignores the mitigating provisions in the South Carolina law. If you didn't have an ID, you could still vote by filling out an affidavit and later show evidence of your identity.
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South Carolina's law is similar to and even less strict than laws passed in Indiana and Georgia. "There is no question about the legitimacy or importance of a state's interest in counting only eligible voters' votes," wrote liberal justice John Paul Stevens for the 6-2 majority in the Supreme Court's 2008 decision upholding Indiana's ID law, the toughest in the nation.
The empirical evidence shows that voter ID laws do not suppress minority voting. In Georgia, black voter turnout for the 2006 midterm elections was 42.9%. After Georgia passed its photo ID, black turnout in the 2010 midterm rose to 50.4%. Black voter turnout also rose in Indiana and Mississippi after enactment of their voter ID laws.
Attorney General Eric Holder's concern for voting integrity is suspect in light of his department's mishandling of the blatantly obvious case of voter intimidation in 2008 by members of the New Black Panther Party dressed in military garb and wielding billy clubs outside a Philadelphia precinct.
Holder, like the president he serves, is not above using race as political shield and weapon. "This is a way to get at the president because of the way I can be identified with him," Holder said regarding questions about his knowledge of and role in the federal Fast and Furious gun-running operation to Mexico. "Both due to the nature of our relationship and, you know, the fact that we're both African-American."
Not, of course, due to their failed and misguided policies based on political considerations.
Photo IDs are required for people to board an airplane or Amtrak train, open a bank account, buy liquor, cash checks, enter a federal building and for a multitude of other daily activities.
Consider this bit of irony: When Holder went to Texas to denounce the voter ID laws of that and other states, each person entering the LBJ Library where he spoke had to present his or her photo ID in order to enter.
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Holder's Racial Politics
The AG's attack on voter ID laws may backfire legally and politically.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203391104577125532355717866.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
Eric Holder must be amazed that President Obama was elected and he could become Attorney General. That's a fair inference after the Attorney General last Friday blocked South Carolina's voter ID law on grounds that it would hurt minorities. What a political abuse of law.
In a letter to South Carolina's government, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Thomas Perez called the state law—which would require voters to present one of five forms of photo ID at the polls—a violation of Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Overall, he noted, 8.4% of the state's registered white voters lack photo ID, compared to 10% of nonwhite voters.
This is the yawning chasm the Justice Department is now using to justify the unprecedented federal intrusion into state election law, and the first denial of a "pre-clearance" Voting Rights request since 1994.
The 1965 Voting Rights Act was created to combat the systematic disenfranchisement of minorities, especially in Southern states with a history of discrimination. But the Justice position is a lead zeppelin, contradicting both the Supreme Court and the Department's own precedent. In 2005, Justice approved a Georgia law with the same provisions and protections of the one Mr. Holder nixed for South Carolina. In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board that an Indiana law requiring photo ID did not present an undue burden on voters.
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U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder
.A second case offers a further glimpse into the High Court's perspective on the modern use of Section 5. In 2009's Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District v. Holder, the Court declined to decide the question of the constitutionality of Section 5, writing that while it imposes "substantial federalism costs," the "importance of the question does not justify our rushing to decide it." But the Justices didn't stop there.
They also cast real doubt on the long-term viability of the law, noting in an 8-1 decision by Chief Justice John Roberts that it "imposes current burdens and must be justified by current needs." That such strong criticism was signed by even the Court's liberals should concern Mr. Holder, who may eventually have to defend his South Carolina smackdown in court.
South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley tells us she "will absolutely sue" Justice over its denial of her state's law and that challenge will go directly to federal district court in Washington, D.C. From there it may be appealed directly to the Supreme Court, which would have to consider whether South Carolina can be blocked from implementing a law identical to the one the High Court approved for Indiana, simply because South Carolina is a "covered" jurisdiction under the Voting Rights Act.
In such a scenario, Mr. Holder's tactics could well doom Section 5 itself. That's a big gamble for the sake of trying to stir up election-year minority voter turnout.
Civil-rights groups claim this Justice offensive is needed to counteract a voting environment in which little has changed since Jim Crow. But South Carolina's law, like Indiana's and Georgia's, explicitly addresses potential disenfranchisement by offering state-issued IDs free of charge. When civil-rights groups fretted about the ability of minority voters to get to the local Department of Motor Vehicles to pick up a free state-issued ID card, Governor Haley created an 800 number to offer free rides to anyone who couldn't afford the transportation. About 30 people called.
In October, the South Carolina Department of Elections reported that some 240,000 state voters lacked ID cards. The DMV now says more than 200,000 of those had allowed their IDs to expire, lived in other states or were dead.
The Voting Rights Act was once needed to counteract the gap between black and white voter registration. By 2009 the gap had narrowed to a few percentage points in some covered states while blacks out-registered whites in others. Yet Justice retains a federal veto on election-law changes no matter how innocuous or racially neutral. Section 5 has become a vehicle not to pursue equal access to the polls but to play the grossest kind of racial politics.
As African-American men at the most exalted reaches of government, Messrs. Obama and Holder are a testament to how much racial progress the country has made. It's a shame to see them pretending little has changed so they can scare up some votes.
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How far Barack Obama and Eric Holder have subverted American freedoms
coachisright.com ^ | DECEMBER 27TH, 2011 | Kevin “Coach” Collins
Posted on December 27, 2011 11:29:10 AM EST by jmaroneps37
We know that Eric Holder is a liar and a criminal facilitator based on what we have learned about his conduct in the Fast and Furious crimes.
We are now finding out Holder has been a Democrat “cleaner” and cover up artist for as far back as the Oklahoma City bombing and maybe Waco and Ruby Ridge as well. Holder is a despicable excuse for a human being and that is why Obama appointed him.
We should have recognized this lowlife’s traits when he not only refused to prosecute “his people” the armed Black Panthers who intimidated Whites attempting to vote, but hounded and harassed any of his deputies who attempted to bring them to justice.
This criminal posing as our Attorney General and his equally anti American boss in the White House have succeeded in turning the purpose of the Department of Justice (DoJ) 180 degrees away from its original mission.
What has been lost in history and smothered by the Democrat controlled media is that when the Republican controlled Congress established the DoJ in 1871 its specific purpose, as outlined by Republican President U.S. Grant, was to fight the Democrats in the Ku Klux Klan who were intimidating and murdering the recently freed African American former slaves living in the Southern States.
At that time we saw Grant, a White Republican President, appoint Amos Akerman a White Attorney General, and instruct him to use the power of the federal government against the Democrat Party’s KKK to enforce the 15th Amendment which gave freed slaves the right to vote.
“…Barack Obama, a Black Democrat President, who has appointed Eric Holder, a Black Attorney General allowing and encouraging him to refuse to prosecute club wielding Black Panther thugs… intimidating White people attempting to vote….
(Excerpt) Read more at coachisright.com ...
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KUHNER: Will Obama steal the 2012 election?
By Jeffrey T. Kuhner
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The Washington Times
Friday, December 30, 2011
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. claims Jim Crow is returning. In a recent speech, Mr. Holder said that attempts by states to pass voter identification laws will disenfranchise minorities, rolling back the clock to the evil days of segregation. He said that a growing number of minorities fear that “the same disparities, divisions and problems” now afflict America as they did in 1965 prior to the Voting Rights Act. According to the Obama administration, our democracy is being threatened by racist Republicans. Hence, the Justice Department must prevent laws requiring a photo ID to vote from being enacted.
Mr. Holder argues that voter ID laws disproportionately discriminate against poor blacks and Hispanics - citizens who cannot afford to acquire a driver’s license, passport or other form of photo identification. The latest victim is South Carolina; its voter ID law has been blocked by the Justice Department. Liberal Democrats - taking their cue from the White House - are portraying the national movement for election reform as an authoritarian assault upon civil liberties. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has even petitioned the United Nations, asking it to declare states’ voter ID laws human rights abuses. For the radical left, America has become Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
This would be comical if the consequences were not so serious. South Carolina’s legislation provides for free ID cards to be given to anyone who needs it. Not one person - white, black or brown - is discriminated against or discouraged from casting a vote at the ballot box. Moreover, the Supreme Court already has ruled on the issue - upholding state voter ID laws. In the 2008 Crawford v. Marion County Election Board decision, the high court held that an Indiana law mandating photo identification at the voting booth was indeed constitutional. If it is good enough for the Supreme Court and the overwhelming majority of the states, then it should be for Mr. Holder as well.
It isn’t. And the reason is simple: The administration is trying to whip up minority frenzy, propagating the myth of widespread ballot suppression. The goal is to foster a sense of racial persecution of blacks, intending to maximize voter turnout in November. The results, however, will be to poison race relations further. Mr. Holder is cynically playing the race card in order to achieve President Obama’s overriding ambition: re-election.
Racism has nothing to do with states implementing voter ID laws. Rather, it is about protecting the integrity of our electoral system. Voter fraud is rampant; abuses regularly take place. In Chicago, local elections are often marred by ballot stuffing and multiple voting - including by false voters who use the names of deceased individuals. Indiana election officials have found that, during the 2008 Democratic primary, countless pro-Barack Obama and pro-Hillary Rodham Clinton signatures were falsified. In Minnesota, voter fraud enabled Democrat Al Franken to steal the election from incumbent Republican Sen. Norm Coleman. It is precisely to preserve the fundamental basis of our democracy - one person, one vote - that voter ID laws are necessary.
Mr. Holder evidently wants to scuttle ID laws because he knows which organization will be hurt most: ACORN. For years, community activist groups, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, have engaged in massive electoral fraud - registering illegal aliens, offering bribes to numerous politically disinterested people in the inner cities as inducements to vote and pushing underage and multiple voting. Election reform, therefore, is a stake aimed at the heart of Democratic corruption and ACORN’s power. Clean up the voter rolls and Mr. Obama’s re-election is in serious jeopardy.
It is perverse to have a society that requires a photo ID to go through airport security, drive a car, purchase expensive consumer goods using Mastercard or Visa (as happened to me recently when I bought a stack of DVDs and the cashier asked for my driver’s license to check against credit card theft) or get a simple library card, but not to cast a ballot - the most sacred act of citizenship in a deliberative democracy.
Mr. Holder is a shameless demagogue. He has become the Democratic Party’s new Al Sharpton: Everything is seen through the lens of race. He has refused to prosecute members of the New Black Panther Party, who in the 2008 election stood at a polling booth wielding clubs in a blatant attempt at voter intimidation. Career Justice Department lawyers admitted that Mr. Holder’s policy is not to go after black perpetrators whose victims are white. He insists that Republican criticism leveled at him over Operation Fast and Furious is because of his race - not the obvious fact that, under his watch, thousands of guns were illegally smuggled into Mexico, resulting in hundreds of deaths including a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
Mr. Holder says his department’s aim is to “expand the franchise.” This begs the question: Expand it for whom? Jim Crow is long dead; not one single eligible voter has been turned away because of an ID requirement. In other words, minorities are not being disenfranchised. What Mr. Holder really means is to expand the vote to groups that will help ensure a Democratic victory in 2012 - ACORN and its nefarious allies.
Stealing an election is not beyond this administration. After all, it’s the Chicago Way.
Jeffrey T. Kuhner is a columnist at The Washington Times and president of the Edmund Burke Institute.
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Holder's Race-Baiting is about Obama's Re-Election, Not Voting Rights
Townhall.com ^ | December 31, 2011 | Ken Blackwell
Posted on Saturday, December 31, 2011 8:35:43 AM by Kaslin
Editor's Note: This column was co-authored by Ken Klukowski
Eric Holder’s Department of Justice (DOJ) has launched an all-out war on voter-ID laws and other measures to safeguard to the electoral process. Although Holder’s actions are purportedly to prevent African-Americans from being disenfranchised, the reality is that they serve the crass political purpose of ensuring that Holder’s boss gets reelected next year.
In the past several years states have increasingly focused on measures to protect the vote. After years of the federal government loosening voting regulations, such as through the Motor Voter Act and HAVA (Help America Vote Act), the pendulum started swinging back at the state level.
The clearest example of this trend is through voter-ID laws. In 2008 the Supreme Court upheld Indiana’s landmark law requiring citizens to show that they are the person they claim to be by showing government-issued ID before casting a ballot. But to ensure that those without driver’s licenses or passports are not disenfranchised, Indiana provides free ID’s to everyone who applies for one. The Court upheld this law, with the primary opinion written by no one less than liberal lion Justice John Paul Stevens.
Such laws combat voter fraud that we see on Election Day, especially in certain parts of the nation. In Washington State, King County suddenly “discovered” enough previously “unnoticed” votes for Democrat Christine Gregoire to edge out Republican Dino Rossi for Washington’s governorship in 2004. There are also examples from Wisconsin, Missouri, and other states.
Yet Holder has blocked South Carolina’s voter-ID law. DOJ argues that this law is different from Indiana’s because South Carolina is subject to additional federal oversight under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. (This is especially important because there are several federal cases challenging the constitutionality of Section 5.)
But the reality is that DOJ’s actions are not focused on protecting voting rights. They are instead intended to make sure that Barack Obama wins reelection.
It’s not cynical to say this. The twelve or so battleground states that will decide the 2012 presidential election suggest Obama’s reelection strategy. These states include Virginia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Missouri. All these states have large African-American populations.
The African-American community has a staggeringly-high unemployment rate under President Obama. So Black Americans will not vote for this president because of any prosperity he’s brought to that community. Instead, he has to gin up their votes by painting a picture of racial conflict in which he—and the governmental agency dealsing with such things, DOJ—is their champion.
This is also seen in Holder’s incessant playing of the race card. First he says we’re a nation of cowards about race. Now that he’s on the ropes for DOJ’s scandalous Operation Fast and Furious gun-running scandal into Mexico, he has the audacity to say that he and President Obama are being attacked in part because they’re both African-Americans.
Voting is a fundamental right. It is the means by which “We the People” consent to be governed for a fixed period of time by certain individuals, by electing them as stewards of governmental power. They wield this power to secure our rights as set forth in the U.S. Constitution and (for state officials) the constitutions of the fifty states.
But there is another voting right. It is the right not to have your legal vote diluted by fraudulent votes. As we explain in our Yale Law & Policy Review article “The Other Voting Right,” every invalid vote cancels out one valid vote. Each such cancellation undermines our democratic republic and reduces the legitimacy of election results.
Voting is also unique in that it might be the only right that is also a duty. It’s not too much to ask for citizens to exert a minimal amount of effort to fulfill reasonable regulations to protect the integrity of the electoral process.
Every eligible citizen has a duty to vote. But as we explain in our book Resurgent: How Constitutional Conservatism Can Save America, it is a duty to cast an informed vote. Although there are only so many hours in the day, we each need to make an effort to gather enough information to understand the major issues facing our nation, state, and community, and to carefully vote for candidates who offer the best solutions for our long-term safety and prosperity.
Because voting is a duty, and also because every voter has the right to ensure their valid vote is not diluted by fraudulent votes, citizens can be expected to fulfill certain requirements that would not be justified when exercising other rights, such as free speech or the free exercise of religion. Measures such as showing up at the correct place on the correct day to cast a ballot under the watchful eyes of trained precinct personnel are examples of fulfilling our duty, as is showing valid ID to prove that you are the person listed on that precinct’s voter rolls.
These measures are essential to our self-governing republic. As examples the world over show, losing the integrity of the electoral process is a mistake a free people often get to make only once.
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DOJ Steers Countrywide Settlement Cash to Leftist Groups With Dem Ties
by Tom Fitton
http://biggovernment.com/tfitton/2012/01/06/doj-steers-countrywide-settlement-cash-to-leftist-groups-with-dem-ties
The untold story of the Obama Administration’s widely reported, $335 million discrimination settlement with Countrywide Financial Corporation is that, under a secret Justice Department program, a chunk of the money won’t go to the “victims” but rather leftist groups not connected to the lawsuit.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) will determine which “qualified organizations” get leftover settlement cash and Democrat-tied groups like the scandal-plagued Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and the open-borders National Council of La Raza (NCLR) stand to get large sums based on the hastily arranged deal which got court approval in just a few days.
Judicial Watch has investigated this controversial arrangement and in 2010 sued the DOJ to obtain information about the policy directing big portions of cash settlements from its civil rights lawsuits to organizations not officially connected to the cases. In response to JW’s lawsuit, the DOJ was forced to acknowledge that it has no official guidelines regarding “qualified organizations” that get leftover settlement funds and that it doesn’t monitor how the money is used.
In the Countrywide case, details of the unscrupulous arrangement are buried deep (page 10 of the 17-page settlement) in the court document where Bank of America’s Countrywide Financial Corporation agrees to pay to resolve allegations that it discriminated against qualified black and Hispanic borrowers. The lender denies all of the charges, but wanted to end the case and caved into the government’s terms.
Here’s a synopsis straight out of the court settlement; all money not distributed to allegedly aggrieved persons within 24 months shall be distributed to qualified organizations that provide services including credit and housing counseling, financial literacy and other related programs targeted at African-Americans and Hispanics. Recipients may include “non-profit community organizations that provide education, counseling and other assistance to low-income and minority borrowers…”
This language essentially comes from ACORN’s mission statement. The famously corrupt group has raked in tens of millions of taxpayer dollars over the years but a series of scandals involving misuse of public funds, embezzlement, intimidation tactics, employee abuse, questionable hiring tactics and fraudulent voter registrations led Congress to pass legislation prohibiting the federal government from funding ACORN. The group simply transformed into various “spinoffs” and affiliated organizations and continues to get public money. Read all about it in a special JW investigative report, “The Rebranding of ACORN.”
The NCLR also stands to get money under the Countrywide settlement because the influential Mexican La Raza group is tight with the president and offers Latinos “housing counseling” that’s previously been funded by Uncle Sam. A JW probe uncovered documents in June that reveal federal funding for the group has skyrocketed since one of its top officials— Cecilia Muñoz—got a job in the Obama White House. Keeping with the mutual praise, the NCLR quickly issued a press release commending the administration for holding Countrywide “accountable for targeting communities of color.”
The landmark deal is the largest residential fair-lending settlement in history and has been widely celebrated by liberal groups as well as various media outlets, some of which believe the punishment wasn’t harsh enough. One newspaper editorial called it a “pittance compared to the grievous harm the lender brought to families across the nation.”
The money is supposed to be distributed to more than 200,000 minority victims—nearly one-third of them in California—who took out home loans between 2004 and 2008. According to the DOJ they were charged higher interest rates and fees than white borrowers based on their race not their credit. Thomas Perez, head of the DOJ’s bloated civil rights division, called it “discrimination with a smile” because victims had no idea they were being victimized and instead were thrilled just to get a home loan and realize the American dream.
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Holder, Breuer connected to players in foreclosure fraud? (Did DOJ heads represent fraudsters?)
Hot Air ^ | JANUARY 20, 2012 | ED MORRISSEY
Posted on Friday, January 20, 2012 3:48:14 PM by Qbert
For years, the Left has asked why the Obama administration hasn’t pursued prosecutions against lenders who arguably engaged in fraud when foreclosing on mortgages in the wake of the housing-bubble collapse. It turns out that these lenders had friends in high places in the Department of Justice. Reuters reports that both Attorney General Eric Holder and his lieutenant Lanny Breuer, who ran the DoJ’s criminal division, were partners in a law firm that worked on behalf of those very same firms (via JWF’s Just A Grunt):
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer, head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, were partners for years at a Washington law firm that represented a Who’s Who of big banks and other companies at the center of alleged foreclosure fraud, a Reuters inquiry shows.
The firm, Covington & Burling, is one of Washington’s biggest white shoe law firms. Law professors and other federal ethics experts said that federal conflict of interest rules required Holder and Breuer to recuse themselves from any Justice Department decisions relating to law firm clients they personally had done work for.
Both the Justice Department and Covington declined to say if either official had personally worked on matters for the big mortgage industry clients. Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler said Holder and Breuer had complied fully with conflict of interest regulations, but she declined to say if they had recused themselves from any matters related to the former clients.
Holder and Breuer aren’t alone. Reuters lists a couple more former Covingtom & Burling associates at the DoJ that have since returned to their law practice, including Holder’s deputy chief of staff John Garland and Breuer’s deputy chief of staff Steven Fagell. The law firm itself lists almost two dozen former attorneys now working in the DoJ and another dozen in US Attorney offices around the country. That’s quite an impressive footprint of influence for Covington & Burling, and a valuable one for its clientele.
It’s not as if the fraud was particularly esoteric, either. Reuters began its own reporting on massive numbers of forged endorsements, part of the robo-signing scandal that halted foreclosure processing for more than a year. Those forgeries got submitted to courts on many occasions as part of the foreclosure process. Despite this, Holder has done nothing — at least publicly — to press an investigation into these forgeries, and as Reuters reports today, more are on their way:
Recent calls for a wide-ranging criminal investigation of the mortgage servicing industry have come from members of Congress, including Senator Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., state officials, and county clerks. In recent months clerks from around the country have examined mortgage and foreclosure records filed with them and reported finding high percentages of apparently fraudulent documents.
On Wednesday, John O’Brien Jr., register of deeds in Salem, Mass., announced that he had sent 31,897 allegedly fraudulent foreclosure-related documents to Holder. O’Brien said he asked for a criminal investigation of servicers and their law firms that had filed the documents because they “show a pattern of fraud,” forgery and false notarizations.
I suspect this information will animate the Left against Holder much more than Operation Fast & Furious, but both need extensive investigation. Perhaps this will be the straw that broke the camel’s back and convinces Barack Obama to get a new Attorney General. If not, Republicans and Democrats alike will have plenty of opportunity to ask Obama why his Department of Justice seems more interested in cover-ups and political machinations than in law enforcement.
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KUHNER: Will Obama steal the 2012 election?
By Jeffrey T. Kuhner
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The Washington Times
Friday, December 30, 2011
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. claims Jim Crow is returning. In a recent speech, Mr. Holder said that attempts by states to pass voter identification laws will disenfranchise minorities, rolling back the clock to the evil days of segregation. He said that a growing number of minorities fear that “the same disparities, divisions and problems” now afflict America as they did in 1965 prior to the Voting Rights Act. According to the Obama administration, our democracy is being threatened by racist Republicans. Hence, the Justice Department must prevent laws requiring a photo ID to vote from being enacted.
Mr. Holder argues that voter ID laws disproportionately discriminate against poor blacks and Hispanics - citizens who cannot afford to acquire a driver’s license, passport or other form of photo identification. The latest victim is South Carolina; its voter ID law has been blocked by the Justice Department. Liberal Democrats - taking their cue from the White House - are portraying the national movement for election reform as an authoritarian assault upon civil liberties. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has even petitioned the United Nations, asking it to declare states’ voter ID laws human rights abuses. For the radical left, America has become Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
This would be comical if the consequences were not so serious. South Carolina’s legislation provides for free ID cards to be given to anyone who needs it. Not one person - white, black or brown - is discriminated against or discouraged from casting a vote at the ballot box. Moreover, the Supreme Court already has ruled on the issue - upholding state voter ID laws. In the 2008 Crawford v. Marion County Election Board decision, the high court held that an Indiana law mandating photo identification at the voting booth was indeed constitutional. If it is good enough for the Supreme Court and the overwhelming majority of the states, then it should be for Mr. Holder as well.
It isn’t. And the reason is simple: The administration is trying to whip up minority frenzy, propagating the myth of widespread ballot suppression. The goal is to foster a sense of racial persecution of blacks, intending to maximize voter turnout in November. The results, however, will be to poison race relations further. Mr. Holder is cynically playing the race card in order to achieve President Obama’s overriding ambition: re-election.
Racism has nothing to do with states implementing voter ID laws. Rather, it is about protecting the integrity of our electoral system. Voter fraud is rampant; abuses regularly take place. In Chicago, local elections are often marred by ballot stuffing and multiple voting - including by false voters who use the names of deceased individuals. Indiana election officials have found that, during the 2008 Democratic primary, countless pro-Barack Obama and pro-Hillary Rodham Clinton signatures were falsified. In Minnesota, voter fraud enabled Democrat Al Franken to steal the election from incumbent Republican Sen. Norm Coleman. It is precisely to preserve the fundamental basis of our democracy - one person, one vote - that voter ID laws are necessary.
Mr. Holder evidently wants to scuttle ID laws because he knows which organization will be hurt most: ACORN. For years, community activist groups, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, have engaged in massive electoral fraud - registering illegal aliens, offering bribes to numerous politically disinterested people in the inner cities as inducements to vote and pushing underage and multiple voting. Election reform, therefore, is a stake aimed at the heart of Democratic corruption and ACORN’s power. Clean up the voter rolls and Mr. Obama’s re-election is in serious jeopardy.
It is perverse to have a society that requires a photo ID to go through airport security, drive a car, purchase expensive consumer goods using Mastercard or Visa (as happened to me recently when I bought a stack of DVDs and the cashier asked for my driver’s license to check against credit card theft) or get a simple library card, but not to cast a ballot - the most sacred act of citizenship in a deliberative democracy.
Mr. Holder is a shameless demagogue. He has become the Democratic Party’s new Al Sharpton: Everything is seen through the lens of race. He has refused to prosecute members of the New Black Panther Party, who in the 2008 election stood at a polling booth wielding clubs in a blatant attempt at voter intimidation. Career Justice Department lawyers admitted that Mr. Holder’s policy is not to go after black perpetrators whose victims are white. He insists that Republican criticism leveled at him over Operation Fast and Furious is because of his race - not the obvious fact that, under his watch, thousands of guns were illegally smuggled into Mexico, resulting in hundreds of deaths including a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
Mr. Holder says his department’s aim is to “expand the franchise.” This begs the question: Expand it for whom? Jim Crow is long dead; not one single eligible voter has been turned away because of an ID requirement. In other words, minorities are not being disenfranchised. What Mr. Holder really means is to expand the vote to groups that will help ensure a Democratic victory in 2012 - ACORN and its nefarious allies.
Stealing an election is not beyond this administration. After all, it’s the Chicago Way.
Jeffrey T. Kuhner is a columnist at The Washington Times and president of the Edmund Burke Institute.
Best article of the bunch.
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Holder’s Law Firm Has Questionable Ties to Mortgage Banks, D.C. Government and Obama Administration
Big Government ^ | 1/22/12 | Jeffrey Scott Shapiro
Posted on January 22, 2012 2:48:54 PM EST by Nachum
Nevadans are probably wondering why their own Attorney General, Catherine Cortez Masto is prosecuting corrupt lenders for the fraudulent act of robo-signing, but U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is not.
In fact, millions of Americans, particularly those who are being foreclosed upon are probably wondering the same thing since the Obama administration decided in October to forego criminal charges against Bank of America, JPMorgan, Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Ally Financial in exchange for a $25 billion civil settlement.
But new information reported by Reuters today implies that Holder and other top Justice Department officials may be restraining themselves because their former Washington, D.C. white-shoe employer, Covington & Burling, which represented many of the big banks getting a break.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer, head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, were partners for years at a Washington law firm that represented a Who’s Who of big banks and other companies at the center of alleged foreclosure fraud, a Reuters inquiry shows.
The firm, Covington & Burling, is one of Washington’s biggest white shoe law firms. Law professors and other federal ethics experts said that federal conflict of interest rules required Holder and Breuer to recuse themselves from any Justice Department decisions relating to law firm clients they personally had done work for.
Holder has resisted calls for a criminal investigation since October 2010, when evidence of widespread “robo-signing” first surfaced. That involved mortgage servicer employees falsely signing and swearing to massive numbers of affidavits and other foreclosure documents that they had never read or checked for accuracy.
(Excerpt) Read more at biggovernment.com ...
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House Judiciary letter warns Holder not to redistribute $335M Countrywide settlement to ACORN
The Daily Caller ^ | 1/26/12 | Matthew Boyle
In a letter obtained by The Daily Caller, House Judiciary Committee chairman Rep. Lamar Smith warned Attorney General Eric Holder not to permit the transfer of funds from a recent $335 million Department of Justice settlement to organizations associated with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, more commonly known as ACORN, or other advocacy groups allied with President Obama.
Smith is concerned that flimsy language in the settlement agreement with Countrywide Financial — the mortgage arm of Bank of America — could be politically motivated.
“I am concerned that the terms of the Justice Department’s recent settlement with Countrywide Financial Corporation and certain affiliates (collectively, ‘Countrywide’) will allow the Department to give large sums of money to individuals and organizations with questionable backgrounds or close political ties to the White House without any guidelines or oversight,” Smith wrote.
“If that is to be the case, this sort of backdoor funding of the president’s political allies would be an abuse of the Department’s law enforcement authority.”
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/01/26/house-judiciary-letter-warns-holder-not-to-redistribute-335m-countrywide-settlement-to-acorn-affiliates/#ixzz1kapBfNhT
(Excerpt) Read more at dailycaller.com ...
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Eric Holder's False Testimony Warrants Impeachment
IBD Editorials ^ | January 30, 2012
Posted on January 30, 2012 8:20:16 PM EST by Kaslin
Scandal: For incompetence alone, Attorney General Eric Holder should resign in the wake of the illegal "Fast and Furious" gunrunning scandal. But fresh news that he knew of it and is covering it up warrants impeachment.
In the latest Friday night document dump — news released as to minimize its scandalous impact on the White House — congressional investigators learned that Attorney General Holder knew all along that a gun his Justice Department intentionally let fall into the hands of Mexico's cartels was used to murder U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry on Dec. 15, 2010.
Holder must have known right away because his Deputy Chief of Staff Monty Wilkinson received an email from then-Arizona U.S. Attorney General Dennis Burke telling him just that: "The guns found in the desert near the murder(ed) BP officer connect back to the investigation we were going to talk about — they were AK-47s purchased at a Phoenix gun store."
According to the Daily Caller, the emails also showed that Wilkinson then "alerted" Holder about the killing of the U.S. agent.
Since then, Wilkinson has taken the Fifth in congressional testimony and told investigators, "I don't recall," while the Justice Department on Monday declined to give any answer to the press about what Holder knew and when he knew it.
This is classic coverup behavior — late-night document dumps, officials taking the Fifth, "I don't recall" excuses — the likes of which we haven't seen since the Nixon and Clinton years.
Along with the false testimony that Holder gave last year to congressional investigators including Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, this never-ending case can only get worse as the damning evidence piles up.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...
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Fast and Furious: Holder’s Perjury Defense Gets Shaky
humanevents.com ^ | 30 January, 2012 | John Hayward
To the great annoyance of congressional investigators, Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department has been dragging its feet turning over subpoenaed documents relating to several inquiries – most infamously the “Fast and Furious” gun walking operation, in which American guns were deliberately allowed to fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartel killers.
DOJ has a habit of releasing these subpoenaed documents in massive “dumps” on Friday night, to guarantee minimal media coverage. Last Friday’s dump weighed in at 500 pages, and turned out to contain some very interesting emails sent in the wake of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s murder. Among the first media outlets to dig out these messages was… National Public Radio:
The email messages show the former top federal prosecutor in Arizona, Dennis Burke, notifying an aide to Holder via email on Dec. 15, 2010 that agent Brian Terry had been wounded and died. "Tragic," responds the aide, Monty Wilkinson. "I've alerted the AG, the acting Deputy Attorney General..."
Only a few minutes later, Wilkinson emailed again, saying, "Please provide any additional details as they become available to you."
Burke then delivered another piece of bad news: "The guns found in the desert near the murder [sic] ... officer connect back to the investigation we were going to talk about — they were AK-47s purchased at a Phoenix gun store."
Uh-oh. This is very bad news for Attorney General Eric Holder’s perjury defense - which rests on the assertion that he has no idea what’s actually going on at the Justice Department, doesn’t read his email, and was totally out of the loop on Operation Fast and Furious until it became a media sensation. Specifically, Holder told Congress in May 2011 that he “probably heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the last few weeks.” Later, he changed his mind and said it was more like “a couple of months.”
But here we have emails clearly demonstrating that Holder’s aide, Monty Wilkinson, was fully aware of the Fast and Furious connection to Agent Terry’s murder on December 14, 2010 almost immediately. NPR’s summary of the incriminating emails leaves out some very important details, which the Washington Times provides:
The released emails show a conversation between one official, whose name was redacted, and now-former Arizona U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke.
“On December 14, 2010, a BORTAC agent working in the Nogales, AZ AOR was shot. The agent was conducting Border Patrol operations 18 miles north of the international boundary when he encountered [redacted word] unidentified subjects. Shots were exchanged resulting in the agent being shot. At this time, the agent is being transported to an area where he can be air lifted to an emergency medical center,” the email read.
Another email sent an hour later, read: “Our agent has passed away.”
Burke then forwarded those two email to Eric Holder’s then-deputy chief of staff, Monty Wilkinson, adding that the shooting was “not good,” due to the fact that it had happened “18 miles w/in” the United States border.
Wilkinson responded with, “I’ve alerted the AG [Holder], the Acting DAG, Lisa, etc.”
Later that day, Burke sent an email to Wilkinson alerting him that the guns used to kill Brian Terry were weapons from the gunrunning operation, Fast and Furious.
“The guns found in the desert near the murdered BP officer connect back to the investigation we were going to talk about – they were AK-47s purchased at a Phoenix gun store,” Burke wrote to Wilkinson in an email.
(Emphases mine.) Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) of the Senate Judiciary Committee, one of the leading investigators of the Fast and Furious scandal, said via Twitter that these documents “clearly show Holder’s people knew about gun running days before I opened my investigation, yet they lied.” (Note: I have taken the liberty of transcribing Grassley’s comment from highly compressed Twitter-speak.)
Now, in order to maintain his “Sergeant Schultz” defense against perjury, Holder would have to claim that his aide, Wilkinson, never actually briefed him after claiming to have done so, and never passed along any of the Fast and Furious-related details of Terry’s murder.
If Wilkinson is willing to go under the bus for his boss, he might try claiming he was somehow distracted from researching this immensely significant story, after plainly stating he would look into it, and keep Holder up to speed. Keep in mind that the emails make it absolutely and unambiguously clear that Wilkinson knew weapons found at the scene of Terry’s murder were connected to an investigation he and Burke “were going to talk about.” It strains credulity that Wilkinson simply lost interest in the Terry murder, which generated a huge amount of DOJ message traffic, and near-panic among the ATF brass running Operation Fast and Furious.
Or, alternatively, Holder would have to claim that Wilkinson dutifully prepared a detailed briefing within a day or two of Terry’s murder, but Holder never bothered to read it.
Burke, by the way, is a key Fast and Furious player who admitted, after resigning, that he leaked a Justice Department memo to the press, in an attempt to discredit whistle-blowing ATF agent John Dodson. To date, he’s pretty much the only person to lose his job because of the Obama Administration’s deadly gun-walking scandal. He just happens to have been the subject of a critical profile in the Arizona Republic this weekend, which pointed out that many observers think he was thrown under the bus to protect his superiors, perhaps including AG Holder:
Curiously, the supporters and detractors agree on one point: They say Burke became a scapegoat to protect higher officials in the Justice Department or White House. Dave Workman, a gun-rights blogger, described Burke as "the chief sacrificial lamb."
Sen. Grassley, in an October statement, said: "Mr. Burke is to be commended, to some extent, for being the only person to resign and take responsibility for the failed operation. Of course, I do not believe he should feel obligated to be the only fall guy."
Phoenix attorney Andy Gordon, a close friend for nearly two decades, said Burke may be loyal to a fault, protecting higher-ups in the Justice Department. "DOJ threw him under the bus. That's my view," Gordon said.
Another friend, attorney Tim Nelson, said: "I don't know the workings of the Obama administration, whether they were looking for a fall guy or what. But it certainly looks that way."
It is difficult to see how Holder could remain in office after making these claims – the man would clearly be a dangerous incompetent whose continued presence posed a clear and present danger to the Justice Department’s operations and accountability. However, if he doesn’t continue his cluelessness defense, he’ll be facing perjury charges. All of this is sure to come up when Holder makes his next appearance before the House Oversight committee tomorrow. If former U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke really wants to clear his name, this would be a good time to come forward, and tell Congress exactly what he discussed with Holder’s aide, in the hours after Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s murder.
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Holder's fantastical claim about 'Fast and Furious'
washingtonexaminer.com ^ | 30 January, 2012 | Examiner Editorial
Philosophers and poets have argued for at least three millennia about who is more valuable. Poets claim they tell tales that inspire men to do things they would otherwise never accomplish. But philosophers argue that this requires the acceptance of obvious fantasies, thus leading men away from the truth. Judging by what Attorney General Eric Holder has been asking Congress and the American people to believe regarding what and when he knew about Operation Fast and Furious, we think he is telling tales that lead away from the truth.
Fast and Furious is the Justice Department program that allowed thousands of weapons to be sold in 2009 to known buyers for Mexican drug cartels in the hope that the tainted guns would show up at future crime scenes. The department's cockeyed theory was that the "walked" weapons would enable authorities to tie the drug bosses to specific crimes in the United States and Mexico. Unfortunately, the bureaucrats lost track of the weapons until it was too late.
Now Holder wants Americans to believe an obvious fantasy, namely that he didn't know about Fast and Furious until witch-hunting House Republicans made it a highly charged partisan issue a few months ago. But after reviewing new emails made public by the Justice Department last Friday, it seems clear that accepting Holder's claim at face value would be credulous in the extreme.
He is scheduled to appear Thursday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The first question for Holder will concern a series of emails sent in the immediate aftermath of the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry on Dec. 15, 2010. The emails make clear that Monty Wilkinson, then Holder's deputy chief of staff, was informed by U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke of Terry's death, and that weapons found on the scene were bought in Phoenix and were among those in "the investigation we were going to talk about."
Other documents obtained by the committee make clear that the investigation in question was Fast and Furious. The emails also establish that Wilkinson and other senior Justice Department officials in Washington were briefed on the program shortly after Terry's murder. In other words, within days, if not hours, of Terry's death, it was known at the highest levels of the Justice Department that he was killed by guns sold with the full knowledge of federal officials who then lost track of them.
It is simply inconceivable that Wilkinson did not inform others in the Justice Department, including Holder, about these facts. Regardless of the political damage that such a scandal would cause, Wilkinson should have made informing Holder a top priority. Doing anything less was at the least gross negligence. This is even more the point with Holder: Either he actually knew about Fast and Furious months before he told Congress he did, or he didn't know when he should have. No wonder nearly 100 House members have signed a resolution of no confidence in Holder.
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Eric Holder's False Testimony Warrants Impeachment
IBD Editorials ^ | January 30, 2012
Scandal: For incompetence alone, Attorney General Eric Holder should resign in the wake of the illegal "Fast and Furious" gunrunning scandal. But fresh news that he knew of it and is covering it up warrants impeachment.
In the latest Friday night document dump — news released as to minimize its scandalous impact on the White House — congressional investigators learned that Attorney General Holder knew all along that a gun his Justice Department intentionally let fall into the hands of Mexico's cartels was used to murder U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry on Dec. 15, 2010.
Holder must have known right away because his Deputy Chief of Staff Monty Wilkinson received an email from then-Arizona U.S. Attorney General Dennis Burke telling him just that: "The guns found in the desert near the murder(ed) BP officer connect back to the investigation we were going to talk about — they were AK-47s purchased at a Phoenix gun store."
According to the Daily Caller, the emails also showed that Wilkinson then "alerted" Holder about the killing of the U.S. agent.
Since then, Wilkinson has taken the Fifth in congressional testimony and told investigators, "I don't recall," while the Justice Department on Monday declined to give any answer to the press about what Holder knew and when he knew it.
This is classic coverup behavior — late-night document dumps, officials taking the Fifth, "I don't recall" excuses — the likes of which we haven't seen since the Nixon and Clinton years.
Along with the false testimony that Holder gave last year to congressional investigators including Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, this never-ending case can only get worse as the damning evidence piles up.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...
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Eric Holder's False Testimony Warrants Impeachment
IBD Editorials ^ | January 30, 2012
Scandal: For incompetence alone, Attorney General Eric Holder should resign in the wake of the illegal "Fast and Furious" gunrunning scandal. But fresh news that he knew of it and is covering it up warrants impeachment.
In the latest Friday night document dump — news released as to minimize its scandalous impact on the White House — congressional investigators learned that Attorney General Holder knew all along that a gun his Justice Department intentionally let fall into the hands of Mexico's cartels was used to murder U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry on Dec. 15, 2010.
Holder must have known right away because his Deputy Chief of Staff Monty Wilkinson received an email from then-Arizona U.S. Attorney General Dennis Burke telling him just that: "The guns found in the desert near the murder(ed) BP officer connect back to the investigation we were going to talk about — they were AK-47s purchased at a Phoenix gun store."
According to the Daily Caller, the emails also showed that Wilkinson then "alerted" Holder about the killing of the U.S. agent.
Since then, Wilkinson has taken the Fifth in congressional testimony and told investigators, "I don't recall," while the Justice Department on Monday declined to give any answer to the press about what Holder knew and when he knew it.
This is classic coverup behavior — late-night document dumps, officials taking the Fifth, "I don't recall" excuses — the likes of which we haven't seen since the Nixon and Clinton years.
Along with the false testimony that Holder gave last year to congressional investigators including Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, this never-ending case can only get worse as the damning evidence piles up.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...
I can't believe your copy and pasting hasn't changed the world yet.
PS Get a job.
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Issa threatens contempt charge against Holder if Justice.....( Fast and Furious subpoenas)
FOX ^ | 01/31/12 | William Lajeunesse
Posted on Tuesday, January 31, 2012 5:07:52 PM by Doogle
The head of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is threatening to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress if he fails to comply with congressional subpoenas for documents.
Holder has until Feb. 9 to comply.
In a four-page letter to Holder, Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., claims the Department of Justice has "misrepresented facts and misled Congress," which began its investigation of Operation Fast and Furious one year ago.
Issa claims Holder's "actions lead us to conclude that the department is actively engaged in a cover-up" because it refuses to comply with previous subpoenas.
"If the department continues to obstruct the congressional inquiry by not providing documents and information, this committee will have no alternative but to move forward with proceedings to hold you in contempt of Congress," Issa warned in the letter.
Issa claims the the Justice Department has stonewalled the congressional investigation of the gun-running scandal that sent some 2,000 weapons to the Mexican cartels with the assistance of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
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Have you even LOOKED for a job in the last five years?
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Bribery, compromised officials leave indicted financial-crime suspects free from prosecution
The Daily Caller ^ | 2/1/12 | Matthew Boyle
Posted on February 1, 2012 10:49:20 PM EST by Nachum
Attorney General Eric Holder pauses during a news conference at the Justice Department in Washington, Friday, Jan. 27, 2012. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)
A U.S. Justice Department source has told The Daily Caller that at least two DOJ prosecutors accepted cash bribes from allegedly corrupt finance executives who were indicted under court seal within the past 13 months, but never arrested or prosecuted.
The sitting governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands, his attorney general and an unspecified number of Virgin Islands legislators also accepted bribes, the source said, adding that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is aware prosecutors and elected officials were bribed and otherwise compromised, but has not held anyone accountable.
The bribed officials, an attorney with knowledge of the investigation told TheDC, remain on the taxpayers’ payroll at the Justice Department without any accountability. The DOJ source said Holder does not want to admit public officials accepted bribes while under his leadership.
That source said that until the summer of 2011, the two compromised prosecutors were part of a team of more than 25 federal prosecutors pursuing a financial crime ring, and at least five other prosecutors tasked to the case were also compromised by the criminal suspects they were investigating, without being bribed.
TheDC is withholding the name of the source, a knowledgeable government official who served on the Justice Department’s arrest team and was involved in the investigation, in order to prevent career retaliation from political figures in the Obama administration.
A former high-level elected official vouches for the government source’s veracity. “[The source] was trustworthy … and you could tell [the source] information or [the source] could hear information and [the source] would keep things close to [the source’s] chest,” that former official told TheDC. “You could trust [the source] with your life.”
The identities
(Excerpt) Read more at dailycaller.com ...
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Holder Wants Race Preferences and Benefits . . . Forever
PJ Media ^ | March 2, 2012 | J. Christian Adams
Posted on March 3, 2012 2:06:33 PM EST by jazusamo
Eric Holder has gone all-in supporting race-based hiring preferences and race-based benefits. Given that the majority of Americans despise this rot, surely the presidential candidates will pounce.
In a little noticed interview at the “World Leaders Forum,” Holder makes statements that should be the subject of a direct mail piece in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Virginia:
Holder expressed support for affirmative action, saying that he “can’t actually imagine a time in which the need for more diversity would ever cease.”
“Affirmative action has been an issue since segregation practices,” Holder said. “The question is not when does it end, but when does it begin. … When do people of color truly get the benefits to which they are entitled?”
Let me repeat: When do people of color truly get the benefits to which they are entitled? Again, the benefits to which they are entitled.
Ponder a moment the layers of rubbish in this philosophy.
Some are surprised by Holder’s brazenness. I am not. As I like to say, I wrote a bestseller about Holder’s racialist DOJ. Nothing surprises me anymore. The only surprise is the dumbfounded, stuck, GOP response — which would be none.
If the GOP nominee does not make this a presidential campaign issue because he is afraid to talk about such unpleasantries, then shame on him. In tough economic times, the last thing middle America wants to hear is the attorney general grousing about people of color getting benefits because of their color.
The Obama administration obviously exercises no restraint on racial issues, or perhaps has the courage of their convictions. What price is paid for this racial radicalism? None.
Instead, we have a whole assortment of Republicans, inside the government (oh and I could name so many names), afraid to pound Obama for this. Let’s hope they come out of their shells and fight.
Obama has paid no price for this rotted, unfair, and un-American employment philosophy, and continued GOP silence will preserve this peace.
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Obama Foreclosure Scandal
A Whig Manifesto ^ | March 4, 2012 | Chuck Morse
Posted on March 4, 2012 7:05:25 PM EST by Chuckmorse
Why has it taken the Obama Administration over three years to address the foreclosure scandal and have they actually addressed it? The scandal, which has been referred to in some quarters as “Foreclosure-gate” involves mortgage companies using a phony practice called “robo-signing” in order to fraudulently foreclose on homeowners. The company behind most of these robo-signings is Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, known as MERS. This national company has served as a clearinghouse and as a rapid computer generated paperwork processor for the big banks and secondary mortgage investors seeking to process and re-process mortgages.
MERS tracks an average of 65 million mortgages by computer and processes mortgage transactions without human intervention. The MERS process is presently being challenged in court in several states and jurisdictions.
MERS worked closely with Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the other big national mortgage lenders in the years leading up to the mortgage meltdown and the Trillian dollar TARP bailout. MERS had aided in the process of bundling, credit default swaps, and derivative leveraging by making the process seamless and efficient.
Before becoming Attorney General, Eric Holder worked as a partner in the white show law firm Covington & Burling which represented MERS. In 2006, while Holder was a partner, Covington and Burling defended MERS in a growing number of lawsuits brought by local municipalities and title providers which claimed that MERS was bypassing conventional methods of processing mortgages. It should be noted that as Attorney General, Eric Holder has failed to investigate these practices by MERS, Fannie and Freddie, and by the banks who received TARP funds. There have been no investigations, indictments, or significant changes in the status quo regarding these banking practices since Holder and Obama have been in office. Indeed, billions in TARP funds continue to flow to Fannie and Freddie.
Once the robo-signing scandal came to light, after a 60 Minutes expose in October, 2010, Holder, under political pressure, assigned several investigators, like himself former employees of Covington and Burling, to the case. Holder also directed the FBI to partner with the Mortgage Banking Association, MBA, which represents the banks implicated in this practice, as part of their investigation. Working together, Holder’s FBI and the MBA, developed a definition of mortgage fraud which exempts the big banks. Thus the banks will not be investigated under the protective wing of the Obama Administration. Instead, the FBI will go after small-time operators and mortgage holders.
Meanwhile, the foreclosure settlement is so confusing and vague that it is unlikely any relief will be received by those who were defrauded by the robo-signatures any time soon. In fact, it is being projected that the practical effect of the settlement will be that banks will increase the number of foreclosures with the assurance that they will be protected by the immunity clause in the agreement. Another byproduct of the settlement has been that housing courts around the country have become choked with backlog of cases. All the while, Obama is trotting out the agreement as a cornerstone of his justification for re-election.
The failure of the Obama Administration Attorney General Holder to investigate the mortgage scandal should be the focus of a congressional investigation. Such an investigation might open the whole can or worms around the TARP bailout of Fannie, Freddie and the big banks and the Obama Administration’s tepid actions toward banking reform and investigation of fraud.
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Attorney questions promotion of terrorist defender to head of Gitmo policy at Justice
FoxNews ^
Posted on March 4, 2012 5:50:56 PM EST by nuconvert
A former Justice Department attorney who blew the whistle on his department's policies is now questioning the promotion of a former defense attorney for an American terrorist to the No. 3 spot at the Justice Department -- specifically charged with crafting U.S. policy on Guantanamo detainees.
J. Christian Adams, once an elections lawyer who accused the Justice Department of racial bias in its decision to not prosecute a voter intimidation case involving the New Black Panther Party, said Tony West's promotion from assistant attorney general for the Civil Division to acting associate attorney general is one more step toward letting radicals run the Justice Department
"The most dangerous thing is that West is overseeing Gitmo policy. It's not that he's just some guy at the Justice Department licking envelopes," Adams told Fox News on Sunday.
Judicial Watch, a government watchdog group, noted that in Holder's announcement of West's promotion, he "conveniently omitted" West's role as the defense attorney for convicted Al Qaeda terrorist John Walker Lindh, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence after being captured in Afghanistan in 2001 while fighting with the Taliban.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
4 more years!!!!!!
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AG Holder 'Sorry' and 'Angry' About 'Gun Violence' Killing Law Enforcement Officers
CNS NEWS ^ | 3/6/12 | Susan Jones
(CNSNews.com) - Attorney General Eric Holder on Thursday expressed sorrow and anger at the escalating number of law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty, including at least 71 killed by "gun violence."
"We can, and we must, do even more" to protect law enforcers," Holder told the spring meeting of the National Association of Attorneys General in Washington.
"Just as I promised last year, protecting the safety of our law enforcement officers has been, and will continue to be, a key area of focus for the Justice Department," Holder said.
Holder noted that 177 law enforcement officers were killed in the line of duty last year, a 16 percent increase from 2010. "And 71 of these officers were killed by gun violence," he said.
"I am sorry – and, quite frankly, I am angry – to report that, since the beginning of 2012, we have mourned the loss of an additional 24 law enforcement officers."
(Excerpt) Read more at cnsnews.com ...
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AG Holder 'Sorry' and 'Angry' About 'Gun Violence' Killing Law Enforcement Officers
CNS NEWS ^ | 3/6/12 | Susan Jones
(CNSNews.com) - Attorney General Eric Holder on Thursday expressed sorrow and anger at the escalating number of law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty, including at least 71 killed by "gun violence."
"We can, and we must, do even more" to protect law enforcers," Holder told the spring meeting of the National Association of Attorneys General in Washington.
"Just as I promised last year, protecting the safety of our law enforcement officers has been, and will continue to be, a key area of focus for the Justice Department," Holder said.
Holder noted that 177 law enforcement officers were killed in the line of duty last year, a 16 percent increase from 2010. "And 71 of these officers were killed by gun violence," he said.
"I am sorry – and, quite frankly, I am angry – to report that, since the beginning of 2012, we have mourned the loss of an additional 24 law enforcement officers."
(Excerpt) Read more at cnsnews.com ...
LOL, here comes more gun control under the guise of protecting officers from gun violence.
Which is ironic, because by definition, criminals are the only demographic that WOULDNT change their firearms habits with tighter gun laws.
People confuse me when they assume that stricter gun laws are going to stop criminals from using firearms. Lol.
Only people its going to affect are law abiding citizens, who probably arent the ones out shooting people in the 1st place.
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Funny how Holder an obama never even called the families of terry or zapata either.
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Calls for Holder’s resignation heating back up as six more congressmen join the surge
Daily Caller ^ | Mar 7, 2012 | Matthew Boyle
Posted on Wednesday, March 07, 2012
Spokespeople for Florida Republican Reps. Cliff Stearns and Mario Diaz-Balart told The Daily Caller their bosses agree with the surging group of members already demanding Holder’s resignation. Meanwhile, four new members have signed onto the official House resolution of “no confidence” in Holder — House Resolution 490 – because of Fast and Furious: Republican Reps. Bill Huizenga of Michigan, Cory Gardner of Colorado, and Pete Olson and Mike Conaway, both of Texas.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailycaller.com ...
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US Attorney General to investigate monitoring of Muslim student associations
dailyorange.com/AP ^ | March 11, 2012 | Maddy Berner
Posted on March 11, 2012 5:09:05 PM EDT by Free ThinkerNY
The United States Attorney General is looking into concerns that the New York Police Department monitored Muslim mosques and student associations.
The monitoring, which began in 2006, occurred outside New York City limits and is currently being reviewed, said United States Attorney General Eric Holder. Holder called the events "disturbing" at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Thursday.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailyorange.com ...
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Texas Voter ID Law Blocked By Justice Department
PETE YOST 03/12/12 11:46 AM ET Associated Press
Follow Eric Holder , Video , Voting Problems , Justice Department , Justice Department Voter Id , Texas Voter Id , Texas Voter Id Law , Voter ID , Voter ID Laws , Politics News .
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department's civil rights division on Monday objected to a new photo ID requirement for voters in Texas because many Hispanic voters lack state-issued identification.
Texas is the second state in recent months to become embroiled in a court battle with the Justice Department over photo ID requirements for voters.
The Justice Department said Texas officials failed to show that the newly enacted law has neither a discriminatory purpose nor effect.
The department had been reviewing the law since last year and discussing the matter with state officials. In January, Texas officials sued U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, seeking a court judgment that the state's recently enacted voter ID law was not discriminatory in purpose or effect.
In a letter to Texas officials that was also filed in the court case in Washington, the Justice Department said Hispanic voters in Texas are more than twice as likely than non-Hispanic voters to lack a driver's license or personal state-issued photo ID. The department said that even the lowest estimates showed about half of Hispanic registered voters lack such identification.
The range was so broad because the state provided two sets of registered voter data.
In December, the Justice Department rejected South Carolina's voter ID law on grounds it makes it harder for minorities to cast ballots. It was the first voter ID law to be rejected by the department in nearly 20 years.
In response, South Carolina sued Holder; the state argued that enforcement of its new law will not disenfranchise any voters.
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Holder's Identity Problem
By Rich Lowry
Wherever he goes, people are required to show identification. When cashing a check. When signing up for a library card. When boarding a plane. When entering certain office buildings. When checking into hotels. When (in the case of the youthful-looking) buying a beer or cigarettes, or entering a bar. The tyranny of the photo ID is so all-encompassing that people can’t enter Holder’s own Justice Department without showing one.
Holder is outraged that in a nation where requests for photo ID are ubiquitous, more and more states are requiring that people show them when they vote. In a speech last year, Holder characterized these voter-ID laws as an assault on the voting rights that Congressman John Lewis — the hero of Edmund Pettus Bridge — fought for in the mid-1960s. Back then, blacks in the South had to fear for their safety if they showed up at the courthouse to try to register to vote. Now, states are merely asking everyone, regardless of race, to show identification that is readily available to all, regardless of race.
That Holder can equate the fight against voter ID to the struggles of the 1960s demonstrates a moral obtuseness insulting to the memory of the civil-rights pioneers. His Justice Department is now blocking a new voter-ID law in Texas, after doing the same to a South Carolina law. It argues that the Texas statute will disproportionally affect poor Latinos and therefore violate the 1965 Voting Rights Act.Why would the yokels in Texas do something so outrageous as ask that people prove who they are at polling places? It is obviously a basic check against fraud. Requiring an ID to vote was one of the proposals in 2005 of the Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by Jimmy Carter and James Baker, neither of whom had previously been noted for his hostility to minorities or the poor.
Analyzing Texas data, the Justice Department contends that anywhere from 6 percent to 10 percent of Hispanic registered voters don’t have ID. It piles up a parade of horribles — no cars, great distances, inconvenient hours — for why such potential voters can’t get to an office to acquire one, even though the state’s Department of Public Safety will issue election-identification certificates for free.
The experience of other states with voter-ID laws suggests that minorities are not the hapless victims that Holder’s Justice Department portrays them to be. Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation points out that black turnout increased in Georgia in 2008, the first election under a voter-ID law, more than it did in Mississippi, which didn’t have such a law. A study by the University of Delaware and the University of Nebraska–Lincoln concluded that “concerns about voter-identification laws affecting turnout are much ado about nothing.”
Before his next speech, Holder should bone up on the Supreme Court’s 6–3 decision in 2008 upholding Indiana’s voter-ID law. The liberal Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the majority opinion. The Court held that “there is no question about the legitimacy or importance of the State’s interest in counting only the votes of eligible voters,” and “we cannot conclude that the statute imposes ‘excessively burdensome requirements’ on any class of voters.” The decision cited the finding of a district judge that plaintiffs had “not introduced evidence of a single, individual Indiana resident who will be unable to vote as a result of the law.” Presumably, if the Indiana law had represented the recrudescence of Jim Crow, the nation’s highest court would have noticed.
Not that any of this matters to Attorney General Holder. Just as the administration is manufacturing a “war on women,” he wants to manufacture a “war on voting rights.” It is the same MO of fevered rhetoric and distortions in the service of the same end of motivating key voting blocs.
Holder’s tenure as the government’s top lawyer is an ongoing disgrace.
Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review.
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Eric Holder’s Department of Justice has issued an objection to Texas’ voter ID requirement. As the Associated Press writes:
The Justice Department conveyed its objection in a letter to Texas officials that was also filed in the U.S. District Court case in Washington between Texas and the department. Justice said Hispanic voters in Texas are at least 50 percent more likely and possibly more than twice as likely as non-Hispanic voters to lack a driver's license or a personal state-issued photo ID, which the Texas law requires.
Meanwhile, across the country, James O’Keefe III has released video showing just how easy it is to participate in voter fraud in Vermont, since no photo ID is required. He is even offered ballots by polling officials after giving them the name of dead folks.
So why is the Holder DOJ so intent on stopping Texas’ voter ID requirement? Because the Holder DOJ is dominated by a soft variant of the philosophy of critical race theory. The DOJ contention goes something like this: a law must be racist if it has varying impact on different classes of people. It must be designed to uphold the white supremacist hierarchy. Thus, even a law of neutral applicability – meaning a law that applies equally to everyone, like showing your ID to vote – becomes a racist measure. The system itself is corrupted, even though the law is clearly not racist on its face.
That’s the basis of the DOJ’s letter. And that’s why the DOJ seems so unconcerned with voter fraud, while cracking down on voter ID: only laws that make special provision for different groups (in this case, Hispanics) should be implemented. If the door is opened to voter fraud, so be it; at least we’ll sleep better at night knowing that Hispanics without IDs aren’t disadvantaged by the law.
It’s sheer nonsense. Worse, it moots legitimate votes across the country. But if you consider the entire system corrupt and racist to begin, it’s not a huge departure to move against laws that prevent corruption so as to avoid the shadowy “systemic racism” that supposedly pervades all American law.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/03/13/Holder-DOJ-CRT?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BigGovernment+%28Big+Government%29
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Thursday is 'Poolmageddon' for trial lawyers
http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2012/03/thursday-poolmageddon-trial-lawyers/367846
Tue, 2012-03-13 17:20 President Obama's Department of Justice -- led by Attorney General Eric Holder -- has found a new way to make the Americans with Disabilities Act pay off for Democratic trial lawyer campaign donors.
Since the ADA first became law in 1990, the DOJ has been issuing "guidelines" that businesses must follow to comply with a multitude of the nation's civil rights laws.
For example, if a restaurant bathroom has a light switch that is 52 inches above the floor, then that business is in compliance. But if the light switch is 53 inches above the floor, than the restaurant owner is a civil rights violator subject to fines from the government and liable for civil damages from any disabled individual who ever used the bathroom.
The DOJ has been issuing a growing wave of such guidelines over the years, reaching an ever larger portion of business activities. In September 2010, the DOJ issued guidelines for "recreational facilities," including a new rule that all public access swimming pools must provide a lift capable of moving disabled patrons from their wheelchairs into the water.
Compliance with the rule requires pool owners to have a lift for each "water element" in their facility. So if your local community pool also has a spa, both the spa and the pool must be "accessible." But if you have two spas, don't worry, only one lift is required.
In fact, most people in the swimming pool industry thought that one portable lift would be enough. Pool owners claim they were led to believe that, as long as they had one device that could be wheeled out whenever someone needed help getting into or out of a pool or spa, there would be no need intrusive permanent fixtures.
But then industry leaders began hearing rumors last year that Obama's DOJ would require permanently fixed lifts for each pool and spa. They began to write letters to DOJ asking for clarification on the issue.
On Jan. 31 of this year, DOJ granted the industry's call for a clarification: But it was not the answer they wanted. All 300,000 public pools in the United States must install a permanent fixed lift. The deadline for compliance is tomorrow, March 15. Call it "Poolmageddon."
There is no way all 300,000 pools can install permanent lifts by Thursday. There simply are not enough lifts in existence or enough people who know how to install them, according to industry spokesmen. Plus, each lift costs between $3,000 and $10,000 and installation can add $5,000 to $10,000 to the total.
So what happens tomorrow when a disabled individual checks into a Holiday Inn and finds no lift at the pool? The Obama DOJ has said it will not be enforcing the new guidelines right away. That means no fines from the government, for now.
But the ADA also empowered citizens to sue businesses that are not in compliance with DOJ guidelines. The result will be a huge payday for enterprising trial lawyers everywhere.
"The enforcement is going to be by litigation," said Kevin Maher, senior vice president of governmental affairs for the American Hotel & Lodging Association. "A lot of drive-by lawsuits against business by law firms that are set up file to file spurious ADA claims."
These firms "often file lawsuits against every business in the community. A lot of times they are not even looking for businesses to comply with the ADA, they are just looking for a quick cash settlement to go away," Maher explained.
Besides being expensive and impossible to install in time, permanent lifts are also a health hazard. Most hotel pools do not have a lifeguard and kids can access them unsupervised.
The permanent lifts will be a magnet for children to play on, and because they are not designed for that, odds are good that some will get hurt. But then again, each injured kid is just another payday for trial attorneys.
By the way, trial lawyers gave President Obama more than $45 million in 2008.
Have a nice summer.
Conn Carroll is a senior editorial writer for The Washington Examiner. He can be reached at ccarroll@washingtonexaminer.com.
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The troubled mind of Eric Holder
By Troy Senik 6:13 PM 03/15/2012
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The position of attorney general of the United States of America ought to command the highest level of respect. One of only four cabinet positions that can trace its origins to the administration of George Washington, it is among the highest stations in American life: chief law enforcement officer of a constitutional republic that stands, like no other country in the world, for the concept of equality before the law.
Yet during the tenure of Eric Holder, the Justice Department has become anything but a neutral arbiter. Indeed, who you are — and how that identity fits into the political schema of the left — is the most accurate predictor of what kind of treatment you’ll receive from the DOJ.
We were reminded of that unfortunate reality earlier this week, when Holder’s Justice Department announced that it was prohibiting the implementation of a Texas law requiring voters to present photo identification, claiming that it violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act (the DOJ had taken similar action against South Carolina in December).
Both cases are based on tortured rationales that requiring photo identification — which both states will provide to voters for free — discriminates against minority voters. And both states are suing in response. Yet, regardless of the outcomes of those cases, we can be sure that we haven’t seen the last of Holder’s racialist crusades. Since the very beginning of the Obama administration, his fixation on racial issues has been as consistent as it is divisive.
The first sign of this pernicious trend came in the earliest days of Holder’s tenure, when his Justice Department refused to prosecute members of the New Black Panther Party who stood outside a Philadelphia polling place on Election Day 2008 wearing paramilitary outfits and shouting racial slurs at white voters while one of them brandished a billy club. While video of the incident left the public aghast, the DOJ dropped nearly all of the charges and dramatically narrowed the others, claiming the press had overblown the entire affair.
Amidst allegations that senior Justice Department officials wanted the case killed because they didn’t believe that civil rights laws should apply to white voters, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights launched an investigation. During that time, one Justice Department official, J. Christian Adams, resigned his position after his superiors instructed him not to respond to a subpoena.
Attorney General Holder, for his part, was unmoved. When grilled on Capitol Hill about the Justice Department’s failure to follow through on the case, Holder snapped when Republican Congressman John Culbertson of Texas quoted Democratic activist Bartle Bull — who witnessed the event — as saying that it was “the most blatant form of voter discrimination I have encountered in my life.”
“Think about that,” replied the petulant attorney general. “When you compare what people endured in the South in the ’60s to try to get the right to vote for African Americans, and to compare what people were subjected to there to what happened in Philadelphia — which was inappropriate, certainly that … to describe it in those terms I think does a great disservice to people who put their lives on the line, who risked all, for my people.”
It was a moment of self-consciously righteous rage that spoke volumes about Holder’s psychology. There was racial tribalism (“my people”), the characterization of a disgusting event as something like a breach of etiquette (“inappropriate, certainly”) and a failure to grasp right and wrong in absolute, rather than relative, terms (whether or not the Black Panthers incident rose to the same level as the most egregious injustices of the Civil Rights era has no bearing on whether or not it should have been prosecuted). Each of those traits have been hallmarks of the Holder era.
The attorney general’s obsession with race has been monomaniacal. Within the first month of his tenure, he told DOJ employees at a Black History Month event that, when it comes to race, America is “essentially a nation of cowards.” In an interview with The New York Times late last year, Holder claimed that attacks on him were “a way to get at the president because of the way I can be identified with him, both due to the nature of our relationship, and, you know, the fact that we’re both African-American.”
At a speech in Atlanta just a few weeks ago, Holder showed there were no depths of minutiae he was unwilling to plumb when he complained, “We’ve often seen that students of color, students from disadvantaged backgrounds and students with special needs are disproportionately likely to be suspended or expelled. This is, quite simply, unacceptable. … These unnecessary and destructive policies must be changed.” Holder conveniently ignored, however, data that show those students were punished more often because they actually got in trouble more often.
This is the controlling thesis — perhaps the only thesis — that occupies Eric Holder’s mind: any public policy he disfavors can’t be motivated by honest disagreements about first principles or empirical realities; it must be the product of prejudices buried deep within the subconsciousness of its proponents.
When Arizona passed its tough new immigration law (which Holder’s Justice Department subsequently sued the state over), the attorney general publicly warned that the law had “the possibility of leading to racial profiling and putting a wedge between law enforcement and a community that would, in fact, be profiled” — yet Holder admitted at a congressional hearing less than a week later that he hadn’t even read the law.
He even used a similar rationale to defend Obamacare, writing an op-ed with HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius where he compared attempts to overturn the law through the courts to efforts to defeat Civil Rights legislation decades earlier.
There is a touch of tragedy to Eric Holder. He is seemingly unaware that he lives in the most advanced era of racial relations in American history. That we have arrived here is a justifiable source of pride for the nation — and it ought to be even more so for the nation’s first African-American attorney general, a man who has seen the transition happen within the course of his own lifetime. For Holder, however, there is only suspicion, paranoia and a touch of vindictiveness. It goes beyond disturbing to see an office so big inhabited by a man so small.
Troy Senik, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, is a senior fellow at the Center for Individual Freedom (www.cfif.org), where this commentary originally appeared. He is also an editor at Ricochet.com and a contributor for the Manhattan Institute.
Article printed from The Daily Caller: http://dailycaller.com
URL to article: http://dailycaller.com/2012/03/15/the-troubled-mind-of-eric-holder/
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Breitbart.com has uncovered video from 1995 of then-U.S. Attorney Eric Holder announcing a public campaign to "really brainwash people into thinking about guns in a vastly different way."
Holder was addressing the Woman's National Democratic Club. In his remarks, broadcast by CSPAN 2, he explained that he intended to use anti-smoking campaigns as his model to "change the hearts and minds of people in Washington, DC" about guns.
"What we need to do is change the way in which people think about guns, especially young people, and make it something that's not cool, that it's not acceptable, it's not hip to carry a gun anymore, in the way in which we changed our attitudes about cigarettes."
Holder added that he had asked advertising agencies in the nation's capital to assist by making anti-gun ads rather than commercials "that make me buy things that I don't really need." He had also approached local newspapers and television stations, he said, asking them to devote prime space and time, respectively, to his anti-gun campaign.
Local political leaders and celebrities, Holder said, including Mayor Marion Barry and Jesse Jackson, had been asked to help. In addition, he reported, he had asked the local school board to make the anti-gun message a part of "every day, every school, and every level."
Despite strict gun control efforts, Washington, DC was and remains one of the nation's most dangerous cities for gun violence, though crime has abated somewhat since the 1990s.
Holder went on to become Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton administration, and currently serves as Attorney General in the Obama Administration.
The video of Holder's remarks was uncovered by Breitbart.com contributor Charles C. Johnson.
ON BREITBART TV
Holder 1995: We Must 'Brainwash' People Against Guns
LikeNo
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/03/18/Holder-Fight-Guns-Like-Cigarettes
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/key-charges-dismissed-against-michigan-militia-members-charged-with-plotting-war-on-government/2012/03/27/gIQAfUYVeS_story.html
Sweet - Holder smacked down on the mat.
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fuk I think I hate democrat scum bad, then this stuff comes along and takes it lil bit firther
die democrats die!!
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Holder's Revenge
By John T. Bennett
Reverse discrimination against whites has just begun, according to Attorney General Eric Holder. Now, the exploitation of Trayvon Martin's death has thrown the cycle of racial resentment and favoritism into overdrive.
There has been much poisonous rhetoric following Trayvon Martin's death, and more is sure to come. It is hard to imagine that any other current topic could result in racial madness exceeding that tragedy. Nonetheless, an exceptionally ominous and instructive remark was recently made by Attorney General Eric Holder -- a remark more outlandish than any heard so far in our national conversation about Martin.
Attorney General Holder recently addressed the question of affirmative action, and for how long it would be required. He answered, stunningly, that reverse discrimination has only just begun: "Affirmative action has been an issue since segregation practices," Holder said. "The question is not when does it end, but when does it begin[.] ... When do people of color truly get the benefits to which they are entitled?"
We see in these remarks the soil out of which rises the bitter fruit of racial resentment. Holder's attitude is best summed up as the elite victim mentality. The belief is one of perpetual entitlement, fueled by bitterness, and given the stamp of official approval by politicians at the highest levels of national office. The Trayvon Martin upheaval is made possible by this carefully cultivated attitude, which exists within all income levels. Whether it's under the guise of injustice, inequality, underrepresentation, or white supremacy, the effect of the attitude is the same: sheer resentment towards the majority and its institutions.
Not all minorities share this attitude, while many non-minorities do. For instance, Professor William B. Eimicke of Columbia University supports a lawsuit against New York City because the city doesn't have enough black firefighters. Eimicke, who is white, says, "The reality is the [fire] department should look like the city it serves." In other words, the fire department has something wrong with it because there are not enough blacks employed. This is an example of an educated, mainstream leader promoting an arbitrary standard of underrepresentation. Such standards will only fuel more demands for special treatment, and more resentment when the arbitrary standard proves predictably impossible to meet.
Take the example of Eimicke's fellow Columbia faculty. Of the 70 core faculty members in Prof. Eimicke's department, there are 3 blacks. Seventy-five percent of the faculty is white, and 4% is black, whereas New York City is 45% white and 27% black. Presumably, the principle that a fire department "should look like the city it serves" also applies to the faculty of a tony university. If the faculty "should look like the city it serves," then Columbia needs to expedite the removal of white professors. Will Eimicke enlist in the righteous cause of minority representation and quit? Or is that a sacrifice he prefers to delegate to students or middle- and working-class whites? We all know the answer: elite liberal hypocrisy protects many academics and politicians from the application of their own dogmas. Columbia's faculty will never match the ethnic makeup of New York City because professors are typically protected from purported racial favoritism, while firemen are fair game.
As the attorney general's remark shows, the cycle of elite liberal hypocrisy and racial favoritism will never end, so long as liberals control racial discourse.
In the meantime, the results will become increasingly absurd. The attorney general's daughters, and each successive generation, will continue to benefit from affirmative action to the same degree as truly disadvantaged minorities. This incongruity grows more and more evident, as Democratic Senator James Webb pointed out in his famous Wall Street Journal editorial piece. Sen. Webb noted that affirmative action policies have "expanded so far beyond their original purpose that they now favor anyone who does not happen to be white." Racial preferences extend to business startups, prestigious academic admissions, job promotions, and expensive government contracts. Many of these preferences have no relationship to discrimination, oppression, or even socioeconomic class level; they even benefit recent immigrants whose ancestors never faced discrimination in America. Instead, we are actually creating a government-sanctioned nobility -- a favored class of citizens with officially endorsed, race-based hereditary privileges.
Under the sway of of identity politics and racial grievance, even the most privileged members of our society will hold onto petty gripes. In a 2009 commencement address, the First Lady complained about her childhood experience with the University of Chicago. Recalling that she grew up right near the campus, she stated:
[T]hat university never played a meaningful role in my academic development. The institution made no effort to reach out to me -- a bright and promising student in their midst -- and I had no reason to believe there was a place for me there.
That she felt entitled to be "reached out to" in the first place is astonishing. The egomaniacal sense of entitlement contained in her remarks will strike most people as utterly foreign. Yet this way of conceiving of one's own position in society is commonly shared. Amongst the lower class, this attitude takes the form of demands for "Obama money" and other such hilarity.
Perhaps Michelle Obama should have made an effort at some point to understand why young white students, many of whom were not from Chicago, would have been reticent about venturing out into the South Side of Chicago. The reasons are not hard to discover. Immediately after their report on the First Lady's address, CNN aired a segment on violent crime on the South Side. Chief Ernest Brown of Chicago's Organized Crime Division explained the high rate of youth violence by saying that "their behavior is just inconsistent with civility." With that in mind, many students -- of all races -- may not feel that it is their place to step into another community and attempt to help its youth. In fact, not even Dr. Martin Luther King and his family stayed in urban Chicago for long after starting to work in the city in 1966. Cohen and Taylor write that Coretta Scott King was concerned about violence in the neighborhood, and the Kings spent little time there [1].
Our own attorney general, ostensibly committed to even-handed enforcement of the nation's laws, referred to blacks as "my people." Strangely, it is socially acceptable for only certain groups to proudly claim ethnic group membership. If similar tribal loyalties were publicly boasted by a white ethnic, that would be seen as sinister. Just imagine the reaction if a President Bush had identified -- on the basis of race -- with a victim of minority-on-white crime by saying, "Channon Christian looks like my daughters."
Identifying with an ethnic group as one's own "people" will lead in most cases to in-group favoritism. Cultural pride is one thing, but proclaiming exclusive ethnic group affiliation while occupying a position of public trust is another. This tendency is too often written off as a harmless cultural tic or a healthy form of therapeutic identity formation. The trouble is that there is a worldview lying beneath the "my people" language.
In his remarks, the attorney general has provided the most explicit statement of ethnic favoritism and racial grievance by a high public official in American history. And the racket has just begun: "When do people of color truly get the benefits to which they are entitled?" asks Holder. The question is rhetorical, and his constituents know the answer.
In this liberal, racialized conception of society, minority groups are supposedly not getting "benefits to which they are entitled." The danger in this attitude is not just that people are asking for free stuff from the government. The danger is that minority group members are made to believe that society is purposefully withholding benefits from them due to their racial group membership. Hence the resentment and latent animosity lurking at the core of the welfare state, and its ever-expanding legion of dependents.
This menacing fact was once openly recognized by sociologists. Decades ago, Edward C. Banfield wrote that urban social problems will increasingly come to be regarded as the fault of "callousness or neglect by the 'white power structure'" [2]. Just as expected, we now have a cult of anti-white resentment named Critical Race Theory being taught in law schools around the nation.
The constant use of physical metaphors like "white power structure" will guarantee that some people view themselves -- usually falsely -- as being intentionally excluded from that structure. Of course, structures comprise people, so real human beings will inevitably become targets of the resentment originally intended for abstract "power structures."
The victim mentality feeds off racial bitterness, which is constantly politicized and enflamed. We see this in the rhetoric of Congresswoman Frederica Wilson (D-Florida), who said that Trayvon Martin was "hunted down like a dog." The attorney general and president are doing their part to sow the seeds of bitterness, entitlement, and racial favoritism. By acknowledging those seeds, one begins to understand why racial double standards and potential violence are so easily stirred up amidst controversies such as the current one involving Trayvon Martin.
John T. Bennett (MA, University of Chicago, Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences '07; JD, Emory University School of Law '11) is a writer living in Atlanta, GA.
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[1] Barone, Michael. 2000. Review of American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley, by Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor. The Weekly Standard. 21 August 2000: 33, 38.
[2] Edward C. Banfield, The Unheavenly City Revisited 96 (1974).
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/04/holders_revenge.html at April 02, 2012 - 05:33:31 PM CDT
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Government
DOJ to Pay Pro-Life Advocate $120,000 for Wrongful Lawsuit
Posted on April 2, 2012 at 6:00pm by Erica Ritz Print »Email »
After an 18-month legal battle, Eric Holder’s Justice Department has dropped the case against a Florida pro-life advocate, agreeing to pay her $120,000 for the improper lawsuit.
“Life News” reports that the defendant, Susan Pine, had been counseling women who were considering abortion (and providing support for those who chose life) outside an abortion clinic in West Palm Beach, Florida for twenty years. Though the court found no evidence of her ever using force to prevent women from entering the clinic, the Department of Justice charged her with violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE) in 2010, seeking thousands of dollars in fines.
Holder’s original complaint stated: “In bringing this action, the United States Attorney General has reasonable cause to believe: (1) Defendant, Mary Susan Pine, has committed, and is likely to continue to commit, violations of FACE; and (2) various persons are being, have been, and will continue to be injured by Defendant’s conduct.”
Judge Kenneth L. Ryskamp reportedly chastised and questioned the integrity of the DOJ after concluding that Pine had not violated any of the three elements of FACE. “The Court is at a loss as to why the Government chose to prosecute this particular case in the first place,” he wrote. “The Court can only wonder whether this action was the product of a concerted effort between the Government and PWC [Presidential Women's Center abortion clinic], which began well before the date of the incident at issue, to quell Ms. Pine’s activities rather than to vindicate the rights of those allegedly aggrieved by Ms. Pine’s conduct.”
“The evidence could not lead a rational jury to find that Ms. Pine’s conduct constituted a physical obstruction within the meaning of FACE,” he concluded.
Pine (Photo: Liberty Counsel)
Matthew Staver, whose organization assisted Pine throughout the proceedings, remarked: “It is irresponsible for the U.S. Department of Justice to place politics above principle when deciding to prosecute, and thus attempt to silence, a pro-life sidewalk counselor without any evidence of wrongdoing. When the nation’s highest law enforcement officer files suit against any citizen, the suit must be based on the law coupled with compelling evidence. Anything less is an abuse of the high office. Susan Pine will not be silenced or detoured from her mission to save the lives of innocent children.”
The Life Legal Defense Fund also chimed in: “Despite the struggling economy and skyrocketing federal debt, apparently, the U.S. Government sees fit to expend unlimited taxpayer dollars pursuing these baseless charges against Ms. Pine.”
Many have noted that, while Holder’s Justice Department aggressively pursued charges against Ms. Pine despite no evidence to support the suit, it has yet to prosecute members of the New Black Panthers for voter intimidation during the 2008 election– and that was caught on tape.
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Justice Dept. Agrees to Pay Native Tribes $1 Billion for Mismanaged Funds
All Gov.com ^ | 4/14/12 | David Wallechinsky, Noel Brinkerhoff
Posted on April 15, 2012 2:22:31 PM EDT by Nachum
The Obama administration has reached a settlement with more than 40 Indian tribes to resolve claims of mismanaged funds by the Department of the Interior.
After 22 months of negotiation, the U.S. Department of Justice agreed with tribal representatives for the government to pay more than $1 billion to 41 tribes.
Attorney General Eric Holder said the settlements “fairly and honorably resolve historical grievances over the accounting and management of tribal trust funds, trust lands and other non-monetary trust resources that, for far too long, have been a source of conflict between Indian tribes and the United States.” The settlement does not have to be approved by Congress because it comes out of the Treasury Department’s Judgment Fund.
The Interior Department became involved through its management of about 56 million acres of trust lands for federally-recognized tribes as well as 100,000 leases on these lands for uses ranging from timber harvesting to farming to oil and gas extraction.
(Excerpt) Read more at allgov.com ...
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A Death Bounty and an Attorney General
Right Side News ^ | April 16, 2012 | Arnold Ahlert
One can be forgiven for wondering what level of New Black Panther Party (NBPP) thuggery is sufficient to warrant the attention of Florida law enforcement officials or, seemingly, the most myopic U.S. attorney general to ever head the Department of Justice. On March 24th, New Black Panther Party leader Mikhail Muhammad offered a $10,000 bounty for the “capture” of Zimmerman and publicly stated that Zimmerman “should be fearful for his life.” Fellow Panthers distributed wanted posters calling Zimmerman a “child killer” and offering that bounty “dead or alive.” And in a mind-boggling rant during a conference call, Michelle Williams, Chief of Staff for the Tampa, FL branch of the NBPP, told Party members to get ready for a “race war.”
Willams was just warming up. She got far uglier:
I just wanna say to all the listeners on this phone call if you are having any doubts about getting suited, booted, and armed up for this race war we in (sic) that has never ended, let me tell ya somethin’–the things that’s about to happen to these honkies, these crackers, these pigs, these pink people, these mother-f**ker (inaudible) people, it has been long overdue.
What constitutes a criminal action in Florida? Florida Code 787.01 makes it a felony to “Commit or facilitate commission of any felony,” or “Inflict bodily harm upon or to terrorize the victim or another person.” Florida Code 777.04 considers it a “criminal conspiracy” if a person “solicits another to commit an offense prohibited by law and in the course of such solicitation commands, encourages, hires, or requests another person to engage in specific conduct which would constitute such offense or an attempt to commit such offense,” or if a person “agrees, conspires, combines, or confederates with another person or persons to commit any offense.”
How serious are the Panthers? On March 24th, Hashim Nzinga, 49, a high-ranking member of the party, also announced on CNN that the NBPP would offer a bounty for Zimmerman, even as he noted that in this particular case, “we letting (sic) Attorney General Eric Holder–who clearly I know Obama and Eric Holder will be on our side–this case need (sic) to be a murder case, and it need (sic) to be a murder case quickly, or we gonna do what America been doin’ for many, many years–a citizen (sic) arrest.” On March 27th, Nzinga himself was arrested for possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, according to the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office.
Has Attorney General Eric Holder, as Mr. Nzinga seems to believe, chosen sides? On Monday April 9th, George Zimmerman’s family sent a letter to Holder, asking the Attorney General how it’s possible that “a group of people in the United States put a bounty on someone’s head, circulate Wanted posters publicly, and still be walking the streets?” Mr. Holder has not responded, and DOJ spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler did not respond to a request for a comment on the issue by The Daily Caller.
Two days later, Mr. Holder appeared at the opening of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network (NAN) convention–and heaped praise on the racial arsonist “for your partnership, your friendship, and your tireless efforts to speak out for the voiceless, to stand up for the powerless, and to shine a light on the problems we must solve, and the promises we must fulfill.” That would be the same Al Sharpton who publicly advocated for a “full blown occupation of Sanford with tents and everything over Easter weekend” as well as a threat that his is National Action Network would “move to the next level” if George Zimmerman was not arrested in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin.
At the conference, Holder also promised to “examine the facts and the law. If we find evidence of a potential federal criminal civil rights crime, we will take appropriate action. And, at every step, the facts and the law will guide us forward.” That promise was made with respect to George Zimmerman. The implication here is that if Zimmerman is found innocent in Florida, the DOJ will continue to pursue a case. What did Holder have to say about the NBPP and their overt threats against Mr. Zimmerman’s life? Not a word.
Mr. Nzinga may be correct about where the president’s sympathies lie as well. Mr. Sharpton was invited to the White House for its Easter Prayer Breakfast, despite his long and public record of fomenting racial discord and violence. And Mr. Obama also became the first president ever to appear at the same NAN conference attended by the Attorney General.
Thus, the two highest-ranking law enforcement officers in the nation have aligned themselves with a race-baiter. And lest anyone think they were alone, Sharpton’s conference was also attended by U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson–all of whom gave speeches. Hilda Solis was as effusive regarding Sharpton as Attorney General Holder. “I am proud to march with him on any occasion,” she gushed.
One can only wonder if such “occasions” would have included the 1991 march in Crown Heights that fomented three day of black violence against Jews, or the 1995 demonstrations against a Jewish store owner in Harlem that precipitated the murder of eight people, not long after Sharpton promised protesters that a black record store owner wouldn’t have his rental lease terminated “so that some white interloper can expand his business on 125th Street.”
As for Holder, this is not the first time he has demonstrated a calculated lack of concern regarding lawlessness by the Panther Party members. The DOJ dropped an already won case of voter intimidation against three men who showed up armed outside a Philadelphia polling place in 2008, and shouted racial threats at voters. The defendants failed to respond to a DOJ lawsuit, and a federal court in Philadelphia entered a default judgment against them. Despite this, the DOJ dropped charges against two defendants and barred the third man from displaying a weapon near a Philadelphia polling place for the next three years.
The ginning up of racial animosity (where no evidence of any exists) by the NBPP and NAN achieved the desired outcome. Mr. Zimmerman was indicted for second-degree murder by Special Prosecutor Angela Corey last Wednesday, even as she promised that she and members of her team would be “seekers of the truth.” One can only hope. Ms. Corey had ample chance to present her findings to a grand jury prior to indicting Zimmerman. She passed, despite the fact that only the prosecutor presents evidence at that point in the process. This is a possible indication that Ms. Corey might have been concerned that the evidence she would have presented was insufficient to warrant an indictment.
Attorney Alan Dershowitz thought so. He accused Corey of grandstanding for political gain, and contended the indictment was “unethical” because “nothing in the charging instrument … suggests probable cause to believe Zimmerman had a ‘depraved mind regardless of human life’ when he shot Martin,” required under Florida law.
Whether Dershowitz is right or wrong remains to be seen. What apparently will not be seen is any pursuit of charges against the New Black Panther Party, who crossed the freedom of speech line when they put a bounty on Zimmerman’s head. Nor does it seem we will get anything in the way of a statement from President Obama, telling the NBPP and or Al Sharpton and his National Action Network to back off.
That’s what a president who once said, “Our goal is to have a country that’s not divided by race,” would do. But that was long before the administration’s dismal record of first-term accomplishments necessitated changing tactics to deflect attention away from that record. Thus, courting even the tiniest of potential constituencies, even those who align themselves with racist agitators like Al Sharpton and the NBPP, becomes necessary.
Yet his silence regarding the NBPP and his embrace of Al Sharpton demonstrates something else as well: given a choice between being president or a community organizer, Mr Obama reflexively opts for the latter job description.
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National Review ^ | APRIL 14, 2012 4:00 A.M. | By Andrew C. McCarthy
Posted on April 16, 2012 8:42:15 PM EDT by vg0va3
This week, our esteemed attorney general canoodled with Reverend Al at the annual convention of the “National Action Network,” home base for the infamous huckster (that would be Sharpton, not Holder — sorry for any confusion). It is difficult to imagine another attorney general in American history sucking up to such a race-mongering charlatan. The Sharpton record was succinctly catalogued on the Corner by Victor Davis Hanson: inciting murderous riots; slandering Jews, Mormons, and homosexuals; libeling a state prosecutor in the course of championing Tawana Brawley’s fabrication of a racial “hate crime.” Yet there was Holder, ladling cringe-making praise on Sharpton for “your partnership, your friendship, and your tireless efforts to speak out for the voiceless, to stand up for the powerless, and to shine a light on the problems we must solve and the promises we must fulfill.”
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http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/23/us-usa-florida-firefighters-idUSBRE83M1KQ20120423
(Reuters) - The Justice Department sued the city of Jacksonville, Florida, on Monday, claiming its use of written tests to determine promotions in the city's fire department discriminates against African-Americans.
The lawsuit followed a more than two-year investigation examining Jacksonville's record of promoting African-Americans for the ranks of lieutenant, captain, district chief and engineer dating back to 2004.
It came after a separate lawsuit filed last year by two dozen Jacksonville firefighters challenging the city's promotional process. In the lawsuit, the firefighters alleged union officials unfairly shared exam questions with white workers but not with black workers ahead of the test.
"This complaint should send a clear message to all public employers that employment practices that have the effect of excluding qualified candidates on account of race will not be tolerated," Thomas Perez, a U.S. assistant attorney general for civil rights, said in a statement.
A spokesman for the Jacksonville mayor's office declined to comment.
The complaint by the Justice Department alleges the exams are "not job related for the positions in question."
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DOJ Tries To Seize Control Of Public Records Arbitration
Judicial Watch ^ | April 24, 2012
In a dangerous power grab that will jeopardize government transparency, the Obama Justice Department wants to redefine federal public record law so that it becomes the sole arbiter in disputes between agencies and individuals who submit requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
The unprecedented move would give the Department of Justice (DOJ), an extension of the executive branch, scary authority to determine if and how public records are disseminated throughout government. It would also strip those duties from the agency— Office of Government Information Services (OGIS)—that was created by Congress as a neutral party to mediate FOIA disputes and assure compliance among all federal agencies.
This is not the sort of story you’ll see in the mainstream media since, not surprisingly, the Obama Administration is keeping it under the radar. However, Judicial Watch has obtained an inside congressional document outlining the DOJ’s unscrupulous plot to become FOIA ombudsman. It comes from one of the most influential and powerful chambers in the U.S. House of Representatives, the Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
In a letter addressed to Attorney General Eric Holder, the California congressman who chairs the Oversight and Government Reform Committee (Darrell Issa) says the proposed modification will have a negative impact on government transparency. The letter also requests documents involving efforts to modify OGIS’s statutorily established FOIA dispute resolution authority by shifting the duties to the DOJ. Holder has until this week to comply with the committee’s request.
The House investigative committee also reminds Holder that the DOJ’s proposal to become the referee for public records disputes clearly contradicts Congress’s intent and is an apparent contravention of FOIA law. “DOJ has important but limited statutory responsibilities concerning the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA),” the letter says. “These responsibilities include making information about agency FOIA programs publicly available; issuing recommendations and guidelines to agency FOIA offices, and encouraging agency FOIA compliance. DOJ’s responsibilities under FOIA, however, do not include offering dispute resolution services between agencies and FOIA requesters.”
Congress created the OGIS more than four years ago as a crucial neutral party that offers a range of mediation services to resolve public records disputes and to assure government-wide compliance. The agency, which is headquartered at the U.S. National Archives, has had tremendous success, directly helping resolve more than 1,200 FOIA disputes from virtually every state. No wonder Issa asks Holder to “reconsider the proposed modification and comply with current law.”
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Judiciary Chairman Unleashes on Holder for ‘Partisan’ Ignorance of Constitution
PJ Media ^ | April 30, 2012 | Bridget Johnson
Posted on Monday, April 30, 2012 4:20:43 PM by jazusamo
With a scathing roll call of Eric Holder's sins, Lamar Smith paves the way for the attorney general's upcoming appearance before his committee.
The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee launched a scathing attack on the Department of Justice today with a report outlining how Attorney General Eric Holder’s agency is “ignoring the Constitution to impose a partisan agenda.”
“The pattern of pushing partisan ideology rather than neutrally enforcing the law began nearly as soon as the Administration took office and has continued unabated since,” the report from Rep. Lamar Smith states.
The Texas Republican said that under the Obama administration, the Justice Department “has become more partisan than ever.”
Smith has called Holder to testify before the committee on June 7 to answer for that partisanship.
“The Obama administration has ignored the constitutional balance of power between co-equal branches of government and blocked investigations of its actions. When the Administration doesn’t like a law, they refuse to enforce it. And if the Senate’s constitutional authority to approve political appointees gets in their way, the Administration ignores the Constitution,” Smith said.
“All government officials are bound by the limits of the Constitution and the rule of law, including the President and the Attorney General,” the chairman added.
The report delves into several high-profile examples of the DoJ’s quest to “impose the Administration’s partisan agenda on the American people.”
The first of these: Operation Fast and Furious.
“Since the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives’ (ATF) Operation Fast and Furious first became public in January, 2011, the Department has responded with a consistent focus on avoiding responsibility rather than addressing institutional flaws,” the report states.
Smith’s chairman’s report calls out Holder for his May 3, 2011, testimony before the committee in which he said that he “probably heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the last few weeks.”
Months before the hearing, though, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) had personally handed Holder a copy of his Jan. 27, 2011, letter regarding the matter, and documents later revealed by the DoJ that fall included memos to Holder with summaries of the gun-walking scandal.
Holder denied giving untruthful testimony, but under pressure from lawmakers eventually said he’d meant to say “a few months” before the committee.
The Department of Justice responded to a CBS News Freedom of Information Act request on Fast and Furious last week by sending mostly blank pages to the news network.
Smith’s report also faults the DoJ for “rushing to court to oppose state laws aimed at improving immigration enforcement while ignoring sanctuary cities and other policies which explicitly violate federal immigration law,” knocking its legal action against Arizona’s SB1070.
“Even if the Department’s argument were not entirely frivolous, it is a much weaker case than could be mounted against states like New York, Massachusetts, and Illinois that openly violate their duty to support federal immigration enforcement,” it says. “While Arizona’s law complements and strengthens federal immigration policy, the laws of these states and some of the cities within them explicitly violate the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) of 1996—yet DOJ refuses to take any action against them.”
The report asserts that since the DoJ has not brought a single court action to block sanctuary city policies or tuition breaks for illegal immigrants, the choice to focus limited resources on strained, weaker arguments shows the department’s bias.
“The glaring inconsistency can best be explained by highly partisan decision making influencing which cases to pursue,” it says.
“The Justice Department claims to be acting to protect the interests of Congress, arguing that except in narrow circumstances only Congress can legislate immigration enforcement. In truth, the Department ignores Congress except when it can help the Administration achieve its partisan goals, in this case its fiercely anti-enforcement immigration agenda.”
Smith then goes after Holder & Co. for challenging voter ID laws, asserting that it’s due to partisan bias that the Justice Department puts taxpayer dollars to “waste” with its challenges.
“The Justice Department claims that in South Carolina minorities are 20 percent more likely than whites to lack photo ID,” the report states. “This sounds significant until you examine the original data. 90% of minorities have photo IDs compared with 91.6% of whites. The Department’s presentation is mathematically true (because 10% is technically 20 percent more than 8.4%) but it masks that in reality, the Department is battling over a difference of less than 2%.”
The report faults the DoJ for blocking congressional inquiries, including oversight requests — five from the Judiciary Committee alone since July 2011 — probing just how deep of a role Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan had in shaping ObamaCare before her appointment to the court.
The Justice Department has claimed that the Judiciary Committee — studying her background to ensure that federal law governing recusals is adequate — “has no legitimate legislative interest in the material,” according to the chairman’s report.
“The Administration’s lack of cooperation only heightens concerns that they have something to hide,” the report states. “Unfortunately, the Administration’s stonewalling of Congress could result in an unconstitutional law being upheld.”
Smith proceeds to take on the DoJ for refusing to stand behind the Defense of Marriage Act. Holder informed Congress on Feb. 23, 2011, that his department would no longer defend DOMA in court, arguing that it violated the constitutional guarantee of equal protection.
“The unprecedented nature of the Attorney General’s arguments and the evasion of accountability represented by continuing to enforce the law while not defending it combine to support the inference that the Administration’s stance is based on its partisan agenda rather than on a sincere analysis of the Constitution and, as such, the Administration’s non-defense of the Defense of Marriage Act is a usurpation of Congress’s legislative function,” the report states.
Finally, the chairman goes after Justice for turning a blind eye to constitutional limits of President Obama’s recess appointment power.
Obama sparked fury in Congress with three recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board and another to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Jan. 4. The Senate was not technically in recess at the time, but in pro forma sessions with no business to be conducted — which could be reversed if senators were asked to conduct any business — as agreed by both parties.
Smith linked the appointment to bad advice given to Obama by Justice Department counsel, who found that the President “has discretion to conclude that the Senate is unavailable to perform its advise-and-consent function and to exercise his power to make recess appointments.”
“The invocation by the President of the recess appointment power when the Senate was not in recess was an unconstitutional evasion of the Senate’s power of advice and consent,” the report said. “It encroached upon the Senate’s constitutional prerogatives and aggrandized power to the President.”
After a roll call of Justice Department sins, the chairman concludes that “the Constitution has not been guarded with care.”
“[Holder] promised that under his leadership, the Department of Justice would be free from partisanship,” Smith’s report states. “He testified that in his tenure ‘law enforcement decisions must be untainted by partisanship.’”
“The reality has been different from the promise.”
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Pro tip: No one is paying attention to your torrent of copy and pastes, stupid.
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Issa threatens contempt charge against Holder if Justice.....( Fast and Furious subpoenas)
FOX ^ | 01/31/12 | William Lajeunesse
Posted on Tuesday, January 31, 2012 5:07:52 PM by Doogle
The head of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is threatening to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress if he fails to comply with congressional subpoenas for documents.
Holder has until Feb. 9 to comply.
In a four-page letter to Holder, Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., claims the Department of Justice has "misrepresented facts and misled Congress," which began its investigation of Operation Fast and Furious one year ago.
Issa claims Holder's "actions lead us to conclude that the department is actively engaged in a cover-up" because it refuses to comply with previous subpoenas.
"If the department continues to obstruct the congressional inquiry by not providing documents and information, this committee will have no alternative but to move forward with proceedings to hold you in contempt of Congress," Issa warned in the letter.
Issa claims the the Justice Department has stonewalled the congressional investigation of the gun-running scandal that sent some 2,000 weapons to the Mexican cartels with the assistance of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
It's VERY obvious that there is a cover-up going on.
I dont get why Issa is acting so impotent here. Giving Holder an entire year. F&F is a non-issue, while Romney should be shouting about it to anyone with a microphone.
Why is the GOP nominee avoiding talking about it nonstop? ISSA = Soft on Holder.
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The Chicago Way: Justice for Sale at Holder's DOJ
In an explosive Newsweek article set to rock official Washington, reporter Peter Boyer and Breitbart contributing editor and Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer reveal how Attorney General Eric Holder and the Department of Justice are operating under a “justice for sale” strategy by forgoing criminal prosecution of Wall Street executives at big financial institutions who just so happen to be clients of the white-shoe law firms where Holder and his top DOJ lieutenants worked.
There’s more.
Even as President Barack Obama and Holder co-opt the Occupy Wall Street rhetoric of getting “tough” on the Big Banks and Big Finance, the Newsweek investigative report reveals that Eric Holder has not criminally charged or prosecuted a single top executive from any of the elite financial institutions thought responsible for the financial crash. And why would they? As Boyer and Schweizer report, “through last fall, Obama had collected more donations from Wall Street than any of the Republican candidates; employees of Bain Capital donated more than twice as much to Obama as they did to Romney, who founded the firm.”
Collecting millions from Wall Street was hardly the plan Obama and Holder telegraphed upon entering office. In 2009, the new Attorney General said boldly:
We face unprecedented challenges in responding to the financial crisis that has gripped our economy for the past year. Mortgage, securities, and corporate fraud schemes have eroded the public’s confidence in the nation’s financial markets and have led to a growing sentiment that Wall Street does not play by the same rules as Main Street. Unscrupulous executives, Ponzi scheme operators, and common criminals alike have targeted the pocketbooks and retirement accounts of middle class Americans, and in many cases, devastated entire families’ futures. We will not allow these actions to go unpunished….This Task Force’s mission is not just to hold accountable those who helped bring about the last financial meltdown, but to prevent another meltdown from happening.
Obama unloaded on Wall Street too. In 2009, Obama created the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force and announced that its purpose was to hold “accountable those who helped bring about the last financial crisis as well as those who would attempt to take advantage of the efforts at economic recovery.”
But Holder and Obama’s anti-Wall Street “law and order” rhetoric has turned out to be a smokescreen that allows the Obama campaign to talk the talk of the 99% while taking money from Wall Street’s 1%. The result is extortion by proxy. As President Obama put it to the Big Finance executives who met with him at the White House just two months into his presidency, “My Administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”
Not surprisingly, of the elite bundlers who made up Obama’s 2008 campaign, the second most represented industry after law was the securities and investment industry. It’s a level of hypocrisy has outraged even committed leftists. Industrial Areas Foundation activist Mike Gecan put it squarely: “I’m from Chicago, I’ve seen this game played my whole life."
So what have the securities and banking industries received for their political contributions?
As Boyer and Schweizer report, Department of Justice criminal prosecutions are at 20-year lows for corporate securities and bank fraud. And while large financial institutions have faced civil prosecution, those typically end in settlement fees with the major banks that represent a fraction of their profits, often paid through special taxes on mortgage-backed securities.
It’s the most crass and cynical brand of politics imaginable, the Chicago Way writ large: pay to play justice from the nation’s highest law enforcement official.
Stay tuned to Breitbart News for continuing coverage on the Department of Justice exposé.
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Why Can't Obama Bring Wall Street to Justice?
Maybe the banks are too big to jail. Or maybe Washington’s revolving door is at work.
by Peter J. Boyer , Peter Schweizer | May 6, 2012 1:38 PM EDT
Obama’s 2009 White House summit with finance titans, in which the president warned that only he was standing "between you and the pitchforks"
Why, despite widespread outrage, financial-fraud prosecutions by the Department of Justice are at 20-year lows
Attorney General Eric Holder’s lucrative ties to a top-tier law firm whose marquee clients include some of finance’s worst offenders
How Obama’s trumpeted “task force” for investigating risky mortgage lenders—announced in this year’s State of the Union speech—is badly understaffed and has yet to produce any discernible progress
With the Occupy protesters resuming battle stations, and Mitt Romney in place as the presumptive Republican nominee, President Obama has begun to fashion his campaign as a crusade for the 99 percent--a fight against, as one Obama ad puts it, "a guy who had a Swiss bank account." Casting Romney as a plutocrat will be easy enough. But the president's claim as avenging populist may prove trickier, given his own deeply complicated, even conflicted, relationship with Big Finance.
Obama came into office vowing to end business as usual, and, in the gray post-crash dawn of 2009, nowhere did a reckoning with justice seem more due than in the financial sector. The public was shaken, and angry, and Wall Street seemed oblivious to its own culpability, defending extravagant pay bonuses even while accepting a taxpayer bailout. Obama channeled this anger, and employed its rhetoric, blaming the worldwide economic collapse on "the reckless speculation of bankers." Two months into his presidency, Obama summoned the titans of finance to the White House, where he told them, "My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks."
The bankers may have found the president's tone unsettling. Candidate Obama had been their guy, accepting vast amounts of Wall Street campaign money for his victories over Hillary Clinton and John McCain (Goldman Sachs executives ponied up $1 million, more than any other private source of funding in 2008). Obama far outraised his Republican rival, John McCain, on Wall Street--around $16 million to $9 million. As it turned out, Obama apparently actually meant what he said at that White House meeting--his administration effectively would stand between Big Finance and anything like a severe accounting. To the dismay of many of Obama's supporters, nearly four years after the disaster, there has not been a single criminal charge filed by the federal government against any top executive of the elite financial institutions.
"It's perplexing at best," says Phil Angelides, the Democratic former California treasurer who chaired the bipartisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. "It's deeply troubling at worst."
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Strikingly, federal prosecutions overall have risen sharply under Obama, increasing dramatically in such areas as civil rights and health-care fraud. But according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data-gathering organization at Syracuse University, financial-fraud prosecutions by the Department of Justice are at 20-year lows. They're down 39 percent since 2003, when fraud at Enron and WorldCom led to a series of prosecutions, and are just one third of what they were during the Clinton administration. (The Justice Department says the numbers would be higher if new categories of crime were counted.)
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Getty Images (3); Paul J. Richards / AFP-Getty Images
"There hasn't been any serious investigation of any of the large financial entities by the Justice Department, which includes the FBI," says William Black, an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, who, as a government regulator in the 1980s, helped clean up the S&L mess. Black, who is a Democrat, notes that the feds dealt with the S&L crisis with harsh justice, bringing more than a thousand prosecutions, and securing a 90 percent conviction rate. The difference between the government's response to the two crises, Black says, is a matter of will, and priorities. "You need heads on the pike," he says. "The first President Bush's orders were to get the most prominent, nastiest frauds, and put their heads on pikes as a demonstration that there's a new sheriff in town."
Obama delivered heated rhetoric, but his actions signaled different priorities. Had Obama wanted to strike real fear in the hearts of bankers, he might have appointed former special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald or some other fire-breather as his attorney general. Instead, he chose Eric Holder, a former Clinton Justice official who, after a career in government, joined the Washington office of Covington & Burling, a top-tier law firm with an elite white-collar defense unit. The move to Covington, and back to Justice, is an example of Washington's revolving-door ritual, which, for Holder, has been lucrative--he pulled in $2.1 million as a Covington partner in 2008, and $2.5 million (including deferred compensation) when he left the firm in 2009.
Related
Peter Schweizer: Congress's Corruption Racket
Putting a Covington partner--he spent nearly a decade at the firm--in charge of Justice may have sent a signal to the financial community, whose marquee names are Covington clients. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Deutsche Bank are among the institutions that pay for Covington's legal advice, some of it relating to matters before the Department of Justice. But Holder's was not the only face at Justice familiar to Covington clients. Lanny Breuer, who had co-chaired the white-collar defense unit at Covington with Holder, was chosen to head the criminal division at Obama's Justice. Two other Covington lawyers followed Holder into top positions, and Holder's principal deputy, James Cole, was recruited from Bryan Cave LLP, another white-shoe firm with A-list finance clients.
Justice's defenders point out that prosecuting financial crime is a complicated matter requiring the highly specialized expertise found in the white-collar defense bar. But some suggest there is also the potential for conflicting interest when the department's top officials come from lucrative law practices representing the very financial institutions that Justice is supposed to be investigating. "And that's where they're going back to," says Black. "Everybody knows there is a problem with that." (Two members of Holder's team have already returned to Covington.) A spokesperson for Covington was not available for comment. (Newsweek uses the firm as outside counsel.)
Top bankers after meeting with Obama, who told them “my administration is the only thing standing between you and the pitchforks.” (Mark Wilson / Getty Images)
Justice's inaction regarding the big Wall Street firms is not for a lack of suspicious activity. Three different government entities exhaustively examined the practices that contributed to the financial collapse, and each has referred its findings to the department for possible criminal investigation. One such matter involved a 2007 transaction by Goldman Sachs, in which Goldman created an investment, based on mortgage-backed securities, that seemed designed to fail. Goldman allowed a client who was betting against the mortgage market to help shape the investment instrument, which was called Abacus 2007-AC1; then both Goldman and the client bet against the investment without informing other clients (whose investments were wagers on its success) how the securities included in the portfolio were selected. These uninformed clients lost more than $1 billion on the investment. In 2010, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Goldman with securities fraud "for making materially misleading statements and omissions" in marketing the investment. The SEC, which conducts only civil litigation, referred the case to Justice for criminal investigation.
A year later, in April 2011, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Democrat Carl Levin, after a two-year inquiry, issued a fat report detailing several transactions, including Goldman's Abacus deal, that Levin and his staff believed should be investigated by Justice as possible crimes. The subcommittee made a formal referral to the department (as did the federal Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, chaired by Phil Angelides), and Levin publicly stated his view that criminal inquiry was warranted. Goldman executives, including the firm's chief executive officer, Lloyd Blankfein, started hiring defense lawyers.
Meanwhile, Obama's political operation continued to ask Wall Street for campaign money. A curious pattern developed. A Newsweek examination of campaign finance records shows that, in the weeks before and after last year's scathing Senate report, several Goldman executives and their families made large donations to Obama's Victory Fund and related entities, some of them maxing out at the highest individual donation allowed, $35,800, even though 2011 was an electoral off-year. Some of these executives were giving to Obama for the first time.
Justice insists that political operations such as fundraising are kept strictly distanced from the department, in order to avoid even the appearance of political influence. But the attorney general and his team are not unfamiliar with the process; Holder was himself an Obama bundler--a fundraiser who collected large sums from various donors--in 2008, as were several other lawyers who joined him at Justice.
It would be a leap to infer these Goldman contributions were made--or received--as quid pro quo for dropping a criminal investigation. Still, the situation constitutes what one Justice veteran acknowledged is a "bad set of facts."
Maintaining public faith in the justice system is one of the reasons why people such as Angelides continue to call for a rigorous criminal investigation into Wall Street. "I think it's fundamental that people in this country need to feel that the justice system is for everyone--that there's not one system for those people of enormous wealth and power, and one for everyone else," he says.
In July 2010, three months after the SEC charged Goldman in the Abacus case, the agency reached a settlement with the firm. Goldman agreed to pay $550 million, but admitted no wrongdoing. The agency touted the amount of the fine as the biggest ever--but to Goldman it was a relative pittance. The fine amounted to about 4 percent of the sum that Goldman paid its executives in bonuses ($12.1 billion) in 2007, the year of the Abacus transaction.
Earlier this year, it was reported that Goldman executives were feeling optimistic that the Justice inquiry would not result in criminal charges against the firm, or its executives. Goldman declined to comment on the case, as did the Justice Department. But spokeswoman Alisa Finelli said, "When we find credible evidence of intentional criminal conduct--by Wall Street executives or others--we will not hesitate to charge it. However, we can and will only bring charges when the facts and the law convince us that we can prove a crime beyond a reasonable doubt." Holder, speaking in February at Columbia University, said that while "we found that much of the conduct that led to the financial crisis was unethical and irresponsible ... we have also discovered that some of this behavior--while morally reprehensible--may not necessarily have been criminal."
Midway through his State of the Union speech this year, President Obama announced plans "to create a special unit of federal prosecutors and leading state attorneys general to expand our investigations into the abusive lending and packaging of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis," and he vowed again to "hold accountable those who broke the law."
That portion of the speech had a familiar ring. In November 2009, Attorney General Holder, with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner at his side, announced the creation of another special unit--the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force--that was similarly charged with investigating securities and mortgage fraud that contributed to the financial meltdown. Since its creation, that task force, which critics say was drastically under-resourced, has produced not a single conviction (or even indictment) of a major Wall Street player related to the financial disaster.
Some who heard the president's State of the Union speech thought they discerned a hidden purpose behind his new "special unit"--the Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities Working Group, as it would be called. The day before the president's speech, state attorneys general from around the country met in Chicago with Justice officials to discuss a proposed national settlement with five major banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, over questionable foreclosure practices. The administration was pushing the settlement, as were the banks. But a handful of attorneys general were resisting the settlement, believing it gave too much away to the banks--including protection from mortgage-related investigations that were still unfolding. These holdout state officials were supported by a coalition of activists, who argued that the banks would never make meaningful concessions--such as the reduction of principal on underwater mortgages--unless they faced the threat of investigation.
One of those activists, Mike Gecan, of the Industrial Areas Foundation, says he was disheartened when he heard Obama's speech, and the news that New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman would be co-chairing the new "working group." Schneiderman, who is in the tough-guy mold of his predecessors, Eliot Spitzer and Andrew Cuomo, had been a leader of the state holdouts; now, Gecan feared, Schneiderman had been co-opted by the Chicago Way. "I'm from Chicago, I've seen this game played my whole life," he says.
Gecan's view seemed vindicated two weeks later, when Obama announced that the settlement had been reached.
Nearly three months later, it is not clear what, if any, progress the "working group" has made. The unit was only promised 55 investigators, attorneys, and support staff--a tiny fraction of the resources afforded to similar groups investigating the S&L and Enron/WorldCom scandals--and it is not clear that even that commitment has materialized. "I think what happened is what usually happens: the administration rope-a-doped," says Gecan. "There's no office, there's no director, there's no staff, there's no space, there's no phone."
Last month, Gecan wrote an op-ed article for the New York Daily News, calling upon Schneiderman to quit the group in protest (Schneiderman's office did not respond to requests for an interview). In the meantime, Gecan said, he will work to bring pressure on Obama. "There's a little presidential campaign that's going to start, and we're going to make this issue central to this campaign," he said.
It may be, as the attorney general points out, that Wall Street was greedy, stupid, and immoral, without actually breaking any laws. But the powers of the Justice Department are immense, and a more aggressive prosecutor surely could have found cases to make. Black, the UMKC professor, says the conduct could well have violated federal fraud statutes--"securities fraud for false disclosures, wire and mail fraud for making false representations about the quality of the loans and derivatives they were selling, bank fraud for false representations to the regulators."
The absence of prosecutions, and the fact that the cops on the beat hail from the place that represents the banks, does not sit right with many who hoped Obama would fulfill his promise to hold Big Finance accountable. The left's frustration fuels the Occupy movement, and chills the Democratic base. And it gives Romney, the career capitalist, an opening he is avidly exploiting.
Through last fall, Obama had collected more donations from Wall Street than any of the Republican candidates; employees of Bain Capital donated more than twice as much to Obama as they did to Romney, who founded the firm. By this spring, however, resolution had come to the GOP contest, and Wall Street could see a friendly alternative to Obama. While most of Romney's contributions so far come mainly from the financial sector, Obama's donations from Wall Street have dropped sharply.
But this turn may yet help Obama, playing into the Romney-as-plutocrat theme. Just the other week, the Republican candidate quietly slipped into a fundraiser at the home of hedge-fund king John Paulson, who made a killing shorting mortgage futures (including about $1 billion on the Abacus deal). The Obama campaign pounced. Obama may yet fully liberate his inner populist--that Obama who in 2010 in an off-Prompter moment uttered a sentence that made blood run cold on Wall Street: "I do think at a certain point you've made enough money."
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Group Headed By Weather Underground Terrorist Gets DOJ Grants (Bernardine Dohrn)
Judicial Watch ^ | May 8, 2012
Posted on Tuesday, May 08, 2012 5:35:51 PM by jazusamo
The Justice Department has awarded a group headed by a domestic terrorist and one-time FBI fugitive with close ties to President Obama hundreds of thousands of dollars to reduce racial disparities in the juvenile justice system.
This is a story you likely won’t see in the mainstream media, but a conservative political magazine exposed it this week. The Department of Justice (DOJ) has given $400,000 in grants to an organization ( W. Haywood Burns Institute) that blames disproportionately high criminal behavior among minority juvenile delinquents on discrimination. The San Francisco-based nonprofit describes itself as a leading organization in the field of juvenile justice and ethnic and racial disparities reduction.
Among the institute’s board of directors is Bernardine Dohrn, a longtime Obama supporter and fundraiser and proud member of the Weather Underground, a radical group that planted bombs on the Capitol, Pentagon and other government buildings to protest U.S. policy. Dohrn’s violent actions earned her a spot on the FBI’s most wanted fugitives list in the 1970s. She eventually served probation and spent some time in jail for refusing to cooperate with an investigation.
Dohrn is married to President Obama’s close friend and political mentor, William Ayers, the co-founder of the Weather Underground. Like his beloved wife, Ayers was also an FBI fugitive who has proudly admitted planting bombs on government buildings during the Vietnam era. In fact, he has publicly said that he doesn’t regret his terrorist acts and that in fact his group “didn’t do enough.”
The couple has long supported Obama’s political career by donating money to his campaigns and hosting fundraisers at their Chicago home. For years they all hung out in the same political and social circles, lived in the same Chicago neighborhood and Obama and Ayers served on the board of a leftwing Chicago nonprofit. However, during the 2008 presidential campaign Obama worked hard to distance himself from his terrorist pals.
Using the generous DOJ grant as a guide, it appears that Dohrn is still benefitting from the relationship. How else could one explain the DOJ grant? As the article that broke the story points out, Dohrn has a history with the Justice Department and it isn’t good. Why would the agency responsible for enforcing the law and defending the country against the attacks she once carried out give her taxpayer dollars? Americans will have to guess because the feds and Dohrn refused to comment for the story.
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Obama's DOJ And Wall Street: Too Big For Jail?
By Peter Schweizer
US Attorney General Eric Holder (Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)
“The appearance of conflict is as dangerous to public confidence in the administration of justice as true conflict itself. Justice must not only be done; justice must also be seen to be done.” –Lloyd Cutler, 1981
Over the past three years, the Department of Justice has filed criminal charges against hundreds of ordinary Americans for financial fraud. But no one from the largest banks and firms on Wall Street have been similarly charged for events leading up to the financial crisis. Could that be because those banks are clients of the firms from which top DOJ officials hail?
In November 2009, President Obama established the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force to deal with financial crimes related to the 2008 financial crisis. As Attorney General Eric Holder, chairman of the Task Force, explained at the time: “This Task Force’s mission is not just to hold accountable those who helped bring about the last financial meltdown, but to prevent another meltdown from happening. We will be relentless in our investigation of corporate and financial wrongdoing, and will not hesitate to bring charges, where appropriate, for criminal misconduct on the part of businesses and business executives.”
None of that happened. The Task Force is still humming along almost three years later, but its highlighted successes are less “business executives” than ordinary Americans who have had the book thrown at them. From their website:
“Three Connecticut Women Charged with Overseeing ‘Gifting Tables’ Pyramid Scheme.” Three women in their 50s and 60s have been indicted on conspiracy, tax and wire fraud charges. “These arrests should send a strong message to all who threaten the financial health of our communities,” said one federal agent.
Ten people in Las Vegas have been criminally charged with conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud in a “scheme to fraudulently control” Condominium Home Owners Associations. They have pled guilty and face up to 30 years in prison.
“Justice Department Sues Princeton Review for Claiming Reimbursement for Tutoring Services It Did Not Provide.” The educational publisher apparently billed the federal government for reimbursements in connection with a federally-funded program for underprivileged children.
“Alabama Real Estate Investor Agrees to Plead Guilty to Conspiracies to Rig Bids and Commit Mail Fraud for the Purchase of Real Estate at Public Foreclosure Auctions.” Steven Cox will get one year in prison because he and some friends agreed not to bid against each other at public auctions and then hold a second secret auction with the properties they purchased. This meant that they ‘artificially suppressed prices…[and] homeowners and others with a legal interest in rigged foreclosure properties receive less than the competitive price for the properties,” reads the Task Force press release. People in several other states have been similarly charged.
“Former Real Estate Appraiser Sentenced in Washington, D.C. to 65 months in Prison for Mortgage Fraud.” A property appraiser goes to jail for fraudulently manipulating mortgage applications while flipping real estate properties. The fraud scheme cost mortgage lenders $2.3 million. A Florida man was sentenced to 14 months in federal prison for obstructing an SEC investigation.
Certainly there have been opportunities to aggressively investigate criminal acts of fraud involving the largest banks and investment houses. The SEC has alleged that half a dozen banks “knowingly” passed fraudulent information along to government agencies and investors. The same charges have been leveled against several of the largest investment houses as it relates to subprime mortgages.
The SEC has accused a number of banks including JP Morgan, Wachovia Securities, UBS, and Bank of America, of “fraudulently” rigging municipal bond auctions by “entering into secret arrangements with bidding agents to get an illegal ‘last look’ at competitors’ bids.” And they won bids because “the bidding agent deliberately obtained non-winning bids from other provides, and it facilitated bids rigged for others to win by deliberately submitting non-winning bids.” All of these investment houses faced civil charges and paid fines. Meanwhile those fixing HOA elections or residential foreclosure auctions go to jail.
Why these two levels of justice? Could this disparity simply be a case that the big banks will fight charges more aggressively, thus making criminal prosecutions more difficult? Maybe. But it also undoubtedly has something to do with the fact that the top leadership at DOJ is drawn almost exclusively from White Collar Criminal Defense Practices at large firms that represent the very firms that Justice is supposed to be investigating. Covington and Burling, the firm from which both Attorney General Eric Holder and Associate Attorney General and head of the criminal division Lanny Breuer hail, has as its current clients Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, ING, Morgan Stanley, UBS, and MF Global among others. Other top Justice officials have similar connections through their firms.
White Collar Criminal Defense work has become one of the few revenue bright spots for large firms. According to a detailed analysis by the Professor Charles D. Weisselberg of UC-Berkeley in the Arizona Law Review, there is big money to be made because “this area of practice is not susceptible to the same types of cost controls” that apply to other legal work. In short, white collar criminal defense work is “enormously lucrative.”
Eric Holder left Covington with a $2.5 million salary and a seven figure bonus. If he returns to Covington (as two of his colleagues at Justice already have) a similar payday certainly awaits him.
Lloyd Cutler, who served as White House Counsel to President Carter, argued in the Robert Tyre Jones Memorial Lecture on Legal Ethics back in 1981 that “integrity is not enough.” It’s not enough to simply proclaim that Justice officials will do the right thing. You need to know that they are making decisions that don’t have ethical entanglements. He argued that conflicts arise “when a private lawyer enters government service and a matter comes before him affecting his former law firm or its clients.” Relationships are key at this level of the legal profession and he warned that lawyers at a firm like Covington “operate at somewhat more distance, their friendships and loyalties—not to mention their financial interests—tie them closely to the corporate officers.”
Peter Schweizer is the author of “Throw Them All Out”.
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This article is available online at:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/05/07/obamas-doj-and-wall-street-too-big-for-jail
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House to Eric Holder: Stop lying to us
The Hill ^ | 05/09/12 | Pete Kasperowicz
Posted on Thursday, May 10, 2012 11:59:35 AM by neverdem
The House Wednesday evening voted overwhelmingly to prevent the Justice Department from using taxpayer funds to lie to Congress.
The vote came in a Wednesday evening series of amendments to a bill, H.R. 5326, funding the Justice Department for 2013. Members approved the language in a 381-41 vote; all 41 "no" votes came from Democrats, although 142 Democrats voted with Republicans in support of the amendment.
The vote reflects the ongoing frustration Republicans — and apparently some Democrats — have with Attorney General Eric Holder.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) offered the novel funding limitation amendment earlier in the day. The amendment was a reaction to arguments that Justice lied when it told Congress in February 2011 that it had no involvement in a gun-walking program called Operation Fast and Furious.
That program allowed guns to enter Mexico and fall into the hands of drug cartel members. Justice later retracted the 2011 letter and acknowledged that the so-called Fast and Furious program was flawed, but Republicans have since argued that Attorney General Eric Holder has stonewalled their requests for more information about the operation.
"What is totally and wholly unacceptable … is that the Department of Justice would knowingly and willfully present a letter back to Congress on Feb. 4 [2011], that was so inaccurate and so wrong," Chaffetz said during debate. "They basically lied to Congress, and it took months and months and months and months to get to the point where they finally had to rescind that letter."
Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Texas) also accused Holder and others who "stonewall at best, and lie more likely," and Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) fumed that no one has been punished for the scandal.
"There hasn't been a demotion, there hasn't been a firing, there hasn't been a sanction, there hasn't been a frowny-face on a performance evaluation," he said.
The House also approved other controversial funding limitation amendments, including one to prevent Justice from defending the 2010 healthcare law, and to prevent Justice from suing states over over voter ID laws.
Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) proposed the amendment to block the use of funds in the bill to defend the 2010 healthcare law in court. That amendment was approved in a partisan 229-194 vote.
Rep. David Schweikert (R-Ariz.) offered language preventing Justice from taking actions against states that require photo identification at voting booths. His language was added in a 232-190 vote.
An amendment from Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) to prevent Justice from spending money to litigate against states on behalf of the National Labor Relations Board in cases relating to secret ballots in union elections was approved 232-192. And, language from Rep. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.) to prevent Justice from being party to court settlements involving the removal of funds from mortgage backed securities trusts was approved 238-185.
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Sen. Cornyn: Holder’s ‘arrogance knows no bounds’
The Daily Caller ^ | May 9, 2012 | Matthew Boyle
Posted on May 11, 2012 4:25:57 AM EDT by yoe
Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn told The Daily Caller on Wednesday that he thinks Attorney General Eric Holder needs to comply with the congressional subpoena demanding documents relating to Operation Fast and Furious.
Cornyn also said he thinks Holder’s demonstrable failure to comply with House oversight committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa’s subpoena for Fast and Furious documents is an indicator of his overall disregard for congressional oversight. “It’s abundantly clear that when it comes to cooperating with Congress, the Attorney General’s arrogance knows no bounds,” Cornyn told TheDC.
President Barack Obama now has a responsibility to step forward and make Holder comply with the subpoena, Cornyn added. He said Obama and Holder owe it the family of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry, who was murdered more than a year ago with Fast and Furious weapons the Obama administration allowed to get into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.
“President Obama should show leadership and direct the Attorney General to provide the Terry family with answers,” Cornyn said.
Issa served Holder with a subpoena on Oct. 12, 2011. The Attorney General has so far failed to comply with all 22 categories of the subpoena that requires him to provide Congress with documents relating to Fast and Furious. With 13 of the categories, Holder (has provided no documents) When it comes to the other nine subpoena categories, Holder (is still far from compliant,) , as TheDC reported late last week.
Contempt of Congress proceedings for Holder appear to be on the immediate horizon if he continues failing to comply with the subpoena.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailycaller.com ...
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House Votes to Limit DOJ Funding Unless Holder Comes Clean (142 Democrats votes for it)
American Thinker ^ | 05/11/2012 | M Catherine Evans
The House voted on a controversial funding limit amendment Wednesday evening to stop Attorney General Holder from lying to Congress.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) Comments the move to cut off Holder's DOJ allowance for 2013 unless he tells the truth about the gun walking operation known as Fast and Furious.
The amendment to H.R. 5326, an appropriations bill funding Holder's agency for 2013, was in response to a February 4, 2011 letter to Congress in which DOJ officials denied any involvement in Operation Fast and Furious. Months later after damaging contradictions and discrepancies surfaced the Department was forced to rescind the letter.
In a 381-41 vote, House members including 142 Democrats, overwhelmingly sided with Chaffetz. The peoples' representatives decided taxpayer monies should not be used to support liars.
But the best Comments of outrage over the DOJ's above-the law attitude came from Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC).
"There hasn't been a demotion, there hasn't been a firing, there hasn't been a sanction, there hasn't been a frowny-face on a performance evaluation."
I'm thinking there are some politicians who have reached their limit of patience with Holder and Company. Not even one darn frowny-face.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
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Meet the Radical DOJ Lawyer Forcing Florida to Keep Foreigners on the Voter Rolls
PJ Media ^ | June 1, 2012 | J. Christian Adams
Posted on June 1, 2012 4:46:32 PM EDT by jazusamo
Yesterday, Eric Holder’s Voting Section ordered Florida to stop purging foreigners from the voter rolls. Two weeks ago, Florida found 53,000 dead voters registered to vote. Florida has also found non-citizens on the voter rolls and Secretary of State Ken Detzner has started the process of removing them.
Not so fast, says Eric Holder’s DOJ.
In a letter to Detzner, the DOJ says to stop removing foreigners from the rolls. The Voting Section makes a dubious argument under Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act, a law the Obama administration has refused to enforce because of ideological opposition. The letter notes that Elise Shore is the attorney behind the letter.
Eureka!
Elise Shore
Recall that PJ Media produced the Every Single One series that exposed the partisan DOJ hiring practices and the radicalism of the DOJ Civil Rights Division lawyers hired by the Obama administration.
What do we know about Elise Shore from the installment about the Voting Section?
Elise Shore . Ms. Shore came to the Voting Section by way of the “Southern Coalition for Social Justice,” where she worked as a legal consultant focusing on “voting rights, immigrant rights, and other civil rights and social justice issues.” The far left-wing positions of this group are nicely summarized on its website. Ms. Shore also made a $1,000 contribution to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.
Before joining the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, she worked for more than two years as a Regional Counsel for MALDEF [Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund]. There, she was an outspoken critic of Georgia’s voter ID law and well as its proof of citizenship requirements for voter registration (which, incidentally, have been found to be non-discriminatory by a federal court) and described how heartened she was that the Civil Rights Division had objected to the registration law under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. But her joy must have been fleeting: the Division later capitulated and withdrew its objection after Georgia filed a federal declaratory judgment action. It will be interesting to see if Shore can put her politics to the side in her role as the Voting Section’s point of contact for all redistricting submissions in the state of Florida.
It looks like Ms. Shore wasn’t able to set aside MALDEF-style radicalism, even after she started working for the taxpayers of the United States. Sadly, this private radicalism has metastasized into radical open-borders public policy. Not only does the DOJ stop states from enforcing their laws pertaining to illegal immigration, the DOJ is forcing Florida to keep non-citizens on the voter rolls. We have entered strange and dangerous times.
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Holder's Racial Incitement [Wall St. J Editorial]
Wall St. J ^ | May 31, 2012
Posted on June 1, 2012 10:28:21 PM EDT by Steelfish
May 31, 2012 Holder's Racial Incitement When looking for the Attorney General's motives, think lower.
The United States of America has a black President whose chief law enforcement officer, Attorney General Eric Holder, is also black. They have a lot of political power. So how are they using it? Well, one way is to assert to black audiences that voter ID laws are really attempts to disenfranchise black Americans. And liberals think Donald Trump's birther fantasies are offensive?
"In my travels across this country, I've heard a consistent drumbeat of concern from citizens, who—often for the first time in their lives—now have reason to believe that we are failing to live up to one of our nation's most noble ideals," Mr. Holder said Wednesday in a speech to the Council of Black Churches. Voter ID laws and white discrimination, he added, mean that "some of the achievements that defined the civil rights movement now hang in the balance."
That's right. The two most powerful men in America are black, two of the last three Secretaries of State were black, numerous corporate CEOs and other executives are black, and minorities of many races now win state-wide elections in states that belonged to the Confederacy, but the AG implies that Jim Crow is on the cusp of a comeback.
It's demeaning to have to dignify this argument with facts, but here goes. Voter ID laws have been found by the courts not to be an undue burden under the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution. The landmark Supreme Court opinion, upholding an Indiana law in 2008, was written for a six-member majority by that noted right-winger, John Paul Stevens.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
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If Romney gets the nod (and, if things keep going like this, it's almost a lock), I hope one of the FIRST things he does, after being sworn into office, is to put that goof Holder in chains and haul his sorry carcass to Leavenworth, so he can master the art of making little rocks out of big rocks.
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DOJ sues Las Vegas casino for screening non-citizen workers
Examiner.com ^ | 06/01/2012 | Jim Kouri
Posted on June 2, 2012 6:33:02 PM EDT by aimhigh
While proponents of immigration enforcement have been told that the federal government monitors the hiring of illegal aliens by the private sector, including adherence to the federal employment verification (I-9) program, Attorney General Eric Holder's Justice Department appears to have made a decision to penalize organizations that zealously comply.
For example, on Thursday the Justice Department announced that it filed a civil lawsuit against the Tuscany Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, accusing the company of engaging in "a pattern or practice of discrimination in the employment eligibility verification and re-verification process."
(Excerpt) Read more at examiner.com ...
Dear fucking god. Fu Obama and holder and every disgusting c unt who voted for you.
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Who Will Stop the Lawless Obama Justice Department?
scottfactor.com ^ | 06/05/2012 | Gina Miller
It is a painful, heartbreaking thing to watch your country fall in slow motion. It is gut-wrenching to stare helplessly as a communist-infiltrated United States federal government operates lawlessly on a daily basis. In this ever-growing darkness, we look for spots of light, signs of hope that somehow we can turn around this full-frontal assault on America. We look for a miracle in November to prevent the theft of the presidential election.
Not that we will ever stop fighting for America as founded, but it may be too late to restore our nation, because corruption and immorality run to its core. The infestation of communist operatives in the three branches of our federal government and all its agencies is so pervasive that it would literally take a fiery revolution to oust them, or at least some major miracles during elections. Every level of our leadership is occupied, from the criminal fraud in the White House on down.
One of the most glaringly lawless, commie-infested offices is the Department of Justice (DOJ), the supposed king law enforcement entity of the land. Yet, here is perhaps the most criminal Justice Department in American history, under the detestable Attorney General Eric Holder. Whether we consider Holder’s handling of New Black Panther voter intimidation from the 2008 presidential elections, or his refusal to defend the federal Defense of Marriage Act (which another groups of radicals on the federal bench has just ruled “unconstitutional”), or his culpability in the deadly Fast and Furious gun-running scheme, how could we imagine a more corrupt, American “law enforcement” entity? Do not answer that, because we know it could always get worse, and I am certain it will get worse if Barack Obama (or whatever his name is) is “voter frauded” back into the presidency in November.
Eric Holder is implementing a radical leftist program in our country. One of the big areas in which he is inflicting this campaign is in his criminal handling of our nation’s immigration laws. Another area is in his attacks on the states’ efforts to protect the integrity of elections. Holder knows no illegal alien that he is not willing to defend against our nation’s own rightful immigration laws. Holder knows no state that he is not willing to sue if the state dares to uphold the immigration laws of our land. Holder knows no voter identification laws that he is not willing to block. This desperately wicked man is a clear and present danger to our great Republic. In a sane world, Eric Holder would be in prison for treason against the United States.
This past week we saw even more outrages by the DOJ; in one case, its voting division. On Thursday, the head of the voting division ordered the state of Florida to stop purging its voter rolls of ineligible voters. This is utter insanity. The DOJ is trying to use the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which sought to protect minorities, to justify its stupid demand. It is also claiming Florida is violating the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, the so-called “Motor Voter Act,” which was inspired by the radical, socialist duo Cloward and Piven.
The Miami Herald reported that Florida may fight the DOJ’s interpretation of federal voter law.
How can anyone not see that this administration is clearly at war with America itself? Florida is purging its voter rolls of illegal aliens, dead people and others who are ineligible to vote in Florida elections. Who in their right mind could possibly be against this? No one. Eric Holder and the rest of the commie freaks in this administration are not in their right mind, because they have no right mind. They are deranged enemies of America, and they are working their tails off trying to enable as much election fraud as they possibly can. They need all the fraudulent votes they can get their dirty hands on, because there is no way Obama can win a legal, honest election—even if he were actually eligible to be President in the first place!
It would be such a breath of fresh air if Florida told the DOJ goons to stick their foolish demand in their pipe and smoke it. As of this writing, there are no firm reports of Florida’s response to the DOJ. Of course, if Florida tells Holder to go pound sand, the DOJ will simply sue, just like they sued a Las Vegas casino last week.
Yes, the lawsuit maniacs at the DOJ are again burning up the court system against the Tuscany Hotel and Casino. If the DOJ sues you, then you know you must be doing something right. In this case, Tuscany was trying to carefully screen their job applicants to weed out illegal aliens. Oh, the horror! Tuscany only wants to employ American citizens. What a concept! It is a concept that is unacceptable to the criminal rats in the DOJ.
But, why is the DOJ pulling this stunt on this one casino? The answer could be the pure, vindictive thuggery of this gangster Obama regime.
As Jim Kouri wrote at Examiner.com,
“Some believe this lawsuit is nothing more than payback by the Obama DOJ since earlier this year the Tuscany Hotel and Casino booked a special conference by a law enforcement group that was not favorable to the Obama administration. The Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) has stated their goal is to ‘take back America from the unlawful incursions and overreach of state and federal governments and their agencies.’
Speakers at the event included Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Sheriff Bradley D. Rodgers, Sheriff Richard Mack, and Larry Pratt, founder and executive director of Gun Owners of America, none of whom are popular in the Obama White House or DOJ.”
So, when are the states, American businesses and the American people going to stand up to these despotic enemies of our country who have taken over our government? When will the states stand up to anti-American federal judges and their insane court rulings? When will we finally say to the Obama administration, “You’ve made your ruling, now let’s see if you can enforce it”?
It is no exaggeration to say that these people in this administration are on an aggressive mission to destroy this nation—from our Constitution to our economy to our freedoms, everything we hold dear is in their commie crosshairs. Many of us have been sounding like a broken record as we have been repeating ourselves on this point since before Obama was installed in the presidency.
In an American Thinker column from November 2009, Jim Simpson bluntly stated,
“These people are our enemies. They don't use guns, yet, but they are just as dangerous, determined, and duplicitous as the communists we faced in the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, and bush wars across the globe, and the Nazis we faced in World War II.
It is time we fully internalized and digested this fact, with all its ugly ramifications. These people have violated countless laws and could be prosecuted, had we the political power. Not only are their policies unconstitutional, but deliberately so -- the goal being to make the Constitution irrelevant. Their spending is off the charts and will drive us into hyperinflation, but it could be rescinded, had we the political power. These policies are toxic, but they could be stopped and reversed, had we the political power. Their ideologies are poisonous, but they could be exposed for what they are, with long jail sentences as an object lesson, had we the political power.”
This is what I keep saying is like trying to run in a nightmare, where your feet feel almost rooted to the ground: this desperate feeling of helplessness in the face of such blatantly criminal vermin in the Obama administration who are running a scorched earth campaign on our nation. If only we had the political power to bring worldly justice to them, to expel them from office, to strip them of power, to make them pay for their crimes against our country with the loss of their freedom.
I am still praying for that miracle in November’s elections, with a stronger lead in the House and a resounding super-majority victory for us in the Senate. Even though the thought of Mitt Romney being our nominee makes me sick, four more years of Obama and his minions would be grave for our nation.
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Streaming this racist communist pofs testimony today. Holder and all of the thugs on the panel providing him cover belong in jail. Disgusting.
Its like this country is being run like Zimbabwe with these thugs in power.
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BUMP.
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Obama Suing Florida - and Vice Versa - Over Voter Registration
Townhall.com ^ | June 11, 2012 | Kevin Glass
Posted on June 11, 2012 10:27:02 PM EDT by Kaslin
The state of Florida recently engaged in a campaign to fight voter fraud, combing through their voter rolls to weed out illegitimately-registered voters. While they've been accused of invalidating legal voters' registrations, the effort has been having some modicum of success.
n the last few days, the Division of Elections released a list of the names of 86 voters it says have been removed by local supervisors because they were non-citizens between April 11 and June 8. About half of them are listed as having voted.
That, backers of the purge effort say, proves the need for the move, because it shows that some non-citizens have indeed registered and cast votes.
Florida Governor Rick Scott has been promoting his state's law as a necessary measure, especially absent the federal government's responsibility to combat voter fraud. But now, the Obama Administration is alleging that Florida is violating the Voting Rights Act and the National Voter Registration Act.
In an interview with Fox News on Monday, Scott also defended the initiative. He denied that the purge could unfairly target Latino residents, and he said he's just trying to fairly enforce the law.
"We need to have fair elections in our state. I want to make sure that when we have elections ... not one person's vote gets diluted by somebody that doesn't have the right to vote," Scott told Fox News. "We're doing the right thing. ... We have people that are voting illegally in our races -- that's not right."
As we had with Arizona and SB 1070, a red state is taking the responsibility on itself to enforce laws that the federal government is allegedly not enforcing - and the Obama Administration has responded in kind with another lawsuit.
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Eric Holder Shows Nothing But Contempt For The Truth In Fast And Furious Scandal
investors.com ^ | 11 June, 2012 | NA
Posted on June 11, 2012 8:47:16 PM EDT by marktwain
The Law: A House committee has announced a June 20 vote on whether Attorney General Eric Holder is in contempt of Congress for withholding documents in the "Fast and Furious" scandal. It can't happen soon enough.
For more than a year, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has labored to find out the truth of White House involvement in the blood-drenched debacle known as "Fast and Furious."
For now, all that's known is the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives intentionally let straw purchasers buy 2,000 deadly weapons from U.S. gun dealers, and then let them "walk" across the border to arm Mexico's murderous cartels.
The official story has been the agency was just trying to trace them. Curiously, it has made no effort to do so.
It looks like a fig leaf against evidence pointing to a White House effort to encourage mayhem in Mexico as a means of building political momentum for gun control in the U.S., the old Obama administration pattern of politics taking precedence over duty to country.
Yet Holder and his White House bosses claim nobody knew a thing and the ATF was just full of bunglers.
Whatever the truth, the Justice Department is hiding something. Holder and his minions have withheld documents since February 2011 — about the time they were going into damage-control mode over the scandal — and these could reveal the truth about what the White House knew. Instead, they've stonewalled Congress.
Holder himself has misstated and backtracked on claims to the House Oversight Committee in the past year, while a National Security Council official who's advocated gun control in the past — the just-resigned Dan Restrepo — was in receipt of ATF emails.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...
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Holder Refuses to Provide Testimony on Kagan’s Involvement in Obamacare
cnsnews.com ^ | 6/12/12 | Terence P. Jeffrey
Posted on June 12, 2012 8:54:14 PM EDT by ColdOne
These are three of the eight questions that Sessions submitted to Holder on Nov. 15, 2011 to be included as part of the official record of Holder’s testimony in an oversight hearing that the Senate Judiciary Committee held on Nov. 8, 2011. Sessions is a senior member of the committee.
Holder did not provide the committee with a formal response to Session's questions until June 7, 2012—seven months after Sessions submitted them.
When he finally did officially respond, Holder did not answer any of the questions.
Instead, in responding to each, he simply referred the Judiciary Committee to a letter Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich had sent to Sessions on Feb. 24. This letter, in turn, responded to a letter Sessions had sent to Holder on Jan. 31 noting that Holder had not yet answered the questions that Session had submitted in November.
Weich’s February letter informed Sessions directly that the Justice Department would decline to answer his questions to Holder about Kagan’s involvement in Obamacare.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnsnews.com ...
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Meet the Radical DOJ Lawyer Suing Florida to Keep Foreigners on Voter Rolls
PJ Media ^ | 6-12-2012 | J. Christian Adams
Posted on June 12, 2012 10:41:22 PM EDT by smoothsailing
June 12, 2012
Meet the Radical DOJ Lawyer Suing Florida to Keep Foreigners on Voter Rolls
J. Christian Adams
The DOJ filed a complaint against Florida today to stop Florida from removing ineligible non-citizens from the voter rolls. (Yesterday DOJ, disgracing long established tradition, leaked this impending news to a sycophantic blogger.) Florida has already discovered noncitizens who voted illegally in previous elections.
The lawsuit filed today seeks to stop Florida from purging non-citizens from Florida voting rolls. No word on whether Eric Holder’s Justice Department will be filing criminal charges against the foreigners who illegally registered to vote. Priorities lie elsewhere.
Let’s meet Jenigh Garrett, the radical DOJ Voting Section lawyer who filed the lawsuit today to stop Florida from removing non-citizens from the voter rolls. She is a long-time opponent of state election integrity laws, as are so many of the recent hires exposed by the PJ Media Every Single One series. From the report:
Jenigh Garrett: Ms. Garrett worked for approximately five years as an assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF), where she worked on voting-related litigation. She co-drafted the NAACP LDF’s amicus brief in Crawford v. Marion County Board of Elections, claiming that voter ID laws are unconstitutional (a position the Supreme Court rejected in an opinion by Justice John Paul Stevens).
Garrett also was a member of the organization’s litigation team in Hayden v. Paterson, arguing that felon disenfranchisement laws violate the Voting Rights Act (a position the Second Circuit rejected). She is a member of the American Constitution Society and recently gave a presentation at Yale Law School on “The Future of Black Legal Scholarship and Activism.” Although DOJ’s FOIA shop notably redacted her other activities on her resume, perhaps legislators in Virginia can ask her about them: she is the redistricting point of contact for the Commonwealth.
Jenigh Garrett
(Read at PJ Media about another lawyer on the complaint, Elise Shore).
I describe in detail in Injustice how the radical anti-election integrity agenda of the Left is now burrowed into the Voting Section at the Justice Department advancing this agenda using your tax dollars. Now these lawyers are perverting Section 8 of Motor Voter, a provision designed to fix the problems in Florida, not preserve them.
Two items of note. In the complaint, the DOJ did not bring the threatened case under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. DOJ claimed in a letter that the voter purge procedure had not been precleared by DOJ under the Voting Rights Act. People familiar with Florida’s election procedures tell me that threat was baseless, that all of the laws and rules had been precleared.
Lastly, PJ Media has been reporting for two years how the Eric Holder DOJ refuses to bring Section 8 cases under Motor Voter to force states to clean up their voter rolls. Indeed, I first broke news about these corrupt instructions in July 2010, instructions which DOJ has never specifically denied, because they can’t. A former Justice Department official tells me tonight it is “deliciously ironic that the first and only NVRA Section 8 case brought by the Justice Department is one seeking to block the removal of ineligible voters.”
I’m usually a fan of delicious irony, but this latest outrage from Obama’s embattled Attorney General marks a new corrupt low, even for him.
TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Extended News; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections; US: Florida; Click to Add Topic
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Eric Holder’s Corrupt Agenda
FrontPage Magazine ^ | June 14, 2012 | Arnold Ahlert
Posted on Thursday, June 14, 2012 7:45:20 AM by SJackson
- FrontPage Magazine - http://frontpagemag.com -
Eric Holder’s Corrupt Agenda
Posted By Arnold Ahlert On June 14, 2012 @ 12:50 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 3 Comments
On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced it was filing a lawsuit against Florida over the state’s push to clean its voter roles of dead and foreign voters. The move comes on the heels of Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA), the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, scheduling a vote by his panel on June 20th aimed at holding U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over documents in the Fast and Furious gunrunning scandal. While the corrupt practices of Holder’s DOJ may finally be getting the attention they deserve, it is also becoming apparent that the department is not just degrading the principles of law and order to advance a radical leftist agenda — but to enhance president’s Obama’s re-election chances by any means necessary.
The DOJ’s lawsuit against Florida is little more than the latest evidence of the highly politicized nature of the department and the man at its helm. As mentioned above, the state has been singled out for attempting to purge its voter rolls of non-citizens. Yet as testimony by former DOJ attorney J. Christian Adams to the House of Representatives revealed, the department has taken exactly the opposite approach with other states, “deliberately refusing to enforce Section 8 and require states to purge rolls because of philosophical disagreement with the purging statute.” He further testified that during his time in the Voting Section, “political appointees expressed open and outright hostility to enforcing Section 8.”
The DOJ’s sudden interest in enforcing Section 8 in Florida rests on two contentions. One, that Florida has conducted its effort “within the 90-day quiet period before an election for federal office established by the law” and that “Florida’s use of inaccurate and unreliable voter verification procedures violates the requirement in Section 8 of the NVRA that any such program be uniform and nondiscriminatory.”
Both contentions are easily debunked. On Tuesday, Republican Governor Rick Scott revealed that Florida has been forced to use state databases to cleanse voter rolls because the Department of Homeland Security has refused to allow his state access to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE), a national immigration database needed to confirm citizenship status. According to Scott, the DHS has stonewalled the state for nine months. This undercuts both of the DOJ’s arguments, even as it reveals the Orwellian nature of an Obama administration willing to deny Florida a more reliable database and timely access to it, while suing the state for “violations” it forced the state to preform.
Scott has taken notice. He announced that Florida will file suit for access. “We’ve done all the right things,” he said in an appearance on CNN’s “Starting Point.” “We’re put in a position where we don’t have a choice but to sue them to get access to a database…to make sure that your right as a citizen is not diluted by a non-citizen.” Scott also revealed the critical reason why. “We tried to use our own database to do it…even with that database, we’ve found 100 people not entitled to vote and we know 50 of them have voted.”
Florida is only the latest example of the blatant prejudice that emanates from the DOJ. Both Texas and South Carolina are being sued for enacting voter photo ID statutes despite a 6-3 ruling by the United States Supreme in 2008 upholding Indiana’s right to require such identification for voting. This implies that Eric Holder and company believe each state must file individual suits before SOTUS to achieve the same right.
The same prejudice is seen in lawsuits against states seeking to enforce immigration laws the DOJ routinely ignores. Arizona, Alabama, South Carolina, and Utah have all been targeted–even as not a single suit has been filed against any of the numerous “sanctuary cities” whose illegal alien-protecting statutes are unambiguous violations of federal immigration law. Taken as a whole the message is clear: anything that conflicts with the progressive agenda of the Obama administration becomes a target, while anything that accrues to it remains beneath the radar.
And the primary tactic for enforcing that message is crystal clear as well: delay, delay, delay. Delay the conclusion of a gunrunning scandal that may engulf high-ranking administration officials. Delay the implementation of voter photo ID requirements in defiance of a Supreme Court ruling permitting them. Delay the cleansing of tainted voter rolls that would weed out ineligible voters. Delay enforcing immigration laws in sanctuary cities and the implementation of laws designed to address illegal immigration. Delay for how long?
Until after the general election in November, at least.
With respect to voter ID laws, immigration statutes and voter rolls, such delays are likely a slam dunk. The wheels of justice grind slow, and there is no doubt that every effort will be made by the DOJ to appeal every decision that goes against them all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary. And until Darrell Issa finally reached the limit of his patience, it was virtually certain that the Fast and Furious investigation, already more than a year old, would have continued past next November as well.
It probably will anyway. Speaking before a Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Mr. Holder, much like Iranian nuclear negotiators, claimed he was willing to work out a compromise with the House Government and Oversight Committee. “I want to make sure it is very clear that I’m offering–I myself–to sit down with the [House] speaker, the chairman, with you and work our way through this in an attempt to avoid a constitutional crisis and come up with ways, creative ways, in which to make these materials available,” Holder told Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA). Grassley remained skeptical. “Here we are, one year later, and the Terry family is still waiting for answers, they’re still waiting for justice,” he said.
Yet Holder’s newfound attitude apparently resonated with Issa. Yesterday he sent a letter to Holder urging him to make the Committee an offer.
“Let me be clear–if the Department of Justice submits a serious proposal for how it intends to alter its refusal to produce critical documents subpoenaed by the Committee, I am ready and willing to meet to discuss your proposal,” Issa wrote. No other conditions were set by Issa, but Sen. Grassley kept up the pressure. He wants to see the 80,000 documents that were subpoenaed, of which the DOJ has so far produced only 7,600. Grassley told Fox News that he would be satisfied only “when they cough up” the rest of those documents.
As for timeliness regarding the investigation, i.e. the public disclosure of top secret national security secrets, forget it. Even with the appointment of a special prosecutor in the far less serious “outing” of CIA agent Valerie Plame, that investigation took two years. The president opposes the appointment of a special counsel in this case, leaving Eric Holder to conduct the investigation. Holder has appointed two prosecutors, Ronald Machen, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, and Rod Rosenstein, the U.S. attorney for the District of Maryland, to direct “separate probes that are already being conducted by the FBI.” The phrase separate probes suggests that, at some point those probes will have to be reconciled, undoubtedly lengthening the time of an investigation.
Whether the American public can put the pieces of these various efforts together remains to be seen. They’re certainly not going to get any help from the mainstream media. For example, CNN has characterized potential contempt charges against Holder as “politics,” while Tuesday marked the first time NBC news saw fit to cover Fast and Furious at all. Apparently some prominent players in the Fourth Estate are every bit as invested in obscuring reality as Eric Holder and the Obama administration. All of them remain fully committed to getting Barack Obama to the finish line in November relatively unscathed and unchallenged by legitimate concerns about the voting process.
And their tactic is as simple as it is corrupt. It is best described by an old aphorism: justice delayed is justice denied.
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The top three reasons Eric Holder should be held in contempt
dailycaller.com ^ | 14 June, 2012 | Rep. Paul Gosar
Posted on June 14, 2012 9:40:37 PM EDT by marktwain
On June 20, the House Oversight Committee will meet to decide whether to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress. All of this stems from Operation Fast and Furious, a government-run gun-running program that had no clear goals, no real oversight and, by many accounts, was intended to cause violence that could be used as a pretext to chip away at Americans’ Second Amendment rights. I predict that the House Oversight Committee, of which I am a member, will find him in contempt. That would be the right outcome. Here are the top three reasons why:
1) Holder won’t comply with our subpoena. Congress has been requesting Department of Justice records about Fast and Furious since March 2011. Getting no real voluntary cooperation (and getting a lot of double talk and delay), we issued a subpoena in October 2011. It is Holder’s refusal to comply with that subpoena in good faith that is bringing this vote to the committee. We are due over 10,000 documents.
2) Holder has been less than forthcoming. The attorney general has not been candid with the committee. Some say Holder has perjured himself on what he knew about Fast and Furious and when he knew it. He has had to issue one too many “corrections” to his testimony after the fact. Most famously, Holder’s department first told us that no gun-running had occurred, then once the truth was discovered, the DOJ “retracted” that testimony — after a year of misleading the people.
3) Holder hasn’t held anyone accountable. Guns distributed through this DOJ program have been used to kill Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry as well as hundreds of Mexicans. Holder has refused to accept responsibility for the deaths on both sides of the border and has refused to hold anyone under his authority, particularly political appointees, accountable.
Holder’s efforts to delay this investigation and mislead the House Oversight Committee are unprecedented. This is only the fourth time in the past 30 years that Congress has sought to hold an executive branch member in contempt, but, as I’ve noted, the contempt proceedings are warranted by the facts and, quite frankly, overdue.
Finally, I am the sponsor of H. Res. 490, which is seeking a vote of no confidence in Holder. Regardless of whether Holder is held in contempt, we should vote on my resolution of no confidence. So far, 114 members of Congress are supporting it. I have lost confidence in Holder and so have the American people.
Rep. Paul Gosar, a Republican, represents Arizona’s First Congressional District. He is a member of the United States House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
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Sorry Bro... Alberto Gonzalez, John Mitchell, and A. Mitchell Palmer were ALL worse.
Holder is a top 5 easily though.
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Sorry Bro... Alberto Gonzalez, John Mitchell, and A. Mitchell Palmer were ALL worse.
Holder is a top 5 easily though.
LOL. 3 dead border agents, 300 plus dead mexicans, but yeah Gonzales was worse. whatever. ::).
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LOL. 3 dead border agents, 300 plus dead mexicans, but yeah Gonzales was worse. whatever. ::).
Yes... Gonzales is worse.
He suspended habeus corpus, supported secret prisons, justification of torture, ignoring geneva conventions, and he pressed John Ashcroft in a hospital room to sign off even more extreme measures to "fight terrorism" and yeah... he's fucking worse.
You think sending guns over is bad... and I DO TOO... but to suspend habeus corpus against US fucking citizens is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what his job is supposed to be doing.
So um... Yes...worse.
But... fucking forget Gonzales if you want to and speak on my other mentions?
Hell, how about Harry Daugherty who escaped Prison because of 2... count 'em... 2 hung juries because of his fraud in the in the Teapot Dome Scandal of the 1920s.
So you still want to act like Holder is the "worst" ever?
Get out of here with that nonsense and look into some history of the position... There's a lot of shit bags worse than Holder who've held that office.
As I said.. Holder is like top 5.
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Holder has done the same thing by supporting NDAA, drone strikes on Americans, etc.
Yes... Gonzales is worse.
He suspended habeus corpus, supported secret prisons, justification of torture, ignoring geneva conventions, and he pressed John Ashcroft in a hospital room to sign off even more extreme measures to "fight terrorism" and yeah... he's fucking worse.
You think sending guns over is bad... and I DO TOO... but to suspend habeus corpus against US fucking citizens is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what his job is supposed to be doing.
So um... Yes...worse.
But... fucking forget Gonzales if you want to and speak on my other mentions?
Hell, how about Harry Daugherty who escaped Prison because of 2... count 'em... 2 hung juries because of his fraud in the in the Teapot Dome Scandal of the 1920s.
So you still want to act like Holder is the "worst" ever?
Get out of here with that nonsense and look into some history of the position... There's a lot of shit bags worse than Holder who've held that office.
As I said.. Holder is like top 5.
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Holder has done the same thing by supporting NDAA, drone strikes on Americans, etc.
Yes. But he didn't set the precedent.
Gonzales did that.
Also. I mentioned 3 other worse AGs in the history of the US and you ignored them completely.
Why?
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Yes. But he didn't set the precedent.
Gonzales did that.
Also. I mentioned 3 other worse AGs in the history of the US and you ignored them completely.
Why?
None come close to Holder.
Marc Rich pardon
FLAN terrorists
KSM trial in NYC
Black Panthers
Politicized the justice department beyond anything
Fast n Furious
Suing states over voter ID
Suing businesses based on bizarre interpretations of foreign law
and on and on and on and on.
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None come close to Holder.
Marc Rich pardon
FLAN terrorists
KSM trial in NYC
Black Panthers
Politicized the justice department beyond anything
Fast n Furious
Suing states over voter ID
Suing businesses based on bizarre interpretations of foreign law
and on and on and on and on.
I disagree.
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I disagree.
That is because you are being selective in your opinion based on hatred of bush, which is fine, but the facts disagree with you since holder did everything those people did, and then he coupled a whole of items even worse RESULTING IN THE DEATHS OF OVER 300 PEOPLE, which makes him worse.
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That is because you are being selective in your opinion based on hatred of bush, which is fine, but the facts disagree with you since holder did everything those people did, and then he coupled a whole of items even worse RESULTING IN THE DEATHS OF OVER 300 PEOPLE, which makes him worse.
Not at all.
Again... I've listed NUMEROUS AGs who are worse than Holder... NUMEROUS. They didn't work for Bush.
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Holder faces corruption scandal, too
WND ^ | 6-13-12 | Jerome R. Corsi
Posted on June 16, 2012 6:42:38 PM EDT by Tigen
At a time when millions of Americans are losing their homes as a result of questionable or fraudulent mortgage banking practices, Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department is being accused of blocking prosecution of a high-visibility real estate deal. Snip Allegedly, Holder and Breuer want to shield from federal criminal prosecution the bank, Credit Suisse Group AG, a client of the Washington-based law firm Covington & Burling, as well as key Democratic Party operatives suspected of playing a role in allegedly fraudulent mortgage financing and bank lending practices.
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
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Sorry Bro... Alberto Gonzalez, John Mitchell, and A. Mitchell Palmer were ALL worse.
Holder is a top 5 easily though.
agreed
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Tu
You're smarter than braindead baboons like SAMSON, andre et. al
Alberto Gonzalez suspended habeas corpus and set up secret prisons? ::)
C'mon brotha. I expect more from you.
Whether you consider Holder the worst of all time is matter of personal taste. I'm 28 years old and he is by far the worst in my lifetime.
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Border Patrol group calls for Holder’s resignation
The Washington Times ^ | June 18, 2012 | Jerry Seper
Posted on Monday, June 18, 2012 12:17:33 PM by jazusamo
The National Border Patrol Council, which represents all 17,000 of the agency's nonsupervisory agents, called Monday for the resignation of Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. for his role in the botched "Fast and Furious" gunrunning operation that resulted in the death of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
Council President George E. McCubbin III, a 25-year Border Patrol veteran, described Mr. Holder's actions in the case as "a slap in the face to all Border Patrol agents who serve this country," adding that the attorney general showed "an utter failure of leadership at the highest levels of government."
Two semi-automatic AK-47 assault weapons found at the scene of the Dec. 15, 2010, killing of Border Patrol Agent Brian A. Terry were traced by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to "straw buyers" who bought the weapons as part of the Fast and Furious investigation.
The agent died during a gunfight with heavily-armed Mexican bandits along the U.S.-Mexico border south of Tucson, Ariz.
More than 2,000 weapons purchased during the ATF-led Fast and Furious operation were "walked" to drug smugglers in Mexico. More than 600 of them still are missing.
Mr. McCubbin said Border Patrol agents are indoctrinated from day one of their training that "integrity is their most important trait and that without it, they have little use to the agency." He said agents who lie or show a lack of candor are disciplined quickly.
"The standard that applies to these agents should at a minimum be applied to those who lead them," Mr. McCubbin said. "If Eric Holder were a Border Patrol agent and not the attorney general, he would have long ago been found unsuitable for government employment and terminated."
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
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Tu
You're smarter than braindead baboons like SAMSON, andre et. al
Alberto Gonzalez suspended habeas corpus and set up secret prisons? ::)
C'mon brotha. I expect more from you.
Whether you consider Holder the worst of all time is matter of personal taste. I'm 28 years old and he is by far the worst in my lifetime.
He did... Does the name Jose Padilla mean anything to you?
He absolutely did those things.
Holder isn't much better... Not at all.
But again, to say that Holder is worse than Gonzalez, in my mind, is not true... and he certainly isn't worse than the OTHERS i mentioned.
Seriously... everyone is enjoying skipping over the other AGs I mentioned specifically?
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He did... Does the name Jose Padilla mean anything to you?
He absolutely did those things.
Holder isn't much better... Not at all.
But again, to say that Holder is worse than Gonzalez, in my mind, is not true... and he certainly isn't worse than the OTHERS i mentioned.
Seriously... everyone is enjoying skipping over the other AGs I mentioned specifically?
Holder gave Obama the legal permission to kill an american citizen and do the NDAA remember?
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Holder gave Obama the legal permission to kill an american citizen and do the NDAA remember?
Yes and I hate him it, the truth is that all of that sort of shit was started under Gonzalez and has been carried over... So yes... Holder is a piece of crap, but slightly less so than Gonzalez in my mind.
Again... There have been a shit ton of craptastic AGs.
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John Fund: Will Holder’s Politicking Finally End?
National Review Online ^ | June 18, 2012 | John Fund
The Washington Post just bestowed its “Worst Week in Washington” award on Attorney General Eric Holder, and it’s not hard to see why.
Over the weekend, Senator Joe Lieberman, who caucuses with the Democrats, clearly expressed his lack of confidence in Holder by calling for a special counsel who is independent of the Justice Department to investigate serious leaks of national-security documents. Someone near the president is leaking classified information, and both Democrats and Republicans seem determined to find out who.
But the real blow came last week, when Holder’s carefully constructed stone walls against House investigators started to crumble.
Representative Darrell Issa, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, announced he would initiate contempt-of-Congress proceedings against Holder for not turning over documents related to the committee’s probe of the Fast and Furious gunwalking scandal at Justice. Issa says that more 200 Mexicans and a U.S. Border Patrol agent were murdered with weapons that the U.S. government allowed to be sold to Mexican drug cartels as part of a probe into gun smuggling.
“The Justice Department is out of excuses,” House Speaker John Boehner said in support of Issa’s move. “Either the Justice Department turns over the information requested, or Congress will have no choice but to move forward with holding the attorney general in contempt for obstructing an ongoing investigation.”
The Justice Department dismissed Issa’s complaints, saying he was “playing political games.” By Friday, though, Holder said he was willing to sit down and negotiate to avoid what he dramatically called “a constitutional crisis.” For his part, Issa said he was willing to delay the contempt vote set for this Wednesday if Justice turns over a large chunk of the documents he has requested. But Issa says he will not back down until he gets to the bottom of Fast and Furious.
Holder’s sudden flexibility after 15 months of evasive maneuvers has two origins. First, sources inside Justice gave Issa a valuable leak last week: six wiretap applications used as part of Fast and Furious. Together, they provide evidence that higher-ups at Justice knew about and approved Fast and Furious, contrary to Holder’s assurances.
During an interview with me in New York last week, Issa pointed out that 31 House Democrats wrote a letter to Holder last year asking for more documents on Fast and Furious. The new revelations have shaken many of those Democrats, and Issa believes, based on a whip count, that many Democrats would ultimately back a contempt-of-Congress motion against Holder. This turnabout by Democrats is the second reason Holder is now promising cooperation. Until now, Holder wanted to wait for Justice’s inspector general to complete his own look at Fast and Furious before turning over more documents to Congress. But that investigation has been under way for 15 months, and there are no signs it will wrap up soon.
Issa’s patience is exhausted. “This is like Iran-contra, like Watergate, and other embarrassments over the years,” he told me. “The major embarrassment is the delay in being honest and open about it.”
The pattern of delay and denial is a familiar one, Issa says. “If you translate the double talk we get [from Justice], it amounts to ‘We will tell you what you need to know to know that we are right,’” he says. “What is the definition of propaganda?”
Attorney General Holder clearly helps President Obama in several ways. His brazen stonewalling of investigations certainly helps Obama postpone any final revelations until after the November elections. His department’s blatant refusal to enforce federal law requiring states to clean up their inaccurate voter-registration records, combined with DOJ lawsuits against state voter-ID laws, must bring smiles to any ACORN-like groups contemplating electoral mischief this fall. Finally, his attempt to contain and effectively delay any probe of the national-security leaks may outrage members of the intelligence community, but the perpetrators of those leaks surely must welcome Holder’s tactics.
With this record, Eric Holder has become, to paraphrase Gilbert and Sullivan, the very model of a modern attorney general — thoroughly political. It’s just too bad that such no-holds-barred partisanship has so little to do with real duties of the attorney general: upholding the rule of law, the Constitution, and standards of conduct other attorneys in government are expected to adhere to.
— John Fund is national-affairs columnist for NRO.
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Yes. But he didn't set the precedent.
Gonzales did that.
Also. I mentioned 3 other worse AGs in the history of the US and you ignored them completely.
Why?
because they're not black
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because they're not black
What does skin color have to do with the fact that Holder has Brian Terry's blood on his hands?
Figures that a racist scumbag couldn't care less about a dead cracker. JUSTICE FOR TRAYVON!!!!! ::) ::) ::)
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What does skin color have to do with the fact that Holder has Brian Terry's blood on his hands?
Figures that a racist scumbag couldn't care less about a dead cracker. JUSTICE FOR TRAYVON!!!!! ::) ::) ::)
you are amazing.....try taking 3333's balls out of your mouth.........It has nothing to do with race per se, but with 3333 EVERYTHING is race......and you know that
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you are amazing.....try taking 3333's balls out of your mouth.........It has nothing to do with race per se, but with 3333 EVERYTHING is race......and you know that
STFU. You are the most raise poster on this board.
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McGurn: Eric Holder's Politics of Contempt
The attorney general has it coming, but the answer isn't a special prosecutor.
By WILLIAM MCGURN
Finally, Eric Holder is on the ropes. House members are readying to vote him in contempt of Congress. Senators wonder aloud whether he can be trusted to investigate White House leaks that have exposed inside information about some of our most successful antiterror operations to some of our most dangerous enemies.
Alas, the old bulls of the Senate—including Republicans John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Chuck Grassley, along with Independent Democrat Joe Lieberman—are calling for the one thing that might derail the accountability train: a special prosecutor.
Columnist Bill McGurn on Attorney General Eric Holder's role in the White House. Photo: Getty Images
.
.
It all makes for the perfect tea party moment, an opportunity to make one of the most attractive arguments from the 2010 revolution: that process is as important as outcome, and that the Constitution gives us all the process we need to hold our leaders accountable.
The most immediate constitutional mechanism for accountability happens to be the one Mr. Holder is trying to put off—a vote by the House to hold him in contempt for refusing to turn over documents relating to "Fast and Furious." That was a stupid policy that had tragic results when a weapon smuggled into Mexico by U.S. authorities ended up being used to kill a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
Should the House hold him in contempt, Mr. Holder would be left with three choices: standing by as a U.S. attorney begins prosecuting him; directing the U.S. attorney not to prosecute him; or invoking executive privilege to justify not releasing the documents Congress seeks.
There are huge downsides to all three. Let's take them one by one.
A sitting attorney general under federal prosecution would be fatally weakened, with his continuing presence in the job a fat target for the president's political opponents. On the other hand, ordering a U.S. attorney not to prosecute him suggests a massive conflict-of-interest, not to mention conveying that he has something to hide. Ditto for "executive privilege." Not only does executive privilege have a tainted history, it couldn't be invoked without admitting that the White House is also implicated in Fast and Furious.
In no scenario are we likely to have the satisfaction of a definitive conclusion. Then again, the Framers of the Constitution didn't expect we would. Their view was to let the different parties and different branches of government go at it, and leave accountability for the voter to impose at the next elections.
The furor over Fast and Furious started out as a policy dispute, with Congress trying to find out who ordered what and why. Mr. Holder has helped escalate the issue into a contempt vote by his stonewalling response.
The fuss over national-security leaks is different. Unlike stupid policy decisions, leaking classified information is inherently criminal. That's why Mr. Holder has appointed two U.S. attorneys to investigate.
President Obama says his White House didn't leak. But books and news stories—about drones, the virus that attacked Iranian computers and more—cite as their sources the president's advisers and former advisers.
That's the reason why Mr. McCain and others are calling for a special prosecutor: How can attorneys who report to Mr. Holder oversee any credible investigation of their boss? Especially when, instead of saying he will fire anyone found to have leaked, President Obama publicly asserts that there have been no leaks?
Perhaps after a few years and gazillions of tax dollars, a special prosecutor would give his results. What purpose, however, is served by keeping those answers to a prosecutor instead of to the American people? The proper vehicle for getting answers is Congress, using its oversight powers to conduct hearings and get the appropriate officials on the record and under oath.
The best outcome would be for Mr. Holder to reach an accommodation with the House Oversight Committee's Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) that would avoid a contempt vote altogether. Unfortunately for the attorney general, he enters the conversation with a highly politicized record—here investigating CIA interrogators whose intel would later help his president hunt down bin Laden, there declining to defend the Defense of Marriage Act, there again declining to prosecute Black Panthers for voter intimidation.
Mr. Issa and House Speaker John Boehner have their own calculations to make. They must weigh whether holding the attorney general in contempt would backfire if Americans decided it was the latest Beltway attempt to criminalize policy differences. Forcing that political calculation is also as the Framers intended.
For tea partiers, this is a crisis that shouldn't go to waste. We're well reminded of the Obama people who today express doubts about a special prosecutor but sang a very different song when Bush administration folks were the target. We're even better reminded that the possibility that the nation's highest law enforcement officer might be held in criminal contempt by Congress means we need not look outside the Constitution for accountability.
Write to MainStreet@wsj.com
A version of this article appeared June 19, 2012, on page A11 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Eric Holder's Politics of Contempt
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Is this the end of Eric Holder’s games?
By MICHAEL A. WALSH
Last Updated: 6:11 AM, June 20, 2012
Posted: 12:13 AM, June 20, 2012
Bait-and-switch? Or breath-taking chutzpah? Either way, Eric Holder is in big trouble.
The embattled attorney general destroyed what little is left of his credibility yesterday afternoon when he failed to turn over 1,300 subpoenaed and unredacted documents in the Fast and Furious gunrunning scandal to House investigators led by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.).
How did the Justice Department come to OK an operation that handed massive firepower to Mexico’s drug lords, with no hope of tracing the guns and without a word to the Mexican government? Still no good answers, some 18 months after one of those guns was found at the site of the murder of a US Border Patrol agent, while countless others have been used to kill innocent Mexicans.
Nor has Justice handed over more than a token number of the duly subpoenaed documents that might help explain the disaster.
Instead, in a 20-minute meeting that Holder himself had requested to stave off today’s planned contempt citation vote in Issa’s committee, he merely offered to “brief” Issa on their contents.
Holder’s insulting, 11th-hour offer came after he’d already missed a morning deadline to turn over the documents — a small percentage of the total number that Congress has demanded as it tries to get to the bottom of the scandal.
Issa surely feels like Charlie Brown charging the football, with Holder as Lucy. For over a year, he’s been trying to pin down the slippery AG, issuing one “last chance” after another, dragging Holder in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (on top of Senate appearances) and firing off angry letter after angry letter.
Each time, Holder has scampered off, meeting Issa’s legitimate demands with contempt — for the congressman, the Congress itself and the rule of law.
He tried it again yesterday after his offer was rebuffed, calling Issa’s demands “political gamesmanship” and cracking, “The ball’s in their court.”
Um . . . no, Mr. Attorney General. The ball’s in your court — and has been ever since Justice took the extraordinary step of formally “withdrawing” a Feb. 4, 2011 letter from assistant AG Ron Weich — who announced last week that he’s leaving Justice to become dean of the University of Baltimore law school.
Weich is just the latest F&F figure to jump ship, after ex-US Attorney for Arizona Dennis Burke and former acting head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Ken Melson.
Weich’s letter definitively denied allegations that the ATF, which supervised the F&F operation, “knowingly allowed the sale of assault weapons” to straw buyers acting on behalf of Mexican drug cartels.
Oops. In December, Holder told Congress that Weich’s letter was now inoperable, then promptly clammed up again, making it clear he has something — something big — to hide from Congress and the American people.
Which is why — unless he produces the documents before 10 a.m. this morning — Holder is looking at a House committee vote on contempt of Congress charges; once the full House goes along, he’ll be only the 11th official to be so cited since 1975.
Then what? Technically, the citation goes to the US attorney for DC to present to a grand jury. Usually, lawyers for the White House and Congress huddle and work out some accommodation — but relations may be too poisonous for that now.
Holder also has the option to simply not prosecute himself — which would surely set off a firestorm, as would any attempt by him or the president to assert executive privilege at this late date.
The last thing President Obama needs heading into the election is even more controversy over his hyper-politicized chief law-enforcement officer — especially with some in Congress already calling for a special prosecutor to investigate intelligence leaks emanating from the administration.
So Holder’s in a pickle, looking at up to a year in jail should he be convicted. And convictions do happen — just ask former EPA official Rita Lavelle, convicted of lying to Congress back in 1983.
Even should the AG finally come across with the documents, Issa must not let up. Holder has thumbed his nose at Congress and the country for too long. It’s time for the truth.
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/is_this_the_end_of_eric_holder_games_CNV5Tn2OyMsyTgIv6EV3pI#ixzz1yKx8lN1R
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because they're not black
Figures you would bring race into it like all weak minded liberals do when they have no talking points left to defend their idiotic opinions.
You are a racist. You only post on racist threads or you try to hijack every thread by accusing everyone of racism.
Listen, sparky. Obama and Holders are idiots. Plain and simple. They are incompetent. They just happen to be black, but they are still imbeciles. You only defend them because they match your pigmentation. Shame on you.
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Figures you would bring race into it like all weak minded liberals do when they have no talking points left to defend their idiotic opinions.
You are a racist. You only post on racist threads or you try to hijack every thread by accusing everyone of racism.
Listen, sparky. Obama and Holders are idiots. Plain and simple. They are incompetent. They just happen to be black, but they are still imbeciles. You only defend them because they match your pigmentation. Shame on you.
Andre - like the other 95ers are more racist than anyone and would defend obama and holder if they put them in chains and shackles and sent them to africa.
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Figures you would bring race into it like all weak minded liberals do when they have no talking points left to defend their idiotic opinions.
You are a racist. You only post on racist threads or you try to hijack every thread by accusing everyone of racism.
Listen, sparky. Obama and Holders are idiots. Plain and simple. They are incompetent. They just happen to be black, but they are still imbeciles. You only defend them because they match your pigmentation. Shame on you.
sigh...read the whole thread instead of coming on in the middle of an argument like you usually do........I actually agreed with 3333 that Holder was in the top five WORST Attorney Generals........I only accused 3333 of being a racist...which he is..he's admitted it on more than one occasion
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:)
I attended a black bar association meeting of westchester tonight in mt vernon. Made friends w some great folks tonight bro.
sigh...read the whole thread instead of coming on in the middle of an argument like you usually do........I actually agreed with 3333 that Holder was in the top five WORST Attorney Generals........I only accused 3333 of being a racist...which he is..he's admitted it on more than one occasion
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This is WND printer-friendly version of the article which follows.
To view this item online, visit http://www.wnd.com/2012/06/holder-prosecutes-mom-and-pop-fat-cats-walk/
WND EXCLUSIVE
Holder prosecutes mom and pop, fat cats walk
Yet another scandal for Obama's embattled attorney general
Jerome R. Corsi, a Harvard Ph.D., is a WND senior staff reporter. He has authored many books, including No. 1 N.Y. Times best-sellers "The Obama Nation" and "Unfit for Command." Corsi's latest book is "Where's the REAL Birth Certificate?"
MIAMI BEACH, Fla. – With great fanfare, President Obama signed Executive Order 13519 on Nov. 17, 2009, establishing a Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force to be led by Attorney General Eric Holder with the aim of prosecuting fraud and recovering assets in the economic debacle that began one year earlier.
In 2010, the Mortgage Fraud Working Group organized under the executive order issued its first annual report, boasting that the number of mortgage fraud defendants charged by the U.S. Attorneys’ Offices more than doubled from 526 in fiscal year 2009 to 1,235 in fiscal year 2010. A similar increase was reported in the number of mortgage fraud cases charged, going from 267 in 2009 to 656 in 2010.
However, WND research has demonstrated that the mortgage fraud cases pursued by Holder’s Department of Justice have typically targeted homeowners charged with making fraudulent loan applications. Largely ignored are the financial institutions that made the loans and prominent Democrat donors and colleagues of Obama administration officials.
High friends in high places
As WND has previously reported, Holder has overlooked possibly fraudulent “loan to own” equity recapitalization loans Credit Suisse made to some 15 or more luxury resorts or to various principles involved in the transactions, including supermarket billionaire Ron Burkle, a long-time Democratic Party operative with a history of providing financial support to top Democrats, including Bill and Hillary Clinton.
WND has also reported that Credit Suisse is a client of the Washington-based law firm that Holder left as a partner to become attorney general and Lanny Breuer left as a partner to head of the Justice Department criminal division under Holder.
The firm, Covington & Burling, represents “a Who’s Who of big banks and other companies at the center of alleged foreclosure fraud,” Reuters reported Jan. 20.
In addition to Credit Suisse, they include Bank of America, Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo & Co. and at least one other bank among the top 10 largest mortgage servicers.
Holder prosecutes mom and pop
On Feb 19, 2011, New York Times Op-Ed writer Joe Nocera lamented that Holder and the Justice Department had decided not to prosecute Angelo R. Mozilo, the high-flying former CEO of Countrywide Financial, one of the mortgage lending firms most responsible for the continuing mortgage crisis.
“Hundreds of billions of dollars have been lost by investors while millions of borrowers have lost their homes,” Nocera wrote, recalling that Mozilo sold $140 million in Countrywide stock while his company was failing. “Few of the people who ran the institutions that contributed to the disaster have been found liable.”
On March 25, 2011, Nocera contrasted the kind treatment Mozilo received at the hands of Holder’s DOJ with the experience of 48 year-old Charlie Engle. Engle caught the attention of Robert W. Nordlander, an IRS special agent, after movie actor Matt Damon financed a documentary film titled “Running the Sahara,” featuring Engle’s ultra-marathon challenge.
Convinced Engle was understating his taxes, Nordlander resorted to a dumpster dive for records Engle may have thrown away, unwilling to believe that all Engle earned from the documentary was $30,000.
Still unsatisfied, Nordlander hired an attractive female undercover agent to meet Engle and see if she could entice him into making admissions.
Engle’s crime, for which Holder’s U.S. Attorneys sent him to prison as a felon, was that he took out a “liar loan,” overstating his income.
“Charlie has always insisted that he never filled out the loan document – his mortgage broker did it, and he was actually a victim of mortgage fraud,” Nocera wrote in yet another editorial on Richard Engle, published June 1, in which he noted the broker later pleaded guilty to another mortgage fraud.
“Indeed, according to a recent court filing by Charlie’s lawyer, the government failed to turn over exculpatory evidence that could have helped Charlie prove his innocence.”
Nocera’s conclusion: “For whatever inexplicable reason, prosecutors really wanted to nail Charlie Engle. And they did.”
Another “small fry” touted by the DOJ in November 2009 as part of a Holder surge in mortgage fraud prosecutions was Lakeisha Gates.
In 2007, Gates worked as a clerk at a small brokerage firm in St. Petersburg, Fla.
Allegedly at the behest of the owners of the firm, Gretchen and Eric Scott, Gates acted as the nominee purchaser at grossly inflated values for two properties the Scotts owned. She misrepresented on the loan application that she made $5,000 per month as the vice president of a catering company.
Gates obtained a mortgage for $300,000, which soon defaulted. For her participation in the deal, Gates earned $10,000.
She pleaded guilty to federal mortgage fraud charges and agreed to testify against the Scotts, who she said put her up to it. The Scotts were charged with a conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud.
When the Mortgage Fraud Working Group boasts of prosecuting mortgage fraud, the cases typically involve individual borrowers who had lied or otherwise committed fraud by obtaining mortgages on one or more properties.
Those the Obama administration allows to walk free are the likes of Angelo Mozilo, who built an empire making highly inflated mortgages based on questionable appraisals to lenders who were never properly credit-qualified. Mozilo amassed a fortune that enabled him to pay a $67.5 million fine to settle Securities and Exchange Commission fraud charges without appreciably denting his massive net worth.
WND has previously reported how Countrywide Financial Group gave preferential “friends of Angelo Mozilo” loans to Democrats Franklin Raines and James Johnson, who each made millions personally while holding executive positions in Fannie Mae amid the irresponsible mortgage activities each directed to the ultimate detriment of the taxpayer.
Nocera’s conclusion was that the Justice Department has taken after “the smallest of small fry – and then trumpeted these prosecutions of how tough it is on mortgage fraud.”
He wrote: “It is a shameful way for the government to act.”
‘The fix is in’
WND has previously reported that Edra Blixseth, the former spouse of Tim Blixseth, the founder of Yellowstone Club, has teamed with Ron Burkle, the supermarket billionaire who was a major donor to Hillary Clinton in her 2008 presidential campaign.
Mike Flynn, attorney for Tim Blixseth, has explained to WND his reasons for believing Burkle used his political connections with Holder and Breuer to quash criminal investigations regarding Edra Blixseth.
“The Holder/Breuer-controlled Justice Department quashed the entire investigation; they declared the Yellowstone Club ‘off limits,’ and even the ‘connected’ bankruptcy judge Ralph Kirscher, who declared Edra exonerated and discharged from all liability,” Flynn told WND.
“The Holder DOJ and Judge Kirscher made the decisions to sweep away the pending Montana Yellowstone Club investigation and proposed indictment of Edra Blixseth in the face of the documented, irrefutable evidence,” he said.
Flynn provided WND evidence of a series of questionable loans and various financing attempts to gain ownership of the Yellowstone Club at prices deeply under market undertaken by Edra Blixseth, beginning in June 2007. The transactions resulted in millions of dollars of defaulted loans. Meanwhile, Blixseth, Burkle, various hedge fund investors and Credit Suisse ended up owning the Yellowstone Club for under $10 million.
“Some of the loan documents, Edra Blixseth used to commit this massive fraud or so grossly false on their face for tens of millions of dollars, that it makes the Edra Blixseth case appear to be a cover-up resulting from rank cronyism or worse,” Flynn said.
Flynn told WND his office provided the Obama-appointed Montana U.S. Attorney with documentary evidence proving that while Edra Blixseth was signing perjured loan documents with banks, she was contemporaneously signing sealed affidavits in her divorce reciting the opposite of what she was stating to the banks – in both instances to obtain millions of dollars in her divorce and tens of millions from the banks.
“Tens of millions of dollars of the Edra Blixseth loans have never been paid to creditors or accounted for,” Flynn said.
“Burke and Sam Byrne of the Boston-based hedge fund CrossHarbor Capital Parthers have ended up with $800 million in Blixseth assets, while the Democratic bankruptcy judge has swept all the documentary evidence under the rug. Judge Kirscher has discharged Edra Blixseth, and the Holder/Breuer DOJ has quashed all criminal investigation as ‘off limits.’”
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Eric Holder: 'It’s Going to Get Really Busy on Thursday, Apparently'
2:00 PM, Jun 26, 2012 • By DANIEL HALPER
via Drudge
Attorney General Eric Holder avoided commenting on the Fast and Furious scandal in Boston today. The Boston Herald reports:
Embattled Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. refused to say today whether he would consider resigning if a federal probe into the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ disastrous “Fast and Furious” operation threatens President Obama’s re-election.
The question was posed to Holder by a Herald reporter at the Seaport World Trade Center, where he delivered a keynote address on the state of civil rights to a packed room of federal prosecutors and local law enforcement. Holder kept on walking and didn’t answer.
In just two days, the U.S. House of Representatives is expected to take a historic vote, potentially to hold Holder in contempt of Congress for allegedly refusing to turn over documents about the two-year gun-tracking investigation in Mexico that resulted in the murder of a Border Patrol agent.
Later, Holder made an oblique reference to the House vote scheduled for Thursday on whether to hold the attorney general in contempt. "It’s going to get really busy on Thursday, apparently," Holder said, according to the Boston Herald. Holder's comment was reportedly met with "awkward laughs."
A self-effacing Holder drew awkward laughs from the symposium hosted by longtime pal U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz when, while touching upon how busy his schedule is, he said, “It’s going to get really busy on Thursday, apparently.”
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He should resign already. Nothing but a major distraction at this point.
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Team Obama's Brother Sharpton Moment
Townhall.com ^ | June 27, 2012 | Michelle Malkin
Attorney General Eric Holder's people have no shame. After months of stonewalling, misinformation and petulant disregard for the victims of the Fast and Furious gunwalking scandal, President Obama's Justice Department is hiding behind the most despicable race-card demagogues on the planet. "Post-racial" America never looked so bitter, clingy and cowardly.
At a Tuesday press conference in Washington, D.C., human shield Al Sharpton condemned the upcoming House vote on a contempt motion against Holder as "reckless" and "morally reprehensible." Yes, the infamous hate-crimes hoaxer, cop-basher and riot incitement specialist is now the self-appointed sheriff of Capitol Hill morality. A Huffington Post report hyping Sharpton's protection racket decried the contempt citation as an "assault on minority rights." In typical race-baiting style, Sharpton told the leftwing website: "I'm not saying that this is because Holder is black, and I'm not calling (Republicans) racists. I'm saying what they're doing has a racial effect."
Of course Sharpton's accusing Republicans of racism -- and by extension, he's smearing every American demanding truth and justice in Obama's bloodiest scandal. That includes the family of murdered Border Patrol agent Brian Terry, whose December 2011 death came at the hands of a Mexican thug wielding a Fast and Furious weapon. What about the Mexican government officials left in the dark about the deadly operation? And the hundreds of families of Mexican victims of Fast and Furious-enabled bloodshed? Yes, yes, they are all racists and minority vote suppression advocates, too.
Sharpton forged ahead, comparing the effort to hold Holder accountable for his serial delays and deception to racial profiling. The race-hustling reverend invoked driving-while-black imagery in lambasting the Republican oversight staffers who have "stopped and frisked" Holder, the nation's first black attorney general, "without probable cause" to be "made an example of."
While he regurgitated DOJ talking points about Holder's "unprecedented" level of cooperation, Sharpton neglected to mention that the agency has delivered less than 8 percent of the 80,000 documents sought by congressional investigators. He forgot to acknowledge that of the 70 DOJ officials involved in Fast and Furious, 48 have been blocked by DOJ from testifying. He failed to detail the withdrawn Feb. 4, 2011, letter to Congress falsely denying the existence of Fast and Furious, Holder's flip-flops over what he knew and when, and Holder's blame-shifting assertion, withdrawn last week, that falsely accused former Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey of being briefed on a separate gunwalking operation.
Lest we forget, the White House's racial guardian and MSNBC host is the same bigoted clown who manufactured the Tawana Brawley fake hate crime and tried to frame police officers, railed against "Chinamen," "Greek homos" and "n****rs," inveighed against Jewish "diamond merchants," and stoked black mobs at white-owned Freddy's Fashion Mart in Harlem, which was burned to the ground in 1995 after protesters broke in and gunned down four employees.
Team Obama can no more dissociate itself from Sharpton's bloody legacy than Sharpton can dissociate himself from his own poisonous tongue. In return for his blind and tireless defense over the past year and a half, Holder has publicly embraced Sharpton and endorsed his toxic racial smokescreen. In April, Holder lavished praise on Sharpton "for your partnership, your friendship and your tireless efforts to speak out for the voiceless, to stand up for the powerless and to shine a light on the problems we must solve and the promises we must fulfill." Obama himself addressed Sharpton's spring convention, as did several other Cabinet secretaries. White House visitor logs show more than a dozen entries for "Al Sharpton" or "Alfred Sharpton" over the past three years.
President Clinton had his Sister Souljah moment: a public attempt in 1992 to distance Democrats from radical racial demagoguery. The current White House has turned that centrist maneuver on its head, and American voters of good will shouldn't forget it. Obama's Brother Sharpton moment, a calculated deflection from the Fast and Furious scandal, is an unrepentant bear hug of racial extremism. Shame, shame, shame.
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House Dem breaks from party, plans to vote for Holder contempt
Published June 27, 2012
The Daily Caller
The Democratic Party’s resistance to holding Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress is crumbling.
Utah Democratic Rep. Jim Matheson said Tuesday he plans to vote in favor of holding Holder in contempt over his refusal to comply with a subpoena into the Operation Fast and Furious scandal.
“It just compounds the tragedy when both sides play politics instead of releasing the facts. The Terry family, the public and Congress deserve answers,” Matheson said in remarks first reported by the Salt Lake Tribune in his home state. “Sadly, it seems that it will take holding the attorney general in contempt to communicate that evasiveness is unacceptable.”
To make matters worse for Holder, President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party, more Democrats are expected to join Matheson in holding Holder in contempt. House Minority Whip Rep. Steny Hoyer, the House Democrats’ chief vote-counter, isn’t even sure how many Democrats will break ranks. According to the Associated Press — which framed the Democratic defections as a result of the NRA’s decision to score the vote — Hoyer wouldn’t say how many Democrats he expected to vote in favor of Holder in contempt, but confirmed he expects some, like Matheson, to abandon party lines.
These Democratic defections cut sharply into the narrative House oversight committee ranking Democratic member Rep. Elijah Cummings, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, the White House and Holder himself have created around this scandal. They have all claimed that House oversight committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa and House Republicans are motivated by partisan politics in pursuing this issue, something that Matheson and other Democrats’ vote would undercut.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/06/26/house-dem-breaks-from-party-plans-to-vote-for-holder-contempt/#ixzz1yzhB6nxP
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House Dem breaks from party, plans to vote for Holder contempt
Published June 27, 2012
The Daily Caller
The Democratic Party’s resistance to holding Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress is crumbling.
Utah Democratic Rep. Jim Matheson said Tuesday he plans to vote in favor of holding Holder in contempt over his refusal to comply with a subpoena into the Operation Fast and Furious scandal.
“It just compounds the tragedy when both sides play politics instead of releasing the facts. The Terry family, the public and Congress deserve answers,” Matheson said in remarks first reported by the Salt Lake Tribune in his home state. “Sadly, it seems that it will take holding the attorney general in contempt to communicate that evasiveness is unacceptable.”
To make matters worse for Holder, President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party, more Democrats are expected to join Matheson in holding Holder in contempt. House Minority Whip Rep. Steny Hoyer, the House Democrats’ chief vote-counter, isn’t even sure how many Democrats will break ranks. According to the Associated Press — which framed the Democratic defections as a result of the NRA’s decision to score the vote — Hoyer wouldn’t say how many Democrats he expected to vote in favor of Holder in contempt, but confirmed he expects some, like Matheson, to abandon party lines.
These Democratic defections cut sharply into the narrative House oversight committee ranking Democratic member Rep. Elijah Cummings, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, the White House and Holder himself have created around this scandal. They have all claimed that House oversight committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa and House Republicans are motivated by partisan politics in pursuing this issue, something that Matheson and other Democrats’ vote would undercut.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/06/26/house-dem-breaks-from-party-plans-to-vote-for-holder-contempt/#ixzz1yzhB6nxP
I already wrote a letter to my congresscunt to vote for contempt of this racist neo-terrorist AG
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I already wrote a letter to my congresscunt to vote for contempt of this racist neo-terrorist AG
Of course you did good for you. Now fuck off
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I already wrote a letter to my congresscunt to vote for contempt of this racist neo-terrorist AG
I'm sure he read it avidly
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Holder is a ghetto thug racist neo-terrorist piece of trash as are all of the 95ers still supporting him.
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Owned
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http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/06/27/house-democrat-breaks-ranks-to-back-holder-contempt-as-vote-looms
So far 20 Demos voting for Contempt
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http://www.punditpress.com/2012/06/list-of-democrats-voting-holder-in.html
Holder is going to get slapped down tommorow.
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Black Lawmakers Plot 'Walkout Strategy' During Holder Contempt Vote
National Journal ^ | 7/27/2012
Posted on Wednesday, June 27, 2012 6:43:48 PM by Altura Ct.
The Congressional Black Caucus has called a members-only "emergency" meeting on Thursday to plot a "walkout strategy" ahead of the scheduled contempt vote of Attorney General Eric Holder later in the day.
The plans, detailed in an email from the executive director of the Congressional Black Caucus obtained by the Alley, include circulating a letter disapproving of the vote and having lawmakers walk out of the Capitol to hold a press conference during the roll call.
The letter, a draft of which is being circulated for signatures, accuses the GOP leadership of "rushing recklessly to a contempt vote." The letter is being circulated among the Black, Hispanic, Asian and Progressive caucuses, among other.
"We cannot and will not participate in a vote to hold the Attorney General in contempt," says the letter, in which the signers urge that "all members of Congress to stand with us during a press conference on the Capitol Building steps during this appalling series of votes to discuss our nation's most significant priority--creating jobs."
The House is expected to vote on Thursday hold Holder in contempt of Congress for refusing to release certain documents related to the failed "Fast and Furious" gun-running program.
At moments, the fight has taken on racial undertones, most notably when Holder, who is African American, told the New York Times in December 2011 that he served as a stand-in for GOP attacks on President Obama. "This is a way to get at the president because of the way I can be identified with him," Holder said, "both due to the nature of our relationship and, you know, the fact that we're both African-American."
A copy of the full draft letter is below:
Dear Colleague:
We write to urge you to stand with us in the pursuit of justice for the Attorney General of the United States of America, Eric H. Holder. In its history, the United States House of Representatives has never held a United States Attorney General, or any other Cabinet official, in contempt.
Instead of focusing on job creation and other critical issues before this Congress, we have been asked to engage in a political stunt on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. Our constituents elected us to do real work, not to engage in meaningless partisan activity.
Over the past 15 months, Attorney General Eric Holder and the Department of Justice have cooperated with the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform's requests for information on "Fast and Furious", an unfortunate operation that began under the Bush Administration and, in fact, was terminated by Attorney General Holder. The Department has made extraordinary efforts to accommodate Congress by turning over almost 8,000 documents--including all the documents that relate to the tactics in this investigation and the other flawed investigations that occurred in Arizona during the Bush Administration. The Attorney General also participated in a bicameral meeting in a good faith effort to satisfy the Committee's information requests. While the Attorney General has advised House Republicans that he is willing to work with them in attempting to reach an agreement, the Republican Leadership is instead rushing recklessly to a contempt vote.
Contempt power should be used sparingly, carefully and only in the most egregious situations. The Republican Leadership has articulated no legislative purpose for pursuing this course of action. For these reasons we cannot and will not participate in a vote to hold the Attorney General in contempt. We adamantly oppose this partisan attack and refuse to participate in any vote that would tarnish the image of Congress or of an Attorney General who has done nothing but work tirelessly to protect the rights of the American people. We must reflect upon why we are elected to this body and choose now to stand up for justice.
We call upon all members of Congress to stand with us during a press conference on the Capitol Building steps during this appalling series of votes to discuss our nation's most significant priority--creating jobs. At this critically important time in our nation, we must work as colleagues rather than political enemies.
________________________ ________________________ ________
Disgusting.
Race over all else for these jerks
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Race over all else for these jerks
Holder's been crying over race issues for a while. Wouldn't surprise me if one his cronies started feeding the race story. If he denounces it...that would be shock, lol.
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House should hold Holder in contempt
The Seattle Times editorial board argues that the Justice Department should hand over documents regarding the "Fast and Furious" gun-sale program, or else the House of Representatives should declare Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress.
Seattle Times Editorial
EXECUTIVE privilege is a principle dangerous to democracy, whether invoked by a Republican or Democratic president. The Obama administration has invoked it and now is threatened with retaliation: House Republicans say unless the administration hands over subpoenaed documents, they will vote Thursday to declare Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress. If that is what it takes, they should do it.
It is an election year, so the administration's defenders are saying that a call for disclosure is "all politics." Of course there is political hay in it, but the request is still valid. Congress needs to know about botched government programs.
This was one. Called "Fast and Furious," it was a sting operation run out of the Phoenix, Ariz., office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from 2009 to 2011. Its aim was to allow Mexican drug organizations to buy illegal guns so that U.S. agents could follow the guns, arrest the people who had them and destroy the cartels.
The U.S. agents lost track of hundreds of guns. In 2010, two of the guns were found at the killing scene of U.S. border agent Brian Terry. The Mexican government also said Fast and Furious guns were found at 170 crime scenes in Mexico.
Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, followed with an investigation, which led to the testimony of Holder and the release of 7,000 pages of Department of Justice documents.
Another 1,300 pages under House of Representatives subpoena were the subject of a presidential order of executive privilege, the first such order of Obama's presidency. That is what the argument is about.
Obama has said he did not know about Fast and Furious, and Issa does not claim the president knew. That is not the issue.
The issue is whether Congress has the right to learn about it, and it does.
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How to end the Holder stand-off: Fire him
www.washingtonpost.com
By Jennifer Rubin
The speaker of the House’s press secretary, Michael Steel, sent out an e-mail this morning that reads in part:
As we approach Thursday’s contempt vote, there is some misunderstanding and misinformation out there on executive privilege. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney and others seem to be hanging their hats on Chairman Issa’s statement that there is currently no evidence that the White House was involved in the cover-up. That is exactly our point. We never, ever suggested the White House was involved. That’s why it was so bizarre that the president asserted executive privilege. Executive privilege protects internal White House decision-making. True, presidents have asserted it over other executive branch documents and communications. But the courts have ruled those claims to be invalid and ordered them overturned. (See “Nixon, Richard Milhous”)
As the D.C. Circuit Court wrote in 2004 in its Judicial Watch Inc. v. Department of Justice decision, “communications of staff outside of the White House in executive branch agencies that were not solicited and received by such White House advisors could not [be covered by executive privilege].” Also, as noted in this CRS [Congressional Research Service] report, the D.C. Circuit Court ruled in 1997, “the presidential communications privilege should never serve as a means of shielding information regarding governmental operations that do not call ultimately for direct decision-making by the President.”
He’s right. If “executive privilege” means the president can shield deliberation within a department on a policy matter then we would have no oversight by the legislative branch at all. To borrow a dilemma for the left from the Obamacare cases, if internal Department of Justice documents on Fast and Furious are privileged, where would the Obama spinners draw the line? When would Congress ever be entitled to investigate executive branch departments. ( I know, I know.. when it’s a Republican president.)
Now you might ask what about “attorney client privilege”? Two problems exist with that, which is why the Obama team didn’t raise it.
First, there is no attorney-client privilege that can be invoked by the president against Congress because they work for the same client, namely the American people. As an aside, I love when that point comes up because it wonderfully illustrates how invoking phony privileges isn’t in the interest of Americans, but of the government officials who too often confuse their own interest in avoiding embarrassment with the nation’s interests.
Second, no one is suggesting the documents refer to a legal analysis of the Fast and Furious program. This was about policy and public statements about the program. That’s not information that would be subject to the attorney-client privilege even outside government.
In fact we don’t even know which “executive privilege” the White House is talking about. Todd Gaziano of the Heritage Foundation tells me, “It’s reasonable to demand that the White House and DOJ specify what types of executive privilege they claim are being invoked as to what documents. Congress and the courts might yield to some claims of privilege but not to others.”
For example, Gaziano explains, there is a species of executive privilege relating to national security. Is this about keeping secrets with (or from) Mexico? As for the “the deliberative process privilege,” this too is a type of executive privilege. But the jurisprudence on that suggests that while it can go beyond the White House, it doesn’t cover every person in government and it must often bend to legitimate oversight by Congress.
If he were a first-year law student asked to explain how the president could refuse to allow House oversight on a botched operation in which Americans and Mexicans died and the administration has twice had to cop to providing erroneous information to Congress, Eric Holder’s letter would get an “F.” He doesn’t set out the nature of the document being withheld, the type of privilege being asserted, or the argument as to why it supersedes the right of Congress to oversee executive branch misconduct.
Congress is certainly within it rights to hold him in contempt. But really the president should can Holder. He’s a lousy lawyer.
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;)
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Uh oh. Seventeen Democrats voted in favor.
House votes to hold Attorney General Holder in contempt of Congress
Published June 28, 2012
FoxNews.com
The GOP-led House voted Thursday to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for failing to provide key information pertaining to Operation Fast and Furious, making Holder the first sitting Cabinet member to be held in contempt.
The vote was 255-67 with one lawmaker voting not present. Seventeen Democrats broke ranks to vote in favor of contempt, while two Republicans voted against the measure.
The vote was preceded by a heated floor debate.
“It’s important to remember how we got here,” House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said during a speech ahead of the vote. “The Justice Department has not provided the facts and information we requested. … It’s our constitutional duty to find out.”
The GOP-led House took the step over the alleged failure to provide additional information about the failed gun-running operation known as Fast and Furious which was run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives -- a division of the Justice Department led by Holder.
Democrats walked out of the chamber ahead of the vote.
“What is happening here is shameful," said Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who argued House Republicans are more politically motivated in attacking Holder than getting to the bottom of the failed operation, in which at least two of the guns were connected to the fatal shooting of U.S. border agent Brian Terry.
Lawmakers voted against a proposal by Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., to return the matter to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/06/28/house-holds-holder-contempt/
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Not surprised.
Justice Department shields Holder from prosecution after contempt vote
Published June 29, 2012
FoxNews.com
The Justice Department moved Friday to shield Attorney General Eric Holder from prosecution after the House voted to hold him in contempt of Congress.
The contempt vote technically opened the door for the House to call on the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia to bring the case before a grand jury. But because U.S. Attorney Ronald Machen works for Holder and because President Obama has already asserted executive privilege over the documents in question, some expected Holder's Justice Department to balk.
Deputy Attorney General James Cole confirmed in a letter to House Speaker John Boehner that the department in fact would not pursue prosecution. The attorney general's withholding of documents pertaining to Operation Fast and Furious, he wrote, "does not constitute a crime."
"Therefore the department will not bring the congressional contempt citation before a grand jury or take any other action to prosecute the attorney general," Cole wrote, in the letter obtained by Fox News.
A department official told Fox News the letter was "pro forma" -- or a formality -- considering that ex-Attorney General Michael Mukasey in 2008 also refused to refer two Bush White House aides to a grand jury after they were held in contempt.
Republicans nevertheless blasted the Justice Department for the move. Frederick Hill, spokesman for House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, said "it is regrettable that the political leadership of the Justice Department is trying to intervene in an effort to prevent the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia from making an independent decision about whether to prosecute this case."
Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, also wrote in a letter to Machen that the Cole letter "has put the cart before the horse." He suggested the U.S. attorney has not yet had a chance to make an informed decision on whether to move forward with the case.
The move by the Holder Justice Department, though, means Republicans are likely to take their case to civil court as they seek documents pertaining to Operation Fast and Furious -- which was already the unofficial plan. Along with the criminal contempt resolution, Republicans also passed a civil contempt measure Thursday allowing them to go to civil court to try and get an order that would compel the Obama administration to release the documents.
Issa, R-Calif., had acknowledged Thursday night that it was "very possible" the president would instruct the U.S. attorney not to prosecute Holder. He indicated Republicans would use the civil courts to get what they want.
"The House has authorized me to hire staff and legal staff who can pursue civilly through the courts to try to get a federal judge to order, separately, this discovery," he said.
Hill also told FoxNews.com that the next stop probably would be civil court, but he suggested the threat of criminal prosecution still looms. For now, the Obama administration can argue that its executive privilege claim over the documents protects Holder from the possibility of prosecution.
But if a civil court rules that claim invalid, Hill said, "then basically Justice has lost that shield."
If the administration still refused to turn over the documents the Republicans want, then they could start looking at prosecution more seriously.
Republicans technically have a handful of other options if the Justice Department still refused to take the case to a grand jury.
Republicans could move to appoint a special prosecutor or even move to impeach. The last time that happened with a Cabinet member, though, was in 1876 -- with the impeachment trial of war secretary William Belknap.
Hill said lawmakers are not looking at that option for Holder. They remain focused on the civil court route.
Machen and Holder also have spoken fondly of one another in public, further casting doubt on the possibility that the U.S. attorney would ever bring the case before a grand jury.
Machen is one of the two U.S. attorneys Holder tapped to lead an investigation into the recent rash of security leaks. In early June, Holder praised Machen and the other attorney as "great U.S. attorneys who have shown a willingness to take on difficult cases."
Meanwhile, Issa continued to add fuel to the debate over Fast and Furious when he entered into the Congressional Record a letter detailing a secret wiretap application pertaining to the operation.
In the letter, Issa claimed the affidavit contained "clear information that agents were willfully allowing known straw buyers to acquire firearms for drug cartels and failing to interdict them -- in some cases even allowing them to walk to Mexico."
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/06/29/after-holder-contempt-vote-republicans-eye-civil-court-case-to-extract-furious/
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Holder is a ghetto thug racist neo-terrorist piece of trash as are all of the 95ers still supporting him.
Is that all?
I mean, is he a slut and a communist as well?
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Is that all?
I mean, is he a slut and a communist as well?
marc Rich, FLAN terrorists, Elian Gonzales, KSM Trial, Black panthers, etc.
Holder, and the idiots who support him, are thugs.
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Not surprised.
You're not? Hmm... Could it be, perhaps, because you know that it has been DoJ policy for a long long time (I believe going all the way to the Reagan Administration, and Theorore Olsen) to not prosecute Executive Branch employees for contempt of Congress charges when the charges are the result of the employees failure to produce documents over which the President has asserted Executive Privilege?
Justice Department shields Holder from prosecution after contempt vote
The article only tells half the story. I don't particularly like the policy and would like to see it changed. But, as I said before, the fact is that it has been in place for a really long time and to assert that this is some sort of unprecedented political shielding that the Administration is engaging in, as Fox News does in this article, is flat-out dishonest. I wish news outlets would give us the facts, instead of half-assed partisan press releases.
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I would just like to say that I really appreciate this thread because of all the research that went into it.
I mean, someone wouldn't just come on getbig and post something like "The Worst Attorney General in American History" without pouring over records from all of American history, would they?
I'm sure they researched everything, including the early 19th century, and then made an informed decision.
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You're not? Hmm... Could it be, perhaps, because you know that it has been DoJ policy for a long long time (I believe going all the way to the Reagan Administration, and Theorore Olsen) to not prosecute Executive Branch employees for contempt of Congress charges when the charges are the result of the employees failure to produce documents over which the President has asserted Executive Privilege?
The article only tells half the story. I don't particularly like the policy and would like to see it changed. But, as I said before, the fact is that it has been in place for a really long time and to assert that this is some sort of unprecedented political shielding that the Administration is engaging in, as Fox News does in this article, is flat-out dishonest. I wish news outlets would give us the facts, instead of half-assed partisan press releases.
No, I didn't know about any DOJ policy and don't care about some internal policy. Nor do I care about the handful of people it may have applied to going "all the way back" to the 1980s. What I do know is there is no precedent, because this is the first time the AG has been held in criminal contempt by Congress.
I am not surprised that Holder's employees decided not to pursue their boss.
I have no problem with the article. It's factual. The title isn't really important, but it's accurate.
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No, I didn't know about any DOJ policy and don't care about some internal policy. Nor do I care about the handful of people it may have applied to going "all the way back" to the 1980s. What I do know is there is no precedent, because this is the first time the AG has been held in criminal contempt by Congress.
I am not surprised that Holder's employees decided not to pursue their boss.
I have no problem with the article. It's factual. The title isn't really important, but it's accurate.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the type of person who gets to cast a ballot. Mr. "I don't know and I don't care"...
The DoJ hasn't done anything inappropriate in this instant. Holder should be investigated, I agree, but that is another issue.
Trying to spin the DoJ decision in this case as some unprecedented bit of political maneuvering is dishonest. Especially now that you know what the facts are.
But, I take it, you still don't care, do you? ::)
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And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the type of person who gets to cast a ballot. Mr. "I don't know and I don't care"...
The DoJ hasn't done anything inappropriate in this instant. Holder should be investigated, I agree, but that is another issue.
Trying to spin the DoJ decision in this case as some unprecedented bit of political maneuvering is dishonest. Especially now that you know what the facts are.
But, I take it, you still don't care, do you? ::)
Ah yes. Yet another one who thinks way too highly of himself. Who the heck are you to criticize the kinds of people who vote in this country? ::) You have a lot of growing up to do.
I didn't say the DOJ did anything inappropriate. They may have. What I said is I'm not surprised they failed to pursue their boss.
Who said their failure to pursue their boss was unprecedented? The title of the article says they shielded their boss. That's true. Did you even read the article?
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Ah yes. Yet another one who thinks way too highly of himself. Who the heck are you to criticize the kinds of people who vote in this country? ::) You have a lot of growing up to do.
You're the one who said "I don't know and I don't care" and that is something you should be called out for. As for who I am - that's not important. What's important is that I am a citizen. I can - and will - criticize whomever I want. I will especially criticize those whose response, when challenged, boils down to "I don't know and I don't care to know"
If that's thinking highly of myself, then so be it. I won't lose any sleep over it.
I didn't say the DOJ did anything inappropriate. They may have. What I said is I'm not surprised they failed to pursue their boss.
They didn't fail to pursue anyone - boss or no boss. The DoJ isn't required to prosecute a Contempt of Congress charge. The U.S.A. followed DoJ policy that would have applied whether Holder was the Attorney General or a janitor in sector 7-G.
The title of the article says they shielded their boss. That's true. Did you even read the article?
I don't call the exercise of a prosecutor's discretionary power to not charge "shielding" anymore than I call the exercise of his discretionary power to charge "swording" especially when the action was in accordance with Department policies and there's no evidence of such "shielding" unless you assert that every time a U.S.A. decides to not prosecute something he's "shielding" someone.
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Can't you two see that you love each other?
Quit tearing Getbig apart get on with kissing!
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He should resign already. Nothing but a major distraction at this point.
maybe that's a good thing.
Nobody is talking about the dismal economy - it's all immigration this, and eric holder that.
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Eric holder like Obama have a racial get out jail free card for anything they do.
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Eric holder like Obama have a racial get out jail free card for anything they do.
No, you have a put someone in jail who didn't do anything racial card.
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maybe that's a good thing.
Nobody is talking about the dismal economy - it's all immigration this, and eric holder that.
yeah , maybe thats why Obama hasn't asked him to resign yet.....because he's sucking up all the news hours....more time devoted to him, less time devoted to the bad economy :)
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Eric holder like Obama have a racial get out jail free card for anything they do.
you know...every time it looks like you may be taking your medication and wising up, you come out with something like this that drives you back over the edge
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you know...every time it looks like you may be taking your medication and wising up, you come out with something like this that drives you back over the edge
It's not his fault.
I blame it on his Jr. High handlers.
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It's not his fault.
I blame it on his Jr. High handlers.
Yeah between ThugBama and Holder
1. Pardon of Marc Rich
2. Deportation of Elian Gonzalez
3. Pardon of FLAN Terrorists
4. Black Panther case
5. KSM in manhattan trial fiasco
6. Friends w a domestic terrorist and his murderous wife
7. Rev. Wright
8. Obama a memeber of the socialist New Party
Etc etc.
Any white pol w even 10% of that record would not be in public office unless they were a KKK member like Democrat Byrd.
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Yeah between ThugBama and Holder
1. Pardon of Marc Rich
2. Deportation of Elian Gonzalez
3. Pardon of FLAN Terrorists
4. Black Panther case
5. KSM in manhattan trial fiasco
6. Friends w a domestic terrorist and his murderous wife
7. Rev. Wright
8. Obama a memeber of the socialist New Party
Etc etc.
Any white pol w even 10% of that record would not be in public office unless they were a KKK member like Democrat Byrd.
Are you mad at me?
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Are you mad at me?
No, I pity you for your incompetence, ignorance, economic stupidity, and general lack of understanding of the ramifications of the garbage you cheer on.
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No, I pity you for your incompetence, ignorance, economic stupidity, and general lack of understanding of the ramifications of the garbage you cheer on.
OK, Dwight.
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You're the one who said "I don't know and I don't care" and that is something you should be called out for. As for who I am - that's not important. What's important is that I am a citizen. I can - and will - criticize whomever I want. I will especially criticize those whose response, when challenged, boils down to "I don't know and I don't care to know"
If that's thinking highly of myself, then so be it. I won't lose any sleep over it.
They didn't fail to pursue anyone - boss or no boss. The DoJ isn't required to prosecute a Contempt of Congress charge. The U.S.A. followed DoJ policy that would have applied whether Holder was the Attorney General or a janitor in sector 7-G.
I don't call the exercise of a prosecutor's discretionary power to not charge "shielding" anymore than I call the exercise of his discretionary power to charge "swording" especially when the action was in accordance with Department policies and there's no evidence of such "shielding" unless you assert that every time a U.S.A. decides to not prosecute something he's "shielding" someone.
What I don't care about is the non-issue you raised about a purported DOJ policy not to "prosecute Executive Branch employees for contempt of Congress charges when the charges are the result of the employees failure to produce documents over which the President has asserted Executive Privilege." Who the heck cares about that? Other than you? And how many times has an executive branch employee been found in criminal contempt of Congress under these precise circumstances "going all the way back" to the 80s? The fact I could care less about your non-issue says nothing about voting competency. ::)
You should not lose any sleep over anything said on a message board.
Yes, they shielded their boss by not pursuing criminal contempt charges. He shouldn't be treated any differently than any other person who is found in criminal contempt of Congress. But that's not reality.
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What I don't care about is the non-issue you raised about a purported DOJ policy not to "prosecute Executive Branch employees for contempt of Congress charges when the charges are the result of the employees failure to produce documents over which the President has asserted Executive Privilege." Who the heck cares about that? Other than you? And how many times has an executive branch employee been found in criminal contempt of Congress under these precise circumstances "going all the way back" to the 80s? The fact I could care less about your non-issue says nothing about voting competency. ::)
You should not lose any sleep over anything said on a message board.
Yes, they shielded their boss by not pursuing criminal contempt charges. He shouldn't be treated any differently than any other person who is found in criminal contempt of Congress. But that's not reality.
Issa released wiretaps last night clearly showing that Holder and his gang of thugs in DOJ was well aware of the gunwalking.
Holder, like Obama and his cult of lemmings like we have on this board, believe the ends justify the means and so long as holder and thugbama are not imprisoned for their treason and crimes, anything is ok.
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Issa released wiretaps last night clearly showing that Holder and his gang of thugs in DOJ was well aware of the gunwalking.
Holder, like Obama and his cult of lemmings like we have on this board, believe the ends justify the means and so long as holder and thugbama are not imprisoned for their treason and crimes, anything is ok.
Do you have a link to the Saudi handlers?
Thanks.
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Do you have a link to the Saudi handlers?
Thanks.
no, but obama does and I showed you the tape many times.
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no, but obama does and I showed you the tape many times.
Oh, OK.
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What I don't care about is the non-issue you raised about a purported DOJ policy not to "prosecute Executive Branch employees for contempt of Congress charges when the charges are the result of the employees failure to produce documents over which the President has asserted Executive Privilege." Who the heck cares about that? Other than you?
You should care - ask yourself why that rule is in place. As for it being a non-issue, I wonder if you'd be saying the same thing if the shoe was on the other foot.
The REAL issue - the one you haven't given any thought to because you're whining about how Holder was shielded - is whether Obama's assertion of Executive Privilege is legitimate in this instance, and that is what the House should have challenged, instead of pursuing Holder, who they knew wouldn't be subjected to a prosecution.
It's all part of the delicate political dance between the Democrats and the Republicans - two frenemies whose interests only align when it comes to pulling the wool over all of our eyes.
And how many times has an executive branch employee been found in criminal contempt of Congress under these precise circumstances "going all the way back" to the 80s?
I don't have exact numbers, but I recall a similar case in 2008, when the DOJ under A.G. Mukasey refused to prosecute contempt of Congress referrals against two executive branch employees (Harriet Miers and Joshua Bolten) when President Bush asserted executive privilege. I believe similar situations came up during the Clinton and Reagan administrations, but I don't have the details handy.
The fact I could care less about your non-issue says nothing about voting competency. ::)
The voting competency of anyone who isn't willing to educate himself and understand the underlying issues that are political in nature and one claims to be interested in is suspect.
You should not lose any sleep over anything said on a message board.
How can I not? There's so many important questions - like should Nasser have won the Olympia?
Yes, they shielded their boss by not pursuing criminal contempt charges. He shouldn't be treated any differently than any other person who is found in criminal contempt of Congress. But that's not reality.
I don't know what you think the word reality means, but the reality is that Holder was treated no differently than other Executive Branch officials who were referred by the House to DOJ with contempt of Congress charges over the withholding of documents over which the President asserted Executive Privilege.
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You should care - ask yourself why that rule is in place. As for it being a non-issue, I wonder if you'd be saying the same thing if the shoe was on the other foot.
The REAL issue - the one you haven't given any thought to because you're whining about how Holder was shielded - is whether Obama's assertion of Executive Privilege is legitimate in this instance, and that is what the House should have challenged, instead of pursuing Holder, who they knew wouldn't be subjected to a prosecution.
It's all part of the delicate political dance between the Democrats and the Republicans - two frenemies whose interests only align when it comes to pulling the wool over all of our eyes.
I don't have exact numbers, but I recall a similar case in 2008, when the DOJ under A.G. Mukasey refused to prosecute contempt of Congress referrals against two executive branch employees (Harriet Miers and Joshua Bolten) when President Bush asserted executive privilege. I believe similar situations came up during the Clinton and Reagan administrations, but I don't have the details handy.
The voting competency of anyone who isn't willing to educate himself and understand the underlying issues that are political in nature and one claims to be interested in is suspect.
How can I not? There's so many important questions - like should Nasser have won the Olympia?
I don't know what you think the word reality means, but the reality is that Holder was treated no differently than other Executive Branch officials who were referred by the House to DOJ with contempt of Congress charges over the withholding of documents over which the President asserted Executive Privilege.
No, I shouldn't care about a non-issue some yahoo posted on the internet. You're concerned about it, so I'll let you worry about it.
Not sure what you mean by the shoe being on the other foot.
You don't have exact numbers. lol. Right. Maybe that's because it rarely, if ever, happens. ::). And it has never happened to a sitting AG.
The reality is we shouldn't expect an employee to pursue his boss and that politics plays a heavy role. They did precisely what I expected them to do.
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No, I shouldn't care about a non-issue some yahoo posted on the internet. You're concerned about it, so I'll let you worry about it.
A "yahoo"? LOL. The last refuge of those who can't defend their position - namecalling.
Not sure what you mean by the shoe being on the other foot.
Of course you don't.
You don't have exact numbers. lol. Right. Maybe that's because it rarely, if ever, happens.
It does happen rarely - and every time it's happened the position of DOJ has been to not prosecute Executive branch officials for contempt of Congress charges that were the result of a refusal by said officials to turn over documents over which the President has asserted executive privilege.
And it has never happened to a sitting AG.
It's also never happened to a janitor working in sectors 7-G. And?
The reality is we shouldn't expect an employee to pursue his boss and that politics plays a heavy role. They did precisely what I expected them to do.
They declined to prosecute other Executive branch members before - who were not their bosses - so it's kind of silly to assert that the position matters this time around. But I forgot - you don't care about facts that contradict your preconceived notions and challenge your positions on the issues.
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A "yahoo"? LOL. The last refuge of those who can't defend their position - namecalling.
Of course you don't.
It does happen rarely - and every time it's happened the position of DOJ has been to not prosecute Executive branch officials for contempt of Congress charges that were the result of a refusal by said officials to turn over documents over which the President has asserted executive privilege.
It's also never happened to a janitor working in sectors 7-G. And?
They declined to prosecute other Executive branch members before - who were not their bosses - so it's kind of silly to assert that the position matters this time around. But I forgot - you don't care about facts that contradict your preconceived notions and challenge your positions on the issues.
Brilliant. Another pseudo-intellectual on the board. Yes, you are in fact one of those internet yahoos who cannot have a simple exchange without ad hominem.
A "yahoo"? LOL. The last refuge of those who can't defend their position - namecalling.
So say that. Stick to the facts - don't add your ridiculous commentary. It only serves to make people see Obama as someone more sympathetic, because assholes like you attack him.
::) Fuckin' troll.
^^^ This is what small-minded people do.
Don't get it twisted. I don't care about your facts. You like to talk about stuff that doesn't make any dang sense and/or that have nothing to do with the subject at hand. But carry on. You're a legend in your own mind. lol :)
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Brilliant. Another pseudo-intellectual on the board. Yes, you are in fact one of those internet yahoos who cannot have a simple exchange without ad hominem.
^^^ This is what small-minded people do.
Don't get it twisted. I don't care about your facts. You like to talk about stuff that doesn't make any dang sense and/or that have nothing to do with the subject at hand. But carry on. You're a legend in your own mind. lol :)
Dont worry avxo... This is what Mark does all of the time.
He says you don't make any sense and starts rambling... Then when you coherently bring up points, he just does that same thing over and over... Oh... and he will roll his eyes at you.
I got so sick of his nonsense that I just refuse to debate with him... It serves no purpose.
Hard to believe this guy is a lawyer.
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Holder needs to go. How anyone can defend this ghetto thing is beyond me.
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Holder needs to go. How anyone can defend this ghetto thing is beyond me.
Yes he does. I don't see how he makes it to the end of the year.
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Yes he does. I don't see how he makes it to the end of the year.
unless of course he knows where the bodies are all buried. . . . . . . .
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Brilliant. Another pseudo-intellectual on the board. Yes, you are in fact one of those internet yahoos who cannot have a simple exchange without ad hominem.
Ouch. That hurt. MOMMY! THIS GUY ON THE INTERNET TOUCHED ME IN A BAD PLACE! :'(
^^^ This is what small-minded people do.
I never claimed to be above namecalling - and if someone is an asshole and a troll I am not going to hesitate calling that person out as an asshole and a troll. And someone who says "send Obama back to Kenya" is, plainly, a troll. As for you, if you fall back to calling me a yahoo, then don't be surprised if I answer back in terms you understand.
Don't get it twisted. I don't care about your facts. You like to talk about stuff that doesn't make any dang sense and/or that have nothing to do with the subject at hand. But carry on. You're a legend in your own mind. lol :)
Ooh, yes, it's my facts that you don't care about. As opposed, to you know, like this other set of facts from, like, reality. Which is like totally different... ::) Your amazing refutation of my positions has crushed my fragile little ego. Whatever will I do now? :'(
And I'll have you know that I don't appreciate you mocking me! I'm not a legend yet, but I will be, after I become the first ever astronaut-firefighter to win the Olympia 13 times in a row followed by the first-ever combined Nobel prize in Physics and Literature for a captivating criminal-physics drama that details the hunt for the elusive Higgs Boson, the Fields Medal in Mathematics for some sort of breakthrough in the Mathematics of Quantum Neutrino Fields, and an honorary Popeship from the Vatican. And then you'll see!
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SMM?
Ouch. That hurt. MOMMY! THIS GUY ON THE INTERNET TOUCHED ME IN A BAD PLACE! :'(
I never claimed to be above namecalling - and if someone is an asshole and a troll I am not going to hesitate calling that person out as an asshole and a troll. And someone who says "send Obama back to Kenya" is, plainly, a troll. As for you, if you fall back to calling me a yahoo, then don't be surprised if I answer back in terms you understand.
Ooh, yes, it's my facts that you don't care about. As opposed, to you know, like this other set of facts from, like, reality. Which is like totally different... ::) Your amazing refutation of my positions has crushed my fragile little ego. Whatever will I do now? :'(
And I'll have you know that I don't appreciate you mocking me! I'm not a legend yet, but I will be, after I become the first ever astronaut-firefighter to win the Olympia 13 times in a row followed by the first-ever combined Nobel prize in Physics and Literature for a captivating criminal-physics drama that details the hunt for the elusive Higgs Boson, the Fields Medal in Mathematics for some sort of breakthrough in the Mathematics of Quantum Neutrino Fields, and an honorary Popeship from the Vatican. And then you'll see!
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Ouch. That hurt. MOMMY! THIS GUY ON THE INTERNET TOUCHED ME IN A BAD PLACE! :'(
I never claimed to be above namecalling - and if someone is an asshole and a troll I am not going to hesitate calling that person out as an asshole and a troll. And someone who says "send Obama back to Kenya" is, plainly, a troll. As for you, if you fall back to calling me a yahoo, then don't be surprised if I answer back in terms you understand.
Ooh, yes, it's my facts that you don't care about. As opposed, to you know, like this other set of facts from, like, reality. Which is like totally different... ::) Your amazing refutation of my positions has crushed my fragile little ego. Whatever will I do now? :'(
And I'll have you know that I don't appreciate you mocking me! I'm not a legend yet, but I will be, after I become the first ever astronaut-firefighter to win the Olympia 13 times in a row followed by the first-ever combined Nobel prize in Physics and Literature for a captivating criminal-physics drama that details the hunt for the elusive Higgs Boson, the Fields Medal in Mathematics for some sort of breakthrough in the Mathematics of Quantum Neutrino Fields, and an honorary Popeship from the Vatican. And then you'll see!
I see. So the "last refuge of those who can't defend their position - namecalling" does or does not apply to you?
The "facts" you posed are things you care about. And they have nothing to do with the thread. And they don't need to be "refuted," particularly when you haven't really said anything.
You sound pretty ambitious. But I doubt you can ever top becoming the most powerful man on earth without ever really having a full-time job. :)
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Dont worry avxo... This is what Mark does all of the time.
He says you don't make any sense and starts rambling... Then when you coherently bring up points, he just does that same thing over and over... Oh... and he will roll his eyes at you.
I got so sick of his nonsense that I just refuse to debate with him... It serves no purpose.
Hard to believe this guy is a lawyer.
LOL
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I see. So the "last refuge of those who can't defend their position - namecalling" does or does not apply to you?
If I had engaged in the type of namecalling you engaged in, of course it would apply to me. But I didn't. You see, there's a difference between calling someone who says "send Obama back to Kenya" a troll, and having someone who can't defend his position call those who challenge him a "yahoo."
The "facts" you posed are things you care about. And they have nothing to do with the thread. And they don't need to be "refuted," particularly when you haven't really said anything.
You do realize that repeating your mantra that the facts I posted have nothing to do with the thread won't magically make that mantra come true, don't you?
You sound pretty ambitious. But I doubt you can ever top becoming the most powerful man on earth without ever really having a full-time job. :)
Really? Hmm. But a job will end up cutting into my quad-blasting time!
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If I had engaged in the type of namecalling you engaged in, of course it would apply to me. But I didn't. You see, there's a difference between calling someone who says "send Obama back to Kenya" a troll, and having someone who can't defend his position call those who challenge him a "yahoo."
You do realize that repeating your mantra that the facts I posted have nothing to do with the thread won't magically make that mantra come true, don't you?
Really? Hmm. But a job will end up cutting into my quad-blasting time!
A distinction without a difference. 33 wasn't attacking you, yet you called him names. In the next breath, you criticize people for calling names. Pretty inconsistent.
I realize we are going in circles.
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That's What I thought Mr. Valencia... Easy to be a jackass when you are anonymous... not so much when people know who you are.
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It's not his fault.
I blame it on his Jr. High handlers.
:D
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Eric Holder says Republicans have made him a ‘proxy’ to attack President Obama
The Washington Post ^ | July 2, 2012 | Sari Horwitz
Posted on July 2, 2012 10:34:13 PM EDT by Free ThinkerNY
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. sharply criticized lawmakers Monday for voting to hold him in contempt of Congress last week, saying Republicans have made him a “proxy” to attack President Obama in an election year.
In his first interview since Thursday’s vote, Holder said lawmakers have used an investigation of a botched gun-tracking operation as a way to seek retribution against the Justice Department for its policies on a host of issues, including immigration, voting rights and gay marriage. He said the chairman of the committee leading the inquiry, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), is engaging in political theater as the Justice Department tries to focus on public safety.
“I’ve been doing all of these things all the time Darrell Issa and his band have been nipping at my heels,” a defiant Holder said. “They’ve been nipping, but I’ve been walking.”
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
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DOJ lawsuit: Physical test for police officers discriminates against women
July 3, 2012
oel Gehrke
Commentary Writer
The Washington Examiner
E@JoelmentumDJoel on FB
Popular in Politics
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3DOJ lawsuit: Physical test for police officers discriminates against women
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The Corpus Christi, Tex. Police Department has found itself on the business end of a civil rights lawsuit after the Justice Department concluded that a physical ability test used when considering job applications discriminates against women.
As a condition for employment, new applicants must pass a physical ability test (PAT) involving: pullups, a 300-meter run, a 1.5 mile run, and sit-ups. Only 19 percent of female applicants passed this test between 2005 and 2009, compared to 63 percent of men, the DOJ complaint records.
The Justice Department says that the test discriminates against women because “use of the PAT in the screening and selection of applicants for entry-level police officer jobs is not job-related, for the entry-level police officer position,” according to the complaint.
“The Justice Department is looking forward to working with the city to resolve this matter in a way that eliminates the use of the unlawful physical ability test and gives women who were screened out of the process an opportunity to become Corpus Christi police officers,” Thomas E. Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, said in a statement on the lawsuit.
“If women had passed the PAT at the same rate as men, approximately 62 additional women would have been available for further consideration for the position of entry-level police officer,” the Justice Department complaint also says.
In 2011, the city police modified the benchmarks for the PAT. Thirty-three percent of women passed the test under the new standards, along with 82 percent of men. DOJ says that these results also indicate discrimination.
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Meh... no sympathy on that... Women aren't physically as able as men... That's life.
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Meh... no sympathy on that... Women aren't physically as able as men... That's life.
This.
The answer is not to lower physical standards just to make women feel equal.
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Bloggers Who Broke Fast and Furious Story, File Ethics Complaint on Holder With DC Bar
Nicedeb ^ | July 3, 2012
Posted on July 3, 2012 10:15:44 PM EDT by opentalk
An ethics complaint against U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has been filed by David Codrea and Mike Vanderboegh with the Office of Bar Counsel, Board on Professional Responsibility of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. Codrea and Vanderboegh are the two bloggers who first broke the news of the Fast and Furious scandal in December 2010.
Said Vanderboegh, Eric Holder believes that he will escape serious consequences of the congressional investigations of the Fast and Furious scandal simply by running out the clock on his tenure. We intend this ethics complaint to place him on notice that his lies and malfeasances will follow him until justice is done.”
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Eric Holder’s Two Decades Of Concealing Murder
Western Journalism ^ | 7/7/2012 | Doug Book
Posted on July 7, 2012 6:52:01 PM EDT by IbJensen
Information provided to congressional committees by ATF whistle-blowers and leaks within the Department of Justice prove Eric Holder to be either criminally complicit in the Fast and Furious scheme and cover-up, or the most incompetent, congenitally comatose Attorney General in the nation’s history. Though Holder is many things, he is not incompetent, at least not in the willful “execution-upon-command” of illegal and despicable enterprises; especially when those enterprises involve Administration-generated murder.
“You need to know that Eric Holder…played a key role in covering up the torture-murder death of my brother, Kenneth Michael Trentadue.”
This is what Salt Lake City attorney Jesse Trentadue wrote in December of 2008 to prospective incoming chairman of the Senate Justice Committee, Patrick Leahy. The newly-elected Barack Obama had made Holder his choice for Attorney General, and Trentadue was going to do everything in his power to stop this shameful appointment going forward.
Kenneth Trentadue was killed in Oklahoma City on August 21st of 1995, four months after the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building. He had been taken into custody by the FBI and placed in an isolation cell at a federal facility in El Reno, Oklahoma.
The official government report on the cause of death presented to Trentadue’s family stated that Kenneth hanged himself in his cell. But massive bruises and lacerations from head to toe compelled even the Oklahoma City medical examiner to state “very likely he was murdered.”
Using emails and handwritten notes acquired in a 1997 wrongful death lawsuit against the DOJ, Trentadue demonstrated quite conclusively in his correspondence to Patrick Leahy that then-Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder had engineered a scheme to sidetrack any investigation into his brother’s death in order to “…deflect congressional oversight and media attention…”
A fifteen-year investigation by Jesse Trentadue revealed that Eric Holder had covered up the murder of his brother in order to prevent congressional investigators linking the death, and eventually the Clinton Administration itself, to the Oklahoma City bombing. And Holder’s efforts to derail the Fast and Furious probe have made it clear that 20 years have not changed the Attorney General’s propensity for corruption and deceit. For from the aftermath of Oklahoma City to the smuggling of guns across the Mexican border, Eric Holder has callously concealed murders for which two administrations have been responsible.
It’s hardly surprising that Holder’s DOJ minions have decided to not prosecute the Attorney General for the comparatively minor offense of refusing to provide Congress with subpoenaed documents. After all, Eric Holder has gotten away with murder—or at least with being an accessory after the fact—for nearly 2 decades.
Of course, Republicans MIGHT decide to charge Eric Holder with his many crimes when the November victory of Mitt Romney places the Department of Justice in GOP hands. The Party might also bring Barack Obama to justice, both for participation in Fast and Furious and his willful, duplicitous role as Manchurian Candidate.
Yes, they might. But then, Holder and Obama might CONFESS too! The one is just as likely as the other.
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Justice Department Sues Texas for Pay Discrimination
WOAI Radio ^ | 07/12/2012 | Jim Forsyth
Posted on Thursday, July 12, 2012 9:49:27 AM by Afisra
The Obama Administration continues to be at odds with the state of Texas. Today, the Justice Department sued two Texas state agencies, the Texas Department of Agriculture and the Texas General Land Office, claiming the two agencies discriminated against female employees by paying them less than men for doing the same jobs, 1200 WOAI news reports.
The lawsuit also claims the agencies fired women who complained about the discriminatory pay scales.
"This lawsuit highlights the critical need for continued attention to equal pay issues in this country," said Thomas Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division. "The wage gap between women and men persists, and the Civil Rights Division is committed to using all the tolls available under this nation's employment discrimination laws to ensure equal pay for equal work."
The lawsuit claims the now defunct Texas Department of Rural Affairs did a study of all of the salaries in its Disaster Recovery Division, and found that the salaries of women fell significantly short of those of men in comparable positions.
But it says even after the disparities were made public, the agencies failed to equalize salaries, so women were making the same amount for the same work, nor did the agencies 'compensate the women for the substantial amount of time their salaries were undervalued.'
The complaint demands that TDA and GLO take steps to make sure that women and men make the same pay for the same work, and the women who were 'subjected to discrimination and retaliation' should be compensated.
________________________ _______________________
Hysterical. This coming from the ghetto thug who under pays women on his own staff.
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Sources: Eric Holder scolded Capitol Hill intern for taking notes during lecture
The Daily Caller ^ | 7/25/2012 | Matthew Boyle
Posted on July 25, 2012 6:23:41 PM EDT by markomalley
Sources have confirmed to The Daily Caller that Attorney General Eric Holder on Wednesday berated an intern from House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy’s office for taking notes during a lecture he gave on Capitol Hill.
According to one intern who was present, Holder had just started speaking when he noticed a male intern who was standing on the side of the packed room beginning to take notes with a pen and paper.
“Holder is talking and then he sees some kid taking notes,” the intern, who asked to remain anonymous to protect his boss, said in a phone interview. “He [Holder] asks, ‘Oh, why are you taking notes? Are you from the Washington Post?’”
“He [the intern Holder scolded] is like, ‘no,’” the intern who spoke with TheDC recalls.
“Then, he [Holder] is like, ‘what office do you work in?’” he continued. “And, the kid is like, ‘oh Kevin McCarthy.’”
He said, next, Holder responded, “’Oh, you’re one of those guys,’ kind of like jokingly but meaning he was a Republican.”
Holder’s remarks apparently had an effect on the room, the intern who spoke with TheDC said. ““Yeah, I was scared to take notes then,” he told TheDC. “No one else whipped out pens and paper to take notes.”
He said he thought Holder may have been “trying to be funny,” but it was pretty clear to him that Holder scared everyone there.
“I looked around and there was not one other person [taking notes] after that,” the intern said. “I was upset because I forgot my pen and paper, but after that I was like ‘thank God.’”
In the end, the scolded McCarthy intern may have had the last laugh.
After Holder gave his speech, he took questions. The first items up, according to TheDC’s source, were voter ID and prison issues.
“Then, the last question, he went to the kid he yelled at from McCarthy’s office and that kid asked about Fast and Furious,” he said.
Holder is in civil and criminal contempt of Congress for failing to comply with the congressional investigation into Operation Fast and Furious. Eight senators, 130 congressmen, two governors and Mitt Romney have all demanded Holder’s resignation over the gunrunning program.
Another source with direct knowledge of the situation that occurred in the room confirmed the details of the intern’s account for The Daily Caller. “Did the Attorney General of the United States of America scold an intern for taking notes at a lecture? Yes.”
Holder’s lecture was the latest installment in a program for Capitol Hill interns featuring different daily speakers throughout the summer months.
The intern lecture was packed, sources told TheDC and was standing room only, with a couple hundred people in attendance. The talk began at 11 a.m. and was held in room 325 of the Senate Russell Office Building.
It was not open to the general public or the press – only congressional interns were allowed. “They checked our IDs to make sure we were all interns,” the intern who spoke with TheDC said.
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EDITORIAL: Holder’s severe mental deficiency
The Washington Times ^ | August 22, 2012 | Editorial
Posted on August 22, 2012 9:28:26 PM EDT by jazusamo
Justice Department takes affirmative action to crazy extremes
You don’t have to have a severe intellectual disability to work at the Justice Department. But it helps.
According to a July 31 policy memo titled “Hiring of persons with targeted disabilities,” otherwise problematic mental deficiencies are no barrier to jump-starting a career at Justice. The memo lists a number of “targeted disabilities” that trigger special hiring privileges in compliance with President Obama’s Executive Order 13548. Among them are people with “severe intellectual disability,” “psychiatric disability” or other undefined “current severe physical, intellectual or mental conditions.” Most employers would balk at even minor mental disabilities in hiring a lawyer, let alone severe ones. But the policy states that the Cabinet department run by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. must “achieve a work force from all segments of society,” which includes those who are teetering on the edge of sanity.
Mr. Holder’s crazy new human-resources priority says it’s necessary to ensure that people with targeted disabilities “have equal employment opportunities.” It then goes into detail on all the ways in which they will be given special, exclusive treatment. The disabled are eligible for direct hiring in a “streamlined, non-competitive appointment” process that the policy lauds as a “win-win” for the department and the applicant. Of course, this preferential treatment is a lose-lose for the other, perhaps vastly more qualified applicants who were never let in the door, as well as for American taxpayers who cannot benefit from a superior level of public service.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
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Holder Justice Department Recruits Dwarfs, Schizophrenics, and the ‘Intellectually Disabled’
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/08/21/justice-department-recruits-dwarfs
The PJ Tatler has obtained documents from the Justice Department detailing efforts to recruit attorneys and staff who are dwarfs or who have “psychiatric disabilities” or “severe intellectual disabilities.” On May 31, 2012, Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez issued a directive to affirmatively recruit people with these “targeted disabilities.”
This DOJ policy does not merely involve prohibitions against discrimination, but rather the documents reveal deliberate recruitment efforts to hire as attorneys and staff for the Department of Justice people suffering from psychiatric disorders and intellectual disabilities. Moreover, applicants can “self-identify” their disability by means of the “Standard Form 256, Self Identification Disability.”
Those with “targeted disabilities” may be hired through a “non-competitive” appointment. That means they don’t have to endure the regular civil service competition among applicants, but can be plucked from the stack of resumes and hired immediately instead.
According to the documents, those with these “targeted disabilities” may be hired “before the position is advertised” and even “before the position’s closing date.” Moreover, lawyers with psychiatric disabilities and “severe intellectual” disabilities receive a waiver from the requirement that a new DOJ employee have practiced law for one year before being hired.
You can read the detailed Civil Rights Division “Hiring of Persons With Targeted Disabilities Policy” memo here.
You can also read PJ Media’s full report on the attorneys hired for the Justice Department Civil Rights Division from 2009-2010 here in the Every Single One series.
Speaking of preferences, here is another document, the entire “Operational Diversity Management Plan,” obtained by PJ Media. It should be fascinating to those interested in racial preferences in government policy.
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Koutoulas: Holder's DOJ "Biggest Enabler Of Financial Crime In U.S. History"
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/08/23/lawyer_tells_santelli_he_plans_to_pursue_criminal_charges_against_corzine.html
SANTELLI: Boy, this is a story that never goes away. And, in some respects, I think there's a lot of people that are happy about that, actually. James Koutoulas, lawyer who represents thousands of customers of MF Global. James, last week when word came out that the Department of Justice basically didn't see any crime, I called you up and you said, 'I believe unequivocally that fraud and crime were committed.' Can you expand upon that?
KOUTOULAS: Sure, Rick. According to the trustee's report, MF Global was routinely using customer funds to fund intraday operations as far back as August, months before the bankruptcy. That's a violation of the Commodity Exchange Act. Then, once their credit rating was downgraded, they just outright took those funds and wired them to JPMorgan to meet house margin calls, which is also a violation of the Commodity Exchange Act. It is a felony, and it bears a penalty of 10 years in prison per offense.
SANTELLI: Now, the Department of Justice obviously doesn't see it that way, and everything you've talked about we've discussed ad infinitum, and it doesn't seem to make a difference. Now we see that PFG has come into the blend. Is there really a lot of difference between PFG and MF?
KOUTOULAS: No, not at all, Rick. If you read Russ Wasendorf Sr.'s suicide note, he talks about the fact that he had the choice between going out of business or cheating. And he just decided to cheat for 20 years and steal customer money. Sure, he put it in his own account. MF Global, same decision. Senior management says, 'Do we go out of business or do we cheat?' And they cheated. They broke the law. And they took these customer funds to meet margin calls.
SANTELLI: You know, Edith O'Brien supposedly has information. Yeah, you must have information if you want to be protected to give it. You told me they never even really went that route. They didn't give her any immunity. So they don't care that she knows something that probably isn't very good? That's it?
KOUTOULAS: Right. By not giving her immunity, it's a way to stalemate the case and say, 'Well, we don't really have enough evidence to prosecute it. But Attorney General Eric Holder's Department of Justice is the biggest enabler of financial crime in U.S. history, and that's why, way back in January, we went to Congressman Grimm, and we asked him to write a letter demanding that independent counsel be appointed for this case. And 65 congressmen agreed with him.
SANTELLI: Well, I'm sure this isn't going to be the end of this. And the final question I'm going to ask you, again, I know you believe crimes were committed there, you're not going to let up no matter what happens at the Department of Justice, you're going to move forward for criminal prosecution?
KOUTOULAS: That's right, Rick. We've got 50 states in this country, and each of them has an attorney general. I will go to each and every one of them, be it New York, Illinois, Iowa, Idaho, and I will explain to them how to prosecute this case, how to cut through the jargon and the confusion that try to distract people, and we will win. We will get a conviction. And the next time a sociopath CEO says, 'Do I go out of business or do I cheat,' he's going to think about the president's biggest fundraiser in an orange jumpsuit in state prison.
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http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/08/29/Is-Holder-s-DOJ-Community-Organizing-Occupy-Activists-at-the-RNC
Wow.
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EDITORIAL: Holder’s severe mental deficiency
The Washington Times ^ | August 22, 2012 | Editorial
Posted on August 22, 2012 9:28:26 PM EDT by jazusamo
Justice Department takes affirmative action to crazy extremes
You don’t have to have a severe intellectual disability to work at the Justice Department. But it helps.
According to a July 31 policy memo titled “Hiring of persons with targeted disabilities,” otherwise problematic mental deficiencies are no barrier to jump-starting a career at Justice. The memo lists a number of “targeted disabilities” that trigger special hiring privileges in compliance with President Obama’s Executive Order 13548. Among them are people with “severe intellectual disability,” “psychiatric disability” or other undefined “current severe physical, intellectual or mental conditions.” Most employers would balk at even minor mental disabilities in hiring a lawyer, let alone severe ones. But the policy states that the Cabinet department run by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. must “achieve a work force from all segments of society,” which includes those who are teetering on the edge of sanity.
Mr. Holder’s crazy new human-resources priority says it’s necessary to ensure that people with targeted disabilities “have equal employment opportunities.” It then goes into detail on all the ways in which they will be given special, exclusive treatment. The disabled are eligible for direct hiring in a “streamlined, non-competitive appointment” process that the policy lauds as a “win-win” for the department and the applicant. Of course, this preferential treatment is a lose-lose for the other, perhaps vastly more qualified applicants who were never let in the door, as well as for American taxpayers who cannot benefit from a superior level of public service.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
ROFLLLLLLLL
How did I miss this one
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Sorry to do it again-- this needs its own thread.
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ROFLLLLLLLL
How did I miss this one
Just imagine the worst possibly thing you can fathom and chances are with obamugabe its only a week away in the news
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Emails reveal Justice Dept. regularly enlists Media Matters to spin press
12:56 AM 09/18/2012
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Internal Department of Justice emails obtained by The Daily Caller show Attorney General Eric Holder’s communications staff has collaborated with the left-wing advocacy group Media Matters for America in an attempt to quell news stories about scandals plaguing Holder and America’s top law enforcement agency.
Dozens of pages of emails between DOJ Office of Public Affairs Director Tracy Schmaler and Media Matters staffers show Schmaler, Holder’s top press defender, working with Media Matters to attack reporters covering DOJ scandals. TheDC obtained the emails through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. (RELATED: Complete coverage of Media Matters for America)
Emails sent in September and November 2010 show Schmaler working with Media Matters staffer Jeremy Holden on attacking news coverage of the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation scandal.
Holden attacked former DOJ Civil Rights Division attorneys J. Christian Adams and Hans von Spakovsky on Sept. 20, 2010 for what he called an attempt “to reignite the phony New Black Panther Party scandal.”
Before Holden posted his article at 7:52 p.m., Schmaler sent him several emails with information helping him attack both former DOJ oficials.
“Here’s one Wolf letter,” read the subject of one email Schmaler sent Holden that contained no text. The email was likely a reference to Virginia Republican Rep. Frank Wolf, a member of Congress who led the Republican charge on the New Black Panther Party scandal involving alleged voter intimidation at a November 2008 polling place in Philadelphia.
In response, Holden told Schmaler that “The response to interog 38 is particularly helpful. Thanks!”
Interrogatory 38 was a reference to a question from Congress that the Justice Department answered, concerning the role of several senior officials in discussing litigation related to that voter intimidation case.
A follow-up email shows Schmaler sending Holden more information.
“[H]ere’s another one to Smith,” Schmaler wrote. “t’s about perrelli contact with w. WH. helpful in that it makes clear perrelli didn’t have discussions w/ WH on the case (obviously confirming he knew of it) … but also illustrates [REDACTED] they’ve tried to throw up that won’t stick[.]”
Holden responded at 8:34 p.m. — three hours after Schmaler sent her first email at 5:34 — to say, “Post is live, FWIW [for what it's worth]. Thanks again.”
Nearly two months later, on Nov. 18, 2010, Holden wrote a new blog post he described as an “EXCLUSIVE,” titled “Right-wing commission to vote on flawed New Black Panthers report.”
“The conservative-dominated U.S. Commission on Civil Rights will vote Friday on an interim report that omits critical evidence disproving allegations that the Obama administration refuses to enforce voting-rights laws against racial minorities, according to Media Matters’ analysis of a copy of the report we obtained,” Holden wrote in the Nov. 18 article.
Holden attacked Adams again, and Christopher Coates — another now-former DOJ attorney.
After Holden published that piece, Schmaler sent him an email titled “Great piece…” and continuing in the body of the message, “On USCCR investigation.’” One minute later, Holden responded, writing, “Thanks!”
At 9:50 a.m. on July 8, 2011, Media Matters’ Matt Gertz wrote to Schmaler asking for her help “debunking what I think is a conservative media myth about Operation Fast and Furious.” (RELATED: Complete “Fast and Furious” coverage)
Gertz told Schmaler that “Xochitl directed me to you as the person to talk to.” Gertz was referring to Xochitl Hinojosa, a DOJ spokeswoman and former Media Matters staffer.
“Several media outlets, including Fox News this morning, are claiming that Fast and Furious was paid for with stimulus dollars,” Gertz wrote to Schmaler. “My research suggests that this is not true, and I was hoping you’d be able to confirm that.”
Gertz added that he needed a response “by 1 p.m.” because he thought the issue was “likely to snowball if it isn’t stopped.”
In less than two hours, Schmaler responded with an answer from her “budget folks” in DOJ. “You’re right,” she told Gertz, before explaining why she thought so.
At 1:13 p.m., Gertz responded, writing, “Thanks again for your help, here’s the piece” and adding a link to his online article.
An email chain from Sept. 9, 2011, shows Gertz and Schmaler expressing concern over an upcoming Fox News segment on Fast and Furious.
“This is Vanderboegh, who broke the story in the first place and has contacts in the media and at [the House] Oversight [commission]. Any idea what it’s about?” Gertz wrote to Schmaler at 8:29 a.m. that day in an email that quoted conservative blogger Mike Vanderboegh’s website: “FOX Got ‘Em. Huge Gunwalker Story Breaking Later This Morning.”
At 9:19 a.m., Schmaler replied: “So far, no one’s got an idea … unless it’s something that’s already been out. Let’s stay in touch…”
Gertz responded at 9:25 a.m. with a guess that if it were something that had already been out, it would have been a story on Indiana gun sales.
Fox News played its tease shortly after of a segment promising new information on Fast and Furious, and at 10:18 a.m. Gertz sent the text of Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer’s tease to Schmaler.
“Also two weapons found at the scene where Border Agent Brian, uh, Terry was murdered linked to a botched federal gunrunning sting operation, and today the plot thickens once again,” Gertz quoted Hemmer as saying.
Eight minutes later, Schmaler wrote a terse “??” back to Gertz, likely indicating that she did not understand Hemmer’s statement.
Seconds after receiving Schmaler’s reply, Gertz responded, “No idea. Will let you know when the segment happens.”
Schmaler then praised Gertz for monitoring the situation: “Thanks Matt,” she replied.
In two subsequent emails, Gertz told the DOJ public affairs director what happened. The “[c]laim is [that] there was a third gun at the Terry murder scene that was covered up because it was procured by an FBI informant inside the Sinaloa cartel,” Gertz wrote to Schmaler in one message. The other email included the full text of Fox News reporter William LaJeunesse’s article on the matter.
In a Jan. 31, 2012, email chain titled “per our conversation,” Schmaler and Gertz are seen cooperating on an article attacking House oversight committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa. At 12:18 p.m. that day, Schmaler sent Gertz two paragraphs of text from Issa’s comments during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Dec. 8, 2011. Schmaler underlined a portion of the text in those paragraphs in which Issa discussed the differences between Fast and Furious and similar — but different in crucial respects — programs from the George W. Bush administration.
“The difference in the previous administration is there was coordination with the Mexican government,” Schmaler quoted Issa as saying in her email to Gertz. “They made a real effort under [Operation] Wide Receiver [in the George W. Bush administration] to pass off a small amount of weapons and track them. This program [Fast and Furious], just the opposite. Even knowing the drug cartels that were going to receive them, they simply allowed them to go to the stash house.”
Just hours after Schmaler sent Gertz that highlighted Issa quote, it appeared in a Media Matters article titled “Rep. Issa Ties Himself In Fast And Furious Knots.” Gertz wrote the piece for Media Matters Action Network’s “Political Correction” blog.
In his article, Gertz referenced a just-released Democratic House oversight committee staff report that he said concluded “there is no evidence that senior officials in the Obama Department of Justice authorized gunwalking in that case.”
Gertz chastised Issa, who had pointed out that morning on Fox News how DOJ and congressional Democrats were inconsistent about how Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer “was still a believer in Fast and Furious and programs like it” on Feb. 4, 2011.
Issa pointed out that that date was the same day the DOJ sent a letter to Sen. Chuck Grassley falsely denying gunwalking was going on — a letter the DOJ withdrew months later.
“Note Issa’s very slippery use of the phrase ‘Fast and Furious and programs like it,’” Gertz told his readers.
Schmaler reached out to Gertz on March 12, 2012 seemingly to suggest an article attacking Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips for his public comments about Operation Fast and Furious. At the time, Phillips was pressing GOP leadership to take action on the gunwalking scandal. During a Fox News interview, Phillips said Fast and Furious “should be investigated, but we also have to remember the program itself was a partisan program.”
“This was never a law enforcement sting, as you described it earlier. This was purely a political operation,” Phillips added during the Fox segment.
“You send the guns down to Mexico, therefore you support the political narrative that the Obama administration wanted supported; that all these American guns are flooding Mexico; that they’re the cause of the violence in Mexico and therefore we need draconian gun control laws here in America. So because the whole operation itself was political, yes, by all means Congress should be all over this.”
Schmaler obtained a transcript of Phillips’ whole broadcast segment and sent it to Gertz in an 11:55 a.m. email on March 12, asking, “You see this?”
“[C]ompletely false,” Schmaler wrote of Phillips’ allegation. “[W]ide receiver and Hernandez put this to a lie. There’s been lots of coverage on previous bush operations…”
“Thanks,” Gertz responded one minute later.
“Hernandez” was a reference to Fidel Hernandez, the subject of DOJ’s first – and failed — attempt to direct a “controlled delivery of weapons” across the Mexican border by arms traffickers for the purpose of tracking them to their eventual destination.
At 4:05 p.m. the same day Gertz and Schmaler were emailing about Judson Phillips, Media Matters’ Chris Brown wrote a blog entry attacking Phillips for his televised appearance.
“Not surprisingly, Phillips spent the interview promoting the right-wing conspiracy theory that Fast and Furious was a plot to promote gun control instead of a failed law enforcement investigation,” Brown wrote, adding a mention of what Schmaler had emailed: “Further, Phillips refers to Fast and Furious as a ‘partisan program’ despite the fact that Bush-era investigations featured similar ‘gun walking’ tactics as those used in Fast and Furious.”
Seven minutes after Brown’s blog post appeared online, Gertz sent the full text in an email to Schmaler with the headline, “FYI.”
Schmaler had a new request for Gertz on March 20, 2012. ”Got time for a call?” the DOJ’s top communications official wrote to the progressive activist at 2:20 p.m.
Eleven minutes later, Gertz responded, writing, “Got blocks between 10:30 and noon and between 2 and 4.”
It’s unclear what they spoke about. But Gertz wrote significant amounts of material thereafter defending the slain Florida teenager Trayvon Martin and attacking the National Rifle Association and “stand your ground” laws.
Other than two blog posts he wrote in the days immediately before the email setting up a phone call with Schmaler, Gertz had not written much about the story of the black teenager shot by a Hispanic man in Sanford, Fla on Feb. 26. The DOJ had announced on March 19 that it was launching its own investigation into the Martin case.
Throughout the email exchanges TheDC obtained through the FOIA request are numerous examples of Gertz and other Media Matters staff sending the full text of Media Matters blog entries attacking the DOJ’s political opponents in the media.
Among others, Gertz sent Schmaler attack pieces he wrote about Townhall Magazine’s Katie Pavlich, who also authored a book on Operation Fast and Furious; Breitbart.com writers Joel Pollak and Ken Klukowski; Fox News Channel’s William LaJeunesse, Judge Andrew Napolitano, Megyn Kelly, Martha MacCallum, Bill Hemmer, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity; Sipsey Street Irregulars blogger Mike Vanderboegh; DirectorBlue blogger Doug Ross; National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy; and this reporter.
TheDC filed its FOIA request on Dec. 4, 2011 and the Department of Justice acknowledged receiving it a day later. The request, however, was not fulfilled until Aug. 30, 2012 — far outside the 20-business-day limit to fulfill a FOIA request under the law. TheDC was not given any notification of a time extension in the months this request sat before DOJ acted on it.
The DOJ’s own published guidelines for responding to FOIA requests state that ”nder the law, all federal agencies are required to respond to a FOIA request within 20 business days, unless there are ‘unusual circumstances.’” Those circumstances, the DOJ writes, include the need to collect records from field offices, a request involving a “voluminous” amount of records, and the need ”to consult with another federal agency or other Department of Justice components that have a substantial interest in the responsive information.”
Neither Media Matters’ spokeswoman nor Schmaler replied to TheDC’s requests for comment.
Follow Matthew on Twitter
Daily Caller FOIA – DOJ and Media Matters
http://dailycaller.com/2012/09/18/emails-reveal-justice-dept-regularly-enlists-media-matters-to-spin-press/?print=1
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Haha. Holder cleared.
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:o
THUG
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:o
THUG
anybody with an afro is a thug to you
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anybody with an afro is a thug to you
Holder is a thug and a ghetto terrorist
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Holder is a thug and a ghetto terrorist
It surprises me that YOU don't get tired of yourself sometimes.
Damn, man.
Same old shit. Time after time after time.
Why don't you get something going for yourself?
Seriously, what is the point of your existence?
You're just sucking up resources of someone who could have a life with purpose.
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It surprises me that YOU don't get tired of yourself sometimes.
Damn, man.
Same old shit. Time after time after time.
Why don't you get something going for yourself?
Seriously, what is the point of your existence?
You're just sucking up resources of someone who could have a life with purpose.
wow...good post...agreed
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As much as I think that Barrack Hussein Obama is a disgrace as a president, he is at least (it appears anyway) beholden to the will of the people in some respects. Opinion polls matter, elections matter and no president wants to cement his legacy as a one termer when he is barely through his first two years in office.
However, the Obama administration appointees have been a comedy of criminals, radicals, buffoons and incompetent slobs that are as suited to positions of power as autistic gerbils.
Eric Holder is by far the worst of the bunch. Partially because of the prestige of his office, partially because he's a drama queen that loves posing for the camera and mostly because he is a hideously immature partisan hack that I wouldn't let scrub my toilet, let alone preside over the highest legal position that the government has to offer.
His latest disaster ( Count the many; trying to forcefeed the KSM trial to NYC, suing Arizona for enforcing federal immigration law, dismissing the case against the Black Panthers in the voter intimidation debacle for no good reason except for the defendants being black, having the terrorist who participated in butchering several hundred people at the American Embassy in Africa get acquitted on all but one count, calling Americans cowards on race, etc. etc.) involves one of the most ridiculous cases of pandering to the Arab Muslim Nazi's in this country that I have ever seen in my lifetime. A public school teacher decided to take a Hajj to Mecca in the middle of the school year for three weeks. The school said three weeks was too long. The woman decided to go to the EEOC who contacted Justice and now the brilliant Eric Holder is suing the school district on behalf of this camel turd for an ungodly amount of money. I'm posting the link from Huffington because even the douchebag libs who post there think this is a disgrace.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/14/berkeley-school-sued-by-u_n_796578.html
I agree they should all resign Obamas cabinet members are the worst in American History, a bunch of liers and thugs
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unreal that issa hasn't been able to boot him from office.
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Eric Holder to Stay as Attorney General
Townhall.com ^ | November 13, 2012 | Katie Pavlich
Posted on Tuesday, November 13, 2012 3:12:50 PM by jazusamo
Attorney General Eric Holder apparently has enough " gas left in the tank
." He's staying in his position as the head of the Department of Justice for Obama's second term.
President Obama is holding on to Eric Holder as the nation’s top law-enforcement official, The Post has learned.
The newly re-elected president asked his controversial attorney general to stay for the second term, and Holder has agreed despite enduring a firestorm of criticism from Republican lawmakers.
“I don’t know if everyone in the White House wants him [Holder] to stay, but the important guy does, and that’s all that matters,” said one person briefed on the matter.
Under President Obama, getting hundreds of Mexicans killed in addition to American federal agents, not only doesn't get you fired, but gets you a second gig. Holder staying isn't surprising because after all, Obama needs him to carry out a highly progressive agenda by manipulating the law under the guise of false "justice."
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http://www.lifesitenews.com/blog/breaking-eric-holders-wife-co-owns-abortion-clinic-building-run-by-indicted
damn!
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Former Attorneys General say Justice Department's AP operation highly unusual
FoxNews.com ^ | 5/14/2013
Posted on Tuesday, May 14, 2013 4:50:33 PM by RoosterRedux
The Justice Department is obligated to investigate leaks that could endanger national security, but the secret seizure of Associated Press telephone records – called a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" by the news organization – is unusual, according to two former attorneys general.
*snip*
Mark Corallo, chief spokesman for another Bush attorney general, John Ashcroft, called the secret probe "unprecedented."
"The normal course of business is very narrow and very tailored to a particular individual’s phone records," said Corallo, who served for three years as director of public affairs under Ashcroft. "The idea that they would do two months – grab everything – in several bureaus is truly stunning and disgraceful."
Press organizations also lashed out at the DOJ, claiming their investigation constitutes a gross abuse of the First Amendment.
"I don’t think there’s any justifiable situation, ever, for a subpoena this broad without contacting the organization first," said Gregg Leslie, legal defense director of Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
Leslie said Nixon-era guidelines for the Attorney General’s Office speak directly to subpoenaing phone records of news organizations. He called them a "well-established body of law."
"You have to try to first negotiate" with the news organization, Leslie said.
Rules published by the Justice Department require that subpoenas of records of news organizations must be personally approved by the attorney general, but it was not known if that happened in this case. The letter notifying AP that its phone records had been obtained through subpoenas was sent Friday by Ronald Machen, the U.S. attorney in Washington.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
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Attorney General Berates GOP Congressman: Your Conduct Is 'Unacceptable And Shameful'
Grace Wyler|8 minutes ago|256|1
Sparks flew at Wednesday's House Judiciary Committee hearing, when Attorney General Eric Holder fought back against longtime foe Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.).
"No I will not stop talking!" Holder yelled at Issa, when the Republican interrupted him during questioning over Congress' lack of access to emails by President Barack Obama's Labor Secretary Thomas Perez.
"The way you conduct yourself as a member of Congress is unacceptable and shameful!"
The exchange exposed underlying tensions between Holder and Issa, who led the charge against the Attorney General last year over the botched "Fast and Furious" gun-running scandal. Republicans in Congress voted to hold Holder in contempt over that issue, and clearly there is still lingering bad blood.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/holder-issa-conduct-unacceptable-shameful-2013-5#ixzz2TOEBvBxc
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The Attorney General's Willful Ignorance Of The AP Phone Records Seizure Just Seems Ridiculous
Henry Blodget|33 minutes ago|195|4
Attorney General Eric Holder is testifying in front of Congress today.
Not surprisingly, he is being asked about the Justice Department's obtaining Associated Press phone records without telling the Associated Press in advance.
As I described earlier, this seizure of the records may well have been legal and justifiable.
Under current law, the DOJ has the right to demand media phone records when the DOJ can't obtain the desired information through other reasonable means. The DOJ even has the right to do this without telling the media organization in advance--if it thinks telling the media organization will threaten the integrity investigation.
If those two conditions were met in this case, the DOJ has nothing to worry about. But Americans certainly have every right to ask whether those two conditions were met. (And, then, to wonder whether giving the DOJ these rights is really in the country's best interests).
But Attorney General Eric Holder is saying that those conditions were met.
He's saying he doesn't know anything about the AP case, because he recused himself from it.
That just seems ridiculous.
It's not ridiculous that Eric Holder recused himself from the case. If he felt he needed to recuse himself, he should have recused himself.
What seems ridiculous is that he's using his recusal as an excuse to say he knows nothing about the case.
Eric Holder runs the Justice Department. He can be recused from a case and yet still make inquiries about it to understand the decisions that were made in investigating it so he can explain these decisions to Congress.
Even if he's not involved in a decision in his organization, that doesn't stop him from being able to ask questions about it for the purpose of relaying this information to investigators.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/attorney-general-ap-phone-records-2013-5#ixzz2TOFdvATz
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Obama doesn't know anything about this because the AG is independent. The AG doesn't know anything about this because his deputy handled it. What will the deputy say? ::)
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Obama doesn't know anything about this because the AG is independent. The AG doesn't know anything about this because his deputy handled it. What will the deputy say? ::)
Same MO as Fast n Furious
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http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/05/20/DOJ-Inspector-General-confirms-US-Attorney-DOJ-headquarters-leaked-documents-to-smear-Fast-and-Furious-whistleblower
The Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General published a new report Monday that confirms former U.S. Attorney for Arizona Dennis Burke leaked a document intended to smear Operation Fast and Furious scandal whistleblower John Dodson.
The DOJ IG said it found “Burke’s conduct in disclosing the Dodson memorandum to be inappropriate for a Department employee and wholly unbefitting a U.S. Attorney.”
“We are referring to OPR our finding that Burke violated Department policy in disclosing the Dodson memorandum to a member of the media for a determination of whether Burke’s conduct violated the Rules of Professional Conduct for the state bars in which Burke is a member,” the IG wrote.
Burke resigned from his post as U.S. Attorney over the incident in August 2011, the first major Department of Justice official to leave his or her post in the Fast and Furious scandal. He said after the fact, in interviews with congressional investigators, that he now views leaking the document as a “mistake.”
In addition to Burke’s involvement in leaking the document, emails the IG uncovered show senior officials at the Department of Justice discussed smearing Dodson.
One of those was Tracy Schmaler, the Director of the Department’s Office of Public Affairs, who resigned her position at the DOJ after emails uncovered through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request showed that she worked with leftwing advocacy group Media Matters for America to smear whistleblowers and members of Congress and the media who sought to investigate DOJ scandals under Attorney General Eric Holder.
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Lead story on huffingtonpost. :o
"TIME TO GO: HOLDER OK'D PRESS PROBE"
Eric Holder Signed Off On Search Warrant For James Rosen Emails: NBC News
By Jack Mirkinson
The Huffington Post | By Jack Mirkinson Posted: 05/23/2013 5:42 pm EDT | Updated: 05/23/2013 6:56 pm EDT
Attorney General Eric Holder personally signed off on the warrant that allowed the Justice Department to search Fox News reporter James Rosen's personal email, NBC News' Michael Isikoff reported Thursday.
The report places Holder at the center one of the most controversial clashes between the press and the government in recent memory. The warrant he approved named Rosen as a "co-conspirator" in a leak investigation, causing many to warn that the Justice Department was potentially criminalizing journalism. The warrant also approved the tracking of Rosen's movements in and out of the State Department, as well as his communications with his source, Stephen Kim.
The Justice Department later said that it did not intend to press any charges against Rosen.
The attorney general is usually required to approve requests to search journalists' materials, but that rule does not extend to email records.
(Holder recused himself from the investigation into the Associated Press, meaning that he absolved himself of that responsibility.) Holder has previously said that he was not sure how many times he had authorized the search of journalists' records.
The revelation came hours after President Obama said in a speech that he was concerned about the potential implications of the Fox News and AP investigations. Obama said that Holder would be reviewing the department's rules for investigations that involve reporters.
Fox News chief Roger Ailes responded to the Justice Department's investigation on Thursday, sending a staff memo condemning the Obama administration's choices.
"We reject the government’s efforts to criminalize the pursuit of investigative journalism and falsely characterize a Fox News reporter to a Federal judge as a “co-conspirator” in a crime," Ailes wrote. "I know how concerned you are because so many of you have asked me: why should the government make me afraid to use a work phone or email account to gather news or even call a friend or family member? Well, they shouldn’t have done it."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/23/eric-holder-fox-news-james-rosen-warrant_n_3328663.html
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The timing places this right in Obama's lap. Remember when he tried to censor Fox News? That happened in late 2009.
The Obama war against Fox News: Risky business?
October 19, 2009 | 9:50 am
The Obama White House is making no secret of its distaste for Fox News.
In a round of Sunday talk show appearances, the administration escalated its war against the network that likes to call itself "fair and balanced" but that happens to feature quite a few conservative voices.
White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said on CNN that Fox News isn't even a news organization.
And White House political guru David Axelrod, who had coffee a few weeks ago in New York with Fox News founder Roger Ailes, told ABC that Fox News is "really not news. ... Other news organizations like yours ought not to treat them that way. We're not going to treat them that way."
But some are wondering if this is smart politics. Given that Fox News boasts a far larger audience than cable competitors CNN and MSNBC, and given that most elections are decided by independents who might occasionally watch FNC, the strategy could backfire.
“It's a very risky strategy,” perennial presidential advisor David Gergen said recently on CNN. “It's not one I would advocate.”
For its part, the administration seems content to keep the battle going, even though the wars have already claimed a few victims. Glenn Beck pounded the lectern relentlessly about green jobs czar Van Jones for signing a petition suggesting government conspiracy in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Jones resigned.
Now Beck has turned his furor on White House communications director Anita Dunn for saying that China's Mao Tse-tung was one of her favorite philosophers. Firing back, Dunn said she picked up the line from renowned Republican strategist Lee Atwater and that it was meant as irony.
"The use of the phrase 'favorite political philosophers' was intended as irony, but clearly the effort fell flat -- at least with a certain Fox commentator whose sense of irony may be missing," she said. Keeping up the White House attack, Dunn also charged that Fox serves as "the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party."
Now Beck is charging that the White House attack is akin to media genocide, like going after the Jews during the Holocaust.
I dunno, don't these folks have something better to do?
-- Johanna Neuman
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2009/10/the-obama-war-against-fox-news-smart-politics-or-risky-business.html
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/23/eric-holder-fox-news-james-rosen-warrant_n_3328663.html
HP calling for Holder to resign
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Bombshell: Eric Holder Lied to Congress Under Oath
by
Bryan Preston
May 24, 2013 - 8:58 am
During friendly questioning from Rep. Hank “I fear that Guam will capsize!” Johnson in Congress last week, Attorney General Eric Holder offered the following statement.
In regard to potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material. This is not something I’ve ever been involved in, heard of, or would think would be wise policy.
He made that statement before the facts about the sweep on Fox News’ James Rosen were known. Since then, it’s come to light that Holder himself approved the subpoena that, among other things, named Rosen as a criminal co-conspirator.
So, Eric Holder lied under oath before a congressional hearing.
In addition to that, he may have intentionally misled a judge in the request of Rosen’s phone records according to Jennifer Rubin.
[T]he affidavit (paragraph 45) asserts that DOJ exhausted all means available to get the material from Rosen’s e-mails and phone, and “because of [Rosen's] own potential criminal liability in this matter,” asking for the documents voluntarily would compromise the integrity of the investigation. Moreover, the affidavit asserts that the “targets” of the investigation (including Rosen) were a risk to “mask their identity and activity, flee or otherwise obstruct this investigation.” It is highly questionable whether Holder believed any of that to be true. (Really, he imagined a Fox News reporter would flee the country? He thought Rosen would don a disguise?) Was the affidavit a sort of ruse to get Rosen’s records (or later to pressure his cooperation)? Did Holder intentionally mislead a judge when he signed off on the affidavit? That is worth exploring.
President Obama put himself on the record regarding the DOJ’s actions against journalists Thursday, declaring himself sufficiently “troubled” to order Holder to look into the matter. Eric Holder will be investigating Eric Holder to determine if Eric Holder lied under oath and misrepresented facts before a federal judge.
That won’t do.
Eric Holder must resign, and he must face investigation and probable prosecution.
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http://dailycaller.com/2013/08/05/taxpayers-spent-more-than-4-million-on-holders-travel-costs
>:(
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House Votes to Limit DOJ Funding Unless Holder Comes Clean (142 Democrats votes for it)
The House voted on a controversial funding limit amendment Wednesday evening to stop Attorney General Holder from lying to Congress.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) Comments the move to cut off Holder's DOJ allowance for 2013 unless he tells the truth about the gun walking operation known as Fast and Furious.
The amendment to H.R. 5326, an appropriations bill funding Holder's agency for 2013, was in response to a February 4, 2011 letter to Congress in which DOJ officials denied any involvement in Operation Fast and Furious. Months later after damaging contradictions and discrepancies surfaced the Department was forced to rescind the letter.
In a 381-41 vote, House members including 142 Democrats, overwhelmingly sided with Chaffetz. The peoples' representatives decided taxpayer monies should not be used to support liars.
Great way to work across the aisle. We should see more of that. Chaffetz seems to be a real uniter.
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http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2014/12/18/holder_i_cant_honestly_say_that_if_youre_a_person_of_color_you_shouldnt_be_afraid_of_police.html
GFY you thug commie pos