Author Topic: The worst attorney general in American History  (Read 41532 times)

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Re: The worst attorney general in American History
« Reply #50 on: March 07, 2012, 07:45:51 AM »
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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Re: The worst attorney general in American History
« Reply #51 on: March 11, 2012, 03:32:34 PM »
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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Re: The worst attorney general in American History
« Reply #52 on: March 12, 2012, 09:02:30 AM »
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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Re: The worst attorney general in American History
« Reply #53 on: March 13, 2012, 04:59:10 AM »
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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Re: The worst attorney general in American History
« Reply #54 on: March 13, 2012, 05:56:33 PM »
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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Re: The worst attorney general in American History
« Reply #55 on: March 14, 2012, 10:51:12 AM »
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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Re: The worst attorney general in American History
« Reply #56 on: March 16, 2012, 09:33:00 PM »

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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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Re: The worst attorney general in American History
« Reply #57 on: March 18, 2012, 02:54:16 PM »
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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Re: The worst attorney general in American History
« Reply #59 on: March 27, 2012, 03:24:27 PM »
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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Re: The worst attorney general in American History
« Reply #60 on: April 02, 2012, 03:43:22 PM »
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.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[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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Re: The worst attorney general in American History
« Reply #61 on: April 03, 2012, 07:13:43 AM »
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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Re: The worst attorney general in American History
« Reply #62 on: April 15, 2012, 11:35:30 AM »
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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Re: The worst attorney general in American History
« Reply #63 on: April 16, 2012, 09:09:04 AM »
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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Re: The worst attorney general in American History
« Reply #64 on: April 16, 2012, 07:36:15 PM »



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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Re: The worst attorney general in American History
« Reply #65 on: April 24, 2012, 10:18:32 AM »
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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Re: The worst attorney general in American History
« Reply #66 on: April 25, 2012, 08:32:58 AM »
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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Re: The worst attorney general in American History
« Reply #67 on: April 30, 2012, 01:33:46 PM »
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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Re: The worst attorney general in American History
« Reply #68 on: May 01, 2012, 04:53:46 AM »
Pro tip: No one is paying attention to your torrent of copy and pastes, stupid.
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Re: The worst attorney general in American History
« Reply #69 on: May 01, 2012, 05:07:02 AM »
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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Re: The worst attorney general in American History
« Reply #70 on: May 07, 2012, 02:22:02 PM »
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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Re: The worst attorney general in American History
« Reply #71 on: May 07, 2012, 06:57:25 PM »
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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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"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.

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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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Re: The worst attorney general in American History
« Reply #72 on: May 08, 2012, 03:00:56 PM »
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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Re: The worst attorney general in American History
« Reply #73 on: May 08, 2012, 03:04:12 PM »
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”.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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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Re: The worst attorney general in American History
« Reply #74 on: May 10, 2012, 09:04:52 AM »
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.