The View From 1776

Two postings by the Wall Street Journal’s John Fund revisits the mischief.

Who Will Investigate the Investigators?

Another voter fraud scandal involving the Justice Department.
By JOHN FUND

J. Christian Adams, a former career Justice Department lawyer who resigned recently to protest political interference in cases he worked on, made some news yesterday in testimony before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

As expected, he claimed that Associate Attorney General Thomas Perrelli, an Obama appointee, overruled a unanimous recommendation by six career Justice attorneys for continued prosecution of members of the New Black Panther Party on charges of voter intimidation in an incident I detailed here yesterday. [see second article below by John Fund] But Mr. Adams leveled an even more explosive charge beyond the Panther case.

He testified that last year Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes made a jaw-dropping announcement to attorneys in Justice’s Voting Rights section. She said she would not support any enforcement of a key section of the federal “Motor Voter” law—Section 8, which requires states to periodically purge their voter rolls of dead people, felons, illegal voters and those who have moved out of state.

According to Mr. Adams, Justice lawyers were told by Ms. Fernandes: “We’re not interested in those kind of cases. What do they have to do with helping increase minority access and turnout? We want to increase access to the ballot, not limit it.”

If true, Ms. Fernandes was endorsing a policy of ignoring federal law and encouraging potential voter fraud. Ms. Fernandes was unavailable for comment yesterday, but the Justice Department has issued a statement accusing Mr. Adams of “distorting facts” in general and having a political agenda.

But there is some evidence backing up Mr. Adams. Last year, Justice abandoned a case it had pursued for three years against Missouri for failing to clean up its rolls. When filed in 2005, one-third of Missouri counties had more registered voters than voting-age residents. What’s more, Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan, a Democrat who this year is her party’s candidate for a vacant U.S. Senate seat, contended that her office had no obligation to ensure individual counties were complying with the federal law mandating a cleanup of their voter rolls.

The case made slow but steady progress through the courts for more than three years, amid little or no evidence of progress in cleaning up Missouri’s voter rolls. Despite this, Obama Justice saw fit to dismiss the case in March 2009. Curiously, only a month earlier, Ms. Carnahan had announced her Senate candidacy. Missouri has a long and documented history of voter fraud in Democratic-leaning cities such as St. Louis and Kansas City. Ms. Carnahan may now stand to benefit from voter fraud facilitated by the improperly kept voter rolls that she herself allowed to continue.

Mr. Adams’ allegations would seem to call for the senior management of Justice to be compelled to testify under oath to U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. But Justice is making none of its officials available and is refusing to enforce subpoenas issued by the commission. The more this story develops, the more it appears Justice is engaged in a massive coverup of its politicization of voting rights cases.

A Very Obama Scandal

The Black Panthers voter intimidation scandal plagues the Justice Department.
By JOHN FUND

J. Christian Adams, a former career Justice Department official who resigned over the Obama administration’s failure to pursue a voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party, will finally get a chance to tell his story in public today when he testifies before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Mr. Adams will make some explosive charges. He says the administration used a racial double standard in deciding last year to drop the prosecution of the New Black Panther Party after members were videotaped in front of a Philadelphia polling place on Election Day 2008 dressed in military-style uniforms, brandishing a billy club and using racial slurs against voters. Mr. Adams says the career prosecutors who pursued the case did their job but were stymied by Obama political appointees, for whom he has harsh words: “To abandon law-abiding citizens and abet wrongdoers constitutes corruption,” he told Fox News last week.

President Obama’s Justice Department continues to stonewall inquiries about why it dropped the voter intimidation case, which Bartle Bull, a former civil rights lawyer and former publisher of the left-wing Village Voice, calls “the most blatant form of voter intimidation I’ve ever seen.” Mr. Bull and others witnessed one Black Panther pointing his billy club at voters and making racial threats. Mr. Bull says he heard one yell: “You are about to be ruled by the black man, cracker!”
Nonetheless, the Justice Department moved to dismiss most of the charges a month after winning a default judgment against the Black Panthers when the party failed to appear in federal court. The move came after Justice secured an agreement from one Black Panther member not to carry a “deadly weapon” near a polling place until 2012. In a written statement, the Justice Department now says it acted in good faith, adding: “It is regrettable when a former department attorney distorts the facts and makes baseless allegations to promote his or her agenda.”

But the Washington Times has reported that six career lawyers at Justice, including Christopher Coates, former chief of the Justice Department’s voting section, also favored pursuing the case. One of the career attorneys, Appellate Chief Diana Flynn, had urged in an internal memo that a judgment be pressed against the defendants to “prevent the paramilitary style intimidation of voters” in the future.

All of the career attorneys were overruled by Associate Attorney General Thomas Perrelli, an Obama appointee.

Rep. Frank Wolf, a Virginia Republican, says his efforts to require Justice to make the career attorneys available for questions have been rebuffed. Mr. Adams is able to testify today only because he voluntarily resigned his career position. It will be interesting to see if his public testimony finally stirs the broadcast networks to cover this outrage.