Are Trojan horse ‘loyal Bushies’ at DOJ campaigning against Obama?

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When a new administration takes power in Washington, there are always holdovers who cling to the ship of state like lampreys, taking little bites out of the electoral victor who displaced their boss. It was true at the end of the Clinton administration, certainly. It’s proving true once again.

Given the heavy politicization of the Justice Department under President Bush and his man Alberto Gonzales, you should be suspicious any time you read a news story alleging that Obama’s ‘political appointees’ are overruling non-partisan career staff at DOJ. But it doesn’t seem that any skepticism was applied to such claims by the journalists at the Washington Times and Fox News who ran with a leak accusing the President’s hand-picked staff at the Justice Department of overruling career attorneys who sought to prosecute a voter intimidation case from November 2008. The allegations have heavy racial overtones and are already being used to reinforce tropes on the far right fringe that President Obama in some way stole his clear electoral victory.

Specifically, DOJ attorneys prosecuted and sought to punish some ‘New Black Panthers,’ African-American radicals who menaced a few voters outside a polling place in Philadelphia on Election Day last November. Here’s the WT’s take on the story:

Justice Department political appointees overruled career lawyers and ended a civil complaint accusing three members of the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense of wielding a nightstick and intimidating voters at a Philadelphia polling place last Election Day, according to documents and interviews.

The incident – which gained national attention when it was captured on videotape and distributed on YouTube – had prompted the government to sue the men, saying they violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act by scaring would-be voters with the weapon, racial slurs and military-style uniforms.

First, it’s worth pointing out that it is within the purview of political staff to stop a prosecution that isn’t consistent with departmental policies. That point was made over and over again by President Bush’s hand-picked stooge, Alberto Gonzales, in the endless series of Congressional hearings he entertained us with prior to his resignation from the Attorney General’s office in 2007.

And, as the article notes, the case against the New Black Panthers wasn’t simply dropped. One of the men at the Philly polling place, King Samir Shabazz, was penalized with “an order that he not display a “weapon within 100 feet of any open polling location on any election day in the city of Philadelphia” until Nov. 15, 2012.” Probation seems like a fair penalty given that neither Shabazz nor his buddies assaulted any voters.

But the worst of this tale’s telling is what the Washington Times leaves out. ‘Career attorneys’ seemed like a pretty murky phrase until I saw that one of the attorneys involved in the case, J. Christian Adams, is also a member of the National Republican Lawyers Association. As the McClachy Newspapers pointed out in 2007, the NRLA, “trains hundreds of Republican lawyers to monitor elections and pushes for confirmation of conservative nominees for federal judgeships.” Paul Kiel at Talking Points Memo pointed out that since Adams and others joined the Voting Rights Section of the Justice Department in the Bush administration:

the section, which is charged with protecting minority voters from discrimination, has filed only two cases on behalf of African American voters during the Bush administration (and one of those cases they inherited from the Clinton administration).

But the section has, remarkably, pursued the first case to allege discrimination against white voters ever filed under the Voting Rights Act.

And the bloggers at ePluribus Media added that the class of ‘career attorneys’ that Adams came in with marked a sea change in the Voting Rights Section at DOJ:

Over 50% of the Voting Section’s career employees have left in the past two years, and the Bush Administration has replaced them with hand-picked loyalists who continue to force out long-time career employees, many of them minorities, who could derail the Bush administration’s “agenda.” As one anonymous source suggests, the work environment has become hostile to career employees and especially to those who are minorities.

This background, which offers some nuance into evaluating why the Justice Department might have dropped the case against the New Black Panthers, was left out from the story. And once the WT and Fox gave the story the patina of journalistic credibility, it was picked up by town criers and village idiots with even less interest in digging deeper.

For instance, speaking in code that George Wallace and Bull Connor would fully appreciate, Rush Limbaugh declared on Monday in referring to the story, “Say good-bye to federalism.” And even farther out at the fringe, the factually-challenged Pamela Oshry implies at Atlas Shrugs that these New Black Panthers outside this single polling place in a state were critical to Obama winning the election in a state he carried handily:

Regular Atlas readers remember the vocal and racist support the Black Panther party gave to Obama. It paid off. Big time payback to America haters, Jew haters, and white people.

This was almost good timing for the ‘career attorneys’ at DOJ who leaked this story to the conservative press. The far right fringes are obsessed right now with Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s putative ‘reverse racism.’ Implying that Obama is now using the Justice Department to protect black radicals who might be heard screaming ‘G-d Damn America’ may have been a good way to keep alive the notion that Obama and his people aren’t like the rest of us as Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings were scheduled. Sadly, it took the murder of Dr. George Tiller to put much of the far-right media apparatus back on its heels, which has had the fortunate effect of keeping this story from getting anymore pick up.

But just because this is the first time you’re hearing a racially-tinged allegation of political interference in DOJ business, that doesn’t mean it will be the last. Karl Rove’s class in the Justice Department is still there, and they’ll continue bridling against the limits that Attorney General Eric Holder will continue to place on the agenda they hoped to complete until last November shook up ‘justice’ in the United States. It will happen again, and with Sotomayor’s confirmation comng up, perhaps sooner than anyone might think.