Would You Have Been Intimidated?

The Justice Department apparently doesn’t think you should have been.

Whistle-blower J. Christian Adams, a career voting rights attorney with the Department of Justice, resigned his position in disgust over the handling of the voter intimidation case brought against the members of the New Black Panther Party featured in the above video:

On the day President Obama was elected, armed men wearing the black berets and jackboots of the New Black Panther Party were stationed at the entrance to a polling place in Philadelphia. They brandished a weapon and intimidated voters and poll watchers. After the election, the Justice Department brought a voter-intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party and those armed thugs. I and other Justice attorneys diligently pursued the case and obtained an entry of default after the defendants ignored the charges. Before a final judgment could be entered in May 2009, our superiors ordered us to dismiss the case.

The New Black Panther case was the simplest and most obvious violation of federal law I saw in my Justice Department career. Because of the corrupt nature of the dismissal, statements falsely characterizing the case and, most of all, indefensible orders for the career attorneys not to comply with lawful subpoenas investigating the dismissal, this month I resigned my position as a Department of Justice (DOJ) attorney.

The federal voter-intimidation statutes we used against the New Black Panthers were enacted because America never realized genuine racial equality in elections. Threats of violence characterized elections from the end of the Civil War until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Before the Voting Rights Act, blacks seeking the right to vote, and those aiding them, were victims of violence and intimidation. But unlike the Southern legal system, Southern violence did not discriminate. Black voters were slain, as were the white champions of their cause. Some of the bodies were tossed into bogs and in one case in Philadelphia, Miss., they were buried together in an earthen dam.

Based on my firsthand experiences, I believe the dismissal of the Black Panther case was motivated by a lawless hostility toward equal enforcement of the law. Others still within the department share my assessment. The department abetted wrongdoers and abandoned law-abiding citizens victimized by the New Black Panthers. The dismissal raises serious questions about the department’s enforcement neutrality in upcoming midterm elections and the subsequent 2012 presidential election.

Go here to read the rest of his article at the Washington Times.

Veteran civil rights attorney Bartle Bull was present at the poll in question on election day 2008.  Here is his affidavit of what happened.

Let us try a little thought experiment.  Two Klansmen, wearing sheets, show up in front of a poll in Alabama on election day 2008, one of them carrying a baton.  Does anyone doubt that those two would have been prosecuted to the full extent of the law, or that the case would have caused a media firestorm with endless stories?  In this case the Department of Justice drops it and, until literally this week, the major media, other than Fox, has buried this story in oblivion.  Under Obama, Orwell’s Animal Farm rule is in force:  Some animals are more equal than others.