Congratulations to the editors at the Washington Post. Seventeen months after the Eric Holder Justice Department dismissed a slam-dunk case against the New Black Panther Party for voter intimidation, thePost gets around to printing a thorough vetting of the dismissal. The story is slated for Saturday’s print edition. While other media like Breitbart/The Bigs, Fox News, the Washington Times, the Weekly Standard, Pittsburgh Tribune Review, Investors Business Daily, Pajamas Media, and Drudge have had dozens of stories on the corrupt New Black Panther dismissal, the Washington Post at last is in the game.
The story is a shocker too. The shock comes from the middle of the road and factual nature of the story.
There are small problems with the story. For one, the Washington Post is the only outlet that calls King Samir Shabazz by his old “slave name” (Shabazz’s own words) of Maruse Heath. Even Heath doesn’t call himself Heath. Of course this takes some of the sting off Shabazz’s rants against Jews and calls to kill “cracker babies in their crib.”
The Post’s decision to change a man’s name for him is controversial. It has no place.
But overall, the story is very bad news for Eric Holder. It debunks many of the myths spun by the administration. Inside DOJ sources describe deep hostility to protecting whites at Justice. DOJ sources say panther prosecutor Christian Adams never allowed his conservative views to influence his work, contradicting administration spin. And perhaps most damning of all to Holder, sources defending the administration defend the idea that whites aren’t protected by the Civil Rights laws. The latter is the blockbuster news in the Post piece.
The Post also shatters the false administration spin that only low level career lawyers had a fight among themselves: “After the Obama administration took over, high-level political appointees relayed their thoughts on the case in a stream of internal e-mails in the days leading to the dismissal.” The administration told Congress and the public a lie for over a year, and now the Washington Post even knows.
The Post’s Jerry Markon and Krissah Thompson write, “But neighbors said they view Jackson and Heath – who declined to comment – as annoyances rather than threats.” What did you expect the neighbors to say?
The Post has a major revelation, the first on the record confirmation of the attitude inside the Civil Rights Division that whites should not necessarily be protected by the civil rights laws:
“The Voting Rights Act was passed because people like Bull Connor were hitting people like John Lewis, not the other way around,” said one Justice Department official not authorized to speak publicly, referring to the white Alabama police commissioner who cracked down on civil rights protesters such as Lewis, now a Democratic congressman from Georgia.”
This is a startling admission. It is part and parcel of a wide hostility to protecting whites who are victims of racial discrimination, as Christopher Coates and Adams alleged all along. That admission is a major mistake for the administration and should be made well known before the upcoming election.
The Post gathers more gold:
Three Justice Department lawyers, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation from their supervisors, described the same tensions, among career lawyers as well as political appointees. Employees who worked on the Brown case were harassed by colleagues, they said, and some department lawyers anonymously went on legal blogs “absolutely tearing apart anybody who was involved in that case,” said one lawyer.
For the first time in any media, the Washington Post has cracked sources inside the DOJ familiar with what is going on. Kudos to the Post for flushing out more corroboration of the Adams and Coates testimony.
There is this money quote:
“There are career people who feel strongly that it is not the voting section’s job to protect white voters,” the lawyer said. “The environment is that you better toe the line of traditional civil rights ideas or you better keep quiet about it, because you will not advance, you will not receive awards and you will be ostracized.”
So the Post does what nobody has been able to do – obtain deep sourcing inside the Department confirming what Adams and Coates have been saying for months. This is a devastating piece of work by the Washington Post. This is a rare moment where the old print media has returned to the higher standards of years past, and reported facts. A week from an election, it couldn’t have come at a worse time for Eric Holder.
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