Politicization of Justice Department Worsens
If you are a moderate or conservative, don’t expect to get a job with the Justice Department during the Obama administration. All 15 of the attorneys hired by the Justice Department’s Employment Litigation Section were ardent leftists — no moderate or conservative, let alone libertarian, hires at all. Some of the hires were fresh out of law school with no real world legal experience. Meanwhile, “the liberal ideologues hired in the Special Litigation Section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division” engaged in conduct that “is a per se violation of the professional codes of conduct governing lawyers” in order to pursue their ideological agenda. “Every one of the 23″ Special Litigation Section “attorneys hired since Obama took office” has “liberal credentials.”
Left-wing Justice Department lawyers are abusing their position to enforce ideological double standards. The Justice Department is prosecuting a peaceful anti-abortion protester whose speech is protected by the First Amendment under court rulings like Hoye v. City of Oakland and Snyder v. Phelps. Unlike two Obama supporters in Philadelphia that the Justice Department refused to prosecute, the abortion protester “was not carrying a nightstick, and he was not yelling racial epithets or blocking the entrance to a polling place. Yet this is the same Justice Department that dismissed a voter-intimidation case against the New Black Panther party, whose members engaged in exactly that behavior” outside a Philadelphia polling place (one of them did so while working as a poll watcher for the Obama campaign. The New Black Panther party is a racist, anti-semitic hate group).
Under Obama, left-wing government lawyers get a free pass for bad behavior, while conscientious whistleblowers are effectively forced out of their jobs. Leftist lawyers have gotten away with serious misconduct after being hired by the Criminal Section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. As a former Justice Department lawyer notes:
There have been many stories about the politicization of the Holder Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and the general unprofessionalism and incompetence of many of its lawyers who don’t believe in the race neutral enforcement of our voting rights laws.
Now AP is reporting that the division was forced to dismiss a federal prosecution in Hawaii with prejudice three days into the trial after the case fell apart and the lead prosecutor, Susan French, was forced to admit that she had misled a federal grand jury. . .
The division’s Criminal Section is headed by Mark Kappelhoff, a former ACLU attorney and $2,000 Obama campaign contributor who was accused in the past of trying to abuse federal law to attack Republicans. He apparently approved the criminal prosecution of two Hawaiian farmers, Alec and Mike Sou, who recruited workers from Thailand . . .The farmers were indicted for human trafficking due in part to Ms. French’s statement to a federal grand jury that it was a violation of federal law for such workers to pay a recruiting fee when they traveled to Hawaii in 2004.
The problem with that assertion is that such recruiting fees were perfectly legal in 2004 — they did not become a violation of federal law until 2009, five years later. The federal judge overseeing the case, Susan Oki Mollway, had to ask French three times in court whether French agreed she had misstated the law to the grand jury before French finally admitted her mistake.
French and her prosecution team claimed that the farmers mistreated their workers. . .The Sous claimed they treated their workers well. . . none of the witnesses called in the case supported the government’s allegations. One of the jurors was quoted . . . as saying that “the government just did not do their homework, and point by point, evidence from the people giving statements supported the Sous.”
Mexican officials are furious about Operation Fast and Furious, a bungled and mismanaged covert operation in which the Obama Administration funneled guns to violent Mexican drug lords in a failed sting operation that resulted in many deaths on Mexico as well as the killing of a U.S. Border Patrol agent. In this absurd operation,
the federal government used stimulus funding to buy guns from Arizona gun shops for known criminals to funnel to Mexican drug cartels . . . Supposedly, United States taxpayers were picking up the tab for Mexican drug lords’ weaponry in order that the ATF could identify high-up gun-traffickers. But, as it turns out, these high-up gun-traffickers were already known to other agencies — FBI, DEA, and other big-spending acronyms in the great fetid ooze of federal alphabet soup in which this republic is drowning. And, indeed, some of those high-ups are said to have been paid informants for those various federal agencies.
“Lanny Breuer, the Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division at the Justice Department, was clearly aware of Operation Fast and Furious and touted the case during a visit to Mexico. ATF officials in Mexico City were incredulous that their agency would knowingly allow guns to fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartels, and they were incensed when they finally began to learn the full scope of Operation Fast and Furious and the investigative techniques used.” Moreover, “U.S. law-enforcement agents essentially provided security for gun smugglers working for Mexican drug cartels. That such weapons are turning up in drug cases north of the border is hardly surprising,” notes The New York Post.
Attorney General Eric Holder long knew about and supported this disastrous operation, says Investor’s Business Daily: “The evidence suggests that Agent Terry’s death was financed by the president’s stimulus package with the full knowledge and support of Attorney General Holder.” As it notes, “At a House oversight hearing last month, three federal firearms investigators testified they wanted to ‘intervene and interdict’ the guns at the border, but were repeatedly ordered to step aside and let the traffickers proceed. Acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson, in closed-door testimony in front of Rep. Darrell Issa’s committee, said administration officials sought to control and limit his communications with Congress, including withholding documents that made Melson ‘sick to his stomach’ after he reviewed them.”
Political appointees in the Justice Department and other Departments have also rubberstamped controversial Obama administration policies despite being warned by legal experts in the Office of Legal Counsel that those policies were unconstitutional.