Billy-club wielding Black Panthers outside Philadelphia polling station

The 2008 Presidential election featured brazen acts of voting fraud and voter intimidation in favor of the democrat party candidates. The Obama Administration’s Department of Justice just sent a message to its supporters assuring them crimes committed in support of democrats will not be punished.

Washington Times:

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.

Career lawyers pursued the case for months, including obtaining an affidavit from a prominent 1960s civil rights activist who witnessed the confrontation and described it as “the most blatant form of voter intimidation” that he had seen, even during the voting rights crisis in Mississippi a half-century ago.

The lawyers also had ascertained that one of the three men had gained access to the polling place by securing a credential as a Democratic poll watcher, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The Washington Times.

The career Justice lawyers were on the verge of securing sanctions against the men earlier this month when their superiors ordered them to reverse course, according to interviews and documents. The court had already entered a default judgment against the men on April 20.

A Justice Department spokesman on Thursday confirmed that the agency had dropped the case, dismissing two of the men from the lawsuit with no penalty and winning an order against the third man that simply prohibits him from bringing a weapon to a polling place in future elections.

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Original 1:21 video

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The same Washington Times ran the following editorial.

Imagine if Ku Klux Klan members had stood menacingly in military uniforms, with nightsticks, in front of a polling place. Add to it that they had hurled racial threats and insults at voters who tried to enter.

Now suppose that the government, backed by a nationally televised video of the event, had won a court case against the Klansmen except for the perfunctory filing of a single, simple document – but that an incoming Republican administration had moved to voluntarily dismiss the already-won case.

Surely that would have been front-page news, with a number of firings at the Justice Department.

The flip side of this scenario is occurring right now. The culprits weren’t Klansmen; they belonged to the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. One of the defendants, Jerry Jackson, is an elected member of Philadelphia’s 14th Ward Democratic Committee and was a credentialed poll watcher for Barack Obama and the Democratic Party when the violations occurred. Rather conveniently, the Obama administration has asked that the cases against Mr. Jackson, two other defendants and the party be dropped.

The Voting Rights Act is very clear. It prohibits any “attempt to intimidate, threaten or coerce” any voter or those aiding voters.

The explanation for moving to dismiss the case is shocking. According to the Department of Justice: “These same Defendants have made no appearance and have filed no pleadings with the Court. Nor have they otherwise raised any other defenses to this action. Therefore, the United States has the right … to dismiss voluntarily this action against the Defendants.” In other words, because the defendants haven’t tried to defend themselves, the Justice Department won’t punish them.

By that logic, if a murderer doesn’t respond to the charges, he should be let free. That’s crazy.

The Wall Street Journal comments with astonishment on Obama’s choice of Dawn Johnsen, leading opponent of the Bush Administration’s defense of executive branch authority, as head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which interprets the law for his entire administration.

One of the OLC’s main duties is to defend the Presidency against the inevitable encroachment of the judiciary and Congress on Constitutional authority, executive privilege, war powers, and so forth. Ms. Johnsen knows this, or should, having served as acting OLC head in the Clinton Administration between 1997 and 1998. The office has since become all the more central in a war on terror that has been “strangled by law,” to quote Jack Goldsmith, a former Bush OLC chief.

Yet Ms. Johnsen seems to think her job isn’t to defend the Presidency but to tie it down with even more legal ropes. She has written that “an essential source of constraint is often underappreciated and underestimated: legal advisors within the executive branch.” And in touting her qualifications, the Obama transition cited her recent law review articles “What’s a President to Do?: Interpreting the Constitution in the Wake of the Bush Administration’s Abuses”; and “Faithfully Executing the Laws: Internal Legal Constraints on Executive Power.”

In other words, Mr. Obama has nominated as his main executive branch lawyer someone who believes in diminishing the powers of the executive branch. This is akin to naming a conscientious objector as the head of the armed forces, or hiring your wife’s divorce lawyer to handle your side of the settlement too.

Kimberly Strassel in the Wall Street Journal explains the game plan.

If there’s a smarter guy in Washington right now than Sen. Chuck Schumer, Republicans haven’t noticed. The New York Democrat is doggedly working to dismantle what’s left of the Bush presidency, with barely an ounce of pushback from the other side.

Mr. Schumer was the instigator of the Democrats’ probe into the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, although note that the question of who fired which prosecutor is already yesterday’s news. The attorneys mess was just an opening, a hook that is now allowing Mr. Schumer to escalate into an assault on the wider administration, as well as presidential authority over key programs, such as wiretapping.

The ultimate goal? Surround the Bush presidency in a mist of incompetence and corruption, force Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to go, get a special prosecutor appointed to examine the many supposed misdeeds, and then sit back and ride the steady drip-drip of negative Bush headlines all the way to more Senate seats and the Oval Office.

Rick Ballard, at YARGB, has some choice words concerning the reptile Paul McNulty, and President’s Bush’s continuing above-the-fray passivity. He’s perfectly right, too.

How does a man as profoundly perfidious as Paul McNulty get appointed Deputy Attorney General? Who vetted this snake to a post where his betrayal could do so much damage? If you don’t recognize the name, you need to read this exclusive account of perfidy, disloyalty and disobedience to understand what type of loathsome viper the President inadvertently invited into his Department of Justice.

McNulty is a product of the same Southern District of New York which produced Comey and Fitzgerald. He exhibits the same fawning servility to Chuck Schumer as do the other two and his allegiance to that snake of a politician is possibly even stronger. As you read the article you can sense the slightest bit of regret by McNulty for carried scorpion (Schumer) across the river. That regret is as phony as the balance of this non mea culpa. McNulty was and is a very willing betrayer angling for a future political plum.

The President is reaping what he himself has sown in this matter. …

The President’s ludicrous instruction to “fully cooperate” with FBI agents running a political operation in the Plame matter while at the same time insisting that a condition of employment by this White House means forfeiture of the Fifth Amendment right has finally reached what should have been its obvious conclusion. AG Gonzales’ counselor, Monica Goodling has appropriately taken a leave of absence and announced her intention to make full use of her right against self incrimination. Apparently she paid close attention to Fitzgerald’s conduct in the Libby matter and decided that allegiance to a President unwilling to stand beside those who stand beside him was of little value.

McNulty’s fawning obsequience to Schumer and his sideshow is another matter. Having never been loyal to anyone other than himself he cannot be characterized as other than a week reed who should never have been entrusted with his office.

The President’s decision to rid himself of the eight US Attorneys who were not carrying out his policies was correct and without need of any justification other than that they did not please him. After all, that’s what “at the pleasure of the President” means. Cobbling up the “poor performance” rationale was shabby cover for the exercise of a legitimate prerogative and the cover was torn aside by McNulty in an attempt to ingratiate himself with Schumer.

The Bush administration has been remarkably clean (especially in comparison to the Clinton administration). The Indian Affairs scandal (Abramoff affair) was largely due to the venality of Congressmen who thought themselves beyond the law. The Plame matter could easily have been a tempest in a teapot if it had not been handled so maladroitly and the current brouhaha about the exercise of legitimate executive power is an entirely self inflicted wound.

It would be nice if the President woke up tomorrow and remembered that he is still only a politician. He isn’t “above” the fray and he is going to be running the Executive by himself if he doesn’t drop the “turn the other cheek” pose and return open blow for open blow. He might start by taking a hard look at his communication staff and a harder look at those closest to him. They are not telling him what he needs to hear if he is to complete his term with any support whatsoever.

Read the whole thing.

Debra J. Saunders, at the San Francisco Chronicle, explains why conservatives will not be crying if democrats’ attacks force Alberto Gonzales to resign.

If Attorney General Alberto Gonzales resigns over the U.S. attorneys flap, many Republicans will not be sorry to see him go.

It’s not just that some believe Gonzales made a huge mistake in claiming that he asked for the resignations of eight U.S. attorneys for “performance-related” reasons — which was bad form. Or as Washington attorney Victoria Toensing, who worked in the Reagan administration, noted, “Replacing at-will employees should be Government 101. This is not a difficult process. They flunked smart.”

Forget the U.S. attorneys flap. Many on the right believe that Gonzales has been lax in enforcing immigration law, not been sufficiently partisan, and that he’s not particularly competent, either. They wonder: With friends like this, who needs enemies?

For example, some Republicans wonder why Gonzales did not include U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton of the Western District of Texas on his got-to-go list. Sutton, you may recall, prosecuted two Border Patrol agents, Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, for shooting at a fleeing drug smuggler, covering up the incident and depriving the Mexican smuggler of his constitutional rights. Many voters are outraged that the two agents are now serving 11-year and 12-year sentences.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Huntingdon Beach, is incensed that Gonzales did not stop Sutton from throwing the book at two good agents — strike one — while Sutton granted immunity to a man who was smuggling 743 pounds of marijuana into the country. Strike two.

Rohrabacher told me that his frustration with the Bushies had been mounting. “I kept quiet for a long time,” he said. “But when he put the lives of these two Border Patrol agents on the line and decided he was going to squash them like a bug, that was the end of it.”

The cherry on top: Gonzales failed to protect Ramos and Compean when they entered prisons filled with the sort of criminals they used to put away. One night, gang members at the Yazoo City Federal Correctional Complex in Mississippi beat up Ramos. Said Rohrabacher, “The attorney general knew and knows today that these two men’s lives are at risk. Instead of moving forward to try to send them to a minimum security prison or let them get out on bond (while they appeal), he has dug his heels in.” Strike three. …

Then there is former Clinton adviser Sandy Berger. It drives conservatives crazy that the feds prosecuted Scooter Libby for lying about leaking the identity of ex-CIA operative Valerie Wilson, when the feds cut a generous plea bargain with Berger for destroying classified documents.

Berger, who in 2003 destroyed classified National Archives documents relating to the Clinton administration’s terrorism policies, received no penalty: No jail time, just a fine, 100 hours of community service — and he even gets his security clearance back after three years.

Earlier this year, Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., charged the Justice Department with giving Berger a “free pass.” …

As one conservative lawyer, who did not want to be named, told me, the right wants an attorney general who is a “pugilist.” As for Gonzales, he said, “All he does is walk backward and apologize.”

Read the whole thing.

Anti-Republican elements in the Justice Department (could those be the same ones who picked Fitzgerald as special prosecutor?) have leaked a 2003 memo “endorsed” by six lawyers and two analysts in the department’s voting section, which opines that the Texas legislature’s redistricting plan, since upheld twice by a three judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, may violate the Voting Rights Act, to the Washington Post.

Post staff writer Dan Egger artfully mixes generous helpings of inflammatory charges by democrat partisans, conceptually promoting an internal staff memo advancing one point of view to the level of statutory law, with the minimum essential inconvenient facts, and reference to the (partisan) indictment of Representative Delay, topped by the censorious conclusion of a purportedly objective outside expert,

Mark Posner, a longtime Justice Department lawyer who now teaches law (as an adjunct) at American University (who) said it was ‘highly unusual’ for political appointees to overrule a unanimous finding such as the one in the Texas case.”

And voila! we have a brand-new Bush Administration Conspiracy to Violate the Law.

Armando over at Daily Kos is gloating, and has overnight collected some 122 moonbat comments remarking gleefully on the Bush Administration’s “arrogance and contempt for democracy.”