Holder’s Men

At 4:19 PM today, The Hill reported The Department of Justice plans to send federal monitors to 18 states to watch for discrimination against voters.

Monitors will head to Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, North Carolina, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin.

Powerline’s John Hinderaker wonders what the point is noting this must be Eric Holder’s homage to the Democrats’ “effort to keep alive the myth of voter suppression.” 

Hinderaker continues, “That pretense seems to be a key element in their strategy to keep African-American voters in the fold, notwithstanding that the Democrats’ policies are devastating to black voters’ interests. And I guess it must work.”

“So does that mean that New Black Panthers won’t be standing outside polling places with billy clubs this year? Just kidding. And, of course, Eric Holder has never done anything in a “fair and nonpartisan manner” in his six years as Attorney General,” wrote Hinderaker.

So get ready Philly.  Something tells me you’ll be thrilled to know these gentlemen care very deeply about your ability to exercise your right of franchise.

Well, you know what they say…low turnout leads to bad government.

AP Condemns Unprecedented Intrusion By DOJ

“The habits and language of clandestinity can intoxicate even its own practitioners.”--William Colby

WASHINGTON (AP)—The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative's top executive called a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into how news organizations gather the news. 

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed incoming and outgoing calls, and the duration of each call, for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. 

In all, the government seized those records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown but more than 100 journalists work in the offices whose phone records were targeted on a wide array of stories about government and other matters. 

In a letter of protest sent to Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday, AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt said the government sought and obtained information far beyond anything that could be justified by any specific investigation. He demanded the return of the phone records and destruction of all copies. 

"There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters. These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP's newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP's activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know," Pruitt said.

Derek Mead at Motherboard opines, “It's an almost unfathomably arrogant move. Right in the middle of a growing privacy shitstorm in Washington—which includes the IRS, NSA, and every other TLA you can imagine—the DoJ decided to notify one of the largest press agencies in the world that it had been spying on it.”

Ace asks, “But was this about national security—or was it about political embarrassment? Did the Administration take extraordinary steps to protect national security secrets, or to cover up yet another Benghazi-like massaging of talking points?”

One must assume the AP is sufficiently infuriated given the fact that they found out about the seizure on Friday but waited until Monday to release the story.  Can you say “maximum impact?”  Yep.  They.  Are.  Pissed.

Maybe now the MSM will finally decide the Obama administration is worth investigating.

Truth is suppressed, not to protect the country from enemy agents, but to protect the government against the people.

Jay Carney says WH had no knowledge before today's press reports of Justice Dept attempt to obtain seek phone records of the AP reporters.
— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) May 13, 2013

DOJ secretly spying on AP? Gee, imagine what they do to journalist who don't regularly fellate them.
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) May 13, 2013

BREAKING: Bombshell News on DOJ Perjury Imminent

Christian Adams, reporting at PJ Tatler, has heard “that PJ Media will run a story in the next 36 hours revealing bombshell instances of lying under penalty of perjury at the Justice Department.  I hear it involves criminal acts, and also, strangely, implicates congressional redistricting among other matters.  Stay turned to PJ Media for details.”


UPDATE I:  December 22, 2011

The Justice Department Condones Perjury…Again

Hans A. von Spakovsky, Senior Legal Fellow at the Heritage Foundation and former commissioner on the Federal Election Commission reports that throughout 2005-2007, numerous attorney-client privileged documents, confidential personnel information, and other sensitive legal materials were leaked from inside the Voting Section to the Washington Post and various left-wing blogs.

Stephanie Celandine Gyamfi, a career employee in the Voting Section of Justice’s Civil Rights Division has confessed to committing perjury on three occasions, sources say.  Despite the admission, she has not been fired for criminal malfeasance; in fact, she has not been disciplined in any meaningful way.

Ms. Gyamfi is one of the most extreme partisans in the Civil Rights Division, no small distinction considering the competition among her Division colleagues. (Readers of Christian Adams’ recent book, Injustice, may recall seeing photos of Ms. Gyamfi’s Voting Section office walls filled with campaign signage supporting the election of Barack Obama.)

Read the whole thing here.


UPDATE II:  December 22, 2011

Culture of Lies Inside Obama Justice Department

Christian Adams has more on the culture of lies inside the Obama Justice Department.  He connects Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich to false statements given to Congress on both the Fast and Furious and the New Black Panther scandals.

One thing is clear, the Judiciary and Oversight committees in both chambers of Congress need to immediately get to the bottom of this.