As I and others have reported, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR) has issued subpoenas to a number of individuals, including at least two members of the Justice Department’s New Black Panther Party (NBPP) trial team, whose case was ordered dismissed by Obama Justice Department political appointees in May of this year, just before a default judgment was to be entered. The DOJ is objecting to the issuance of these subpoenas, but has not yet invoked “executive privilege” or any legal objection that would prevent its employees from cooperating in the USCCR’s ongoing investigation into the DOJ’s decision to dismiss an egregious case of voter intimidation against both the NBPP and two individual defendants.
This report and other sources have confirmed to me that career DOJ attorney J. Christian Adams and Voting Section Chief Christopher Coates were subpoenaed to appear this past week and produce documents relating to the NBPP case. These individuals have direct knowledge of the case. They would be able to testify as to any efforts to interfere with their legal judgment and the reasons preferred to them for dismissing the case. However, Adams’s attorney and Joseph H. Hunt, the director of the Department’s Federal Programs Branch, have engaged in a back-and-forth over Adams’s obligation to appear and give testimony in response to a lawful subpoena. Sources tell me that the DOJ has cited “internal Department regulations” to dissuade their employees from testifying for now. I am informed that the USCCR has postponed the depositions, but has not specifically released any individuals from the obligation to respond. However, in response to a request from Hunt, the USCCR announced in an open meeting on Friday that additional subpoenas and document requests should be directed to the DOJ.
What does this all mean? The Justice Department has a choice. Holder can attempt to block his employees — the people most informed about the case — from giving testimony and providing documents, and he can do so by invoking executive privilege (sometimes characterized in this context as the “deliberative process” privilege), which case law suggests that only the president, or possibly a department head acting on his behalf, can do. Or Holder can cooperate. If the DOJ decides to cooperate and testimony is taken from Adams, Coates, and others we will finally hear how Obama appointees overrode the legal judgment and undid the legal victory of career lawyers.
Meanwhile, Republican Congressmen are losing patience with DOJ’s stonewalling of their requests for updates on the ongoing DOJ’s internal investigation. Republicans will, I believe, soon begin to employ some legislative maneuvers to try to pry information from the DOJ.
And if that were not enough to give heartburn to Attorney General Eric Holder and the Obama team, up pops one of the dismissed NBPP defendants. This report explains:
The U.S. Justice Department made the right call in dismissing a voter intimidation lawsuit against the New Black Panther Party and recent questions about that ruling are a “political witch hunt” to discredit Attorney General Eric Holder, the party’s leader said this week. Malik Zulu Shabazz, national chairman of the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, told The Associated Press the civil lawsuit filed by the federal government had “no merit” because the party doesn’t condone voter intimidation.
Shabazz didn’t stop there, declaring, “I certainly would like black America and all the world to take a second look at the New Black Panther Party at this point and to understand that we’re sincerely trying to help our people.” This is certainly the last thing Holder wanted to hear. But having plunged into the topic, Shabazz would no doubt be a witness of interest to the USCCR, which is conducting a year-long investigation into the case. (Note that Shabazz declined for a number of months to respond to the DOJ lawsuit and would have had a default judgment entered against him if not for the intervention of Obama appointees.)
If Holder thinks his department made the right call (i.e., the case should have been dismissed), it seems as though he would have no reason to resist so strenuously the efforts of the USCCR and of Congress to get to the bottom of the issue. This week we may well begin to learn more about how an obvious case of voter intimidation was dismissed and what that tells us about the Obama administration’s perspective on civil rights.
