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    Every Single One’ Fallout: Justice Dept. in Turmoil From PJMedia Series

    Congress has had this since 2011 - Nothing has been done and now we find out that the DOJ ASSISTED in the protests in Florida and are using taxpayer monies to fund a hotline seeking "tips" to build their case. Also, rumor has it that the doors in the Civil Rights Section at Justice are filled with justice for Trayvon and anti-Zimmerman posters. - just like a college dorm!!!

    Every Single One
    ’ Fallout: Justice Dept. in Turmoil From PJMedia Series


    What’s happened up until now, and what internal leaks say about what’s coming. Hint: jobs may now be at stake. (This is the twelfth of a series of articles about the Justice Department's hiring practices since President Obama took office. Read parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine,ten, and eleven.)


    by
    DAVID STEINBERG

    Bio

    September 26, 2011 - 12:00 am

    113 and Oh.

    Following the Justice Department’s long-delayed compliance with a Freedom of Information Act request, PJMedia recently published content from the resumes of each career attorney hired to the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division under Attorney General Eric Holder. The articles were written by two former Civil Rights Division attorneys — J. Christian Adams and Hans von Spakovsky — and PJMedia Editor Richard Pollock.


    The Justice Department is forbidden by federal law from hiring employees based on political affiliation. Yet the resumes revealed the following ideological breakdown among the new hires:

    Leftist lawyers: 113

    Moderate, non-ideological, or conservative lawyers: 0.

    That represents the basest headline for the series, the matter-of-fact evidence that should lead any reasonable observer to believe the DOJ has employed an illegal political litmus test during the interview process. But the “Every Single One” series has provided additional benefits: the results present the inherent flaw in leftism’s perversion of the term “civil rights,” while providing a real world example of the flawed belief actualized. Additionally, the “Every Single One” series presents ramifications that reach far beyond the individuals most directly affected by DOJ activity.

    We hope not to understate it: this perversion of “civil rights“ is the beating heart of leftism itself.

    Only one definition of “civil rights” could ever logically exist: that of equal protection under the law, the law defined as the codified protection of an individual’s life, liberty, and property. Yet Eric Holder, Loretta King, Thomas Perez, the 113 hires — they claim that civil rights, and the Division established to enforce them, reside in racial, gender, disability, and even sexuality preferences presiding above the law, in the hands of an elite few trusted by an elite public class to establish some breed of “fair lawlessness.”

    The flaw is obvious: when the law is not equally applied, a citizen’s actions are no longer their own.

    Their fates are no longer tied to their personal adherence to life, liberty, and property, but to an unelected bureaucrat’s whim, an individual who believes both that he is qualified to make such judgments of other men and that our country’s laws allow him to do so. They claim that civil rights are not the individual’s, but somehow theirs, a definition incompatible with itself!

    This is, as we know, the post-Marxist brand of tyranny — a “well-meaning” lawlessness. But prior to this series, we did not know that since 2008 the Civil Rights Division has been populated entirely according to this ideology, behavior which represents the perfect antithesis of civil rights.

    The Way-Backstory: Strom’s (D-SC) Segregation-athon
    The DOJ Civil Rights Division is a product of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first — and largely unsuccessful — of several legislative attempts to secure voting rights for blacks. The bill passed by a large margin, though passage was ardently opposed by Democratic Senator Strom Thurmond, who marked the occasion with the longest single-person filibuster in the Senate’s history: 24 hours, 18 minutes. (Please note: Democratic Senator Strom Thurmond (D-SC) was, at the time, a Democrat.)

    The Act’s passage created the office of Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. This office is currently held by Obama appointee Thomas Perez, and he oversees a Division that now encompasses 11 sections: the Appellate Section, Criminal Section, Disability Rights Section, Educational Opportunities Section, Employment Litigation Section, Federal Coordination and Compliance, Housing and Civil Enforcement Section, Office of Special Counsel for Immigration Related Unfair Employment Practices, Policy and Strategy Section, Special Litigation Section, and the Voting Section.

    “Insufficient Evidence to Prosecute … ”

    “Every Single One” presented key information from the resumes of each of the 113 career attorneys hired to serve within 10 of these 11 sections since the appointment of Eric Holder. The key information presented provided substantial evidence of the political leanings of each hire. In each case, enough evidence was available for a reasonable observer to determine that the hire was neither a conservative, moderate, nor apolitical.

    The hiring practices within the Division should be of primary interest to the American citizen for several reasons; this series concerned itself with three. First, and inherently most urgent: employing a political litmus test during the applicant screening process is illegal under the Civil Service Reform Act. (This Act dates back to Chester Arthur, and was intended to ensure nothing other than that government hiring be merit-based.)

    A political litmus for hiring is also contrary to the DOJ’s Reasonable Accommodation Statement:


    The U.S. Department of Justice is an Equal Opportunity/Reasonable Accommodation Employer. Except where otherwise provided by law, there will be no discrimination because of color, race, religion, national origin, political affiliation, marital status, disability (physical or mental), age, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, genetic information, status as a parent, membership or non-membership in an employee organization, on the basis of personal favoritism, or any non-merit factor.
    Our second concern: a political litmus test — in this case, a “no exceptions” political litmus test — for employment within the Civil Rights Division raises the possibility of a significant number of Americans simply not being protected by the civil rights statutes the Division was created to enforce. Indeed, this is the singular purpose of creating a politically blind hiring process, and in practice — the discrimination statute now violated under Eric Holder — the political litmus test has unimpeachably resulted in the occurrence of this concern. See the New Black Panther case dismissal, or the2010 military voting rights scandal.

    The third concern: the difference in federal treatment of the Bush DOJ and the Obama DOJ constitutes an uneven enforcement of the ban on a political litmus test.

    On July 30, 2008, Inspector General, U.S. Department of Justice Glenn Fine testified before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. His statement was titled: “Politicized Hiring at the Department of Justice.” From his introduction:

    Our investigation found that [DOJ White House Liaison Monica] Goodling, Kyle Sampson (the former Chief of Staff to the Attorney General), and other staff in the Office of the Attorney General improperly considered political or ideological affiliations in screening candidates for certain career positions at the Department, in violation of federal law and Department policy.
    And from his conclusion:

    [T]he Department must ensure that the serious problems and misconduct we found in our reports about politicized hiring for career positions in the Department do not recur in the future.
    The testimony was accompanied by a 70-page report, which primarily attacked Assistant Attorney General Brad Schlozman — the position now held by Thomas Perez. Six months later, on January 22, 2009, Spakovsky eviscerated the report and defended Schlozman in the Weekly Standard (the report had not been made public until the week prior, on January 13).

    The result of all of this investigation: Schlozman resigned. Kyle Sampson resigned. Monica Goodling resigned. (She was later reprimanded by the Virginia State Bar following the report. Four years later. Strange.)

    However, and most telling: none were prosecuted. Further investigation concluded that there was not sufficient evidence of law being violated by anyone involved.

    Glenn Fine was still IG until January 2011: his earlier concern about the “serious problems and misconduct” inherent in politicized hiring — which resulted in several unnecessary resignations — had faded when Eric Holder took over the Department under his watch. Fine’s enforcement was blatantly uneven, and overlaps with our second concern: a significant number of Americans are neither protected by our civil rights laws nor by the appointed Department watchman.

    Where’s Our Pulitzer?

    A fourth concern, unrelated to the law yet perhaps as relevant to the American citizen, is the hypocrisy with which this “no exceptions” political litmus test has been examined by left-leaning media outlets and establishments.

    The most notable findings by the press resided in the work of the Boston Globe’s Charlie Savage: Due in no small part to his investigation of Bush DOJ hiring practices, Savage was the recipient of a 2007 Pulitzer!

    Savage submitted a series of eight articles to the Pulitzer committee; the series resulted in his win. One of the eight articles, published on July 23, 2006, was titled: “Civil Rights Hiring Shifted in Bush Era: Conservative leanings stressed.” From the piece:

    The Bush administration is quietly remaking the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, filling the permanent ranks with lawyers who have strong conservative credentials but little experience in civil rights, according to job application materials obtained by the Globe.

    The documents show that only 42 percent of the lawyers hired since 2003, after the administration changed the rules to give political appointees more influence in the hiring process, have civil rights experience. In the two years before the change, 77 percent of those who were hired had civil rights backgrounds.

    The profile of the lawyers being hired has since changed dramatically, according to the resumes of successful applicants to the voting rights, employment litigation, and appellate sections. Under the Freedom of Information Act, the Globe obtained the resumes among hundreds of pages of hiring data from 2001 to 2006.

    Hires with traditional civil rights backgrounds — either civil rights litigators or members of civil rights groups — have plunged. Only 19 of the 45 lawyers hired since 2003 in those three sections were experienced in civil rights law, and of those, nine gained their experience either by defending employers against discrimination lawsuits or by fighting against race-conscious policies.

    Meanwhile, conservative credentials have risen sharply. Since 2003 the three sections have hired 11 lawyers who said they were members of the conservative Federalist Society. Seven hires in the three sections are listed as members of the Republican National Lawyers Association, including two who volunteered for Bush-Cheney campaigns.

    Several new hires worked for prominent conservatives, including former Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr, former attorney general Edwin Meese, Mississippi Senator Trent Lott, and Judge Charles Pickering. And six listed Christian organizations that promote socially conservative views.

    The changes in those three sections are echoed to varying degrees throughout the Civil Rights Division, according to current and former staffers.
    Note that Savage only announced results for three sections. Our investigation took ten of the eleven sections into account.

    And note his statistics: 42 percent from 77 percent, 19 out of 45. These differ in severity from our one statistic: 113 to 0. His data, later found to be part of a package of evidence found to be not worth prosecuting — and indeed representing an example of politically blind hiring rather than the opposite — helped him win a Pulitzer.

    Another comparison between Savage’s work and ours deserves your attention: how was Savage able to gather the data for his Pulitzer-winning investigation? It doesn’t appear that he had to work terribly hard.

    Presented with a Freedom of Information Act request, the Bush DOJ turned over the resumes plus hundreds of pages of hiring data to the Boston Globe within a few weeks, significantly ahead of the statutory FOIA deadline. The Bush DOJ redacted absolutely nothing, except the hires’ contact information.

    During the Obama administration, FOIAs have proven to be notoriously — criminally? — hard to extract if the filer appears to be ideologically opposed to the administration. (But not so for fellow leftist travelers — PJMedia covered this very topic. Also see an interview with Adams on this.) Unlike Savage, PJMedia had to fight an almost year-long legal battle with the Most Transparent Administration in History to obtain the Civil Rights Division resumes of attorneys hired under Eric Holder:

    In spring of 2010, PJ Media requested the exact same information from the DOJ that Charlie Savage requested in 2006 — except for hires made in the Obama DOJ. Recall the Bush administration turned over all the resumes of attorneys as fast as they could, and well before the statutory FOIA deadline.
    PJM’s request was ignored. Then on October 13, 2010, the request was renewed by certified mail. Still, no response as required by law.

    So on January 18, 2011, the case of PJ Media v. United States Department of Justice was filed in the United States District Court in D.C.

    We finally received materials on May 13, 2011. But not everything – it included redactions and some material was missing. The FOIA was not fully complied with until July.
    Has Charlie Savage, so terribly concerned with violations of the Civil Service Reform Act while George W. Bush was president, shown any interest in the hiring practices of the Eric Holder Civil Rights Division? Actually, he has — and he reported on it in a manner that only a delusional observer or one tasked with defending the DOJ from prosecution might.

    On December 31, 2010, Christian Adams offered Savage some advice on this front:

    Savage could bolster his credibility by making the same inquiries of this Justice Department as he did to the Bush DOJ. For starters, he could examine the preposterous hiring practices in the Civil Rights Division since Obama’s inauguration. The more time that passes without an inquiry from Savage and the New York Times, the more partisan his badgering of the Bush DOJ appears.

    We cannot know for sure if Charlie Savage read Adams’ above recommendation, but he followed through on May 31, 2011, with an article covering the resumes of the new hires. Interestingly, the National Law Journal took Adams’ plea for an investigation to heart, and they performed one as well! They published a report on the resumes on May 30, 2011.

    Two reports in two days. Savage mentioned the following in his piece:
    The New York Times analyzed the résumés — obtained via the Freedom of Information Act — of successful applicants to the division’s voting rights, employment discrimination, and appellate sections.
    You’ve likely already noticed what stinks to heaven about this, but for the sake of placing it in writing: we filed our FOIA in Spring 2010, and it was not even partially complied with until early May 2011. But little did we know — at the same time we were fighting a legal battle — that both the New York Times and the National Law Journal had made the exact same FOIA requests! Which were also complied with in … May 2011.

    Two possibilities:

    1) Both left-leaning organizations caught wind of our FOIA, and decided to file the exact same FOIA to get to the bottom of this rumored lefty hiring spree. Perhaps they fought the same almost year-long battle for compliance. (Note: I call this a “possibility” in that the standard model of particle physics would not prevent it from occurring.)

    2) The FOIA referred to in Savage’s article above was actually our FOIA. The DOJ voluntarily released the resumes to the New York Times and the National Law Journal at the same time they were released to us so that the two left-leaning organizations could offer an opposing viewpoint to our investigation.
    But this possibility only holds water if the two organizations actually were shameless enough to report that all was well after viewing the left-wing resumes. Did that happen? Hit it, Charlie:

    In Shift, Justice Department is Hiring Lawyers With Civil Rights Backgrounds

    Under the Obama administration, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has reversed a pattern of systematically hiring conservative lawyers with little experience in civil rights, the practice that caused a scandal over politicization during the Bush administration.

    Instead, newly disclosed documents show, the lawyers hired over the past two years at the division have been far more likely to have civil rights backgrounds — and to have ties to traditional civil rights organizations with liberal reputations, like the American Civil Liberties Union or the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

    The release of the documents came as a House Judiciary subcommittee prepared to hold its first oversight hearing, on Wednesday, on the Civil Rights Division since Republicans regained the House. It also comes against the backdrop of efforts by conservative activists and media outlets to throw back at the Obama administration the charges of politicizing the Justice Department that were made against the Bush administration.

    Which conservative media outlets? Tell us!

    Savage and the National Law Journal actually did manage to spin a clear and severe violation of the Civil Service Reform Act into the Carville-ian: “Bravo for hiring lawyers with a civil-rights background.” (Note: the same defense later employed by the DOJ itself. Keep reading).

    So we know what Savage and the National Law Journal think. Forgive us for feeling slighted, but we want to know about everyone else: What do the Boston Globe, the rest of the MSM that breathlessly parroted the findings of Savage’s original article, and the Pulitzer committee think of our objectively superior, unimpeachable work?
    PJMedia readers will get that answer. Stay tuned.

    The Spin, the Turmoil, and the Even Bigger Reveal

    Our investigation has not yet resulted in an inspector general investigation, group resignations, or a Little League trophy to show at the White House Correspondents Dinner, but we are getting results.
    As a direct follow-up to “Every Single One,” Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) submitted a letter to Eric Holder on August 10 demanding answers regarding our published proof of an ideological litmus test. Grassley did not go ignored: Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich responded on September 8. The key passage:

    Your letter questions whether the Division has nonetheless considered the actual or perceived political or ideological affiliations of applicants for career positions and thereby reverted to the politicized approach in hiring that was documented in the 2008 Report. We can assure you unequivocally that it has not done so. The Division does not take into account actual or perceived political or ideological affiliations in the career hiring process — much less inquire into applicants’ political or ideological affiliations as occurred during the period examined in the 2008 Report and documented in the Report. The blog postings referenced in your letter posit that working at certain organizations, belonging to certain groups, participating in certain activities in law school, or even having a certain sexual orientationnecessarily reflects a particular political or ideological affiliation, and therefore establishes that hiring decisions were made based on that perceived affiliation. That is not the case. As would any responsible employer, the Division places a high value on an applicant’s relevant experience in the field, as well as demonstrated commitment to full and fair enforcement of civil rights laws, when making hiring decisions. The examples of prior employment cited in these blog posts and your letter — noting, for example, that numerous new hires for the Civil Rights Division had previously worked for civil rights organizations — reflect nothing more than that. (Emphasis added)
    The two defenses as laid out in this paragraph from Weich are important, as they define the tactics which the DOJ has selected to defend themselves publicly, and — perhaps eventually — legally. They are: 1) Despite appearances, we did not inquire about political affiliation. 2) The 113 lawyers hired happen to be leftists because only leftists care about civil rights. Charlie Savage agrees.

    These two arguments noted in this paragraph were parroted by Main Justice, a site run by Mary Jacoby that bills itself as “an independent news organization and not part of the U.S. government,” and which exists to cover insider news about the DOJ. In reality, Main Justice has appeared closer to being a DOJ mouthpiece.

    Following the money leads to some circumstantial evidence: Eric Holder’s former law firm Covington & Burling buys advertising on the site. And a DOJ employee who wishes to remain anonymous tells PJMedia: “When Jacoby is reporting it, Jacoby is hearing it from a DOJ official.”

    Main Justice’s role as mouthpiece is evident in the article “Behind Grassley’s Attack on Civil Right Division Hiring, Some Familiar Faces”:

    Their series is entitled, “Every Single One,” as in “every single one” of the new hires is a liberal. Their research found the new lawyers have worked for organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union. It apparently formed the basis of Grassley’s assertion in a congressional hearing earlier this week that the Civil Rights Division in the Obama era “has hired 96 liberals and zero conservatives.”

    The punch line here is, of course, that Adams and Von Spakovsky are the ones connected to improperly politicized hiring inside the division.
    Heritage Foundation fellow Von Spakovsky was a political appointee in the division when it ran amok during the Bush administration hiring career attorneys based on their conservative ideology, and driving out veteran lawyers perceived to be too liberal.

    The stumbling block for Grassley (and Adams and Von Spakovsky) is that the historical mission of the Civil Rights Division — ensuring full voting, housing and other rights for minorities who have faced documented discrimination — is inherently a liberal mission.
    Jacoby’s reporting is notable for two reasons: First, according to Christian Adams, Main Justice has previously published an article claiming Adams was “associated with the improper hiring” of the Bush DOJ. Adams contacted her, explaining he was nowhere named in the 2008 inspector general report, and insisted she retract the line. She did.

    Now, she publishes the exact same falsehood again!

    Further, Jacoby got it wrong on Hans von Spakovsky, too: this leads us to believe she either did not check the 2008 inspector general report to see what it actually said about him, or she chose to report a falsehood. Von Spakovsky was a career lawyer in the Division, not a “political appointee” as Jacoby mistakenly claims. Von Spakovsky also tells PJMedia that he was interviewed by Jacoby several years ago, and that during the interview he informed her of this. The IG report itself makes no claim whatsoever that von Spakovsky was involved in any politicized hiring.

    Second, Jacoby’s piece includes a confession regarding DOJ hiring practices: “The historical mission of the Civil Rights Division … is inherently a liberal mission.” You should take this as nothing less than a “guilty, and proud” admission, and having read Weich’s response, be reasonably assured that this is a DOJ position.

    The best I can manage for summarizing this argument: “Civil rights” in fact means preferences, therefore preferences in our own hiring is in accordance. We didn’t break the law, but we don’t agree with the law. And further, the Bush DOJ did break the law when they used preferences, which we do not do, but we agree with.

    The argument is lawless, and illogical: “It counts as civil rights when we do it.”

    It’s leftism’s beating heart of identity preferences, which always and forever ends in a statement defining tyranny. It’s a lie, and you should be angry in shouting it down.

    There are plenty of conservative lawyers who take on the mission of defending civil rights, defending the only possible definition: equal protection of the individual’s life, liberty, and property. Two of these lawyers are named Christian Adams and Hans von Spakovsky.

    Further, the response from Weich dropped a nasty, underhanded lie directly intended to defame PJMedia: that we determined political affiliation from any of the hirees’ sexual orientations.

    No. We did not. This is a nasty, nasty line designed to paint us as homophobes.

    First: this was not possible, for goodness’ sake! No one puts their sexual orientation on their resume! Show us where this information sits on any of the 113 resumes — we certainly do not see it; perhaps it lies in the areas you redacted?

    In many cases, we drew conclusions regarding the political ideologies of the hirees from the political affiliations and behavior of the organizations they belonged to.

    The only people drawing conclusions of political ideology based on sexuality are the liars who cooked up that smear. They can get further information regarding their ignorance from the members of GOProud, and they can learn more about PJMedia’s track record from CEO Roger Simon, who announced his personal boycott of CPAC within moments of hearing they had banned GOProud from attending.

    This smear is the tyranny talking; it’s what happens when a group believes the impossible, that they “own” civil rights.

    Second: this nasty lie secondarily expressed the point that we had gotten something wrong. That in using sexual orientation, which we did not, we got someone’s political ideology incorrect.

    DOJ and Main Justice: let us know where you think we are mistaken. Who among the 113 is actually conservative?

    Internal Panic?

    Weich’s public response belied a more nervous tone brewing within the Civil Rights Division. A confidential source within DOJ leaked the following memo to PJMedia, written by Thomas Perez two weeks ago and circulated throughout the Division:

    From
    : Perez, Thomas E (CRT)
    Sent: Tuesday, September 13, 2011 04:13 PM
    To: CRT Users
    Subject: Civil Rights Division Success
    To all Division Staff:

    This morning I had the opportunity to testify before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary about the remarkable work of the Division. It was a great honor to discuss some of our recent accomplishments, and to show that, despite the difficult budget situation, the Civil Rights Division staff are among the best this government has to offer.

    As I told the Committee, when I returned to the Civil Rights Division in 2009, I promised to restore and transform the Division. Thanks to all of you, our efforts have yielded great success. I am attaching a copy of my full statement, as well as the oral statement I delivered today, for your review.

    I discussed the many ways in which our work has transformed communities for the better, and provided access to opportunity. It was incredibly satisfying to discuss the largest ever Title III ADA settlement, the largest ever settlement involving claims of rental discrimination, the largest ever monetary settlement for identified victims in a fair lending case, the largest ever settlement in a case alleging discrimination in hiring based on immigration or citizenship status. I discussed the successful prosecution of the New Orleans Police Department officers involved in the shootings on the Danziger Bridge in the wake of Hurricane Katrina that left two civilians dead and four wounded. I mentioned our trip to Puerto Rico to release the findings of a comprehensive, extensive investigation of the police department there. It was an honor to discuss the guilty pleas in the first case charged under the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act, bringing some measure of justice for the incident’s victim – a young man of Navajo descent who had developmental disabilities. I discussed our renewed efforts to ensure language access in courts nationwide, and our ramped up efforts to protect service members from employment discrimination when they return from service. I discussed our first efforts in nearly a decade to protect students from harassment in school because they fail to conform to gender stereotypes. And I discussed the Voting Section’s incredible efforts to respond to the influx of redistricting plans submitted for administrative review, all while defending the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act and handling the most robust case docket in a decade.

    Your work on behalf of the American people is critical and priceless. Your ability to maintain a high level of enthusiasm and dedication even during difficult and uncertain times is admirable, and I want to thank each of you for your hard work on behalf of the Division and the nation.

    Recently, we received an inquiry from Senator Grassley about the Division’s hiring practices, and I have attached to this email our response to the Senator’s inquiry. As you all know, one of my first priorities was to return integrity to the Division’s career hiring process. As a career attorney in the Division, I had the privilege of serving on the selection committee for the Honors Program in the administrations of President George H.W. Bush and President Clinton. Under both administrations, the instruction we received was identical: hire the best qualified candidates, plain and simple.

    In the last two years, the process has been returned to career staff, and the hiring policies, available on our website, ensure integrity and transparency in hiring, and prohibit the consideration of any political affiliation or ideology. We hire, based on merit, individuals who have the knowledge, experience and qualifications necessary to do the demanding work of the Division. I want to thank those who have served on the hiring committees for their adherence to these principles, and for taking the time out of their already very busy work schedules to participate in this important process. I have been consistently impressed by the new lawyers that were brought on in the career staff-led hiring processes of the past two years. As noted in our letter in response to Senator Grassley, the integrity and quality of our hiring process should be judged by the quality of the Division’s work – and I can say with great confidence that our collective work product is among the best the Division has ever produced.

    Our success is a product of the talent, experience and dedication of all of the Division’s employees – both those who have been here for years or decades, and those who have joined us during the current administration. I could not be more proud of our work, and I consider it a great honor to be a part of an organization filled with so many dedicated, passionate individuals who have made a commitment to public service. I thank each of you for your continued dedication to the critical mission of the Civil Rights Division.

    Tom
    Sounds like what we heard from Main Justice, no?

    In any event, we know the memo was an attempt to shore up flagging morale within the Division, a concern directly brought on by “Every Single One.” A confidential source within the Division tells PJMedia:

    Perez gets to sit and watch the bloody carnage inside each time a new “Every Single One” story comes out.
    Bombshell Number One

    We know that the DOJ employees behind the interview desk are nervous about a legal investigation brought on by “Every Single One,” but more immediately, we now know that the new hires themselves should be desperately concerned about the source of their next paycheck.

    A source inside DOJ tells PJMedia (paraphrased):

    During last week’s Senate CJS meeting, several million in funding for all DOJ litigating components were cut — including the Civil Rights Division. The amount cut was what used to hire about 100 of the new attorneys.

    In other words, it may well be that they have to get rid of many of their new hires.

    This really should be a big story.

    DOJ hired these new attorneys knowing they didn’t have the money now and probably wouldn’t be getting it. These new lawyers probably all make more than $100,000 in salary, plus benefits. They spend maybe 20 million dollars they didn’t have. They did it specifically to fill the Division with leftists.

    Now they are trying to cover it by offering early retirement/buyouts.

    Bombshell Number Two, and the Big Reveal

    Why might DOJ be so panicked? While the resumes speak for themselves, prosecution within a federal agency generally requires a smoking gun, and perhaps DOJ fears that it has already been found. They should be.

    As Christian Adams has previously written in “Every Single One”:

    Loretta King, while serving as the acting assistant attorney general for civil rights at the outset of the Obama administration, ordered the resumes of highly qualified applicants to be rejected only because they didn’t have political or left-wing civil rights experience. Multiple DOJ sources with direct knowledge of hiring committee practices have confirmed this to me.

    We have proof of this.

    Which takes us to the Big Reveal: all that we have presented up to this point should upset you as a citizen, a taxpayer, but we are not close to having completed publication of all that we have uncovered. The Department of Justice has done much further abuse to your liberty and property, committed significantly more acts of lawlessness on your dime. Additional articles will be forthcoming on PJMedia within a week or so.

    Further, we have a much more extensive treasure trove of information we’d love to publish for you this very minute!

    Read the Resumes at :
    http://pjmedia.com/blog/%E2%80%98eve...inglepage=true

  2. #2
    Super Moderator Newmexican's Avatar
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    Voting Section

    Bryan Sells
    : Mr. Sells was recently hired as one of the Voting Section’s new deputy chiefs. He comes to the Department from the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, where he worked for nearly 10 years as a Senior Staff Counsel. During his tenure, his organization strongly opposed all voter ID laws, and challenged the right of states to verify the U.S. citizenship of individuals seeking to register to vote. He also characterized state felon disenfranchisement laws – which are expressly authorized in the Constitution — as a “slap in the face to democracy,” and consistently took the most aggressive (and generally legally unsupportable) positions on redistricting cases throughout the country.


    Meredith Bell-Platts
    : The other new deputy chief hired by the Voting Section, Meredith Bell-Platts, also comes from the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, where she, too, spent nearly 10 years. Much of her time there was devoted to blasting voter ID requirements, which she claimed were motivated by people who do not want to see blacks vote (an issue on which she consistently lost in court). Before arriving at the ACLU, Ms. Bell-Platts was a founding member of the Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law, a publication whose stated “mission is to explore the impact of gender, sexuality, and race on both the theory and practice of law” and thereby “complement[] a long tradition of feminist scholarship and advocacy at the [Georgetown] Law Center.”

    Anna Baldwin: While all of the new trial attorneys hired into the Voting Section have streaks of radicalism, few can match Ms. Baldwin. A financial contributor to the Obama presidential campaign, she clerked for two liberal Clinton appointees on the federal bench and then worked briefly at Jenner & Block (a D.C. law firm which has been a major feeder of Democratic political appointees to the Obama administration), where she primarily pursued liberal positions in pro bono litigation. During law school, she interned at the International Labor Rights Fund and Women’s Agenda for Change.

    Prior to that, Baldwin served for three years as field coordinator for Equality Florida, where she “coordinated lobbying and state legislative policy work on behalf of Florida’s gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender communities.” Meanwhile, in her undergraduate days at Harvard, she was a member of the “Queer Resistance Front” and was frequently covered in the Harvard Crimson for her radical antics. A review of these campus newspaper articles suggests that Ms. Baldwin will have to work very hard to separate her activist politics from her role as an apolitical civil servant. Then again, if she takes her cues from most of her Voting Section colleagues, she won’t even need to attempt such separation. As the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case showed, partisanship and law enforcement are one and the same in Holder’s Civil Rights Division.

    Risa Berkower: Ms. Berkower was hired into the Voting Section following a clerkship with U.S. District Judge Christopher Droney, a liberal jurist who President Obama recently nominated to the Second Circuit and whose brother is the former state chairman of the Connecticut Democratic Party. During law school at Fordham, she interned in the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, a notorious hotbed of left-wing activity. She also worked on the “Student Hurricane Network” with members of the NAACP LDF, the Advancement Project, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. It was in her undergraduate days at Yale, though, that she really let her left-wing political colors shine. While on the Yale College Council, she wrote an editorial advocating support of unionization of Yale graduate students and advocated “neutrality” in card-check reform (which has become a major Obama initiative as a sop to organized labor).

    It is quite ironic that a lawyer who refused to oppose the effort by unions to get rid of the secret ballot, a fundamental mainstay of our democracy, is now charged with protecting voting rights. All of the leadership positions on Berkower’s resume were conspicuously redacted by the Obama administration in its FOIA response to PJM. And lest you think she abandoned her radical ways since arriving in the Civil Rights Division, Ms. Berkower is the same Voting Section attorney who negotiated the outlandish consent decree with the state of Rhode Island earlier this year in a case under Section 7 of the National Voter Registration Act which, as Christian Adams detailed extensively, ignored the requirements of federal law and represented a gross abuse of federal authority.

    Daniel Freeman: Mr. Freeman comes to the Voting Section following a fellowship at the New York Civil Liberties Union. He previously interned at the ACLU, where he assisted the organization with its efforts to attack the Bush administration’s national security policies. He also helped to challenge the “state secrets privilege” and to support the rights of terrorist detainees at Guantanamo Bay during an internship at Human Rights First.
    On his resume, Freeman proudly notes his membership in the liberal American Constitution Society, as well as his service as co-chair of the Yale Law School Democrats. Of course, being a member of the American Constitution Society does not bar you from federal employment. Yet the Bush administration was castigated for hiring lawyers who were members of the Federalist Society. Incidentally, Mr. Freeman is helping lead the Voting Section’s review of redistricting submissions from the state of Alabama.

    Jenigh Garrett
    : Ms. Garrett worked for approximately five years as an assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF), where she worked on voting-related litigation. She co-drafted the NAACP LDF’s amicus brief in Crawford v. Marion County Board of Elections, claiming that voter ID laws are unconstitutional (a position the Supreme Court rejected in an opinion by Justice John Paul Stevens).

    Garrett also was a member of the organization’s litigation team in Hayden v. Paterson, arguing that felon disenfranchisement laws violate the Voting Rights Act (a position the Second Circuit rejected). She is a member of the American Constitution Society and recently gave a presentation at Yale Law School on “The Future of Black Legal Scholarship and Activism.” Although DOJ’s FOIA shop notably redacted her other activities on her resume, perhaps legislators in Virginia can ask her about them: she is the redistricting point of contact for the Commonwealth.

    Abel Gomez
    : Mr. Gomez initially came to the Voting Section in the waning days of the Clinton administration as part of a wave of hiring engineered by former Acting Assistant Attorney General Bill Yeomans. The intent: stack the Civil Rights Division with left-wing activists before President Bush took office. Gomez had previously served for six years as a public defender in Tallahassee, Florida. In 2007, he left the Civil Rights Division to join another component of the Department of Justice, but was eager to rejoin the Voting Section once Obama and Holder were in charge. In addition to his voting work, FEC records reveal that he is a significant financial contributor to the “Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund” and to organizations opposing California’s Proposition 8 (Marriage Protection Act).

    Bradley Heard: Before joining the Voting Section, Mr. Heard worked for a number of years at the Advancement Project, a radical left-wing voting organization. The Advancement Project has worked closely with the ACLU, NAACP LDF, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, and other liberal advocates to oppose voter ID statutes, felon disenfranchisement laws, and citizenship verification regulations, and to take myriad other militant positions on state and federal voting rights laws. Mr. Heard fit right in at the Advancement Project, having previously founded the Georgia Voter Empowerment Project, which describes its mission as increasing the “civic participation levels of progressive-minded Georgians.”
    Amusingly, before moving to Washington, Mr. Heard had a nasty breakup with his plaintiff’s civil rights firm in Atlanta. He commenced litigation against his partners, who in turn claimed he was engaging in misconduct. Heard then sought criminal arrest warrants against his former partners, charging that they had engaged in false voter registration and voting by an unqualified elector, both felonies. The court declined to issue the warrants. South Carolina officials can ask Mr. Heard about these events during his review of the state’s redistricting submission; after all, he is the point of contact for the Voting Section.

    Michelle McLeod
    : Ms. McLeod has overcome substantial adversity in her personal life, and her story is an admirable one in many respects. But her liberal bona fides are equally genuine, and likely represent the primary reason why she was hired into the Voting Section under Eric Holder’s regime. Ms. McLeod came straight to the Justice Department after her graduation from law school at the University of Maryland, where she worked as a research assistant toProfessor Sherrilyn Ifill, a radical academic whose writings and media appearances on voting rights and race issues take her well out of the mainstream.

    Ms. McLeod also worked in the law school’s Post-Conviction Appellate Advocacy Clinic, assisting convicted felons with their direct appeals and habeas corpus challenges. As an undergraduate at East Carolina University, she interned for the SEIU Local’s New York Civic Participation Project, where she wrote articles favorable to labor unions. She also interned for the National Employment Law Project, drafting pro-union articles and other publications relating to workers’ rights. She is now one of the Voting Section’s points of contact for redistricting in Mississippi.

    Catherine Meza
    . Ms. Meza, who contributed $450 to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign before getting hired by the Voting Section, has a rich history of liberal advocacy. During law school at Berkeley, she interned for (i) the NAACP LDF, where she worked on voting rights and “economic justice” issues, (ii) Bay Area Legal Aid, (iii) the ACLU of Northern California, (iv) the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), (v) Centro Legal de la Raza, and (vi) the East Bay Community Law Center Workers’ Rights Clinic. She also worked as a legislative intern for Democratic Rep. (now Sen.) Robert Menendez of New Jersey as part of a fellowship with the liberal National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. On her resume, Meza proudly proclaims her membership in the American Constitution Society and her role as an Advisory Board Member of the Thelton Henderson Center for Social Justice. Talk about filling the whole bingo card! Meanwhile, while working a brief stint at the Fried Frank law firm after law graduation, she assisted on a pro bono case seeking to preserve the confidentiality of ID cards issued to illegal aliens by the city of New Haven, Connecticut, an effort to help illegal aliens avoid being prosecuted for violating federal law. She also helped draft a report for the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination in which she suggested that the U.S. “government’s programs and policies continue to perpetuate segregation and concentrate poverty in communities of color.”

    Kelli Reynolds: Ms. Reynolds arrived in the Voting Section having worked for several years as the Senior Redistricting Counsel and Assistant General Counsel at the NAACP. While there, she managed the organization’s National Redistricting Project, no doubt working closely with many of her now-colleagues in the Voting Section. She also boasts on her resume of her membership in the American Trial Lawyers Association (or, as that plaintiffs’ lawyers group now likes to euphemistically refer to itself, the “American Association for Justice”).

    Elise Shore
    . Ms. Shore came to the Voting Section by way of the “Southern Coalition for Social Justice,” where she worked as a legal consultant focusing on “voting rights, immigrant rights, and other civil rights and social justice issues.” The far left-wing positions of this group are nicely summarized on its website. Ms. Shore also made a $1,000 contribution to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

    Before joining the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, she worked for more than two years as a Regional Counsel for MALDEF. There, she was an outspoken critic of Georgia’s voter ID law and well as its proof of citizenship requirements for voter registration (which, incidentally, have been found to be non-discriminatory by a federal court) and described how heartened she was that the Civil Rights Division had objected to the registration law under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. But her joy must have been fleeting: the Division later capitulated and withdrew its objection after Georgia filed a federal declaratory judgment action. It will be interesting to see if Shore can put her politics to the side in her role as the Voting Section’s point of contact for all redistricting submissions in the state of Florida.

    Jaye Sitton
    : Ms. Sitton first joined the Civil Rights Division during the Clinton administration, but left immediately before President Bush took office in order to become an international human rights lawyer. (This desire not to serve in a Republican administration seems to be a recurring theme among many of the individuals hired into the career ranks of the Division during the Clinton years.) Before recently returning to work as an attorney the Voting Section, she volunteered to work in North Carolina for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

    Sitton is a member of the “Intersex Society of North America,” an organization “devoted to systemic change to endshame, secrecy, and unwanted genital surgeries for people born with an anatomy that someone decided is not standard for male or female.” She also taught a course on “sexuality, sexual orientation, gender, and the law” at the College of William and Mary Law School, and wrote a law review article titled “(De)Constructing Sex: Transgenderism, Intersexuality, Gender Identity and the Law” for the William and Mary Law Journal.

    Sharyn Tejani
    : Ms. Tejani is another activist who has come to the Voting Section to masquerade as a career civil servant. She also first joined the Civil Rights Division during the Clinton administration but left within two months of President Bush taking office. Her resume boasts of her work defending affirmative-action programs, i.e., racial quotas, during that earlier stint of employment. She recently returned, however, after having worked as a Senior Policy Counsel for the National Partnership for Women and Families, a left-wing organization that advocates greater abortion rights and is deeply involved in judicial nomination battles in favor of liberal candidates and in opposition to conservative candidates. Prior to that, Tejani served for more than three years as an advisor to one of the Democratic commissioners on the EEOC, and for three additional years as the Legal Director of the Feminist Majority Foundation. In her writings, she has advocated for the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would require equal pay for men and women even when there are legitimate work- and experience-related reasons for those pay disparities. She also wrote an article for Ms. Magazine sharply criticizing any efforts by the Commission on Opportunity in Athletics to modify Title IX regulations to stop the discrimination that has occurred against men’s sport programs.


    Justin Weinstein-Tull
    : Mr. Weinstein-Tull, a $250 contributor to President Obama’s 2008 campaign, was hired into the Voting Section following a clerkship for Judge Sidney Thomas, one of the most liberal judges on the Ninth Circuit. One can see why Judge Thomas was eager to have him in chambers. Indeed, Mr. Weinstein-Tull interned with the ACLU of Southern California, worked as a research associate at the liberal Urban Institute, and served as a fellow at the Congressional Hunger Center.

    He also wrote a law review article for the University of Virginia Law Review in which he criticized the Supreme Court’s decision in Gonzales v. Carhart – affirming the constitutionality of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 — as a setback to a woman’s right to choose abortion. Mr. Weinstein-Tull will now be one of the Voting Section’s points of contact for redistricting submissions from the state of North Carolina.

    Elizabeth Westfall: Last, but certainly not least, is Ms. Westfall. According to the Federal Election Commission website, she contributed nearly $7,000 to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential election campaign, contributed another $4,400 to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, contributed $2,000 to Wesley Clark’s presidential campaign in 2004, contributed $3,000 to John Kerry’s presidential campaign and compliance fund in 2004, contributed $500 to former Senate Democratic Majority Leader Tom Daschle’s PAC in 2004, and contributed $2,000 to Hillary Clinton’s U.S. Senate campaign in 2000.

    In addition to this incredible funding of Democratic candidates, Westfall worked for six years at the far-left Advancement Project, directing its Voter Protection Program and managing its litigation and advocacy activities. She also previously served as a staff attorney at the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights in its Fair Housing Group, and worked on the Hill as a legislative assistant to then-Congressman Bill Richardson (D-NM).

    On Westfall’s self-drafted Harvard alumni biography, she notes that she has testified before the U.S. Congress about supposed “barriers” to voter registration, “unwarranted” purging of the voter rolls, and voter caging. While those subjects may sound benign, in fact, the Advancement Project and the Lawyers Committee claim that common-sense reforms like voter ID or requiring proof of citizenship are “barriers” to voting and registration and that removing voters who have moved or otherwise become ineligible to vote is “unwarranted purging.”

    “Vote caging,” an imaginary crime the Left dreamed up several years ago, faults any efforts by private parties to challenge the eligibility of voters when first-class mail sent to their registration addresses is returned by the U.S. Postal Service as undeliverable because they no longer live there. This despite the fact that federal law specifically authorizes election officials to use the USPS for that very purpose. Just the kind of neutral, detached attorney a state wants reviewing its redistricting submissions and applying the heavy hand of the federal government in voting rights enforcement actions. California’s redistricting submission will be in the hands of Ms. Westfall.
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