TPM on McClatchy Story about DOJ Attorneys and the Republican National Lawyers Association
[Posted by WLS]
This story seems to have run out of steam as events of the day involving Imus and the controversy over WH/RNC emails have taken over.
But, TPM has a link to a McClatchy story exploring the fact that approx. 25 DOJ attorneys are listed as members of the Republican National Lawyers Association (RNLA).
The McClatchy story begins with a somewhat ominous tone, but eventually gets around to pointing out that most DOJ attorneys are not restricted from belonging to organizations like this, or for working on behalf of partisan political organizations on their own time, though the author includes a variety of “I’m concerned about the appearances blah blah blah” from various and sundry “former DOJ officials”. One guy who they did quote was Stanley Hunterton, a former federal prosecutor of 12 years before he left the department in 1985. I guess no one at McClatchy bothered to look into the fact that the Hatch Act was substantially revised by Congress in 1993 to allow/encourage more overt partisan political activity by government workers, including DOJ attorneys. So, the law wasn’t the same during Mr. Hunterton’s time with DOJ as it is now.
But, the TPMmuckraker post really gets silly when it begins sniffing out some nefarious goings-on involving two members of RNLA who happen to work in the Voting Rights Section of the Civil Rights Division of DOJ.
Take two of those listed names in particular: Christian Adams and Joshua Rogers, both lawyers in the voting section. The section, which is charged with protecting minority voters from discrimination, has filed only two cases on behalf of African American voters during the Bush administration (and one of those cases they inherited from the Clinton administration).
But the section has, remarkably, pursued the first case to allege discrimination against white voters ever filed under the Voting Rights Act.
That case is United States v. Ike Brown and Noxubee County. It’s a case essentially against the Noxubee County Democratic Party — it’s one of the named defendants in the complaint. And Ike Brown is chairman of the county Democratic committee. The complaint alleges that Brown has been trying to limit whites’ participation in local elections.
And who are the two lawyers in the section handling the case? Christian Adams and Joshua Rogers.
Do you think there’s an appearance of conflict there?
Now it’s obvious that no one at TPMmuckraker bothered to look too closely at the Noxubee case, because had they done so, they would have found that DOJ attorneys Adams and Rogers filed suit on behalf of white DEMOCRAT voters who were being racially excluded from running for office and voting by the African-American Democrat majority in the county (62% of voting age population) which ran the County Elections Commission, and is alleged to have recruited non-resident African-American candidates to run in the Dem. primary in county races for which they were not eligible; to have applied different rules for accepting and counting of absentee ballots depending on whether the ballot came from a white voter or an African American voter; to have allowed African American residents of surrounding counties to vote in Noxubee County primary contests while putting up barriers to voting by white voters who lived in Noxubee County.
The complaint is 18 pages long. You can read the details for yourself here.
You just can’t trust those RNLA members — off filing complaints on behalf of oppressed Democrat voters.
— WLS