Clarice Feldman
The American Thinker
December 8, 2009
The Washington Times suggests in an editorial that the fallout from the Department’s refusal to proceed with the New Black Panther party’s criminal prosecution for voter intimidation is causing an implosion in the Holder Department of Justice.
DOJ has already lost three top officials; Gregory Craig,Cassandra Butts, and now David Ogden:
[T]he Justice Department has, for now, ordered two key career attorneys not to comply with a subpoena about the case issued by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. The commission, by law, has explicit power to issue subpoenas, and the law mandates that “all federal agencies shall cooperate fully with the commission.” The Justice Department, however, is citing internal regulations stemming from a 1951 case to support its order to ignore the subpoena.
One of the attorneys, J. Christian Adams, has been advised by his personal attorney, former South Carolina Secretary of State Jim Miles, that failure to comply with the subpoena could put him at risk of prosecution. “I can’t imagine,” Mr. Miles told The Washington Times, “that a statute that gives rise to the power of a subpoena would be subjugated to some internal procedural personnel rule being promulgated by DoJ.” In short, the department is stiffing the commission and unfairly putting its own employee in a legal bind.
Second, that same day, the two Republican House members with top-ranking jurisdiction over the Justice Department, Rep. Frank Wolf of Virginia and Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, issued a joint statement calling Justice Department delays “a cover-up,” and “a pretense to ignore inquiries from Congress and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.” At a hearing on Thursday, Mr. Smith said that “continued silence by the Justice Department is an implied admission of guilt that the case was dropped for purely political reasons.”
Third, at the same hearing, Rep. Steve King, Iowa Republican, accused Justice Department Civil Rights Division chief Thomas Perez of not being “truthful” while under oath, to such an extent that “there are people who have gone to jail” for such a level of purported “dishonest[y].”
I believe that normally, government agency subpoena enforcement is handled by the Department of Justice. Who will be selected to enforce these subpoenas against the Department itself?
