Rep. Devin Nunes truthfully accuses the lying accusers at the start of the impeachment enquiry, which is the latest move in the Democrats’ evil plot to overthrow the elected president:

Something that seems to have eluded comment, though it is particularly disturbing and puzzling, is that the FBI and DOJ bosses named by the inspector general in his report as having used their positions to try keeping Donald Trump out of power, and bringing him down from it, were passionately intent on helping a crook into the White House.

They knew, better than anybody – since they worked hard to cover it all up – that Hillary Clinton was crooked, corrupt, venal, lying, hypocritical and incompetent. And yet they fervently strove to get her elected to the presidency!

What does that say about them? What does it say about the politics of the Democratic Party who nominated a scoundrel as their candidate for the highest office in the land? Isn’t it obvious that to put an incompetent crook in power is to court disaster? Did they shut that logical understanding out? If so, why? What advantage in her election did they see that eludes common sense and overrides prudence?

Reason is baffled. So let’s consider emotion. What emotional need cries out for a leader who could only take the country into steep decline? What weird immoral passion?

How do they square with their conscience the sneaky spiteful steps they took to slander Donald Trump, to stitch him up, to lie about him in order to destroy him?

We are not talking about the dwindling audiences of CNN and the gullible readers of the New York Times – uninformed and misinformed people who swallow what they’re told; who can believe that “Trump is Hitler” because they know nothing about Hitler; who burble nonsense about being “on the right side of history” in imitation of their idol Obama. We are talking about the servants of the nation, the highly educated, the highly paid, the most trusted.

Is it the same intense emotion that compels European leaders to invite Islam to occupy, conquer and subdue their countries? Self-hatred? Life-hatred?

All our questions in this post are rhetorical. But opinions are welcome as always.

Republicans in Congress are fed up with being played for irrelevant fools by the little dictators of the DOJ and FBI.

The stench of corruption from both those federal agencies grows stronger by the day.

The guilty men and women need to be cleaned out, and all the facts of their perfidy revealed.

Is it beginning to happen at last?

It is bad that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is corrupt. It is worse that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is corrupt. But worst of all is the corruption of the Department of Justice.

When the government agency in charge of seeing that the rule of law is enforced gives up that responsibility, and takes upon itself instead to protect law-breakers and assist corruption, the rule of law is at an end.

Under the Obama administration, that is what has happened. The Department of Justice, first headed by Eric Holder who made it his solemn duty to protect black law-breakers, and subsequently by Loretta Lynch who is manifestly the obedient servant of the corrupt Clintons, is now nothing but a tool of the Democratic Party dictatorship.

Mike Adams, who sadly expects Crooked Hillary Clinton to be the next president of the United States but hopes that she might be impeached, writes at Townhall:

[Hillary] Clinton is guilty of more serious crimes than those of her husband prior to his impeachment. Next year she will have been placed in office by accepting a series of bribes – some of which have been funneled through her private “charitable” foundation and illegally used to fund her campaign for the presidency. If that is not an impeachable offense then no offense is impeachable.

None of this should come as a surprise. The Clintons began accepting bribes from corporations long before Bill even got out of office. In May of 1999, bankruptcy attorney William Brandt gave $1 million to the Clinton Presidential Library. Three months later, the Clinton Justice Department dropped charges against him for lying under oath about illegal lobbying of federal officials. The same year Anheuser-Busch kicked in $1 million after the Clinton administration dropped a bid to regulate beer advertisements aimed at minors.

It only got worse the following year when Denise Rich paid three bribes to the Clintons in exchange for the pardon of her husband Marc Rich. One bribe was $100,000 to Hillary’s 2000 Senate campaign. Another was $450,000 to the Clinton presidential library. A final bribe was for $1 million to the Democratic Party. Rich was pardoned on Clinton’s last day in office.

Things have only gotten worse since Hillary became the Secretary of State. The Clinton Foundation has been collecting money from foreign-owned businesses …  The foundation has also failed to disclose millions of dollars of gifts (bribes) from foreign entities seeking Hillary’s help to approve of transactions with serious national security implications. Speaking of serious national security implications, it is interesting to observe the change in policy toward India since Bill left office in 2001. India had never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and was hit with sanctions for refusing to do so. India attempted to have those sanctions lifted by having Indian entities with a direct financial interest in lifting the sanctions pay Bill Clinton large speaking fees. Indians who could legally do so also made donations to Hillary’s senate and presidential campaigns. Additionally, millions were poured directly into the Clinton Foundation. After the bribes were deposited, Bill and Hillary went to work lifting the sanctions that Bill had imposed as president.

The activities of the Clinton Foundation deserve heightened scrutiny because foreign governments cannot contribute to American political campaigns. But they can donate to a “charity” like the foundation. They are also allowed to pay exorbitant fees for speeches. Americans of all political persuasions should be troubled by the fact that corporations benefiting from State Department actions while Hillary was Secretary of State have funded Clinton speeches. Notably, affiliates of companies funding Clinton speeches have been the direct recipients of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars. Predictably, the Clintons never disclosed any of the obvious conflicts of interests.

After the initial years following Bill Clinton’s presidency, his income from speeches started to dwindle. Then, when Hillary became Secretary of State in 2009 his high-paying overseas speeches suddenly started to increase in frequency. Of the thirteen speeches Bill Clinton has given for over half a million dollars, eleven occurred when his wife was Secretary of State.

Nigeria, which is one of the most corrupt nations on the planet, has been one of the biggest moneymakers for Bill Clinton. In his first eight years out of office, Bill never spoke in Nigeria. After Hillary became Secretary of State, Bill pulled in two of his top three speeches ever ($700,000 each) speaking in Nigeria.

Despite its record of corruption, Hillary granted Nigeria a waiver so it could continue to receive US assistance.  This is despite the fact that in 2006 $1 million from a poverty alleviation fund was funneled into an organization run by Nduka Obaigbena in order to bring Beyonce to Nigeria. Obaigbena is also the alleged underwriter of Bill Clinton’s $700,000 speeches.

Clinton benefactor Gilbert Chagoury has been implicated in numerous bribery and corruption schemes in Nigeria. He has built a financial empire with the help of Sani Abacha, a Nigerian dictator whose time in office was known for brutality, bribery, and corruption. Abacha is also tied to Mark Rich who helped obtain oil assets in Nigeria and sell them for the benefit of General Abacha. During the same time frame, Abacha funneled hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign assistance into European bank accounts.

Chagoury also funneled money into the 1996 Clinton reelection campaign and to the Democratic National Committee. He donated nearly half a million dollars to a voter registration group tied to the DNC. Even the Washington Post had the good sense to recognize that it was done to curry favor with the Clinton administration on behalf of the Abacha dictatorship.

In 2000, Chagoury was convicted in Switzerland of money laundering and of “aiding a criminal organization in connection with billions of dollars stolen from Nigeria”. Since his conviction he has donated millions to the Clinton Foundation. In 2009, after Hillary became Secretary of State, he pledged a whopping billion dollars to the Clintons

Every story of the Clintons’ corruption – of which there are many, though none can ever be complete – requires a mention of their hypocrisy. 

Mike Adam duly recalls:

In December of 2009, Hillary Clinton gave a speech as a part of “International Anti-Corruption Day”, in which she praised the work of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in combatting bribery. In fact, she would go on to chair the group two years later. This is the same woman who began her political career with a controversy over turning a $1000 investment in cattle futures into $100,000. Throughout her career, the biggest payments into her coffers have not come from countries like England and Germany. They have flowed from nations rife with corruption and bribery. Nonetheless, in 2012 Hillary stated that fighting corruption is an “integral part of national security” adding that “our credibility depends on practicing what we preach”. She even said that bribery is “morally wrong – and far too common”. 

Indeed. Screwing your country with bribes is far more serious than screwing your intern with cigars. Let the [impeachment] proceedings begin.

But they won’t begin, of course. Even if the Republicans retain their majorities in the House and the Senate, it is very unlikely that they will dare to impeach Hillary Clinton. 

Why? Because everyone accepts now that the Clintons are above the law.  

And the Department of Justice is owned by them.

Matthew Vadum writes at Front Page:

The highly politicized Department of Justice swatted down pesky FBI requests to investigate the Clinton Foundation earlier this year, CNN reported yesterday.

CNN buried the lede, as it frequently does on news stories that make Democrats look bad. The online version bears the innocuous-sounding headline, “Newly released Clinton emails shed light on relationship between State Dept. and Clinton Foundation.”

It is not until the 25^th paragraph that the article states that an unidentified law enforcement official gave CNN a heads-up earlier this year. As the probe of Clinton’s private email servers was ramping up “several FBI field offices approached the Justice Department asking to open a case regarding the relationship between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation”. 

At that time, the article continues, the Justice Department “declined because it had looked into allegations surrounding the Clinton Foundation around a year earlier and found there wasn’t sufficient evidence to open a case”.

Not even enough evidence to look into the foundation’s affairs?

Not more than a year after the publication of Peter Schweizer’s blockbuster book, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, opened the floodgates for investigative reporters to dig into the matter. …

Lawyers have told me there is already a strong legal case against Mrs. Clinton. The fact that she destroyed email evidence – evidence subject to a congressional subpoena, no less — is already evidence in itself that she obstructed justice through spoliation of evidence. Spoliation means you can take as evidence the fact that evidence has been destroyed. Courts are entitled to draw spoliation inferences and convict an accused person on that basis alone.

The only reason FBI Director James Comey didn’t recommend she be prosecuted is because, well, he lacks a spine and he’s corrupt. He said there was no evidence of Clinton’s “efforts to obstruct justice”,  a requirement that does not actually appear in the Espionage Act.

Evidence of corruption at the Clinton Foundation is everywhere, yet CNN and much of the mainstream media are still doing everything they can to ignore, misrepresent, or downplay the questionable things Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton did through the foundation.

The congenitally corrupt Clintons created their private email system to frustrate Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) requesters, shield Hillary’s correspondence from congressional oversight, and steer money to their corrupt foundation, which, amazingly enough, still enjoys tax-exempt status.

These illegal, insecure private email servers Clinton used while at the State Department are at the heart of the scandal over her mishandling of an Islamic terrorist attack in militant-infested Benghazi, Libya on the 11th anniversary of 9/11 that left four Americans, including U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens, dead. Even now, four years after the assault, the Obama administration has failed to provide an autopsy report about Stevens who was initially reported to have been ritualistically sodomized before being murdered by Muslim terrorists.

Every few days Judicial Watch has been releasing emails obtained under FoIA that may ultimately lead to evidence of political interference at the highest levels that provided cover for the anticipatory presidential bribe processing vehicle known as the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. …

May lead to … ? No. As long as there is a Democrat in the White House there will be no prosecution of the Clintons.

But Hillary Clinton is intent on finding cause to prosecute Trump “for corruption”!

A high-profile watchdog group controlled by Hillary Clinton ally David Brock is demanding the IRS investigate Donald Trump’s personal foundation for allegedly aiding his presidential campaign.

The call by CREW, or Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, has to be the most obvious political hit job of this election cycle.

CREW is a member of what some in the conservative think tank community call the “Brocktopus”, that is, the network of groups the disgraced former journalist runs, which spends oodles of money defending all things Clinton. An admitted serial liar, Brock’s empire of sleaze also includes “conservative misinformation” watchdog Media Matters for America, pro-Hillary disaster-control spin site Correct the Record, and American Bridge 21st Century, a super PAC that promotes Hillary and attacks her critics.

CREW executive director Noah Bookbinder asked the IRS to investigate the Donald J. Trump Foundation, a tiny nonprofit founded by Trump decades ago to give away profits from his book, The Art of the Deal.

How the foundation, which ranked 4,347th in the FoundationSearch “Top Foundations by Assets for the state of New York” list would help the Trump campaign isn’t clear. “The Trump Foundation has no full-time staff, and gave away just $591,000 in 2014 — the last year for which records are available,” the Washington Post reports. …

Even if the IRS takes up this piddling little case not much is likely to come of it. It’s a political stunt by CREW, a nakedly partisan group under the boot of one of Hillary’s biggest backers.

It’s the wheeling and dealing Clinton Foundation with its involvement in billion-dollar transactions, its ties to shady figures, and the debt it owes to the unsavory governments of countries around the world that needs to be properly and thoroughly examined.

But as it won’t be examined, because (we repeat) the misnamed Department of Justice is owned by the Clintons –

Should those of us give up hope, who –

• Want to live under the rule of law, with nobody being above it?
• Value, above all else, individual freedom protected by the law?
• Want government to be the servant, not the master, of the people?

If Hillary Clinton is elected to the presidency, then the answer to that question is YES.

The growing dominance of the federal government over the states has obscured more fundamental changes within the federal government itself: It is not just bigger, it is dangerously off kilter. Our carefully constructed system of checks and balances is being negated by the rise of a fourth branch, an administrative state of sprawling departments and agencies that govern with increasing autonomy and decreasing transparency.

We take these extracts from an article in the Washington Post by Professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University. If he is right, America is being governed by a bureaucracy accountable to no other branch of government or to the people. The rule of the bureaucrats is arbitrary and tyrannical.

For much of our nation’s history, the federal government was quite small. In 1790, it had just 1,000 nonmilitary workers. In 1962, there were 2,515,000 federal employees. Today, we have 2,840,000 federal workers in 15 departments, 69 agencies and 383 nonmilitary sub-agencies.

This exponential growth has led to increasing power and independence for agencies. The shift of authority has been staggering. The fourth branch now has a larger practical impact on the lives of citizens than all the other branches combined.

The rise of the fourth branch has been at the expense of Congress’s lawmaking authority. In fact, the vast majority of “laws” governing the United States are not passed by Congress but are issued as regulations, crafted largely by thousands of unnamed, unreachable bureaucrats. One study found that in 2007, Congress enacted 138 public laws, while federal agencies finalized 2,926 rules, including 61 major regulations.

This rulemaking comes with little accountability. It’s often impossible to know, absent a major scandal, whom to blame for rules that are abusive or nonsensical. Of course, agencies owe their creation and underlying legal authority to Congress, and Congress holds the purse strings. But Capitol Hill’s relatively small staff is incapable of exerting oversight on more than a small percentage of agency actions. And the threat of cutting funds is a blunt instrument to control a massive administrative state — like running a locomotive with an on/off switch.

The autonomy was magnified when the Supreme Court ruled in 1984 that agencies are entitled to heavy deference in their interpretations of laws. The court went even further this past week, ruling that agencies should get the same heavy deference in determining their own jurisdictions — a power that was previously believed to rest with Congress. In his dissent in Arlington v. FCC, Chief Justice John Roberts warned: “It would be a bit much to describe the result as ‘the very definition of tyranny,’ but the danger posed by the growing power of the administrative state cannot be dismissed.”

The judiciary, too, has seen its authority diminished by the rise of the fourth branch. Under Article III of the Constitution, citizens facing charges and fines are entitled to due process in our court system. As the number of federal regulations increased, however, Congress decided to relieve the judiciary of most regulatory cases and create administrative courts tied to individual agencies. The result is that a citizen is 10 times more likely to be tried by an agency than by an actual court. In a given year, federal judges conduct roughly 95,000 adjudicatory proceedings, including trials, while federal agencies complete more than 939,000.

These agency proceedings are often mockeries of due process, with one-sided presumptions and procedural rules favoring the agency. And agencies increasingly seem to chafe at being denied their judicial authority. … A 50-year-old technology consultant … charged with disorderly conduct and indecent exposure when he stripped at Portland International Airport last year in protest of invasive security measures by the Transportation Security Administration, … was cleared by a federal judge who ruled that his stripping was a form of free speech, … but was pulled [by the TSA] into its own agency courts under administrative charges.

The rise of the fourth branch has occurred alongside an unprecedented increase in presidential powers — from the power to determine when to go to war to the power to decide when it’s reasonable to vaporize a U.S. citizen in a drone strike. In this new order, information is jealously guarded and transparency has declined sharply. That trend, in turn, has given the fourth branch even greater insularity and independence. When Congress tries to respond to cases of agency abuse, it often finds officials walled off by claims of expanding executive privilege.

But while the agencies can sometimes be protected by the president, they can also protect themselves from him. Their power is independent of the president just as it is, in practice, independent of Congress and the judiciary.

Of course, federal agencies officially report to the White House under the umbrella of the executive branch. But in practice, the agencies have evolved into largely independent entities over which the president has very limited control. Only 1 percent of federal positions are filled by political appointees, as opposed to career officials, and on average appointees serve only two years. At an individual level, career officials are insulated from political pressure by civil service rules. There are also entire agencies — including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission — that are protected from White House interference.

Some agencies have gone so far as to refuse to comply with presidential orders. For example, in 1992 President George H.W. Bush ordered the U.S. Postal Service to withdraw a lawsuit against the Postal Rate Commission, and he threatened to sack members of the Postal Service’s Board of Governors who denied him. The courts ruled in favor of the independence of the agency. …

Only “a small percentage of agency matters… rise to the level of presidential notice”. The rest remain “the sole concern of agency discretion”. For instance, when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) or the Department of the Interior (DOI) force people into poverty by depriving them of their land or their water or their jobs in order to preserve some animal, bird or fish instead, there seems to be no recourse to any higher authority for the human victims to appeal to for arbitration. (See for example our post The environmentalists’ tyrannical drive against civilization, January 19, 2013.)

The marginalization Congress feels is magnified for citizens, who are routinely pulled into the vortex of an administrative state that allows little challenge or appeal. The IRS scandal is the rare case in which internal agency priorities are forced into the public eye. Most of the time, such internal policies are hidden from public view and congressional oversight. While public participation in the promulgation of new regulations is allowed, and often required, the process is generally perfunctory and dismissive.

Professor Turley speaks of “the new regulatory age“, in which –

Presidents and Congress can still change the government’s priorities, but the agencies effectively run the show based on their interpretations and discretion.

The importance of this development, he stresses, cannot be overestimated. It is a huge, momentous change in the US system of government.

The rise of this fourth branch represents perhaps the single greatest change in our system of government since the founding.

And he ends with a warning:

We cannot long protect liberty if our leaders continue to act like mere bystanders to the work of government.

Does the independent power of the bureaucracies mean that President Obama is off the hook for the scandals of Benghazi, the IRS targeting of conservative groups applying for tax exempt status, the Department of Justice secretly investigating journalists? That he could have done nothing much about them one way or the other even if he’d wanted to?

If so, is that why the Washington Post published Professor Turley’s article?

Interesting questions, but of passing concern.

What matters is that Americans are no longer living in the free democratic republic they think they are.

The mainstream media tried to ignore the “Fast and Furious” scandal, but can do so no longer. A Congressional panel has recommended that the House of Representatives cite Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. for contempt of Congress, and President Obama has asserted executive privilege to shield Justice Department documents from disclosure.

This summary of the dire results of the nefarious activity authorized by the Department of Justice comes from Investor’s Business Daily:

Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed in December 2010 at the hands of an illegal immigrant working for the Sinaloa Cartel just 10 miles from the Mexico border near Nogales, Ariz. Two AK-47 assault rifles found at the site of the Terry shooting were traced back to a straw buyer allowed to smuggle guns into Mexico with the blessing of the ATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] and Eric Holder’s Department of Justice.

In addition to Agent Terry, Immigration Customs Enforcement Agent Jaime Zapata was also killed [February 2011] in a separate incident by a weapon allowed to “walk” into Mexico from the U.S. as part of the administration’s third-rate alleged attempt to track and catch gun traffickers. Let us not forget the hundreds of Mexican nationals who have been killed by Fast and Furious weapons.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Rep. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) tried to get information from the DOJ and the ATF about the operation dubbed “Fast and Furious”.

They were lied to. The DOJ claimed that allegations of sales of assault weapons to a straw purchaser who then took them to Mexico were false. President Obama declared on TV that neither he nor the Attorney General, Eric Holder, had authorized Fast and Furious.  In May 2011 Holder testified to the House Judiciary Committee that he didn’t know who had approved the operation but now it was being investigated. He said he’d only heard about it in “the last few weeks”. But in October 2011 documents surfaced revealing that he had known about it since July 2010. Holder then hastened to say that he had misunderstood the question. (“When did you first know about …” is a difficult question to understand?) In November 2011 he admitted that “gunwalking” had in fact been done in Fast and Furious, and explained that his earlier denials had been unintentional. But he still insisted that he personally had been unaware that “gunwalking” tactics had been used. On June 7 2012 Holder again testified at a Congressional hearing (his seventh on this issue), and again denied knowing anything about his department ordering “gunwalking”. His department had provided only 7,000 documents, about 5% of the number Congress had asked for. Now Congress asked for 1,300 documents in addition to the 7,000. Holder refused to hand them over. On June 20 2012 President Obama invoked “executive privilege” to keep the documents from Congress under his personal orders. On the same day, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform cited Holder for contempt. The House of Representatives will vote on the issue next week.

Can anyone explain, or plausibly conjecture, why Fast and Furious was launched? What the real motive was for the operation, just what the DOJ hoped to accomplish, and exactly how?

The aim stated when the operation was finally admitted to, was to track the firearms to the bosses of Mexican drug cartels, who would then be arrested so that the cartels could be destroyed. Without the co-operation of the Mexican government – which was not even informed about it – how might that have been managed?

Some say it was to help the Obama administration make a case against the Second Amendment rights of US citizens to carry arms. How might that case be argued?

Answers are invited.

J. Christian Adams is the lawyer formerly employed by the Department of Justice who recently revealed the DOJ’s policy of not prosecuting blacks for intimidating white voters (see our post Payback time at the DOJ, June 28, 2010.)

Now at PajamasMedia he reveals another policy decision which makes it plain that under Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, the DOJ disdains the law, and assumes an arbitrary right not to uphold and enforce it.

The “Motor Voter” law was passed in 1993 to promote greater voter registration in the United States. … [It] obliged the states to ensure that no ineligible voters were on the rolls — including dead people, felons, and people who had moved. Our current Department of Justice is anxious to encourage the obligations to get everyone registered, but explicitly unwilling to enforce federal law requiring states to remove the dead or ineligible from the rolls.

In November 2009, the entire Voting Section was invited to a meeting with Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes, a political employee serving at the pleasure of the attorney general. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss Motor Voter enforcement decisions.

The room was packed with dozens of Voting Section employees when she made her announcement regarding the provisions related to voter list integrity:

“We have no interest in enforcing this provision of the law. It has nothing to do with increasing turnout, and we are just not going to do it.”

At Commentary Contentions, John Steele Gordon comments on this:

The only reason I can think of why the DOJ would not want to purge the voter rolls of the names of those ineligible to vote is to make voter fraud as easy to accomplish as possible.

We think he’s right. The decision mocks democracy. But  the issue is bigger and more important even than voter fraud. It is a threat to the rule of law itself.

The law is the house of our safety. Obama with his henchmen and henchwomen are knocking it down. If they are not stopped, we will be left exposed to the whims of dictatorship, whichever way they blow.

Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, does not apparently approve of the rule of law. In fact, he is actively working against it.

An exaggeration?

J. Christian Adams, who was a voting rights attorney at the  so-called Department of Justice tells a story that bears out the accusation. He has resigned because the DOJ will not prosecute the Black Panther thugs who tried to intimidate voters on election day 2009.

Here’s part of an article he has written about it:

On the day President Obama was elected, armed men wearing the black berets and jackboots of the New Black Panther Party were stationed at the entrance to a polling place in Philadelphia. They brandished a weapon and intimidated voters and poll watchers. After the election, the Justice Department brought a voter-intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party and those armed thugs. I and other Justice attorneys diligently pursued the case and obtained an entry of default after the defendants ignored the charges. Before a final judgment could be entered in May 2009, our superiors ordered us to dismiss the case.

The New Black Panther case was the simplest and most obvious violation of federal law I saw in my Justice Department career. Because of the corrupt nature of the dismissal, statements falsely characterizing the case and, most of all, indefensible orders for the career attorneys not to comply with lawful subpoenas investigating the dismissal, this month I resigned my position as a Department of Justice (DOJ) attorney.

The federal voter-intimidation statutes we used against the New Black Panthers were enacted because America never realized genuine racial equality in elections. Threats of violence characterized elections from the end of the Civil War until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Before the Voting Rights Act, blacks seeking the right to vote, and those aiding them, were victims of violence and intimidation. …

Based on my firsthand experiences, I believe the dismissal of the Black Panther case was motivated by a lawless hostility toward equal enforcement of the law. Others still within the department share my assessment. The department abetted wrongdoers and abandoned law-abiding citizens victimized by the New Black Panthers. The dismissal raises serious questions about the department’s enforcement neutrality in upcoming midterm elections and the subsequent 2012 presidential election.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has opened an investigation into the dismissal and the DOJ’s skewed enforcement priorities. Attorneys who brought the case are under subpoena to testify, but the department ordered us to ignore the subpoena, lawlessly placing us in an unacceptable legal limbo.

The assistant attorney general for civil rights, Tom Perez, has testified repeatedly that the “facts and law” did not support this case. That claim is false. If the actions in Philadelphia do not constitute voter intimidation, it is hard to imagine what would, short of an actual outbreak of violence at the polls. Let’s all hope this administration has not invited that outcome through the corrupt dismissal.

Most corrupt of all, the lawyers who ordered the dismissal – Loretta King, the Obama-appointed acting head of the Civil Rights Division, and Steve Rosenbaum – did not even read the internal Justice Department memorandums supporting the case and investigation. …

Most disturbing, the dismissal is part of a creeping lawlessness infusing our government institutions. Citizens would be shocked to learn about the open and pervasive hostility within the Justice Department to bringing civil rights cases against nonwhite defendants on behalf of white victims. Equal enforcement of justice is not a priority of this administration. Open contempt is voiced for these types of cases.

Some of my co-workers argued that the law should not be used against black wrongdoers because of the long history of slavery and segregation. Less charitable individuals called it “payback time.” Incredibly, after the case was dismissed, instructions were given that no more cases against racial minorities like the Black Panther case would be brought by the Voting Section.

It seems that many if not quite all of the Dictator’s appointees to jobs in his administration are left-radical sympathizers with America’s enemies. But few are in a position actively to aid them. The attorney general is in the best position to do so if he chooses. He could, for instance, staff the Department of Justice with lawyers who have a record of defending terrorists – and not just defending them but working hard for their acquittal even outside the limits of the law; persons who have shown themselves to be passionately on the other side.

But surely he wouldn’t do such a thing, would he?  The Attorney General of the United States cannot be against America and for its enemies, can he?  Okay, it’s true he has in fact brought such persons into his Justice Department, but they must be as patriotic as he is – wouldn’t you assume?

“Does helping jihadists lie, plot, and identify CIA agents demonstrate patriotism — or material support to terrorism?” – Andrew McCarthy asks. And he answers his own question in this illuminating article at the National Review Online which we quote in part:

Bravely entering the lion’s den — delivering a speech in praise of left-wing, “pro bono” lawyering to a group of left-wing, pro bono lawyers — Attorney General Eric Holder recently declared that “lawyers who provide counsel for the unpopular are, and should be, treated as what they are: patriots.”

Sure they are. After all, Holder explained, they “reaffirm our nation’s most essential and enduring values” — like the value we place on coming to the aid of our enemies in wartime. And let’s not forget the value we place on advocating for the release of those enemies who, as night follows day, then return to the business of killing Americans. Sure, the nation somehow missed these essential and enduring values in the two-plus centuries between the Revolutionary War and the War on Terror, but hey, who’s counting?

The attorney general’s encomium was prompted by critics who had embarrassed him, finally, into disclosing at least some of the names of former Gitmo Bar members he recruited for policymaking jobs at DOJ. They “do not deserve to have their own values questioned,” he said of these lawyers. Just like many attorneys at Covington & Burling, Holder’s former firm (which made representing enemy combatants its biggest “pro bono” project), they answered the call of “our values” because, you know, the detainees are so very “unpopular” among the American legal profession.

Truth be told, what’s most unpopular in our elite legal circles is the Bush administration. Bush’s lawyers approved, and Bush’s executive agencies carried out, aggressive counterterrorism policies on interrogation, detention, and surveillance after some of the Gitmo Bar’s clients killed nearly 3,000 Americans. What about those unpopular lawyers and agents? For some reason, Covington & Burling and the other barrister battalions did not volunteer to represent them. And Holder wasn’t content merely to question their “values”; he accused them of war crimes. …

The attorney general’s pep rally occurred just as the public was getting its first glimpse of the peculiar notions of “representation” shared by several Gitmo Bar veterans.. We now know a good deal about several of these volunteer lawyers. To take just a few examples, they provided al-Qaeda detainees with a brochure that instructed them on how to claim falsely that they had been tortured; fomented a detainee hunger strike that disrupted security and precipitated fabricated reports that prisoners had been tortured and force-fed; provided the detainees with other virulently anti-American propaganda (for example, informing them about the Abu Ghraib scandal, comparing U.S. military physicians to Josef Mengele, and labeling DOJ lawyers “desk torturers”); gave the enemy-combatant terrorists a hand-drawn map of Gitmo’s layout, including guard towers; helped the enemy combatants communicate messages to the outside world; informed the detainees of the identities of other detainees in U.S. custody; and posted photos of Guantanamo security badges on the Internet in a transparent effort to identify U.S. security personnel.

And that’s not the worst of it — [there is] the Gitmo Bar’s shocking effort to identify CIA interrogators. The lawyers — from the ACLU and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, perversely calling themselves “the John Adams Project” — actually had investigators stalk U.S. intelligence officers, surveilling them near their homes and photographing them … The photos were then smuggled into Gitmo and shown to top terrorists to determine whether they recognized which intelligence agents had questioned them.

Interestingly, the attorney general claimed that al-Qaeda’s volunteer lawyers deserve the public’s “respect” because they “accept our professional responsibility to protect the rule of law.” All of the above-described activities not only violated the law; they occurred in flagrant contravention of court-ordered conditions that were placed on the lawyers’ access to their “clients.” Evidently, violating statutes and contemptuously flouting court orders protects the rule of law in the same way that coming to the enemy’s aid exhibits patriotism. That’s “our values” for you. …

During the Valerie Plame controversy, we were treated to lectures from the American Left over the dire need to protect CIA agents. That, coupled with the fact that Patrick Fitzgerald, who ran the Plame investigation, is now leading a probe of the Gitmo lawyers, has brought renewed attention to the Covert Agent Identity Protection Act, the statute at the center of the Plame case….

Federal law prohibits providing material support to terrorists and terrorist organizations. Almost any assistance qualifies. The relevant statutes … exempt only “medicine and religious materials.” Though not stated in the statute, legitimate legal assistance must also be exempt — indicted terrorists are entitled to counsel. This was [Lynne] Stewart’s attempted [and failed] defense. [See here and here.] The jury, however, rejected the absurd contention that activities like helping the head of an international terrorist organization convey messages to his subordinates constituted “representation” by an attorney.

It would be interesting to know whether the attorney general thinks legitimate representation by counsel includes stalking the CIA, conspiring to identify covert agents and security personnel, inciting disruptions, providing terrorists with information in rampant violation of court orders, and the Gitmo Bar’s other outrages. Assuming Holder agrees that this is not the “rule of law” he had in mind, why would such activities not constitute material support to terrorists?

Moreover, the Espionage Act prohibits the obtaining of information respecting the national defense with the intent that it be used to the injury of the United States. Specifically included, among many other examples of conduct criminalized under the statute, is the taking of photographs of “anything connected with the national defense.” Doesn’t Mr. Holder think snapping photos of CIA interrogators involves photographing something connected with our national defense? Doesn’t the unauthorized display of such photos to mass murderers at war with our country bespeak an intention to harm the United States?

Certainly the CIA believes that what the Gitmo Bar pulled here was a serious threat to its agents and our country. Yet press reports indicate that the Justice Department didn’t think it was a big deal and resisted CIA demands that enforcement action be taken. Those of us who have pressed for disclosure of the identities and current responsibilities of former detainee lawyers now working at DOJ have argued that the public is entitled to know about potential conflicts of interest. This would certainly seem to be one. Have any former Gitmo lawyers been involved in the Justice Department’s consideration of misconduct by the detainees’ attorneys? …

While she was at Human Rights Watch (HRW), Jennifer Daskal — brought to DOJ by Holder to work on detainee policy despite lacking any prosecutorial experience — played a central role in HRW’s investigation of the CIA. She was largely responsible for its exposure of covert CIA operations (specifically, identifying and publicizing airplanes used by the agency) and its disclosure that the CIA was secretly using prisons in Europe (and elsewhere) to hold top al-Qaeda captives. Daskal met with European Parliament officials and armed them with information that was used to pressure the Bush administration to shut down its detention and interrogation program.

Daskal, who called Bush the “torture president,” was a tireless critic of enhanced-interrogation tactics and other Bush counterterrorism policies. Moreover, in a 2006 memo, she asked the U.N. Human Rights Committee to investigate the United States for, among other things, using “the cloak of federalism” to avoid international governance [!!!-JB]; denying enemy combatants full access to the federal courts during what she described as “the so-called ‘war on terror’”; purportedly violating international treaties by operating not only Gitmo but “supermax” civilian prisons; using secret prisons for War on Terror detainees; detaining terrorism suspects on material-witness warrants; employing military-commission procedures; imposing racially rigged enforcement of the death penalty; and denying illegal aliens the right to organize in labor unions.

That is to say, Daskal has been a harsh critic of the United States, a reliable advocate for terrorists, and a champion of compromising the CIA’s wartime activities. …

I’m betting most Americans would sense a chasm between their values and Ms. Daskal’s — and between their idea of patriotism and Mr. Holder’s.