Category: Eric Holder

Ferguson To Holder: “Bring It. Yourself. Buzz Aldrin Could Calibrate You.”

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by Smitty

Attorney General Eric Holder said Friday the Department of Justice is ready to take any and all steps that are needed to reform the Ferguson, Mo., police department, including the potential dismantling of the force.

But was it really racism?

The complex question of the relationship between wealth and race comes into play here, but it might reasonably be said that this practice — of police and prosecutors and courts together — disproportionately affects black communities not because they are black, but because they are poor. They do not have the means to escape the justice apparatus, unlike the comparatively wealthy, who can pay a fine and be done with the matter — or hire an attorney, and inconvenience courts that prefer the ease of collecting fees to the challenge of arbitrating cases. To this effect, Balko quotes Thomas Harvey, an attorney for ArchCity Defenders, a St. Louis–based legal-aid group: “These are people who make the same mistakes you or I do — speeding, not wearing a seatbelt, forgetting to get your car inspected on time. The difference is that they don’t have the money to pay the fines. . . . When you can’t pay the fines, you get fined for that, too. And when you can’t get to court, you get an arrest warrant.”

It’s not a bad thing to have somebody watching the watchmen. However, after six years of Creep Show Holder wanting to have a conversation about race with every blade of grass in the land, I simply would trust him to tell me the time of day.

And what about the Governor of Missouri? It looks like Nixon is operating slightly above a vegetative state. Is he anxious to avoid the Menendez treatment? It seems yet another example of federalism gone off the rails that there is this abject tool of an Attorney General running around like some kind of authority figure.

It’s time to show the federal bully some resolve. In some pre-Obama America, they’d provide Snidely Whiplash a bit of needful attitude adjustment.

“Blinded By Delight”

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by Smitty

With apologies to Springsteen, and admiration for his lyrical density, here is some love for Eric Holder:

“Blinded By Delight”

Hippies Yippies Drippies and pinheads named Zippy with a Commie zampolit
In the dumps with these chumps as the environmentalist pumps his head all full of ‘it
With the border in disorder, due to Eric Holder, once again he’s Congress-bound
Where Louie Gohmert communicated butt-hurt as his integrity crashed to the ground
And for Trey Gowdy the sky was very cloudy due to prosecutorial discretion
Which for Eric was no fun, as his head gets so little sun, lodged in its position
And now young Scott with a bracelet for his 10-shot tried to excercise his rights
And some southpaw scofflaw shot him point-blank in the jaw–injustice that Holder delights

Eric was blinded by delight
He cut up like a schmuck, another goner on the right
Blinded by delight
He got down but he never got tight, he’ll get a pardon, alright

The bit about Scott is a hypothetical, built on the notion that these pissant laws only harming people who follow them, and strangely affecting the scofflaws not at all.

That is one long set of lyrics, though, and I wasn’t going to get much more than this done anytime soon.

Our country cannot be rid of this Holder cretin quickly enough. What a poster child for everything good people despise about political appointees.

Eric Holder Hospitalized

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Don’t know what the diagnosis or prognosis is:

Attorney General Eric Holder was taken to an area hospital Thursday after reporting faintness and shortness of breath.
Justice Department spokesman Brian Fallon said Holder, 63, began experiencing the symptoms during a regular senior staff meeting at the department.
“As a precaution, the attorney general was taken to MedStar Washington Hospital Center to undergo further evaluation,” Fallon said. “He is currently resting comfortably and in good condition. He is alert and conversing with his doctors.”

Most likely a heart attack, but we’ll have to wait and see.

 

Ted Cruz: Media Acting as ‘Palace Guard’ to Protect Obama in IRS Scandal UPDATE: Tom Perez Fails to Provide Information on Bosserman’s Appointment

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Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said Wednesday the media have failed to do their job by demanding answers in the Internal Revenue Service scandal.

“The media should hold the administration accountable,” Cruz said. Instead of acting as watchdogs, however, the media are acting as a “palace guard” protecting President Obama from scrutiny, the conservative Republican told bloggers during a conference call.

Cruz’s comments came after a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in which he questioned Attorney General Eric Holder about the Justice Department’s investigation of the IRS scandal. In wake of reports that the investigation is being led by Barbara Bosserman, who donated thousands of dollars to Obama’s presidential campaigns, Cruz asked Holder: “I would call upon you to carry out the tradition of independence that attorneys general have honored that office with for centuries and protect the integrity of the Department of Justice, given the political sensitivities, given the fact that individual citizens believe they are being persecuted by the Department of Justice for partisan reasons. It would further Justice and further the integrity of the Department of Justice for you to appoint a special prosecutor with a meaningful degree of independence to investigate and find out what happened, and I would suggest that any special prosecutor should have integrity beyond reproach, and not be a major Obama donor.”

Holder answered: “I don’t think that there is a basis for us to conclude on the information as it presently exists that there is any reason for the appointment of the independent counsel. … The notion that somehow this has caused a loss of faith in this Justice Department is inconsistent with the facts.”

Holder said: “I don’t have any basis to believe that the people who engaged in this investigation are doing so in a way other than investigations are normally done. That is by looking at the facts, applying the law to those facts, and reaching the appropriate conclusion. I don’t have any basis to believe anything other than that is occurring.”

Sen. Cruz responded, “I would say a lot of American citizens have a basis to believe it, given 282 days have passed and no on has been indicted, 280 days have passed and many, if not all, of the victims have not even been interviewed. 280 days have passed and apparently the anger and outrage that both the President and you expressed has utterly disappeared. Indeed, in last night’s State of the Union address the President did not so much as mention the word ‘IRS.’ So the anger and outrage sees very little manifestation in actual action.”

Speaking to bloggers after Wednesday’s hearing, Cruz said “Holder accepted no accountability,” and said the Justice Department “has done absolutely nothing” in its investigation of the IRS scandal, which Cruz described as “abuse of power and lawlessness.”

UPDATE: In related news, on Jan. 14, House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California) and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) sent a letter to Labor Secretary Tom Perez, who in his previous job as an assistant attorney general was Barbara Bosserman’s boss at the Justice Department until July 2013.

In their letter, Issa and Jordan asked Perez to provide documents related to Bosserman’s appointment to lead the IRS investigation: “Please supply this information as soon as possible, but no later than 5:00 p.m. on January 28, 2014.”

Just checked with a source at the Oversight Committee, who reports that Perez failed to comply with Issa and Jordan’s request.

 

Enemies List: Holder’s DOJ and Hillary’s State Department Targeted Fox Reporter

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Everybody’s buzzing today about the Washington Post report that Fox News chief Washington correspondent James Rosen was targeted in a Justice Department investigation of a leak by a State Department official — at least two years before the similar probe of Associated Press that raised cries of outrage from the D.C. media last week.

That probe began after Rosen reported in June 2009 that “that U.S. intelligence officials were warning that North Korea was likely to respond to United Nations sanctions with more nuclear tests,” according to the Post‘s Anne E. Marimow. Rosen’s article at FoxNews.com was filed the same day that a top-secret report on North Korea’s nuclear program “was made available to a small circle within the intelligence community — including Kim.” According to documents in the Kim case obtained by the Washington Post, federal agents obtained phone and e-mail records for Rosen, as well as records of the Fox reporter’s use of a State Department security-badge swipe card . . .

Let’s ask an obvious question here: Of all the leaks from this administration, how many were the subject of this kind of investigation?

Because it seems rather . . . coincidental, we might say, that this 2009 item by a Fox News reporter should have been the focus of such an elaborate inquiry. If you were of a suspicious disposition, you might wonder if the Secretary of State and the Attorney General were determined that, in particular, Fox News should have no sources inside the Obama administration.

C’mon: How many leakers has Eric Holder’s DOJ prosecuted the way they prosecuted Stephen Jin-Woo Kim? Was this intended as a message to administration officials — “Don’t talk to Fox News” — and was it also an attempt to treat Fox News as a criminal enterprise?


The Fate of Basseley Nakoula

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“Hillary’s promise of vengeance to the father of a fallen SEAL wasn’t that we’d get the jihadis who killed him but that we’d punish the filmmaker. That’s perverse, but in keeping with the fact that she decided to run ads on Pakistani TV apologizing for the film while Islamist cretins menaced American diplomats across the region.”
— Allahpundit, Oct. 25, 2012

The wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time: Nakoula was out on “supervised release” for a federal bank fraud conviction. He was $700,000 behind on restitution payments and operating under an alias when he made “The Innocence of Muslims,” a crappy movie that got turned into a YouTube video clip that in turn became the pretext of riots in Egypt and then — it is now generally acknowledged — was utilized as a flimsy excuse by the State Department in an attempt to distract from its embarrassing failures in the September attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Having become unintentionally famous, the con man Nakoula was arrested and hustled into federal court amid unusually high security two weeks after the Benghazi attacks. We need not wonder why Eric Holder’s Justice Department made this a top priority:

“We will make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.”
— Hillary Clinton, Sept. 14, 2012

There was a sort of argument last week between Ken White at Popehat and some conservatives who insist on calling Nakoula a “political prisoner.” Alternately, Rich Lowry calls Nakoula a “patsy,” but this really isn’t the argument we need to be having.

The Nakoula case isn’t about anyone’s free speech rights. The First Amendment doesn’t protect the right of convicted criminals to operate under aliases in potentially lucrative business while owing restitution to the victims of their earlier crimes. While I wholly endorse the right to speak truth about Islam — and to hell with any mob of violent savages who object — Ken White is correct that Nakoula is neither a “political prisoner” nor a heroic martyr for free speech.

But this isn’t really about Nakoula at all, is it?

What the case of Nakoula actually demonstrates is the strangely misplaced priorities of the Obama administration: Eight months later, they still haven’t caught any of the terrorists who killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi, but they needed only two weeks to apprehend Nakoula.

Genuinely dangerous people seem to have no problem eluding federal investigators. Ariel Castro kidnapped women and kept them in his Cleveland basement for more than a decade, while the FBI never even considered the wife-beating school-bus driver a suspect. Nor was Castro the only menace to evade the FBI.

The good news? The feds are finally cracking down on those dangerous high-capacity pressure cookers. About damned time, too . . .