Every Single One: The Politicized Hiring of Eric Holder’s Housing Section
PJMedia’s “Every Single One” series has been exposing the politicized hiring practices of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division under Attorney General Eric Holder. Obtained only after a bitter Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the resumes discussed in the articles reveal a crusade to pack the Civil Rights Division with an ideologically and politically loyal core that will help advance a taxpayer-funded leftist agenda for years to come.
Today we turn to the Housing and Civil Enforcement Section, a litigation shop with enormous power over American businesses. This Section, which is headed by the infamous Steve Rosenbaum — the same individual who (along with Loretta King) ordered the dismissal of the New Black Panther Party lawsuit — is responsible for enforcing the Fair Housing Act and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, among others. The Section has an undercover operation designed to spy on American businesses to determine if racial discrimination is taking place. They also have a unit designed to ensure banks keep the spigot of mortgage loans open to borrowers with marginal credit.
If that sounds like behavior which contributed to the economic crisis, you’re right. Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Thomas Perez has promised to unleash the Section’s attorneys on communities across the country to pursue unprecedented numbers of discrimination lawsuits against mortgage lenders, apartment complexes, and even restaurants.
At this point in the series, it is little surprise that every single one of the new career attorneys hired into the Housing Section passed an ideological or political litmus test. The same is true, of course, with each of the other six sections that have been chronicled so far — the Voting Section, the Office of Special Counsel for Immigration-Related Unfair Employment Practices, the Special Litigation Section, the Education Section, the Employment Litigation Section, and the Coordination and Compliance and Section.
But this series is about more than skewed hiring practices. It is about more than broken Obama campaign promises to “restore” attorney hiring integrity at Justice — much more.
The series is also about a political culture that bears false witness without hesitation. The series exposes a culture so unmoored from objective standards that, in Washington, one side can charge a political opponent with behavior which they themselves intend to deploy in exponentially greater degree than the original charge, once they obtain political power — which they did in 2009.
Worse yet, the partisan rot the series has exposed is not confined to only federal government institutions. Journalists won awards repeating the Left’s allegations about Bush administration hiring practices, but now defend the new administration.
More than mere hiring practices, the series is about elastic standards and foggy values in Washington. When, as we shall see today, 87 new DOJ lawyers are unambiguous leftists or partisan Democrats, and precisely zero are anything else, the former accusers have the audacity to argue such views are now part of the job description at DOJ.
Had an employer hired 87 whites and no minorities, this very same Justice Department would push aside that pre-textual curtain to search out a violation of federal law. When a government agency is populated, stem to stern, with people who obtained power, in some small part, by charging the prior administration with behavior they themselves would eventually adopt, Americans of every political stripe should care. When media institutions, not content to savor past prizes for attacking the prior administration, actually enlist as advance pickets for the new administration on the same issues, Americans should worry.
This series is about far more than partisan and ideological hiring practices at Obama’s Justice Department. It is about a system that rewards falsehood, hypocrisy, and duplicity.
Eleven new career attorneys have been hired into the Housing Section. As described below, their backgrounds all have a common theme.
Eric Halperin: Mr. Halperin was hired as the Division’s new special counsel for fair lending, a position in which he helps supervise the Housing Section. Although this is a leadership position in the front office, it is also a career slot, offering him all the protections of the federal civil service. This means he cannot be cut loose easily in 2013 absent a broad reduction in force. Before joining the Division, he was the director of the Washington office of the Center for Responsible Lending (“CRL”), an advocacy organization funded by labor union SEIU and predatory lending kingpins Herbert and Marion Sandler. The organization coerces lenders to increase their underwriting in poor neighborhoods where borrowers are less likely to be able to pay back mortgages. Last year, Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government media site undertook an exhaustive analysis of the shenanigans that CRL engages in, and discovered that while CRL is heavily focused on redistribution of wealth, it cares little about the financial safety and soundness of the banks it targets. The articles are must-reads.
Prior to his work at CRL, Mr. Halperin interned at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, where he helped promote racial preferences in law enforcement hiring. Incidentally, the Democrat apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. His father was a political appointee (deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury for tax policy) under President Jimmy Carter.
I think you’ve missed the point, and frankly I can’t even read the article it’s so obvious: hiring *any* conservatives is evidence of bias on the part of the hirer. Hiring only far-left liberals shows that the department and the government understands the urgency of the problems being engaged, and shows that those who are doing the hiring are committed to fixing the problems. Conservative=BAD; Liberal=GOOD. That simple. Trust me, if anyone managed to ask Holder or even Obama at a press conference about this, the look on their face would be something along the lines of “What? You find something wrong with this?” and there would be an expression of complete innocence. Since their ideology *demands* conformity, it’s natural that politically incorrect thinkers are to be avoided at all costs. Note that the Boston Globe article you linked to sniffed that some of the attorneys in the Civil Rights section had worked *defending* clients who’d been accused of racial discrimination. Such a client has no legitimate defense, in these people’s eyes; they get an attorney through a technicality in the Constitution, but if the world were fair, they would just be condemned out of hand, for being wealthy and powerful.
There, I’ve ranted enough. This sort of thing makes my blood boil…
Liberals good, Conservatives bad. You are amazingly under-educated and a smoldering pot of emotions. You have to get outside your limited circle of friends, read some history, study the world economies and then – maybe then – you will be able to speak more intelligently about this topic. You speak hubris without factual standing. You think narrow and your view is narrower still.
Please – read something other than your liberal postmates. Watch something other than Michael Moore, Read Thomas Sowell, Charles Krauthammer, Bill Bennett, Irving Crystal for not other purpose than to widen your horizons. Then you may, just might, maybe will see there are greater truths and other opinions.
I do pity those who think the way you think – or don’t think. Open your brain to other ideas – test them against today’s realities. We will be broker than Greece if people who think like you continue to absent yourselves from welcoming other opinions!
This is off thread but whats going on with the DOJ and the second recent armed assualt on Gibson Guitar? This is really weird.
http://www.gibson.com/en-us/Lifestyle/News/gibson-0825-2011/
James its not weird. its just another chapter in this corrupt regime, the most corrupt in the history of the world,
This series is just extraordinary. Thank you PJM for exposing the outrageous and hypocritical conduct of Eric Holder’s Justice Department. You deserve an award for what you are doing. I suspect Holder and his gang thought they could just get away with this stuff without anyone noticing. That certainly has been what has happened in the past, I suppose. But no longer, thanks to PJM.
Quick question, if I may. Can you tell me which candidates to these jobs were rejected, and whether they were rejected because they were conservatives? That would really strengthen our case against Holder.
The Justice Department did not release those resumes in some part because the rejected resumes are protected under Federal law from release. So in other words, the law prevents a review of the rejectees.
On the other hand, the series has already reported about behavior of Loretta King, the former AAG who did in fact reject people, based on sources familiar with actions of the hiring committees, who were supported by members of the hiring committee, but were not liberal enough for King. Pajamas’s has already reported on this aspect of the rot already. Perhaps “Riverstyx” you can take up the charge and pursue this line of action. For now, PJM has reported on the actual resumes of the people NOT hired, not the unsavory rejections of non-liberals.
These are civil service positions and a thorough housecleaning will be in order. The obvious way to do this is to establish a Department of Left Wing Affairs and as part of decentralization of government, move the entire department to Point Barrow, Alaska (sorry, Alaska). The departmental travel budget will be zero.
Actually, the only practical way to remove these people is to abolish their section, divisions, and offices. They would then have the right to seek employment in another DOJ position, but there is no requirement that they be hired. You may recall the old saw about the “Vanguard” missile program: “Why is the Vanguard just like the Civil Service? Because it doesn’t work and you can’t fire it.”
Actually the vast majority of these positions are out of the Plum Book, and are Appointee positions who “serve at the pleasure of the President.” At any point in time, the sitting (or new) President can fire them all, for no reason at all. (unless of course the President is a Conservative, in which case all bets are off)
These are all career attorneys, not political appointees.
I see a thread of corruption stemming from the abject failure of the U.S. education system.
Obama as an example.
He has never had the requirement of performance based employment; Our education system promotes individuals regardless of performance;
The policy of this unique society of misfits, is to stack the deck against all threats to their existence and agenda. This is obvious, but, necessary for their movement to succeed. In other words, require membership in a gang.
This movement/gang has been entrenched for decades, and has finally got the “tools/members” it needs for conquest: Obama, Holder and his thugs, The Democrat Party, many members of Congress and state and local government individuals and organizations, and main stream media propaganda.
They can only gain control from corruption, collusion, and deception, your basic gang activity.
Is it difficult to see that there will be a significant price to pay to correct and eliminate this covert “government within a government”?
They are engaged in a coup d’état, and will succeed without firing one shot.
It is not difficult to confirm that extreme left wing ideologues (Marxists that presently make up around 23% of the American population according to polls) are in all leadership positions of power within America and most of the World. If Conservatives can take back the Congress and Presidency in 2012, the first order should be the immediate dismissal of all of these Marxists similar to Clinton’s dismissal of all of the Justice Dept. Attorneys when he became President.
Weeding out Marxists from government . . . where have I heard that before? Thank you, Joe McCarthy.
And why didn’t the Bush Administration fire Rosenbaum? Because Bush was a RINO and could not stand up to crybaby liberals and the press.
OMG there is a very serious need for retraining a BUNCH of people once we take back our country & government. Unless we could just shoot them…?
No, you may not.
What in the world happened to the instruction above that physical threats will not be tolerated? You are advocating for the assassination of government employees you don’t like based on a one-sided description of their background. I cannot believe this. And you claim the high moral ground here?
“Threats are treated seriously and reported to law enforcement” — what a bunch of hogwash. This specific threat to shoot DOJ employees — which would never be tolerated if it came from a “leftist” — will never be reported to law enforcement, much less taken seriously. Indeed, unnamed anonymous “DOJ sources” say that Adams and Von Spakovsky actually wanted to obtain the home addresses and contact numbers of these employees from their resumes, undoubtedly so that they could publish them so that people like TLinkS could harass these employees and their families. And then Adams and Von Spakovsky would deny any involvement, citing their legal disclaimers, or claim that TLinKS was really a left-wing radical trying to make them look bad.
His question, not a threat, was answered negatively in just 123 minutes. Can you explain why you needed 29 hours and 36 minutes to ignore the first reply? Are you displaying paranoid psychosis by reacting to an imaginary deserved threat while ignoring the inciting to riot sewage being spewed on televised caucus coverage or just waiting for copy from a community leader?
TLinks you have the best idea of all. just shoot them,
Obama shakes up gun agency over botched Mexico sting
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/30/us-usa-mexico-atf-idUSTRE77T3NT20110830
“Shakes up” being defined as “Promoting those responsible, and punishing those whistleblowers who told the truth”
It is my understanding every administration puts “their” people in, and I believe that Bush did not follow that policy.
There are a large number of governmental agencies which are run by presidential appointees. These appointees must be approved of by congress. What happens when the Congress and the President are all on the same party line is that the vast bureaucratic ship of state turns towards a direction that looks a lot like a centralization of power and a primary dominion. These are things which the founders of America sought to avoid.
http://msmignoresit.blogspot.com/2011/09/appointed-bureaucracy.html