(Exclusive) Internal DOJ Documents Argued for SC Voter ID Approval … but Obama Appointees Overruled
PJ Media has learned that a team of career lawyers, expert analysts, and supervisors in the Justice Department Voting Section recommended that South Carolina’s photo voter identification law be precleared under the Voting Rights Act as non-discriminatory. Presidential appointees in the Justice Department then disregarded the career recommendation and an objection followed, blocking South Carolina’s voter ID law.
South Carolina filed suit in federal court, and a trial concluded a few weeks ago. The parties are briefing the case and a decision is expected shortly. (See “DOJ Lawyers Waste Your Money Over Fonts” at PJ Media.)
This information directly contradicts a central theme of Attorney General Eric Holder’s civil rights enforcement — that career civil servants have been placed back in charge of Voting Rights Act enforcement. It also raises questions about political interference during an election year that has resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs from a federal court lawsuit to defend the decision by political appointees to overrule the career recommendation. Had voter ID been precleared, South Carolina would not have needed to sue Eric Holder for approval in court.
Democrats have pushed the narrative that Bush political appointees overruled the recommendation of career lawyers inside the Voting Section and precleared Georgia voter ID in 2005. This story is false because the career civil servant in charge of the Voting Section recommended that Georgia voter ID should be precleared, and the political appointees followed his recommendation.
That didn’t stop Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) from saying “the Washington Post ran two front page articles detailing how President Bush’s political appointees within the Division were overriding career litigators’ recommendations on crucial voting rights cases. . . .There are disturbing reports that career lawyers have been shut out of the Division’s decision-making process.”
Even then-Senator Barack Obama joined in, attacking now-PJ Media contributor Hans von Spakovsky’s role in approving Georgia voter ID: “Reports indicate that Mr. von Spakovsky joined other senior officials in overruling the recommendations of several career staff lawyers who had reviewed the Georgia voter ID law and determined that it would unduly hinder the ability of black voters to cast their ballots.” The actions of the Bush-era Voting Section became a central campaign theme of candidate Obama, as I document in my book Injustice.
Once upon a time, the opinion of career staff at the Voting Section about a voter ID submission was the lodestar to Leahy and Obama.
The South Carolina voter ID law was reviewed by civil rights analysts, a veteran attorney reviewer, the deputy chief in charge of Section 5 enforcement, and ultimately the section chief. Extensive and detailed memos were prepared by career staff recommending that South Carolina voter ID be precleared. There was a very small difference in voter ID possession between blacks and whites – only a 1.6% difference. South Carolina made photo ID free and allowed anyone with a reasonable impediment in obtaining one to vote anyhow after completing an affidavit. Based on these facts, career staff recommended preclearance.
But according to DOJ staff familiar with subsequent events, Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez and Deputy Assistant Attorney General Matthew Colangelo then overruled the career staff and ordered that the Department of Justice object to South Carolina’s voter ID – precisely repeating the same behavior that Leahy and Obama had falsely accused the Bush Justice Department of conducting.
Tom Perez
This revelation is also damning because it means there is extensive DOJ documentation supporting South Carolina’s lawsuit. DOJ lawyers did not reveal to the three-judge federal panel the internal preclearance recommendation stating that the law did not discriminate. Nor did the Justice Department provide these documents to South Carolina in discovery.
Moreover, the career civil servants who recommended preclearance have significantly more experience in enforcing the Voting Rights Act than does Colangelo, a lawyer that one DOJ employee characterized to me as “seriously lacking” in any Voting Rights Act experience. Assistant Attorney General Perez also lacks firsthand experience litigating Voting Rights Act cases, particularly compared with the DOJ staff that recommended preclearance of South Carolina’s voter ID.
In personal meetings with career Voting Section staff, Perez told them to ask outlandish and inappropriate questions of state officials in Section 5 reviews to discern if state officials enacted voter ID with a racially discriminatory intent. Voting Section staff characterized Perez’s suggestions to me as wholly inappropriate.
Nevertheless, in the voter ID court litigation, other Justice Department lawyers have asked similarly outlandish questions of Texas and South Carolina officials in depositions – such as whether they belong to a country club, what cable news channels they watch, whether they spoke with the Heritage Foundation, and what their views toward “sanctuary cities” are.
This political interference comes on the heels of the Obama re-elect campaign making opposition to voter ID a cornerstone of a base-mobilization strategy. Political appointees at the DOJ ensured that official government action would comport with campaign rhetoric.
Whether news outlets that once expressed outrage at the idea of career Voting Section employees being overruled by political appointees in a voter ID case will be outraged when it actually happens remains to be seen. I somehow don’t expect the Washington Post, USA Today, and the ridiculously biased Greg Gordon at the drain-swirling McClatchy to be consistent. Perhaps they should at least ask DOJ public affairs for their own copy of the documents the career civil servants produced recommending that South Carolina’s voter ID law be approved. That way the federal court can learn the entire story.
Perez (l) attends signing ceremony.
Fascists are in control of the DOJ.
NO they are Racists led by the biggest racist Obama who does not want to lose votes from dead people
Racialists of the HIGHEST magnitude are now in control of the most important law enforcement agency in the U.S. It is as if rapists are in charge of victim rights centers, and adjudicating against rape victims!
It is a travesty of injustice created by a Radical-in-Chief, hell bent on remaking the U.S. into a third world nation.
Not that it makes Americans feel any better, but the AG office in Israel is Arabist/leftist in the extreme, and adjudicates to the detriment of all Jews in Israel. I kid you not. This has been the case since the onset of the ‘Oslo Peace/Death Accords’. Many Jews have died due to their (politically charged/prejudiced)decisions. And, I have the statistics to back up my assertion.
/2012/06/26/is-justice-ideologically-blind-in-israel-or-not-you-decide-commentary-by-adina-kutnicki-4-2/
/2012/07/06/leftist-treachery-good-nationalist-patriotism-bad-thus-justice-in-the-holyland-is-both-predictable-ideological-commentary-by-adina-kutnicki-62/
/2012/07/01/leftist-dogma-the-same-world-over-freedom-loving-people-beware-commentary-by-adina-kutnicki-32-2/
As to the American travesty of injustice, courtesy of the AG’s purview -
/2012/08/01/will-barack-hussein-obamas-lawless-justice-department-under-the-aegis-of-ag-holder-finally-fall-commentary-by-adina-kutnicki/
/2012/08/24/when-radical-politics-trumps-national-security-what-can-go-wrong-everything-addendum-toamericans-hope-to-change-the-occupant-of-the-white-house-an-anti-american-potus-runs-an-un-american-cam/
/2012/08/20/the-thug-in-chief-hell-bent-on-disarming-christian-patriots-ordered-his-racialist-ag-to-turn-up-the-heat-addendum-to-barack-hussein-obamas-brave-new-world-second-amendment-pro-life-su/
/2012/08/20/americans-hope-to-change-the-occupant-of-the-white-house-an-anti-american-potus-runs-an-un-american-campaign-commentary-by-adina-kutnicki/
Leftists will destroy the west, IF not stopped!
Tom Perez was recently revealed as a perjuror . Another fine Obama lackey.
You are performing an invaluable public service with these exposures of the DoJ!
Thanks Clarice. Let’s sit back and watch the writers and critics who in 2006 were in a frenzy to see if their outrage has partisan bias or not. Signs point to yes. One leftist election blog already is already running interference for the government, rather than asking tough questions.
No doubt everything in this article is correct, but with little impact until someone can publish PDFs of the pertinent leaked documents.
Ah ha. Let’s sit back and see if DOJ denies that this happened. Then it gets fun.
has anyone done a FOIA request on these?
would an average citizen have standing for them?
This kind of rank hypocrisy from the Obama/Holder Department of Justice has come to be expected now and, sadly, is not altogether surprising. What is tragic, though, is that it does not get more widely reported due to the highly complicit mainstream media, which is so closely ideologically aligned with the partisan liberals running DOJ. Kudos to Christian and PJ Media for exposing these knd of incidents.
Don’t be the fool who disgraces himself and discredits his own arguments.
What are you talking about?
Mr Adams:
“Politicized Bush Justice department”? Do they mean the one whose members made campaign contributions to Obama over McCain by 2-1 in 2008? That DOJ?
Not to mention the failure to prosecute the Obama campaign for facilitating donation fraud by disabling donor verification on its’ website.
Would any of us in 2008, even those who knew Obama for what he was, imagined the contempt his Administration would show for the rule of law?
No. Even as shaky as Obama’s record was before the election, there’s no way any reasonable person could anticipate the shameless, blatant corruption of this administration. The last four years have been a revelation.
If I’m reading you correctly, the court currently adjudicating this case does not have access to those internal DoJ documents, nor any of this evidence pointing to the blatantly political decision to block SC’s voter ID law. So they’ll make their decision based on incomplete information.
As of right now, you are correct. There is nothing in the court record.
Is there any legal complaint that can be made, either before the decision is made, or after a decision against the state, to charge the DOJ with violating the discovery rules that can reverse the decision in time for the election? Or is the only alternative to appeal the ruling on this new information, which would no doubt happen after the election, which is exactly what Holder is trying to accomplish? Once the election is over, he will care less if he gets overturned.
And has anyone noticed how all these cases are being decided too close to the election to be appealed in time? On one of them reported here recently, the court sat on it for a year, only to rule for the administration last month (IIRC, it had to do with Texas’ redistricting).
Coincidence? Right.
And Christian, do you know if the DOJ is pulling the same trick on the military votes as they did in 2010, granting waivers to all the election boards controlled by Democrats to allow them to send ballots to the troops too late to have them back in time to be counted? This practice is despicable and disgusting, but that’s nothing unusual for this administration.
All of the non-lawyers speculating are making incorrect assumptions. The DOJ’s administrative decision-making process, like it or not, has absolutely zero relevance to the court’s judgment on the matter. The court reviews the law de novo. What the DOJ did during its administrative review of the law is not relevant to the court’s review of the law. The court will review the law entirely independently from the DOJ’s decision. Christian knows this. So when he says, “There is nothing in the court record,” he’s being an artful lawyer. He’s not lying, but he’s just not telling the whole story.
JNM is being an artful lawyer too. (You should at least disclose where you work!) If you read the Texas voter ID opinion, you’ll know that the court indeed spent a good deal of ink on the administrative process. JNM is right, it is supposed to be de novo. But in reality, in Texas at least, the court seemed to be paying close attention to the administrative review process. Of course we all know that federal courts are totally immune to outside influences which were not admitted into evidence, so we can probably assume the court will pay no attention to conclusions in the administrative process by the career professionals that the law should have been precleared.
Somehow I’m thinking that the defenders of the ID statute might want to be tugging on the judges’ sleeves. Were documents of this nature not requested in discovery? If so, would witholding them be…problematic? Why, yes. Yes it would.
A few thoughts. Litigation is not my expertise, but man has studied conflict resolution for centuries. Surely there are rules of conduct in the legal profession, which appears to be violated. Congress, not DoJ makes the law. In 2012, I have serious concerns why the states of the old Confederacy are treated any differently that Chicago in voter requirements based on race. And, from my expertise, engineering, I can say that the power of the government to detect all human behavior is in its infancy. The cost of detectors, transmission, and data processing and storage has plummeted in the last generation. This will continue. Voter ID cards may give way to retina scans. Ergo, should voters be required to bring their eyeballs to a voting location?
As a former manager, I accept that higher officials may over rule their subordinates. In the private sector, this can lead to termination of the subordinate (which should be extremely rare, in my experience due to almost psychotic arrogance<" I am right all others are wrong".) In any court case, during discovery, this intramural divide should be exposed. Was South Carolina dumb? Was the rules of discovery too narrow? Was DoJ crooked (violate the law?) Was the judge asleep, allowing extraneous questioning?
We have a right to competent, honest lawyers in government. (I know several and they are very intelligent, decent people; I can not judge their expertise.) We also have a right to pay for only one legal position from our government. Currently we often pay for both plaintiff and defendant. Thus my solution would be to cut the DoJ budget in half, every year, compounded, until the top echelons got their act together. In the private sector this is common, and effective. When Mr. Perez is terminated, loses his house in foreclosure; it will flavor his legal theories.
Gov. Nikki Haley is not amused.
Calling this bunch of liars and absolute racists and political hacks the “Department of Justice” is just as great a misnomer as calling Obamacare the “Affordable” patient care act.
The Obama administration has a talent for naming things the exact opposite of what they are. —– And there’s the “Most Transparent Government” that’s about as transparent as a black tombstone.
Isnt it about time for the Federal Government to leave the South alone? The Civil War was 150 years ago. Jim Crowe laws are dead and gone. In my travels I have seen more discrimination outside the South than down here.
Democrat self-loathing knows no bounds.
OVERNIGHT TECH: Congress returns as cybersecurity executive order is in the works By Jennifer Martinez and Brendan Sasso – 09/10/12
http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/248593-overnight-tech-congress-returns-as-cybersecurity-executive-order-is-in-the-works
Today we had elections in the Netherlands and though not agreeing
with the outcome each and every eligible citizen needs to show his ID
before being handed a ballot form. Any other way seems a bit ‘undemocratic’!
I totally agree with Rogerola. Unless you can show ID, what is going to stop non-citizens from voting? Surprisingly, even in America, illegals have Driver Licenses and ID Cards…States have the right to stop voter fraud!
This fact about the DOJ internal deliberation suggests that the Section 5 preclearance obligation induces a political agenda by DOJ civil rights lawyers who advance this provision to coerce covered jurisdictions to submit to their will. Hans von Spakovsky authored a legal memorandum titled The Bailout Bait and Switch: DOJ’s Last-Ditch Attempt to Rescue Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. The Section 5 preclearance obligation should be rendered unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in TX v. Holder, Shelby County v. Holder, or FL v. Holder for exceeding congressional authority to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitutional for incongruity and disproportionality, which is forbidden by the City of Boerne v. Flores for congressional enforcement clause authority limits and Mulloch v. Maryland for the necessary and power clause. If Section 5 preclearance exceeds congressionality authority under Section 2 of the Fifteenth Amendment, then it violates the Fifth, Tenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments in addition to Article IV of the Constitution as contended by Shelby County, Alabama. The covered jurisdictions should no longer be obligated to submit proposed electoral regulations to the three-judge district court in Washington, DC or the Department of Justice. The National Black Chamber of Commerce and Project 21 agree that Section 5 preclearance is unconstitutional. Justice Clarence Thomas is correct that the obligatory Section 5 preclearance clause is rendered invalid since intentional discrimination on account of race, color, or membership in a langugage minority does not exist. Former MI Attorney General Mike Cox, Former AL Attorney General Troy King, and Former SC Attorney General Henry McMaster would be appropriate candidates qualified for the position of Attorney General of the United States.
Is the DOJ unaware that there are states which already require photo ID?
That’s great! Every state should be required to provide every eligible CITIZEN a photo ID FREE OF CHARGE!
Christian,
Thanks again. You rock! But a serious question…
If this was withheld during the lawsuit and from discovery, isn’t that prosecutorial misconduct/malfeasance subject to court sanctions?
See the posting by JNM. What is not sought need not be turned over.
I intended to reply to something offensive, but my “Don’t be a fool…” comment isn’t now attached to anything, and I don’t see any particularly offensive comments. It seems the comment I replied to was deleted.