Meet the Dishonest Radical Academic Eric Holder Tapped to Oversee Federal Election Law

Her name is Pam Karlan.  She has described herself as a “snarky, bisexual, Jewish woman.”  She is a radical progressive.  She is currently a law professor at Stanford, and a dishonest one at that.  She will be joining Eric Holder’s Justice Department to oversee the enforcement of federal election laws during the 2014 midterm elections.

PJ Media readers already know Pam Karlan as the professor who published dishonest scholarship about the Bush Justice Department’s voting rights enforcement.  From PJ Media’s “The Dangerous Dishonesty of Possible Supreme Court Nominee Pam Karlan“:

Karlan’s dishonesty goes beyond womyn’s issues, and extends to the election system. She falsely attacked the Bush administration’s Justice Department for not protecting racial minorities. This is a favorite and well-worn tactic; it’s what old segregationists like Coley Blease and Woodrow Wilson used to do — stoke racial division by lying about opponents.  Unfortunately, Karlan’s lies were published with an air of respectability in the Duke Journal of Law and Public Policy (4 Duke J. Const. L. & Pub. Pol’y 17, 2009). She writes:

“For five of the eight years of the Bush Administration, [they] brought no Voting Rights Act cases of its own except for one case protecting white voters.”

This is demonstrably false; any visit to the DOJ website demonstrates this. Karlan says the Voting Section brought no cases to protect minorities under the Voting Rights Act in five of eight years — let’s look at the record.

My article then traces out in detail the lies that Karlan published in a Duke Law scholarly publication.

I contacted the editors of the Duke Journal of Constitutional Law in September 2013 to see if Karlan ever submitted a correction for her false scholarship.  She hadn’t.

The faculty advisor apologized and told me: “We are always concerned when an article published in our journal contains misstatements. . . the Constitutional Law and Public Policy Journal – not to mention Duke itself – does not endorse a disputed factual claim like Professor Karlan’s in the way that the [Washington] Times would endorse the claims in an investigative piece published in its newspaper.”

Ed Whelan over at National Review also has this piece on Karlan’s dishonesty in another venue.

Apparently Karlan’s record of dishonesty wasn’t enough to deter Eric Holder.  After all, dishonesty is all the rage in his Justice Department.  Just this month, DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz sent Holder a memo, covered here at PJ Media, cautioning Holder about the perception that various DOJ officials have a troubled relationship with the truth.  Some have committed perjury and are still employed at DOJ.

Horowitz also warned Holder about the perception that the Justice Department is enforcing election laws in a way that is perceived as partisan.

With Karlan, Holder gets a two-fer: dishonesty and partisanship.

That seems to be what leftist legal analysts like Jeffrey Toobin like so much about Karlan moving to DOJ.  Toobin doesn’t mention her history of false scholarship.  Her hackish friends in academia never mention it either, ever.

Instead, to Toobin, this radical fibber is a “sharp progressive.”  None of Karlan’s defenders dare mention her false scholarship.  Dishonesty by “sharp progressives” is always forgiven by not-as-sharp progressives.  Holder naming this dishonest radical to oversee federal election law enforcement demonstrates, once again, that the truth is optional at his Justice Department.