Attorney General Holder got off the hotseat after close to four hours in front of Chairman Frank Wolf. Take aways:
1. The New Black Panther scandal has not abated. Both Congressman John Culberson and Chairman Frank Wolf spent a great deal of time pushing Holder on the dismissal. Holder repeated vintage 2009 denials, disputing the crazy whacky notion that some people don’t want to use the civil rights laws to protect white victims.
2. Wolf revealed something important that is very newsworthy: his office has been getting phone calls from current Department of Justice employees further confirming the substance of the Coates-Adams-Unnamed Washington Post sources set of facts. This had to be bad news for the Attorney General, that current employees at DOJ are now in telephonic communications with Congressman Wolf. Bad news indeed, because it revealed Holder is either out of touch with what is happening, or he is deliberately concealing it.
3. It may be clear now what Holder is hiding from Wolf. He doesn’t want to provide the work product/memos/emails that were produced by the political ranks at DOJ about the black panther case. Why? One moment in the hearing was revealing. After Rep. Culberson read the affidavit of Bartle Bull to Holder, Holder was visibly agitated. He was dismissive of the affidavit’s conclusion that the voter intimidation, as recounted by Bull, was worse than what Bull had personally seen in Mississippi when Bull was there in the late 1960’s. Holder spoke of the civil rights law protecting “my people,” as he put his palms on his chest. It was a revealing and familiar agitation, the same sort of agitation people encounter inside the Civil Rights Division anytime they want to enforce the law equally. One can reasonably infer that the emails and documents among the Obama appointees would reveal similar agitation with equal enforcement of the law. If so, it might explain why they are fighting so hard to conceal them from Congress.
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