WarSclerotic

Memo to Jeff Sessions: It’s Time to Clean House,  Power Line, John Hinderaker, March 11, 2017

(Please see also, Fire Me: U.S. Attorney In Manhattan Refuses To Resign — “The demand to be fired is astonishingly unprofessional and frankly juvenile for a high-ranking prosecutor.”  Is there any federal agency or department that doesn’t need a thorough house cleaning? How about the State Department? — DM)

President Trump won the election with a promise to drain the Washington swamp. No swamp is more in need of draining than the Department of Justice, horribly corrupted by eight years of misrule. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has his work cut out for him. Bureaucrats and lawyers at DOJ will fight him every step of the way as he tries to reform the department.

The press will fight him, too–especially when it comes to efforts to restore professionalism to the Civil Rights Division. That division is now a cesspool of bias and incompetence, but reporters will imply that every effort Sessions makes to reform it is “racist.”

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Of all the Obama administration scandals, what Barack Obama, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch did to the Department of Justice is one of the worst. Two manifestations of the depths to which DOJ has fallen emerged today. First, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, the highly partisan Democrat who selectively prosecuted Dinesh D’Souza for a felony and tried to send him to jail because he contributed too much to a Senate campaign, loudly announced that he refused to resign his position as requested by the Attorney General, his boss. Instead, Bharara insisted that he be fired. This was silly grandstanding, but it got Bharara what he wanted–headlines beneficial to a future political career–and it gave reporters what they wanted–an opportunity to pretend, for one more day, that there is something sinister in the routine replacement of political appointees.

Bharara typifies the highly partisan nature of Barack Obama’s Department of Justice, but his publicity stunt was mostly just annoying. Far more serious is the deep corruption that Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch introduced into DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. Via InstaPundit, Chris Adams reports on yet another case in which federal judges have blasted unethical or illegal conduct on the part of Civil Rights Division lawyers. See the original for links:

Here we go again. Another federal judge has scalded the unprofessional conduct of Justice Department lawyers inside the Civil Rights Division. The first time it was perjury. After that, it was unethical conduct in a trial against New Orleans police officers. Now it’s unprofessional behavior and bigotry toward the South in a federal court trial challenging Texas legislative districts.

In the course of a dissenting opinion on the Texas redistricting case about which you likely have seen headlines, Fifth Circuit Judge Jerry Smith praised the professionalism of the lawyers for both the plaintiffs and the State of Texas. Then he got to the lawyers for the U.S., which intervened in the case. They came from Loretta Lynch’s Civil Rights Division:

And then there is the United States, appearing through attorneys from the Department of Justice. I have no criticism of their knowledge of the law, and their zeal is, to say the least, more than adequate. But they entered these proceedings with arrogance and condescension. One of the Department’s lawyers even exhibited her contempt for Texas and its representatives and her disdain for these proceedings by regularly rolling her eyes at State witnesses’ answers that she did not like, and she amused herself by chewing gum while court was in session.

It was obvious, from the start, that the DoJ attorneys viewed state officials and the legislative majority and their staffs as a bunch of backwoods hayseed bigots who bemoan the abolition of the poll tax and pine for the days of literacy tests and lynchings. And the DoJ lawyers saw themselves as an expeditionary landing party arriving here, just in time, to rescue the state from oppression, obviously presuming that plaintiffs’ counsel were not up to the task. The Department of Justice moreover views Texas redistricting litigation as the potential grand prize and lusts for the day when it can reimpose preclearance via Section 3(c).

Of course, these are just personal impressions based on demeanor and attitude. More objectively verifiable are the witch hunts and fishing expeditions that the DoJ conducted in pursuit of its goals. I give two examples.
First is the DoJ’s vicious attack on Clare Dyer, a dedicated career employee of the Texas Legislative Council who has served both Democratic and Republican legislatures. …

Another example of a Department of Justice witch hunt, in its frustrated attempt to find evidence of intentional discrimination to support an ultimate claim for Section 3(c) opt-in relief, was its unsuccessful fishing expedition to uncover a smoking gun regarding what occurred on Monday and early Tuesday, June 13 and 14, 2011. …

The DoJ was determined to uncover racially-tinged communications (perhaps shopping for firehoses on the Internet?) to prove that the ultimate maps were based on “race for its own sake.” Because it was inadequately prepared, the DoJ called witness after witness, and presented document after document, to try to confect a paper trail from which the court could infer bigotry.
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The Department of Justice has overplayed its hand and, in the process, has lost credibility. The wound is self-inflicted. The grand theory on which its intervention was mainly based—that invidious racial motives infect and predominate in the drawing of the 2011 district lines—has crashed and burned.

Judge Smith is one of a growing list of federal judges who have blown the whistle on Barack Obama’s Department of Justice. Adams explains what happened:

An ideological hiring campaign took place during the Obama years where Every Single One of the lawyers hired into the Civil Rights Division was a committed leftist. When the DOJ Inspector General recommended that hiring criteria be changed to eliminate this perceived bias, then Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez rejected the recommendation.

That’s the same Tom Perez who is now Chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

President Trump won the election with a promise to drain the Washington swamp. No swamp is more in need of draining than the Department of Justice, horribly corrupted by eight years of misrule. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has his work cut out for him. Bureaucrats and lawyers at DOJ will fight him every step of the way as he tries to reform the department.

The press will fight him, too–especially when it comes to efforts to restore professionalism to the Civil Rights Division. That division is now a cesspool of bias and incompetence, but reporters will imply that every effort Sessions makes to reform it is “racist.”

Sessions faces a daunting task, but he is the right man for the job. Conservatives need to be prepared to support him, aggressively, as he begins to clean the Augean stables of the Department of Justice.