THE NEW BLACK PANTHER PARTY SCANDAL
On Election Day, 2008,*two*members*of the*New Black Panther Party—Jerry Jackson and King Samir Shabazz—intimidated white voters with racial slurs and*threats of violence at a Philadelphia polling place. Bartle Bull, a former civil rights attorney and campaign aide to the late Robert F. Kennedy, witnessed the Panthers' actions and*characterizedthem as "the most blatant form of voter intimidation" he had ever seen. Because Section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibits intimidation, coercion and threats to voters or those aiding voters, the Bush Justice Department*filed*a civil-rights lawsuit not only against the aforementioned Jackson and Shabazz, but also against the New Black Panther Party and its national chairman*Malik Zulu Shabazz.In 2009, the Obama administration inherited that lawsuit from the outgoing Bush administration. When the defendants failed to answer the suit, a federal court in Philadelphia entered a default judgment against them. But the Holder Justice Department*responded*by suddenly dropping the charges against the Panthers and two of the defendants; the third defendant was merely barred from displaying a weapon near a Philadelphia polling place for the next three years.In June 2010, J. Christian Adams, a five-year Department of Justice (DOJ) veteran,*resigned*to protest the “corrupt nature” of DOJ's dismissal of the case against the Panthers. “I mean we were told, 'Drop the charges against the New Black Panther Party,'” he*told*Fox News.*In July 2010, Adams gave damning public testimony about how the DOJ believed that “civil rights law should not be enforced in a race-neutral manner, and should never be enforced against blacks or other national minorities.”Christopher Coates—Voting Section Chief for the DOJ—testified to the*U.S. Commission on Civil Rights*and corroborated Adams' assertion that the Department had routinely ignored civil rights cases involving white victims. For more than a year previously, Holder's DOJ had*denied the Commission's requests*to hear Coates' testimony and had instructed Coates not to testify. But in September 2010, Coates finally went public with his story and asked for protection under whistleblower laws. For the full text of Coates' testimony,*click here.In testimony he gave on March 1, 2011, Holder assured the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies that politics had played no role whatsoever in DOJ's handling of the New Black Panther Party case: “The decisions made in the New Black Panther Party case were made by career attorneys in the department,”said*the Attorney General. But documents obtained in 2012 by Judicial Watch, pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit,*revealed*that top political appointees at DOJ were intimately involved in the decision to drop the voter intimidation lawsuit against the New Black Panther Party. DOJ had initially refused to turn over the documents, contending that they didn’t show “any political interference whatsoever.” But Judge Reggie B. Walton in Washington, DC District Court disagreed. Allowing the release of the documents on July 23, 2012, he*declared*that they “reveal that political appointees within DOJ were conferring about the status and resolution of the New Black Panther Party case in the days preceding the DOJ’s dismissal of claims in that case[.]”
