The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin Is Still Wrong About the New Black Panther Party
Titled “Friends in High Places,” Rubin’s June 2010 expose in the Weekly Standard alleged that the “Obama Justice Department went to bat for the New Black Panther party—and then covered it up.” Rubin’s reporting on the New Black Panther voter intimidation case has now been eviscerated by not one but two internal investigations of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, though Rubin has gone out of her way to avoid recognizing this.
Rubin’s claim rested on the fact that, shortly after Obama took office, interim leaders of the civil rights division dropped some of the charges in a voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party. The idea that the first black president of the United States and his black attorney general were going out of their way to protect an anti-white black fringe group fulfilled two right-wing fantasies—Obama as closet radical and his administration as an elaborate scheme of racial revenge against whites. The head of the civil rights division under Bush had broken civil service laws by seeking to purge liberals from the division and then lying to Congress about it, and, to conservatives like Rubin, the New Black Panther case was proof that the Obama Justice Department was no less politicized.
The problem, however, is that right-wing narrative is bogus. In 2011, the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) found “no evidence that the decision to dismiss the case against three of the four defendants was predicated on political considerations.” The interim heads of the civil rights division had dropped some of the charges against the NBPP not because they’d been pushed to by the AG or the White House, but rather because they had discovered the conservative-leaning attorneys who filed the case had left out key—and possibly exculpatory—information. The OPR report also found, contrary to Rubin’s reporting and to right-wing allegations, that political higher-ups at the Justice Department had sought to prevent the New Black Panther Party case from being dismissed outright.
A second report on the topic, from the Justice Department Inspector General’s office, was released Tuesday. Like the OPR report before it, the IG report found that the decision to narrow the case was “based on a good faith assessment of the law and facts of the case.” Perhaps more importantly, the IG report found no evidence that the division “improperly favored or disfavored any particular group of voters.”
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