“Anonymous” is back posting on how elements of the Justice Department have been instrumentalized to aid Senator Obama’s campaign. I posted on this when he made his prior post on this issue, and it didn’t garner much attention:
When I reported on September 19 that partisan career lawyers in the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice were planning on criminally targeting Republican political activists and candidates, this was treated with disbelief by some. In fact, Rick Hasen, a liberal law professor at Loyola who runs the popular Election Law Blog , a website concentrating on voting and election developments, expressed his skepticism “of such anonymous claims.â€Â
Well, those claims have proven all too real to former Republican congressional candidate Tan Nguyen, who ran for office in the 47th Congressional District of California in 2006 against incumbent Loretta Sanchez. On October 1, the Civil Rights Division announced the indictment of Nguyen for obstruction of justice for supposedly making “misleading statements to investigators†regarding a letter that was sent to Latino voters during the election. This investigation and indictment represents a particularly egregious example of the government persecuting someone for engaging in perfectly legal behavior. Essentially, Nguyen is being prosecuted for having informed voters of the truth, although it is a truth disliked by the career lawyers in the Civil Rights Division.
The letter (in Spanish) that is the basis of the indictment was apparently sent out to Latino voters by the California Coalition for Immigration Reform (CCIR). It told voters that if they were a citizen of the United States, they should “participate in the democratic process of voting.â€Â However, the letter warned voters that if they were residing in this country illegally, “voting in a federal election is a crime that could result in jail time†and for which they could be deported. The letter made clear that voting in any election “if you are not a citizen of the United States†would be “useless and dangerous.â€Â
It is important to realize that everything said in this letter is absolutely true. There are a number of federal statutes that make it illegal for someone to falsely claim citizenship when registering to vote or to vote in federal elections if not a citizen. But informing voters that they have to be citizens to vote is highly offensive to the political left, especially organizations like La Raza or MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and their allies in the career ranks of the Civil Rights Division.
As described in the September 19 article, lawyers in the Civil Rights Division said at an internal DOJ training session this summer that they considered sending mailers informing individuals of the citizenship requirement for voting an example of voter “suppression.â€Â Although they acknowledged there was no federal criminal statute making this illegal, they proposed using federal grand juries to go after anyone who engaged in this type of behavior. They have now fulfilled that promise.
Rick Hasen I’ve mentioned here recently with reference to his claims that the GOP are trying to use ACORN’s systematic vote fraud as an excuse for election challenges. In fact, I emailed Patterico for any information he might have about the guy, but Pat hasn’t written back.
In short, in the name of voter suppression, they’ve made it illegal for anyone to actually evoke the law, just as campus speech codes prohibit people from saying things that someone else might somehow find uncomfortable.  If that isn’t Orwellian, I don’t know what can possibly reach the bar.
Fraud, on the other hand, is protected speech.
Comment by Alec Leamas on 10/16 @ 2:51 pm #
Methinks the most Orwellian part of this whole business is that the Justice Department doesn’t seem at all concerned with, you know, illegal non-citizens voting in the first place.
Comment by Rob Crawford on 10/16 @ 3:51 pm #
Why would career government employees, who are members of a public-sector union, want to decrease the power of their sugar daddies?
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[…] assume he did mislead investigators about his involvement. Why were partisan investigators at the DoJ investigating him and asking him questions at all? A staff person with the Toledo Division of Building Inspection told On Call this afternoon that her […]
Comment by WT on 10/17 @ 12:06 am #
Damn, now the citizens are going to be harassed by lawyers who didn’t have the grades to get jobs in the private sector.
Comment by Curmudgeon on 10/17 @ 3:50 pm #
Ugh, these cheating Commiecrats.
Comment by Marty on 10/17 @ 6:21 pm #
Typically, the Bush Admin neither knows nor cares what its employees are doing.
No reason to believe McCain will be any better on issues like this.
Bad times a’coming.
Pingback by New York Times Shills for Vote Fraud [UPDATED] on 10/17 @ 6:25 pm #
[…] on the other hand, they’ve got no interest at all at the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice being…, because apparently that kind of intimidation opens one up to being visited by men in dark suits. […]
Comment by Lee on 10/17 @ 10:31 pm #
At what point is the political process in America so compromised that it ceases to have any validity? When the power of the government is no longer derived from the consent of the governed, the result is tyranny. Why should I, or anyone else, submit to the will of a state that has no legitimate authority?
Back in 2000 when the lefties were going into hysterics over the non-existent fraud they claimed gave Bush in the white house, I thought they were simply engaging in theatrics as usual. But as time has gone by I’ve come to realize that what I thought was calculated manipulation was in fact what psychologists call projection.
What the left sees when it looks to the center is a reflection. When they scream about racism it is because they are racist. When they scream about oppression it is because they are oppressors. When they scream about voting fraud, it is because they wrote the book on it.
They learned long ago that the American people would never knowingly vote them into power. Therefore they engage in various deceptions in order to trick voters. The first of these is to obscure their agenda, or to describe it in the most oblique terms. Obama is a poster-child for this tactic. This deception is able to fool some of the people all of the time. But by itself it is not sufficient to give them a ruling majority, no matter how hard they spin or how complicit the media is in their deception.
Because they cannot sell the American people on their ideology and the policies that derive from it, they have sought to, as Bertrand Russell put it, “elect a new people.” Illegal aliens, dead people,, fraudulent registrations, multiple registrations in different districts, all serve to undermine the will of the American people and replace it with the will of leftist operatives and the alien invaders who are drinking from their trough. At one point the left might have been subtle in going about this, but in recent years they have become far more blatant. I don’t know whether this smacks of confidence or desperation.
What I do know is that if they are allowed to get away with this, the US will cease to exist. The left will have succeeded in doing what no foreign power has ever come close to accomplishing: the destruction of our republic. These people are traitors and enemies of the worst kind, and should be treated accordingly.
Any state agency that seeks to persecute a citizen for informing the public of the law as it is written is an instrument of evil and tyranny. There really isn’t any other way to put it.
Comment by Travis Monitor on 10/18 @ 3:40 am #
Orwell was tragedy, but this is farce.
“Typically, the Bush Admin neither knows nor cares what its employees are doing.”
This is, as usual unfair to the Bush administration. When the Bush administration dared have the balls to look at the US attorneys and decided on firing those who were sitting on the job when it came to Democrat voter fraud cases, they were charged by the Democrats with ‘political interference’, and a multi-million investigation charged with horror that people the President has the right to fire were fired at the instigation of people who worked for the President. Oh the horror! How dare there be a smidgeon of conservative influence on the DoJ, just because numbskull hicks voted for Bush doesnt mean they should alctually have a *say* about who really runs things, right?
So the media did a number on Gonzalez and the whole crew, the Democrat beat the horse to death, and it have been ‘decided’ by the powers that be in Washington that
no conservatives are allowed in the DoJ. Now that the actual Bush administration influence over the bureaucracy has been neutered, apparently Bush’s testicles are held in a lockbox in Rep Waxman’s office, the liberal careerist DoJ thugs can move against the citizenry unhindered.
Just a preview of an Obama DoJ like the Reno DoJ - raids on christian sect compounds and deportation of Cuban refugee 6-year-olds living with relatives in Miami. maybe a sweep of dangerous gun owners.
“Any state agency that seeks to persecute a citizen for informing the public of the law as it is written is an instrument of evil and tyranny. There really isn’t any other way to put it.”
That’s a good way to say it. SIC SEMPER TYRRANIS! Fight the power, dudes!
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