Earlier this week, BigGovernment revealed another chapter in the scandal ridden saga of Georgia Congressman Sanford Bishop. Representative Bishop has represented South Georgia’s second district for nearly 20 years. He’s an under the radar member of the Congressional Black Caucus, seemingly without the temperament or ambition to achieve the high visibility of a John Conyers or Maxine Waters. His relative anonymity has allowed him to avoid much close scrutiny but because of his active role in helping to cover up the Pigford scandal, we are keeping a close eye on him and his race for reelection in 2012. For those of you not familiar with Congressman Bishop, here’s a quick recap of some of his career low lights.

Despite the relative lack of progress and growth he’s delivered to his district, Congressman Bishop is an expert in delivering earmarks. In fiscal year 2010, he was ranked 42nd out of 435 Congressmen.  In 2008 he was ranked 28^th. He generally delivers a combination of military and agricultural pork that has given him the behind-the-scenes support of some in the political class beyond his African-American voter base.

He’s had a couple of scandals that have involved his wife Vivian Creighton-Bishop diverting money to friends and family. Vivian Bishop is the Municipal Court clerk in Columbus, Georgia. In March 2009, Frank Castiglione reported;

During an internal audit of the Junior Marshal Program at the Marshal’s Office in Columbus, it was discovered that two part-time employees had been paid over $7,000 each over a period of some months.

The employees lived in Lithonia, Georgia, well over 100 miles away from the Columbus office. In light of rumors regarding the part-timers, Marshal Greg Countryman called in the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) to launch an inquiry.

The GBI found that the part-time employees, Aayesha Reese and Stephen Reese, are the daughter and son-in-law of Municipal Court Clerk Vivian Creighton Bishop. With more digging, it was discovered that the paychecks, sent via direct deposit, had actually been diverted to Creighton-Bishop’s bank account.

This would seem to be the stuff that would end a political career, but Mr. and Mrs. Bishop appear to possess considerable skill at keeping much of the local press under their sway.

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To understand the truly obscene nature of the fraud perpetrated by Obama’s Justice Department on the state of South Carolina, you need to see the statistical trap that they’ve laid out. The DOJ is well aware that the numbers upon which they are basing their decision about South Carolina’s voter ID laws are incorrect. By establishing the “Holder Math” standard that I described in part one of this series, when the correct numbers are acknowledged, the DOJ will be able to claim (dishonestly) that the situation is actually even worse than before.

AP Photo

The Obama DOJ Ignores South Carolina’s Correct Data

First, let’s look at the data that the DOJ knows is incorrect.

The figures that the DOJ using were based on an initial report from South Carolina that 239,000 people were a) registered voters and b) didn’t have DMV-issued ID. The breakdown is that 10% of black registered voters and 8.4% of white voters don’t have that type of ID. Even at a cursory glance, those numbers seem high. That’s the ID you use to open a bank account, buy a beer, board an airplane or 100 other things.

Apparently South Carolina thought that the numbers seemed off, too. According to this eye-opening interview with South Carolina’s Attorney General Wilson, the state did an audit and found that that group of 239,000 included 37,000 people who were deceased, 96,000 who had moved to other states, and other discrepancies. (more…)

Eric Holder has been on a racialist bender the last few weeks.  Last week, he said his skin color is responsible for the fury of criticism over his Justice Department allowing thousands of guns to flood Mexico.  Friday, he blocked South Carolina from implementing a voter ID law under the Voting Rights Act saying it was racially discriminatory.

Sixteen states, including South Carolina, must submit all election law changes to the United States Justice Department for approval.  States also have the option of bypassing DOJ and going straight to court for approval, an option they should readily choose.  This law, unlike so many federal laws, actually has a legitimate Constitutional basis – the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which bars racial discrimination in voting.  Passed in 1965, it was designed to prevent states from drifting toward renewed discrimination.  It is now being challenged as unconstitutionally outdated by Arizona and Shelby County (AL) in federal court.

Eric Holder’s Voting Section, where I used to work, interposed an objection late in the day today.  These Christmas Eve gifts are becoming tiresome.  In 2009 it was Obamacare.  Today, it was blocking Voter ID.

In the objection letter, DOJ said that South Carolina did not meet its burden to prove that photo identification laws did not have any discriminatory effect.  Notice the word “any,” more on that later.  The data show, according to DOJ, that 1.6 percentage points more voting blacks don’t have a driver’s license than whites.  Roughly 10 percent of blacks registered to vote don’t have a photo ID, and 8.6 percent of whites don’t.  That represents a “discriminatory effect” under the statute.

There are several problems with the objection.  But some law first:

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Today, PJ Media breaks a bombshell that an employee in the federal Department of Justice (DOJ) Voting Section, where I used to work, has admitted to lying three times under penalty of perjury during a DOJ Inspector General’s investigation.

The revelation may well affect congressional redistricting, because of the key role Voting Section staff play in approving state legislative plans, including the staffer in question.

For example, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott might use these allegations of perjury involving Texas redistricting to fight the ongoing redistricting litigation. Impeachment of a different sort–that of a testifying witness–is his for the taking.

The wide ranging DOJ Inspector General investigation is examining the harassment of conservative leaning DOJ employees who were willing to enforce civil rights laws equally against all wrongdoers, such as the New Black Panther party.  You read that right–the harassment of employees who were willing to enforce the law against the New Black Panther Party.

The particulars of the DOJ perjury, as reported by Has von Spakovsky at PJ Media, are even more troubling. They involve the leaking of internal memos about Congressional redistricting to the Washington Post by leftist DOJ staff who hoped to hurt the Bush administration. The current Texas redistricting plans are being litigated in both San Antonio and Washington D.C. courtrooms.

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The family of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry wants answers, and they are growing impatient. Terry is apparently the sole American among countless victims of Mexico’s violent, ongoing drug wars. Drug gangs in that country received a major boost in firepower by way of a disastrously flawed and arguably illegal U.S. program that authorities now say should never have been implemented.

The now infamous “Operation Fast and Furious” was concocted and carried out by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, a division under the direct control of Eric Holder’s Department of Justice. The operation’s stated purpose was to allow illegal buyers to purchase firearms with the hope of tracking the weapons to Mexican narco-terrorist drug gangs. Agents say they lost track of hundreds of guns, some of which also surfaced later at horrific crime scenes in Mexico and at the scene of the murder of Brian Terry in Arizona. Recently uncovered e-mails now show a more nefarious motivation behind the operation: The Obama Administration’s desire to further clamp down on Second Amendment rights via a new law requiring strict reporting of the sale of long guns.

The buck stops at Holder’s desk. That’s what more than fifty lawmakers and four Presidential candidates insist as they call for the Attorney General to resign. While some insist that the operation was ”botched”, ATF whistle blowers say it basically went as planned: The only thing that went wrong is that it was exposed. While Holder has testified, under oath, that neither he nor his Justice Department colleagues were aware of the “gun-walking” tactics involved in Fast and Furious, many lawmakers find it hard to believe that the the nation’s top law enforcement official would be out of the loop in such a potentially deadly trans-national operation.

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I was once told by someone involved in a federal investigation not to let any identified federal law enforcement officer into your house without: a) a warrant and b) your lawyer present. At the time, this notion seemed a bit less than cooperative. Shouldn’t law-abiding citizens be able to live their lives free from the fear that our own government would underhandedly manipulate our rights in their pursuit of an investigation? After all, the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution enumerates a limitation on the federal government, one that prevents “unreasonable search and seizure.” Today, this enumerated protection is being ignored by – of all institutions – the U.S. Justice Department, under the darkened shadow of Attorney General Eric Holder.

A recent column by The Atlantic’s Emily Berman, a Furman Fellow and Brennan Center Fellow at NYU School of Law, informs the citizenry:

It just got easier for the federal government to collect information about innocent Americans — and those Americans have had surprisingly little say in the matter.

On October 15, the FBI reportedly implemented new rules that relax restrictions on, and oversight of, the FBI’s intelligence collection activities. Although they are not available to the public, reports indicate the changes permit FBI agents to search an individual’s trash with the goal of finding material that might pressure him into becoming a government informant, grant agents the authority to search commercial or law enforcement databases without first opening an investigation, and reduce the type of investigations subjected to heightened oversight because of their relationship to protected First Amendment expression, association, or religious practice.

This is the third modification of the FBI’s intelligence collection authorities since September 11, 2001. First in 2002, again in 2008, and finally, just last week, amendments were adopted with scant public attention and with minimal — if any — congressional involvement. Groups and communities concerned about the new rules’ impact on civil liberties, particularly the risk of religious or ethnic profiling, also had no constructive input.

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From Fox News:

Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, sent a subpoena Wednesday to Attorney General Eric Holder as part of his investigation into the gun trafficking operation known as “Fast and Furious.”

“Top Justice Department officials, including Attorney General Holder, know more about Operation Fast and Furious than they have publicly acknowledged,” the California Republican said in a statement. “The documents this subpoena demands will provide answers to questions that Justice officials have tried to avoid since this investigation began eight months ago. It’s time we know the whole truth.” (more…)

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, has sent the following letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, seeking the appointment of an independent examiner to probe the Solyndra scandal:

Rep. Smith to Atty. Gen. Holder

Attorney General Eric Holder has a peculiar tendency to set loose militant black panthers.  Everyone is already familiar with the dismissal of the voter intimidation case I brought as a Justice Department attorney.  There, the DOJ dropped claims against Malik Zulu Shabazz, national head of the New Black Panther Party, and Jerry Jackson, a Philadelphia panther and Democratic Party official.  But Jackson and Shabazz aren’t the only militants Holder has set loose.

Marilyn Buck was a Marxist terrorist who participated in conspiracies that led to the deaths of multiple police officers.  Buck helped the Black Liberation Army, a violent Marxist offshoot of the black panthers, acquire weapons and ammunition.  She participated in the robbery of an armored car where a guard was murdered.  If that wasn’t enough, Buck was also charged with the bombing of the U.S. Senate, Ft. McNair, the Washington Navy Yard Officer’s Club and a New York City federal building.  In many states, Buck’s behavior might have led to a midnight reservation in the electric chair.

Yet Holder’s DOJ unlocked Buck’s jail cell and set her free last summer. Justice concluded that Buck “expressed a dramatic change from her previous political philosophy.”  Releasing Buck reflects an alien attitude that has caused the Obama years to be characterized by an ideological disconnect with most Americans.

The letters which persuaded the Justice Department were stuffed with crackpot arguments and have yet to be reported over the last year.  They are full of lawlessness and arguments from extreme fringes of political thought.  What’s worse, the letters are on the letterhead of government and private institutions, institutions most Americans incorrectly think are worthy of respect.

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Rev. Wallace Charles Smith, pastor of the historic Shiloh Baptist Church in Washington D.C., recently made national headlines after President Barack Obama and the first lady chose to attend Easter Service at his church. Then a video surfaced showing Rev. Smith (like Jeremiah Wright Jr.) making some inflammatory and derogatory comments about whites during a speech in January 2010.

In the speech, Smith said that even with a black president, America is not over its race problems. He said that since “Jim Crow” can now “get a regular news program on Fox” and Rush Limbaugh can make the same “statements that were once the purview of Robert Shelton and members of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizen’s Council.”

Now a new tape of Obama’s Easter Sunday Pastor has surfaced. Smith was interviewed on my show  (The Jesse Lee Peterson Radio Show) on January 17, 2011, where he made more controversial remarks about race and defended his friend Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr.

During the interview, I questioned Rev. Smith about race relations and Obama’s choice to worship in Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr.’s church for 20 years. I also got Smith to go on record about his views regarding Attorney General Eric Holder’s handling of the Philadelphia New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case.

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The New Black Panther fix came in just as we suspected.  Yesterday the Department of Justice completed its 19 month internal investigation into whether Steve Rosenbaum and Loretta King, the political appointee attorneys who ordered the dismissal of the voter intimidation case, acted unethically.  No surprise, DOJ found that DOJ acted ethically.  Otherwise, you wouldn’t have heard about the conclusion.  The Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) report was the narrower of the two DOJ investigations of the matter, and Congress will be sure to conduct a far broader, and more competent, inquiry.

Of course the American people will be the judge of the black panther dismissal, not the DOJ OPR.  Anyone with eyes can see what happened.  Americans have a right to vote without armed racist jackbooted thugs lurking at the entrance to their polling place with a weapon.  That offends nearly every American, but not the lawyers at Eric Holder’s Justice Department.

The fix was in early in the DOJ investigation.  Holder appointed Robin Ashton, the head of OPR, last Christmas Eve.  She worked for Senator Patrick Leahy and was known for rifling through coworker’s desks according to a well sourced National Review article. A week after she was appointed, Attorney General Holder told the New York Times that there was “no there, there” and the black panther scandal was “made up.”  Even former Attorney General Michael Mukasey was shocked at the comments of his successor.  So was the conclusion of the OPR report newsworthy?

Apparently to the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR and Associated Press it was.  For the first time ever, all four outlets had stories about the black panther scandal on the same day.  Naturally the fact the report defended Eric Holder caused the sudden synchronicity of interest in the long ignored story.

It is no accident that Loretta King, one of the central figures in the black panther dismissal, is also behind other nutty DOJ policies, including forcing the Dayton, Ohio police to hire cops that failed the test as well as signing a complaint to sue a school district for refusing to give 19 days of leave to go to Mecca.  King emerges as the engineer who regularly sends Holder’s Civil Rights Division off the rails.

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Wednesday afternoon, Barack Obama trotted out his favorite “document of negative rights,” The U.S. Constitution, and used it to chart a course that will do away with the Defense of Marriage Act.  According to the President, the act signed by Bill Clinton is unconstitutional, and he’s ordered Attorney General Eric Holder to stop defending it in court cases.   Holder has agreed and will cease defense of the law, which states marriage is between a man and a woman.

There’s so much wrong with this, it’s hard to know where to start.

First and foremost, the President has no right to declare something unconstitutional.  You don’t have to be a “community organizer” turned “constitutional scholar” to know this.  Heck, anyone who’s seen even five minutes of Schoolhouse Rock is probably aware of the three branches of government.  The Judiciary branch is responsible for determining constitutionality, not the Executive.  Pronouncing the law unconstitutional, without due process, is a gross overextension of Presidential authority.

Second, both the President and the Attorney General have sworn an oath to uphold the nation’s laws.  It’s not their place to determine which ones they view as being worthy of defense of implementation.  If the Legislative branch chooses to pass a law doing away with the Defense of Marriage act, that’s their prerogative.  The President can sign it as he sees fit.  Otherwise, Holder is there to enforce and support the laws as they exist, not as his boss wishes they did.  In refusing to defend the law as written, both Obama and Holder are willfully derelict in their duties.

Finally, since when is Obama so concerned with Constitutionality?

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Attorney General Eric Holder recently made statements to the New York Times so detached from reality that they could have been written by scheming Republican operatives for fun.  In particular, Holder tells the Times that the lawless dismissal of voter intimidation charges against the New Black Panthers is “a made up controversy.”  I have written about Holder’s accelerating detachment from reality in the interview, along with Jen Rubin.

Putting aside the fact video exists of the armed uniformed thugs in Philadelphia, Holder did something even worse than flirt with kooky conspiratorial characterizations of the fallout from the Black Panther dismissal.  When Holder announced to the New York Times that there “is no there there,” he let the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) know what he believes the outcome of their ongoing investigation into the dismissal should be.   In other words, he tampered with their investigation.

Holder’s close friend Deputy Attorney General James Cole will have the power to veto any critical conclusions by OPR.

Multiple attorneys, including me, have testified under oath that the Obama Civil Rights Division will not enforce civil rights laws in a race-neutral fashion.  Numerous attorneys still at the Justice Department have confirmed the substance of our testimony to the Washington Post. Numerous other attorneys no longer at the Justice Department have also confirmed our testimony. (more…)

At the Justice Department, one man has played a central role in two of the most controversial racialist policies of the Obama Administration – Associate Attorney General Thomas Perrelli.  This bundler of huge campaign contributions for the Obama Campaign is now the second highest ranking Presidential appointee at the Justice Department.  Perrelli is best known for his central role in dismissing the slam dunk voter intimidation case brought and dropped against the New Black Panther Party.  But the leftist Perrelli has outdone himself.

This week, the House passed a $4.6 billion payout to American Indians and black farmers as part of a settlement of alleged race discrimination claims.  BigGovernment.com has reported extensively, on the “Pigford II” settlement and how it promotes fraud.  Worse than fraud, it represents a race-driven political payoff by the Obama Administration to a favored political constituency.

Nothing happens in Washington like the Pigford settlement without the Justice Department.  The DOJ, acting as the nation’s law firm, was intimately involved in piloting the Pigford settlement through Congress and reaching similar settlements with other identity politics plaintiffs.  Perrelli ran the show at Justice in all of these efforts.

In fact, a large portion of  the settlement windfall escapes Congressional approval entirely because Perreilli’s shop at DOJ also approved a similar but separate settlement with Hispanic farmers. Instead of a Congressional appropriation, Hispanic farmers will be paid out of an existing “judgment fund.”

Like the black farmers, Hispanic farmers made claims of racial discrimination in the administration of Agriculture Department loans.  But Hispanic farmers added noisy street protests outside of the Justice Department’s headquarters.  No wonder Perrelli’s DOJ made a settlement offer of $1.3 billion in this lawsuit.  And over $680 million will flow to Indian claimants as part of the Perrelli approved “Keepseagle” lawsuit settlement.

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At a press conference last Wednesday with Mexican President Felipe Calderon, President Barack Obama said his administration was taking a “very close look” at Arizona’s new anti-illegal immigration law, “for any implications, especially for civil rights.”

So while the Obama Administration looks at civil rights implications, the big question to ask is will they also look at the implications of the radical Islamic terrorists in America—including those who have taken advantage of the broken U.S. immigration system?

What? Radical Islamic terrorists are in America?

According to a previously disclosed 2009 Virginia Terrorism Threat Assessment, the answer is a resounding yes, and among them are members of; Al-Qa’ida, Al-Shabaab, HAMAS, Hizballah, Jama’at al-Tabligh, Jama’at ul Fuqra, Lashkar-e Tayyiba, the Muslim Brotherhood, Sunni Extremists, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Islamic Jihad Union, and the Taliban.

This information you will not learn from the Obama Administration’s Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who considers acts of terror to be man-made disasters. The same Secretary Napolitano, who quickly condemned the Arizona immigration law (intended to do the job the Federal government failed to do), even though she had not read it.

Nor would you know that Islamic radical terrorists have taken advantage of America’s immigration crisis by listening to Attorney General Eric Holder either. Instead, for instance, he obfuscated then refused to identify radical Islam as the motive behind the failed Times Square terrorist attack earlier this month, after Faisal Shahzad, a naturalized U.S. citizen (via marriage) from Pakistan, who returned to the States after five months of terror training in Waziristan, was arrested. Holder is considering suing Arizona over their immigration law even though, as he admitted last week, he had not read it either.

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Last week, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a crime syndicate dedicated to tightening the Democratic Party’s grip on America, dissolved its national structure.  Too much of ACORN’s corruption had been exposed to public scrutiny for it to run its vote fraud and extortion rackets effectively.  So, ACORN activists will have to soldier on in state-level organizations, such as New York Communities for Change and New England United for Justice in Massachusetts.

ACORN does indeed operate like the Mafia, but it more closely resembles another organization that began as an affiliate of the Democratic Party, the Ku Klux Klan.  Aside from intimidating some bank executives, ACORN does not engage in violence, but like the KKK it has vote fraud as a top priority.

There have been two distinct organizations known as the Ku Klux Klan.  The modern-day KKK, with whom most people are familiar, was spawned in 1915 by the Hollywood epic Birth of a Nation, premiered at the White House by a Democrat president, Woodrow Wilson.  Cross-burning and other rituals were actually inspired by the movie.  The Klan came to dominate the Democratic Party so thoroughly that the 1924 Democratic National Convention was known as the “Klanbake.”

It is not so much this Klan 2.0 that ACORN parallels as the original version.  Established in 1866, Klan 1.0 was an affiliate of the Democratic Party during the Reconstruction era.  Named for “kuklos,” the Greek word for “circle,” the Ku Klux Klan waged war against the Republican Party in the former Confederate states.  Goofy titles for its commanders such as Wizard and Cyclops were intended to disguise the fact that the KKK was a paramilitary organization.  In some areas, leadership of the Ku Klux Klan and the Democratic Party were indistinguishable.

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Now that a third ACORN video has surfaced, a pattern emerges of ACORN workers willing to help people engage in prostitution, tax fraud, housing fraud, and even human trafficking. Under federal law, a RICO investigation is now warranted. Three strikes and you’re out, ACORN.

Videos show ACORN employees offering to help two undercover reporters/filmmakers posing as a prostitute and pimp in falsifying tax returns and getting a federal loan to buy a house that they could use as a brothel for underage prostitutes smuggled in from El Salvador.

When the first video emerged from such a meeting in ACORN’s Baltimore office on Thursday, ACORN fired the two workers involved. When another video surfaced on Friday, this one from ACORN’s D.C. office, the two workers involved there were fired as well, and ACORN said that these two reporters had tried and failed to carry out this sting in other offices.

One such office where ACORN said these reporters tried and failed was New York City. Yet Monday, a third video surfaced from Brooklyn in New York City. Once again, the ACORN employees on the video advise the undercover duo on how to violate federal law by filing a false income tax return to qualify for a federal housing loan.

As one worker says on the video, “honesty is not going to get you the house.” Well, not if you’re engaged in a host of felonies. (more…)