Rare News Desk
At the time of President Obama’s second inauguration in January, the talk in the Capitol was about how much he could get done before the 2014 midterm election and whether or not the former golden boy prez was already a lame duck. Less than four months later, Barack and all the president’s men are running scared, dogged by comparisons to the scandal-plagued Nixon administration, even by their protectors in the liberal media. Richard Nixon, who resigned from the presidency in 1974 to avoid impeachment, began his second term in 1973 by forcing out his attorney general, chief of staff, chief policy advisor and the White House legal counsel. As the questions become louder asking what the current president knows and when did he know it about a host of egregious abuses of executive power, Mr. Obama will need to throw guilty senior members of his administration overboard. Here are five reasons why the president should start housecleaning by firing Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.:
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1. Spying on Journalists: We are just now learning the dirt about the Holder-led Justice Department monitoring phone logs of at least 20 journalists who work for the Associated Press. This is unlikely to be an isolated incident. Snooping on reporters’ phone lines – checking with whom they are talking, investigating who their sources are – is a brazen violation of the Freedom of the Press guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution. This abuse of power alone should be enough to force Mr. Holder’s resignation or instigate his dismissal. As Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus observed on Tuesday, “If President Obama does not [fire Holder], the message will be unmistakable: The president of the United States believes his administration is above the Constitution and does not respect the role of a free press.”
2. Enabling Voter Fraud: Hundreds of counties in America have more active voters than citizens who are actually eligible to vote. In these places, it is common for dead people to vote and live residents to vote multiple times in an election. The deceased vote Democratic by a wide margin, as do precincts with corrupted voter rolls. The Holder Justice Department refuses to crack down on voter fraud and has stymied state-enacted Voter ID laws to clean up the abuse in Texas, Florida, South Carolina, Mississippi and other jurisdictions. The integrity of the ballot box is essential to a healthy democracy, and Mr. Obama’s attorney general is thwarting that constitutional imperative.
3. Supporting Black Panthers Voter Intimidation: In the 2008 election in which Barack Obama became president, members of the New Black Panther Party patrolled a Philadelphia polling station in military fatigues, brandishing nightsticks, spewing racial epithets and discouraging residents from voting. The Holder Justice Department deep-sixed the intimidation charges and exonerated the violent black-power thugs from further prosecution. Decorated career attorneys of the Justice Department’s Voting Rights division resigned in protest of Attorney General Holder’s cover-up on behalf of the Black Panthers. A nation where the chief law-enforcement officer abets voter intimidation based on race or any other factor is teetering on the edge of lawlessness.
4. Implementing and Covering Up Fast and Furious: The federal government trafficked guns to Mexican drug gangs through the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives ostensibly to follow the arms to the drug lords who purchased them. Predictably enough, incompetent bureaucrats lost track of hundreds of weapons, which were used to murder countless innocent Mexicans and U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. Attorney General Holder has incorrigibly refused to cooperate with congressional oversight by refusing to turn over subpoenaed documents and stonewalling federal investigators. Fast and Furious was a Holder operation; Agent Terry was murdered on Mr. Holder’s watch. With the blood of a federal law-enforcement officer on his hands, there is no justice at Justice so long as this attorney general remains in office.
5. Promoting Racism in Federal Law Enforcement: Justice is supposed to be blind, but that’s not what Attorney General Holder believes. On numerous occasions, he has exposed his racial bias, notably by referring to “my people,” referring to black Americans. Sorry, but as a member of the president’s Cabinet, all Americans should be “his people” without favor. He has gone on the record to explain why he thinks it is necessary for the federal government to apply the law differently to some Americans based on racial considerations and that the law doesn’t apply equally to all races at all times. He has defended the notion that his identity as a black man takes preeminence over everything, saying during the Clinton administration, “I am not the tall U.S. attorney; I am not the thin U.S. attorney. I am the black U.S. attorney… There’s a common cause that bonds the black U.S. attorney to the black criminal.” So much for justice being blind.
The maxim “Equal Justice Under Law” is chiseled into the portico over the entrance to the Supreme Court. Eric Holder’s tenure as U.S. attorney general has been fundamentally opposed to this concept and makes a mockery of law and order. Now it is his corrupt Justice Department that is supposedly up to the task of investigating IRS persecution of Tea Partiers, other conservatives and the growing Watergate-level scandals consuming the Obama administration. Talk about the inmates running the prison. To restore trust and transparency to the top law-enforcement office in the land, Attorney General Holder must go.
Brett M. Decker is Editor-in-Chief of Rare. Follow him on Twitter @BrettMDecker
