Over the weekend, the New
York Times editorialized the following:
Jeff
Sessions, the new attorney general, is hardly likely to be as proactive as the
Obama administration was in investigating complaints of voter suppression by
the states.
This claim is laughable if it were not a serious matter. President Obama’s Department of Justice did little or nothing on actual voter intimidation while acting as partisans. We will limit ourselves to two examples at the beginning and end of President Obama’s term.
In 2009, the new Obama Department of Justice was handed a “slam dunk” case of violations of Voting Rights Act as the result of the intimidation in the infamous “New Black Panther Party” video outside a polling place. Yet, Obama political appointees at the Department of Justice overruled career staff in a partisan decision and the case was largely dismissed. (Jerry Jackson, one of the two in the video, was later rewarded with election to a seat on the Philadelphia Democratic City Committee.)
Late in 2016, Presidential Electors in the state of Michigan received death threats before they cast their ballots for President Thump in the Electoral College. These crystal clear efforts at intimidation or worse did not merit a peep out of the Obama Justice Department.
There are other examples.
However, the Obama Administration Department of Justice seemly ignored voter
intimidation and many other voting matters and did their job on a partisan
basis. The New York Times' proclamations that the
Trump Department of Justice will behave worse when Attorney General Sessions
has been on the job only a few days, shows the Times’ political basis.
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