What’s black and white and “red” all over? The Department of
Justice’s newly designed website. Gone are the
standard red, white, and blue motifs, replaced by an
all-black backdrop. And prominently placed on virtually every
page of the site is a quote credited to a man who facilitated a
greater role for socialists and communists at the U.N., and the
global “workers rights movement.”
The redesigned website was launched without fanfare, but
was noticed internally by several career lawyers, who spoke on
condition of anonymity for fear of political reprisals. “We were
told that the media team and the senior leadership that signed
off on the design thought that the patriotic shtick from the
Ashcroft days was a bit much for an agency that isn’t supposed to
be political,” says a DOJ lawyer, who inquired about the
redesign. “It was a real effort not to laugh at that.”
Prominent now on the site are links to “Justice.gov en
Español” and the “The Recovery Act and the Department of
Justice.” But most jarring is the quote that is appears on
virtually every page of the website. “The common law is the will
of mankind issuing from the life of the people,” which, some DOJ
staff say, is tied to a man who ushered in the socialist and
communist theories that now permeate the United Nations.
Another DOJ lawyer says, “It’s taken from an inscription
along one of the outer walls of the department [“The common law
derives from the will of mankind, issuing from the life of the
people, framed by mutual confidence, and sanctioned by the light
of reason”], but no one is sure where the quote came
from.”
The quotes that ring the building were selected during the
construction process back in the administration of President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Some attorneys
believed the quote is pulled or adapted from the writing of Sir
William Blackstone, the 18th Century British
jurist, who wrote the Commentaries on the Laws of
England, which influenced not only British law, but also the
American constitutional and legal system. But other Department of
Justice employees say the quote originates from British lawyer,
C. Wilfred Jenks, who back in the late 1930s and
after World War II was a leading figure in the “international
law” movement, which sought to impose a global, common law, and
advocated for global workers rights. Jenks was a long-time member
of the United Nation’s International Labor Organization, and
author of a number of globalist tracts, including a set of essays
published back in 1958, entitled The Common Law of
Mankind.
Most telling: Jenks, as director of the ILO is credited
with putting in place the first Soviet senior member of the UN
organization, and also with creating an environment that allowed
the ILO to give “observer status” to the Palestinian Liberation
Organization, and to issue anti-Israeli statements, which
precipitated efforts by the U.S. Congress to withdraw U.S.
membership from the ILO. The U.S. actually did withdraw in the
mid-1970s due to the organization’s leftist leanings.
“It was Jenks’s efforts that helped make the ILO a tool of
the socialist and communist movement,” says one of the DOJ
lawyers. “We used to joke about how fitting it was that this
was Janet Reno’s favorite quote to
use in speeches, and now the Obama folks think it encapsulates
out department’s mission.”
Suggestions to highlight quotes from the U.S. Constitution
or Bill of Rights or quotes from the Founders, the Federalist
Papers or prominent American jurists were quickly shot down by
the Department of Justice’s media and new media teams, according
to DOJ sources familiar with the design process, and the White
House communications shop was given input to the overall design
as well.
