Thomas Perez is a multiple prevaricator.
When the Inspector General of the Department of Justice
(henceforth DoJ) last week issued a report blistering DoJ’s Civil
Rights Division, much attention focused on the IG’s recognition
that division chief Perez, under oath, had “not reflect[ed] the
entire story regarding the involvement of political appointees” in
the now-infamous 2009 decision to dismiss voter-intimidation cases
against several New Black Panthers in Philadelphia.
While this aspect of Perez’s dishonesty deserves all the
attention it can garner (also deserving attention is the extreme
dubiousness of the IG’s assertion that Perez’s lies about
political-appointee interference were not “intentional”), it is far
from the only example, from that very same testimony, of Perez
pushing stories that were flagrantly false.
Perez came awfully close to perjury, and some might argue that
he committed it, when discussing the far more important, broader
issue that was the main focus of the IG report. (It boggles belief,
by the way, that the IG never even discussed this untruth,
considering that it so directly involved the larger substance of
his report.) That broader issue was the question, fairly
definitively answered in the affirmative by the IG, of whether the
Civil Rights Division is a hotbed of hostility against the very
idea of race-neutral enforcement of civil rights and voting rights
laws.
When testifying under oath on May 14, 2010, before the U.S.
Commission on Civil Rights, Perez in effect denied that any such
hostility existed. “We don’t have people of that ilk” in the
Division, he said. The question, he said, is “moot.” Again and
again, under questioning by Commissioner Todd Gaziano, Perez said
that if such an attitude existed, he would put a stop to it, and he
indicated that such a practice was completely alien to his
experience with and knowledge of his division’s practices.
This was no small matter. It encompassed almost the entirety of
Gaziano’s initial questioning of Perez, taking up a significant
portion of the hearing.
Yet on the very day before acting dumbfounded by the accusation
of race-based enforcement of the laws, Perez had hosted a lengthy
meeting during which this very subject was broached in great
detail. As whistleblower J. Christian Adams recounted in his
meticulously reported book Injustice: Exposing the Racial
Agenda of the Obama Justice Department, “At the meeting,
[fellow whistleblower Christopher] Coates explained via
speakerphone from South Carolina the long and detailed history of
hostility toward race-neutral law enforcement inside the Civil
Rights Division.” Included in this history were the accounts, later
confirmed to the IG by more than a dozen people inside DoJ, about
how Obama political appointee Julie Fernandes had twice made
statements in open meetings to the effect that certain parts of
laws were not to be enforced at all, and others were not to be
enforced against black perpetrators.
“Essentially,” wrote Adams, “Perez was arguing that he had never
heard anyone at the Civil Rights Division ever mention hostility
toward race-neutral law enforcement, something Coates had warned
him about just before his testimony.” And, as we now know from the
IG report (and from similar reporting even by the Washington
Post), that attitude was so pervasive within the division that
no sentient being could possibly escape it.
Moreover,
that very subject had already been the focus of reporting
stemming from the New Black Panther case since the previous summer,
and had been repeatedly and extensively discussed in media accounts
leading up to Perez’s testimony. It was at the very heart of the
Commission’s entire investigation into the New Black Panther case
and surrounding controversies. Perez knew, beyond a shadow of a
doubt, that these accusations of race-based enforcement and
certainly of attitudinal hostility against race-neutral enforcement
were rampant. He indicated in his testimony that he would not put
up with any such nonsense. Yet, as is clear from the IG report,
these exact attitudes were widespread within his division, which he
had now led for some five solid months.
In short, he deliberately misled Commissioner Gaziano when he
played dumb about the existence of this problem within his
department — if, that is, he was even being honest when he said
such an attitude would be a problem in the first place. After all,
with regard at least to Section 5 of the Civil Rights Act — which
specifically involves voting rights — Perez himself told the IG
that he thought Section 5 was not intended to protect
white people. This is from the report:
Perez also told the OIG that he believed interpreting
the retrogressive-effect prong of the analysis to cover White
citizens would be inconsistent with the history of and intent
behind Section 5, which he stated was enacted to remedy
the specific problem of discrimination against racial minorities.
In his February 2011 letter, Perez noted that the Division has
always understood the term “minority” to mean not numerical
minority, but rather “an identifiable and specially disadvantaged
group.”
Compare that statement with Perez’s statement under oath to the
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Gaziano asked this direct
question: “Do you agree that the voting rights laws should always
be enforced in a race-neutral manner?” Perez’s clear, unambiguous
answer: “Yes, sir.”
So, which is it? That “yes, sir” directly contradicts what he
told the IG. Was that definitive statement under oath a lie — or
was he instead lying to the IG? Logic says it must be one or the
other.
Likewise, when asked this — “Wouldn’t you want to clarify to
all of the people who may have heard it that that is not the policy
of the Department and that you would not tolerate that kind of a
policy?” — Perez again answered: “Yes, sir.” Yet there is no
indication in the IG report that Perez, either before or after this
hearing, made any concerted effort (other than a random statement
or two) to ensure that these sorts of race-based enforcement
choices were no longer made.
Meanwhile, a very similar scenario applied to the more-discussed
issue of whether Perez “intentionally” misled the commission and
Congress (in several different hearings) about involvement of
political appointees in the decision to dismiss the New Black
Panther case. The IG report dryly notes that Perez “should have
sought more details… about the nature and extent of the
participation of political employees in the [Panther] decision in
advance of his testimony before the Commission.” That’s as strong
an understatement as could be imagined. From the very first print
reports about the dismissal, which came in both a news story and an
editorial on May 29, 2009 in the Washington Times
(Michelle
Malkin apparently beat us at the WashTimes in an
online posting the day before), the issue of political interference
in the decision was front and center.
Indeed, here is reporter Jerry Seper’s
opening sentence in that front-page article, which puts the
issue squarely in its very first four words: “Justice Department
political appointees overruled career lawyers and ended a civil
complaint accusing three members of the New Black Panther Party for
Self-Defense of wielding a nightstick and intimidating voters at a
Philadelphia polling place last Election Day, according to
documents and interviews.”
The
only way that Perez could possibly have failed to know
about the extremely extensive political-appointee involvement is if
he deliberately chose not to investigate the degree of
that involvement — in the face of repeated, obvious, high-profile
interest in the question. If somebody in charge chooses not to
ascertain the accuracy of an answer to a question he knows he will
be asked — just so he can avoid perjuring himself when he denies
any direct knowledge that the truth lay in an answer that would
prove inconvenient — then his answers are the moral equivalent of
a lie even if his weasel words or weaselly actions technically
evade the outright existence of a direct lie.
If one re-reads the transcript of Perez’s testimony
to the Civil Rights Commission, one cannot avoid being struck at
the extent of his lawyerly evasions of the questions. (I was at the
hearing: In person, the evasions seemed even more blatant than they
do in print.)
Finally, let it be noted, on a point related to the actual
record showing that political appointees did indeed decline to
enforce parts of voting rights laws despite multiple staff-attorney
recommendations to the contrary, the contentions of Perez, Attorney
General Eric Holder, and others were remarkable similar. To wit:
that those non-enforcement decisions resulted from an allowable
prioritization of the DoJ attention in light of insufficient
resources to go full-bore after all possible infractions. Yet at
the same time these Obamite officials were claiming that the poor
Civil Rights Division was stretched too thinly to handle certain
cases, Perez was
bragging to left-wing audiences about the unprecedented level
of new resources the Obama administration had devoted to
the Civil Rights Division — and, yet, the division by some
accounts has actually pursued fewer cases than the Bush
administration did. Meanwhile, as Adams reported in
Injustice, the DoJ held a “retreat” on April 27, 2010 for
some 1,000 employees in which the Civil Rights Division
“participated in a skit contest” for which they had “for weeks…
spent work time writing scripts, singing songs, and rehearsing….
One DoJ employee told me that earning a six-figure salary while
watching the skits made him feel such shame, embarrassment, and
disgust that he felt physically ill.”
Surely a few skits could have been sacrificed so that officials
could enforce laws to make sure that voting rolls are accurate.
Just as with the misdirectional testimony about the
political-appointee involvement in the Panther case and about the
Civil Rights Division’s hostility against race-neutral enforcement
of the law, Perez’s claim that a lack of resources was responsible
for non-enforcement decisions is such an absurdity as to amount, no
matter what technical explanations he might offer, to the moral
equivalent of a flat-out lie.
This man is not only a
radical, but disgustingly dishonest. He has
no place in government service.
Photo: UPI
