Is Obama using the Justice Department to stifle free spech?
Senator Obama and his minions are getting more creative in the way they are fighting free speech. Now they are using the Justice Department. The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Section, where many of the top officials are Obama contributors, has suggested criminal prosecutions against those they ANTICIPATE will engage in WHAT THEY intreprate as voter intimidation in an election involving a black candidate. Gee In America people are innocent until proven guilty, but with this new Obama directed effort, you are guilty if I THINK you might do something wrong. Its called intimidating people out of their right to free speech:
In the face of the Obama fundraising and media juggernaut, Republicans are worried about losing the presidential election.
They should be even more fearful, however, about being criminally prosecuted by the Justice Department for political speech and activity protected by the First Amendment — a clear effort by partisan career lawyers within the Civil Rights Division to help the Obama campaign.
How did we reach such a disturbing state of events? In 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft directed the Justice Department to hold an annual training session for lawyers from Civil Rights as well as Assistant U.S. Attorneys and FBI agents. Its purpose was to educate these individuals regarding the requirements of both civil election laws — such as the Voting Rights Act that guarantee access to the polls — and the criminal election statutes that prohibit voter fraud and registration improprieties.
The recent 2008 conference, according to multiple sources, was a radical departure from prior events and quite disturbing. Unlike the past, all of the Civil Rights Division’s presentations were not made by lawyers from the Voting Section. Instead, some were also made by lawyers from the Criminal Section of Civil Rights. While most of the laws enforced by that Division are civil statutes, a small number provide for criminal prosecution for violations of the law that involve the threat or use of force.
The kind of routine violence, targeting civil rights workers in the 60s who were registering blacks to vote, is long gone. The Criminal Section has not pursued a criminal voting-related case in decades. Yet the presentations at this year’s conference show that the Criminal Section has been given the green light to use these same criminal statutes to harass and prosecute political activists (particularly Republicans) who are engaging in protected political activity, not violence or the threat of violence. No candidate for federal, state, or local office should take this unprecedented threat lightly. The entire apparatus of federal election law enforcement was assembled for this conference including every FBI agent and Assistant United States Attorney responsible for election-related matters.
The Criminal Section is headed by a former ACLU attorney, Mark Kappelhoff, who was actually hired by this Administration. So much for the claim that the Bush Administration only hired “conservatives” in the Civil Rights Division. In apparent violation of a memorandum from Attorney General Mukasey that directed employees to be “particularly sensitive to safeguarding the Department’s reputation for fairness, neutrality and nonpartisanship,” Kappelhoff has contributed ,000 to Obama — not exactly the hallmark of “neutrality and nonpartisanship.” But even worse was the presentation by one of his career lawyers, James Walsh, obviously made with Kappelhoff’s approval.
Walsh is a former Voting Section lawyer who transferred to the Criminal Section after working for Senator Ted Kennedy on a detail. Not surprisingly, Walsh is also a contributor to Obama, which is certainly on par with the almost 0,000 that DOJ lawyers and staff who live in Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia have contributed to the Obama campaign, including John Bert Russ, the lawyer in the Voting Section who is responsible for the observer program that will send out hundreds of federal observers on election day.
Walsh made it clear that the Criminal Section intends to use the civil rights statutes to criminally prosecute anyone they consider to be engaging in voter “intimidation” or “oppression.” Now, that might sound like a reasonable idea until you realize that Walsh and Kappelhoff’s definition of “intimidation” and “oppression” goes far beyond what you and I would imagine. Walsh stated that because we have an African-American presidential candidate, there would be voter suppression — a baseless assumption that plays on left-wing stereotypes of America as a racist nation. Every single example of wrongdoing that Walsh and other presenters used in their presentations talked about Republicans: there was not a single example of any wrongdoing committed by any Democrats in the entire two-day conference.
One cited example of a “criminal” violation supposedly inte
This is hardly nonsense. Basic facts.
cited from http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com/
