‘Fact Check’ based on ‘PolitiFact’ comes up short on NBPP voter rights case
Thursday, July 29, 2010 at 10:21AM A number of newspapers provide a regular feature whereby a columnist aims at clearing up facts related to a political claim. In my home city, The Florida Times-Union column for this purpose is ‘Fact Check.’ In the Thursday paper, Fact Check takes on a reader's question about New Black Panther Party members intimidating Philadelphia voters in a single precinct on November 4, 2008.
But there's a serious omission of facts by The St. Petersburg Times who could have rendered a one-word answer to that question about the NBPP voter intimidation case.
The T-U printed a question from a reader: “Is the e-mail true that says Attorney General Eric Holder backed off pursuing a slam-dunk case against the New Black Panther Party on voter intimidation charges because the Obama administration does not want to prosecute minorities for civil rights violations?”
The paper proceeds to take Fox News to task because the above claim “was the contention of anchor Bill O’Reilly and several of his colleagues at Fox News.” The paper then segues into an argument built by ‘PolitiFact’ at The St. Petersburg Times, a paper many of us view as swinging left.
After a carefully built argument, the T-U reaches this conclusion: “According to the timeline and testimony before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the decision not to criminally charge the New Black Panthers was made during the Bush administration…So while PolitiFact.com found it fair to hold Holder accountable for the decision to limit the civil case, it was misplaced for O’Reilly and others to condemn him for not pursuing a criminal one.”
It’s useful to remind that this intimidation case occurred in the waning hours of the Bush administration on Election Day.
It’s also useful to remind that Holder can make his own call on any prosecution regardless of what the prior administration chose to do.
It’s even more useful to cite a statute from the website of the US Dept. of Justice Civil Rights Division. This information is placed under the header, “Criminal Section Statutes Enforced”: “Conspiracy Against Rights, 18 U.S.C. § 241. Section 241 of Title 18 is the civil rights conspiracy statute. Section 241 makes it unlawful for two or more persons to agree together to injure, threaten, or intimidate a person in any state, territory or district in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him/her by the Constitution or the laws of the Unites States, (or because of his/her having exercised the same). Unlike most conspiracy statutes, Section 241 does not require that one of the conspirators commit an overt act prior to the conspiracy becoming a crime. The offense is punishable by a range of imprisonment up to a life term or the death penalty, depending upon the circumstances of the crime, and the resulting injury, if any.”
Therefore, in fact checking PolitiFact (the source the T-U used), I find the fact-check incomplete. The statute above certainly applies to the NBPP case and there is ample evidence from eyewitnesses and a video.
Incidentally, this isn’t the worst example of the federal government bailing on civil rights voting cases. The U.S. vs. Ike Brown (Noxubee, Miss.) is tidily summed up by a former US Justice attorney: “Brown was the head of the Democratic Party in Noxubee County, a majority black county. The party ran the Democratic primaries, which served as de facto general elections, and Brown made no secret about his desire to see every government office in the county held by a black officeholder. Brown ran a Tammany Hall-style political operation. During one election, he literally stuffed illegal ballots he knew were marked for black candidates through an optical scanner in front of a crowd of angry citizens shouting provisions of Mississippi law at him.”
The attorney believes Brown will do the same thing again and nothing will be done about it.
That case dated to President Bill Clinton’s administration. It was prosecuted and won by the Justice Dept. under President George W. Bush.
Former Justice attorney J. Christian Adams has written extensively about both cases; Hans A. von Spakovsky has done the same. Both men worked for the Civil Rights Division at Justice. Both have claimed DOJ will not prosecute voting rights cases against minorities.
Von Spakovsky provides important facts about the NBPP case omitted by The St. Petersburg Times’ PolitiFact: “Acting Assistant Attorney General Loretta King and Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steve Rosenbaum — did not review the facts before they ordered the dismissal.”
Also noteworthy is a Democrat congressman’s call to re-open the NBPP case. The Heritage Foundation blog The Foundry said, “U.S. Rep. Brad Sherman [Calif.] last week became the first Democrat to ask Attorney General Eric Holder to reopen the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case, according to the Washington Times. Sherman wrote a letter to Holder to request that he re-file ‘criminal’ charges against the New Black Panthers involved in the case.”
It’s obvious reasonable people disagree about Holder’s decision on the NBPP case. Therefore O’Reilly and his legal experts were not in error about their claims despite a rambling, complex explanation based on the South Florida paper’s reasoning that addressed far more than the simple question posed in the email.
In a recent video, the New Black Panther Party appeared to admit to voter intimidation and the member speaking shared a few laughs with the audience about that.
For those of us who devoted much effort to civil rights issues in the pursuit of equal rights for all, this incident and the federal government’s handling of it defiles everything we worked for.
The most honest answer to that question about the NBPP PolitiFact could have rendered was a simple yes.
(Commentary by Kay B. Day/July 29, 2010)
Related Information from the Dept. of Justice