Remember the New Black Panthers voter intimidation story?

Here’s a re-cap from the Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt:

President Obama’s Justice Department continues to stonewall inquiries about why it dropped a voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party.

The episode—which Bartle Bull, a former civil rights lawyer and publisher of the left-wing Village Voice, calls “the most blatant form of voter intimidation I’ve ever seen”—began on Election Day 2008. Mr. Bull and others witnessed two Black Panthers in paramilitary garb at a polling place near downtown Philadelphia. (Some of this behavior is on YouTube.)

One of them, they say, brandished a nightstick at the entrance and pointed it at voters and both made racial threats. Mr. Bull says he heard one yell “You are about to be ruled by the black man, cracker!”

In the first week of January, the Justice Department filed a civil lawsuit against the New Black Panther Party and three of its members, saying they violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act by scaring voters with the weapon, uniforms and racial slurs. In March, Mr. Bull submitted an affidavit at Justice’s request to support its lawsuit.

When none of the defendants filed any response to the complaint or appeared in federal district court in Philadelphia to answer the suit, it appeared almost certain Justice would have prevailed by default. Instead, the department in May suddenly allowed the party and two of the three defendants to walk away.

Well, an investigation just completed, and now we have the facts on why the charges were dropped by the Obama administration.

Jennifer Rubin explains why in the left-wing Washington Post. (H/T The Heritage Foundation)

Excerpt:

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights came out in December with a draft of its interim report on the New Black Panthers Party scandal. Earlier today a final report was posted on the commission’s website, and with it, a flurry of rebuttals and separate statements from a number of the commissioners. The import of these statements should not be minimized.

The statements indicate several points: 1) the New Black Panther Party case brought by career Justice Department employees was meritorious on the law and the facts; 2) there is voluminous evidence of the Obama administration’s political interference in the prosecution of the New Black Panther Party case; 3) there is ample evidence that the Obama administration directed Justice Department employees not to bring cases against minority defendants who violated voting rights laws or to enforce a provision requiring that states and localities clean up their voting rolls to prevent fraud; 4) the Justice Department stonewalled efforts to investigate the case; and 5) vice chairman Abigail Thernstrom has, for reasons not entirely clear, ignored the evidence and tried to undermine the commission’s work.

The rest of the article has specific comments from the investigators of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

I wanted to update my readers about a case of voter intimidation by a group of black racists called “The New Black Panthers”. They intimidated white voters in Philadelphia during the 2008 election, by carrying weapons in front of a polling place. The Obama administration dropped the charges against them.

Here’s some of the raw video:

And here’s some eyewitness testimony:

Fox News reports on the original story and the latest development – an ex-DOJ official has come forward to explain what really happened behind the scenes.

Excerpt:

J. Christian Adams, testifying Tuesday before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, said that “over and over and over again,” the department showed “hostility” toward those cases. He described the Black Panther case as one example of that — he defended the legitimacy of the suit and said his “blood boiled” when he heard a Justice official claim the case wasn’t solid.”It is false,” Adams said of the claim.

“We abetted wrongdoing and abandoned law-abiding citizens,” he later testified.

The department abandoned the New Black Panther case last year. It stemmed from an incident on Election Day in 2008 in Philadelphia, where members of the party were videotaped in front of a polling place, dressed in military-style uniforms and allegedly hurling racial slurs while one brandished a night stick.

[…]Adams has described the case as open-and-shut and said Tuesday that it was a “very low moment” to hear Perez make that claim.

But he described the department’s hostility toward that and other cases involving black defendants as “pervasive.” Adams cited hostility in the department toward a 2007 voting rights case against a black official in Mississippi who was accused of trying to intimidate voters. Adams said that when the Black Panther case came up, he heard officials in the department say it was “no big deal” and “media-generated” and point to “Fox News” as the source.

I thought it might help my readers if I posted these videos of Megyn Kelly debating the head of the New Black Panthers, so you can see how they respond to the charges yourself. After all, it’s good to hear both sides.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Why would the Department of Justice side with the New Black Panthers against voters who just want to exercise their right to vote? This whole thing reminds me a lot of ACORN and the voter fraud problems they’ve been having. Obama used to work for ACORN, and the head of ACORN endorsed Obama.

Voter intimidation. Voter fraud. Barack Obama.