By JOSH GERSTEIN | 9/24/10 10:52 AM EDT Updated: 9/24/10 5:48 PM EDT
A Justice Department prosecutor defied his superiors by testifying at a U.S. Civil Rights Commission hearing Friday, where he leveled an explosive allegation: top officials in the department gutted a voter intimidation case against a fringe African American militant group because the suspects were black and their alleged victims were white.
The prosecutor, Christopher Coates, also said the downgrading of the case against the New Black Panther Party was evidence of a Justice Department culture which discouraged “race neutral” enforcement of civil rights laws, frowned on prosecuting minority perpetrators and folded under pressure from black and Latino rights groups. After President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder took office, the culture intensified, Coates told the panel, ultimately leading to his departure as chief of the voting rights section early this year.
“They have not pursued the goal of equal protection of the law for all people,” he said.
Justice department officials, however, have vigorously defended their management of the Panthers’ case, in which two members of the small group allegedly attempted to intimidate voters at a Philadelphia polling place during the 2008 general election. Justice spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler in a statement Friday derided the Civil Rights Commission for its “so-called investigation” that is “thin on facts and evidence and thick on rhetoric.”
"The Department makes enforcement decisions based on the merits, not the race, gender or ethnicity of any party involved,” Schmaler said. “We are committed to comprehensive and vigorous enforcement of the federal laws that prohibit voter intimidation.”
But activists on the right have complained that Holder and the White House did not vigorously pursue the case because the victims were white – a claim that has now become a widespread talking point among Obama’s conservative critics. The right cried foul last year when Justice officials dropped the case against the NBPP and two defendants for lack of evidence and sought a watered-down injunction against the bearer of a nightstick who allegedly carried it to threaten whites.
Coates’ highly-charged testimony before the Civil Rights Commission echoed those allegations, as well as the testimony of J. Christian Adams, one of Coates’ colleagues in the voting rights section. However, Coates’s charges may carry greater weight because he worked decades ago as an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, has won awards from civil rights groups and lacks the partisan GOP resume of the department’s harshest opponents.
In July, Adams told the commission that the pattern of prosecuting white suspects while ignoring minority ones was part of a “lawless” atmosphere, and the handling of the New Black Panther Party case led him to resign in 2009. Since leaving the department, Adams has been an outspoken critic on the right, appearing on Fox News and writing withering articles for conservative publications.
Commission Chairman Gerald Reynolds said Coates “appears here at great personal risk to himself. I’d like to thank Mr. Coates for his courage in appearing today.”
Justice Department officials pointed to comments from Commissioner Abigail Thernstrom – a right-leaning race expert who has called the NBPP case “small potatoes” and questioned why the commission has pursued it. Thernstrom said nothing of substance during Friday's hearing, ceding her time to another panelist and declining to discuss the case with reporters.
Reading from a prepared statement, Coates – a 13-year civil rights prosecutor appointed by President Bill Clinton who also served under President George W. Bush – said he resisted department pressure to focus solely on prosecuting whites rather than blacks or other minorities accused of race-based voting violations. The atmosphere worsened after Obama took office, he said, reaching a turning point with the case against the New Black Panthers.
Though video showed two members in paramilitary gear harassing whites outside a polling place in Philadelphia, Coates said, his supervisors downplayed the case because the alleged perpetrators were black. Yet if the two suspects were white-robed Ku Klux Klansmen menacing black voters, Coates told the panel, there would have been widespread uproar and demands for justice.
Coates accused the Justice Department of caving in to outside influence groups, including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which he said demanded that prosecutors drop the case. “Many of these groups act…as special interest lobbies for racial and ethnic minorities and demand not equal treatment but enforcement of the Voting Rights Act only for racial and language minorities,” Coates said.
The outcome of the New Black Panthers Party case, he said, confirmed his concerns that the top ranks at Justice are interested only in protecting minorities.
Coates said the Justice Department’s efforts to silence him threatened to obscure what he called “the hostile atmosphere that has existed within [Justice’s Civil Rights] Division for a long time against race-neutral enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.”
“I did not lightly decide to comply with your subpoena in contradiction to the DOJ’s directives not to testify,” Coates said. “If incorrect representations are going to successfully thwart inquiry into the systemic problems regarding race-neutral enforcement of the Voting Rights Act by the Civil Rights Division, problems that were manifested....in the New Black Panther Party case that end is not going to be furthered or accomplished by my sitting idly or silently by at the direction of my supervisors while incorrect information is provided.
“I do not believe that I am professionally, ethically, legally, or morally bound to allow such a result to occur,” Coates said.
The Justice Department has said it advised Coates not to testify to avoid chilling the free-flowing exchange of information among department attorneys as cases are considered and prosecution decisions are made.
Coates said Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez’s testimony in May, defending the department’s handling of the NBPP case, “did not accurately reflect” what led to the decision to drop much of the case. Coates said Perez may not have been aware of all aspects of the matter, especially since he took over after others at Justice had decided to downgrade the case.
However, Democratic commissioner Michael Yaki suggested that there were weaknesses in the Justice Department’s case against the Panthers, including no white voters complaining they were intimidated. Yaki asked Coates why the initial investigation into the Panthers took about 45 days, rather than more typical months or years other civil rights cases take.
“Was it that easy a case?” Yaki asked.
“It was that simple a case,” Coates answered. “There was a video shot there of the people standing in close proximity to the entrance to the polling place in uniform with—one of them with a weapon in hand.”
Yaki pointed to e-mails that he said showed Adams frantically searching for a fearful white voter to fill out the “narrative” of the case. “Here we have someone who’s in a rush to get a ‘narrative,’” he said.
Coates said his view that some in the Civil Rights Division were hostile to enforcing voting rights laws against minorities was reinforced by his experience pursuing a case filed in majority-black Noxubee County, Mississippi, in 2005. “Opposition within the voting section was widespread to taking actions under the Voting Rights Act on behalf of white voters in,” where blacks are in the majority, he said.
“A Voting Section career attorney informed me that he was opposed to bringing voting rights cases against African American defendants…until we reached the day when the socio-economic status of blacks in Mississippi was the same as the socio-economic status of whites living there,” he said. “Of course, there’s nothing in the statutory language of the VRA that indicates DOJ lawyers can decide not to enforce the race-neutral prohibitions in the Act against racial discrimination….until socio-economic parity is achieved between blacks and whites in the jurisdiction in which the cases arise.”
Coates said a senior Civil Rights Division official, Loretta King also ordered him to stop asking job Justice Department job candidates if they would be willing to work on cases against minorities who violated equal-protection laws as well as cases filed against whites.
“She did not ask me. She told me. She said, ‘You will not ask that question again,’” Coates said.
Schmaler, the Justice spokeswoman, made no direct comment on Coates’s testimony. However, she suggested that some criticism focused on the Civil Rights Division has been politically motivated.
"The politicization that occurred in the Civil Rights Division in the previous administration has been well documented by the Inspector General, and it was a disgrace to the great history of the division,” she said. “We have changed that. We have reinvigorated the Civil Rights Division and ensured that it is actively enforcing the American people’s civil rights, and it is clear that not everyone supports that."
In his testimony yesterday, Coates took issue with Inspector General’s finding that Bush Administration political appointees, including acting civil rights division head Bradley Schlozman, acted improperly by using political litmus tests when hiring new lawyers for the unit.
“Mr. Schlozman found a Civil Rights Division that was almost totally left-liberal in the basis of the ideology of the people who were working in it. And he made some concerted effort to diversify the division so that conservatives as well as liberals could find work there,” said Coates. “I found the criticism by the career management in the Civil Rights Division that Mr. Schlozman had hired on ideological grounds to be akin to Pete Rose criticizing Willie Nelson for not paying his federal income tax.”
Coates left the Civil Rights Division early this year after falling out with higher ranking officials in the unit. He has since been working in a U.S. Attorney’s office in South Carolina.
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