New Black Panthers: A prosecution that died

last updated 8 January 2015

“Talk about the maladministration of justice,” said the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in an editorial. On Election Day 2008, two members of the New Black Panther Party, in full paramilitary uniform, were videotaped standing outside a Philadelphia polling place, one of them wielding a baton. “You’re about to be ruled by the black man, cracker,” one of the Panthers allegedly told a white voter. The pair were duly charged with voter intimidation, but after Attorney General Eric Holder was sworn in, the charges were mysteriously dropped. It isn’t such a mystery, said Andrew McCarthy in National Review. J. Christian Adams, a career Justice Department attorney who recently quit in protest, says that Holder’s staff told him they wouldn’t bring vote-fraud cases against black defendants, because it doesn’t help Democratic turnout. The message to the Panthers, ACORN, or other activist groups on the Left is clear: Under the Obama administration, the government “will not protect the integrity of our elections.”

Here we go with another conspiracy theory from the paranoid Right, said Clarence Page in the Chicago Tribune. So let’s review the facts. The polling place in question was in a heavily black, pro-Obama district—an odd choice for thugs looking to disenfranchise white voters. A grand total of zero voters filed complaints of intimidation by the NBPP. As for the “whistle-blower” alleging systemic anti-white bias at the DOJ, it turns out that Adams is a career Republican operative who has yet to produce a shred of evidence for his claims. You won’t hear that on Fox News, said Dave Weigel in TheAtlantic.com. The right-wing TV news network is working overtime to convince its viewers that “the New Black Panthers are a powerful group that hate white people and operate under the protection of Eric Holder’s DOJ.” The truth is that, rather like the modern Ku Klux Klan, the NBPP is a tiny group of kooks whom no one takes seriously.

The “analogy to the Ku Klux Klan is apt,” said James Taranto in WSJ.com, but let’s follow it through. Suppose bedsheeted members of the Klan were filmed wielding batons outside a polling place, and the Justice Department—under a Republican president, say—declined to prosecute them. Even if the Klan no longer had any power, that “would be a major story, and rightly so.” So would it be too much to ask for Holder to address why he really killed this case?