Anti-American Conservative Zealots Distort Attorney General Holder's Words To Suit Their Wacko Agenda

Anti-American Conservative Zealots Distort Attorney General Holder's Words To Suit Their Wacko Agenda

Fox News distorted the testimony of Attorney General Eric Holder to claim that he committed perjury before the House Judiciary Committee last week.

It was recently revealed that the Justice Department obtained a search warrant for the communications records of Fox News reporter James Rosen in an effort to track down a leaker who provided him with classified information on North Korea in 2009. On May 15, during a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) asked Holder about the warrant and the potential for prosecuting journalists accused of publishing classified information that they obtained from government sources. Holder responded (emphasis added):

    With regard to the potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material. That is not something that I've ever been involved in, heard of, or would think would be a wise policy.

On May 24, the Justice Department released a statement clarifying Holder's involvement in the approval process for the warrants in question (emphasis added):

    "The Department takes seriously the First Amendment right to freedom of the press. In recognition of this, the Department took great care in deciding that a search warrant was necessary in the Kim matter, vetting the decision at the highest levels of the Department, including discussions with the Attorney General. After extensive deliberations, and after following all applicable laws, regulations and policies, the Department sought an appropriately tailored search warrant under the Privacy Protection Act. And a federal magistrate judge made an independent finding that probable cause existed to approve the search warrant."

Fox News' Special Report on May 24 argued that these statements were inconsistent and concluded that the Attorney General had previously lied to the Judiciary Committee and thus had committed perjury. Host Shannon Bream began the show stating, "It's his story, but he's not sticking to it," claiming that Holder has "chang[ed] his tune" on his involvement in the scrutiny of journalists. Contributor Steve Hayes claimed that Holder's two statements were "incongruent" and Charles Krauthammer speculated that it may be "a case of perjury."

In fact, the statements are not "incongruent" whatsoever. Holder's comments to the Judiciary referred to the possibility of prosecuting journalists for publishing classified information, but that is not the crime the Justice Department's warrant accused Rosen of committing. DOJ investigators were concerned with Rosen's solicitation of classified information, not any subsequent publication of it. Wired explained (emphasis added):

    According to the affidavit (.pdf), FBI Agent Reginald Reyes told the judge there was probable cause to believe that Rosen had violated the Espionage Act by serving "as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator" in the leak. The Espionage Act is the same law that former Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning is accused of violating when he leaked information to the secret-spilling site WikiLeaks.

    To support his assertion, Reyes quoted an email exchange between Kim and Rosen, in which Rosen told him that he was interested in "breaking news ahead of my competitors" and had a particular interest in "what intelligence is picking up." He also told Kim, "I'd love to see some internal State Department analyses."

    The suggestion was that Rosen broke the law by soliciting information from Kim, something that all journalists do routinely with sources.

    Nonetheless, the federal judge found there was probable cause to believe that Rosen was a co-conspirator and approved the warrant.

In other words, Holder's on-the-record denial of involvement in any prosecution of news organizations for publishing classified information in no way conflicts with any knowledge he may have possessed or action the DOJ may have taken against reporters for soliciting said information. Fox's perjury accusations simply don't align with the facts.

All anyone with basic reading skills has to ask themselves is, do the words prosecution and search warrant mean the exact same thing. Rosen violated the Espionage Act, he is a leaker, not a whistle-blower. Rosen and Fox News may have comitted treason. But because the radical conservative movement wields so much influence, the DOJ will let it pass to placate conservatives.

How Do You Know The Washington Post is a Conservative Rag. Because They Will Not Fire Jennifer Rubin For Libel

How Do You Know The Washington Post is a Conservative Rag. Because They Will Not Fire Jennifer Rubin For Libel

Since the summer of 2010, the right-wing media has been obsessively promoting the absurd non-scandal involving the New Black Panther Party, in which the Obama Justice Department was alleged to have dropped voter intimidation charges against the fringe group owing to racial and political solidarity. One of the primary movers of this farce has been Jennifer Rubin, who authored one of the first reports on the story for The Weekly Standard and continued to write at length about DOJ's alleged perfidy at her Washington Post blog.

This month, the Justice Department's inspector general released the results of their investigation into the New Black Panthers affair and confirmed what everyone already knew to be true: the allegations against DOJ were bunk. Rubin is excitedly waving this report around, claiming it reflects poorly on President Obama's reported Labor Secretary nominee, and determinedly ignoring the parts that show pretty much every word she wrote about the New Black Panther story was rooted in falsehood.

Since the DOJ's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released its report, Rubin has written two Washington Post blog posts touting its findings to attack Perez. In a March 12 post, she wrote: "I won't revisit all the behavior of the Obama Justice Department but a nearly-300 page report has been released by the administration's own inspector general. The IG went out of the way to be even-handed, even when there was substantial evidence of politicization." The next day, she briefly referenced the OIG report's findings on the New Black Panther case, writing:

    The IG declined to find a racial or political motive for dismissing the New Black Panther case but found actions surrounding that action "risked undermining confidence in the non-ideological enforcement of the voting rights laws." In other words, it sure looked partisan.

Rubin's twisted construction of the IG "declin[ing] to find a racial or political motive" is fairly comical, given how invested Rubin was in the existence of those motives. Again, she was one of the main drivers of this story. She wrote a lengthy Weekly Standard article in June 2010 (before J. Christian Adams resigned from DOJ claiming racially charged "corruption" in the case, which blew up the story) alleging that the "Obama Justice Department went to bat for the New Black Panther party -- and then covered it up." As the story slowly fell to pieces, Rubin held firm, insisting the critics were wrong. "The issue is whether a meritorious claim of voter intimidation was dismissed under pressure from left-leaning civil rights groups," she wrote in January 2011, "and whether there is reason to believe there is a sentiment against a color-blind application of civil rights laws."

By March 2011, we knew affirmatively that the allegations of racial preference at DOJ were false. The department's Office of Professional Responsibility investigated the matter and released their findings. According to the report, OPR "found no evidence that the decision to dismiss the case against three of the four defendants was predicated on political considerations," and "no evidence that political considerations were a motivating factor in authorizing the civil action against the four defendants."

Rubin, however, was undeterred. She lashed out at OPR, calling it "as unprofessional as it is biased," and insisted that the report was wrong:

    Frankly, in reporting in my pre-Post days and in subsequent reporting by The Post, there is ample evidence that voting section attorneys objected to enforcing civil rights laws against minority defendants("my people," as Eric Holder infamously put it). Yet the crack team at OPR apparently didn't find any evidence of this. (Do they subscribe to The Post?) [Right Turn, 4/3/2011]

The OIG report, however, not only confirms OPR's finding, it flatly debunks Rubin:

    The OIG received allegations that Division leadership between 2009 and 2012 was hostile to "race neutral" enforcement of the voting rights laws and that the Voting Section would enforce Sections 2 and 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act only in "traditional" circumstances -- namely, to protect minorities as historical victims of discrimination -- and not against minority defendants or to protect White victims. We found insufficient evidence to conclude that Division leadership during this period had such a policy, or that the laws were enforced in a discriminatory manner to achieve that result.
The New Black Panthers case was a gigantic distraction, a manufactured controversy meant to stoke outrage and damage the Obama administration politically. We're only still talking about it because of adetermined effort on the part of conservative media figures, like Rubin, to force it into the news cycle. It's been debunked more times than should have been necessary, and the fact that Rubin is gingerly tip-toeing around the most recent dismantling of the fake story she helped will into existence is perhaps an indication that we're finally nearing the point of putting this nonsense to bed once and for all.

Conservative Republican Rubin has a long and dubious history of trying to convince the reading public that her wacko delusions are facts.

I don't understand why Paul Ryan (R-WI) hates America so much. He has a cushy job ($179k per year) where he doesn't do anything - because he wants to do his part to make sure government doesn't work - Paul Ryan's $5.7 Trillion Magic Trick - yet here he is trying to take money from seniors, the working poor and the middle-class to pay for tax cuts for wealthy moochers who keep complaining about how hard they have it.