My article from today’s FrontPage Magazine:
Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Lawyer to Obama’s Justice Department
By Matthew Vadum
President Obama’s nominee to be the nation’s top civil rights enforcer is a race-obsessed lawyer who tried to permanently free unrepentant cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal.
This radical so-called civil rights lawyer, Debo Adegbile, was until fairly recently head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Like Attorney General Eric Holder, Adegbile is a staunch affirmative action supporter and doesn’t appear to believe that white Americans are entitled to civil rights protection. Currently he serves as senior counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, which is chaired by Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.).
It’s yet another nomination to high federal office in which Obama isn’t even trying to conceal his anti-American radicalism. “Obama’s nominee process involves finding the worst person on earth for that job or any job,” as Daniel Greenfield observes. “It’s a process that never fails.”
Interestingly, Adegbile has a personal story that’s similar to Obama’s. The DoJ nominee was raised by a single mother in the absence of her son’s Nigerian father, reports the Washington Post.
Under Adegbile’s leadership, NAACP LDF acted in several legal proceedings for the black leftist folk hero who has parlayed his 1981 murder of white Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner into a career behind bars. Born Wesley Cook, the former Black Panther often referred to affectionately in radical circles as simply “Mumia,” enjoys celebrity status on the Left and is a frequent guest speaker at college commencement ceremonies.
“The question of Abu-Jamal’s guilt is not a close call,” according to John Fund. “Two hospital workers testified that Abu-Jamal confessed to them: ‘I shot the motherf***er, and I hope the motherf***er dies.’ His brother, William, has never testified to his brother’s innocence even though he was at the scene of the crime. Abu-Jamal himself chose not to testify in his own defense.”
As Faulkner tried to arrest Abu-Jamal’s brother during a traffic stop, Abu-Jamal shot the policeman once in the back and then stood over him and shot him four more times at close range, once directly in the face. Multiple eyewitnesses were present during the crime.
Adegbile’s “nomination is an in-the-face appointment,” according to J. Christian Adams, a Justice Department whistle-blower who chronicled the vicious racial politics of the DoJ’s Civil Rights Division in his bestselling book,Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department.
“Any thought that Obama would moderate as a lame duck with collapsing poll numbers vanishes with the Adegbile nomination.”
While Adegbile was at the helm of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the organization became increasingly radical, opposing criminal-background checks by employers and pushing extreme racial-hiring quotas.
“They took positions far outside of the mainstream of the law, far outside existing jurisprudence as it relates to race, and really advanced a fringe agenda,” said Adams. “If he attempts to do the same at the Justice Department, it will be a catastrophe.”
The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund is an important component of the left-wing legal firmament. President Obama calls NAACP LDF “simply the best civil rights law firm in American history.”
The nonprofit litigation shop is supported financially by the usual suspects in the world of radical left-wing philanthropy. Anti-American billionaire and convicted inside trader George Soros has given to the organization through his Open Society Institute ($950,000 since 2004) and his Foundation to Promote Open Society ($833,000 since 2009).
Other major radical funders include Ford Foundation ($16,895,000 since 2000), New York Community Trust ($2,992,790 since 2004), John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation ($1,250,000 since 2003), Tides Foundation ($521,083 since 2002), and Carnegie Corp. of New York ($385,000 since 2000).
At the Justice Department, Adegbile would replace the notorious Thomas Perez, a radical who was barely confirmed by the Senate as labor secretary on an unusual strict party line vote of 54 to 46 last July.
As the nation’s top civil rights enforcer at the Department of Justice, Perez refused to prosecute hate crimes committed against white Americans. He was reportedly instrumental in the Justice Department’s dismissal of a case involving two members of the New Black Panther Party who intimidated white voters in Philadelphia on Election Day 2008.
Perez played a major role in enacting the Church Arson Prevention Act, which was based on the false premise that black churches were being targeted with disproportionate frequency by arsonists. He targeted Maricopa County, Ariz. Sheriff Joe Arpaio, for legal harassment because he doesn’t like Arpaio’s tough-on-crime approach, especially with respect to illegal aliens.
Perez favors the use of affirmative action in hiring at higher education and healthcare facilities. He likens bankers to Ku Klux Klan members. Bankers discriminate “with a smile” and “fine print,” but they are “every bit as destructive as the cross burned in the neighborhood,” Perez said.
Adegbile is more measured and circumspect than Perez when speaking publicly, so outrageous, inflammatory quotations from the nominee are harder to find. But the would-be civil rights division chief appears to be just as radical as Perez.
More than likely Adegbile is an adherent of critical race theory, the multiculturalist Left’s race-obsessed spinoff of critical legal theory. Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has described critical race theorists as the “lunatic core” of “radical legal egalitarianism.” They believe that the white-dominated American system is hopelessly racist. To remedy this imbalance, non-whites should be given preferential treatment, they say.
Adegbile lost a case before the Supreme Court last year (Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder) in which he argued that large swaths of America are racist hellholes that maliciously prevent minorities from voting.
In a rare victory for both the Constitution and common sense, the high court finally recognized that the anti-discrimination provisions of the Voting Rights Act, which gave the federal government a veto over changes in state election laws, may have been needed when the law was enacted in 1965, but no longer.
The Voting Rights Act is what unscrupulous Attorney General Holder used to block states from implementing voter ID laws aimed at combating election fraud. The Left relies on fraud to win closely contested elections.
Adegbile has said that “the Voting Rights Act is Alabama’s gift to this country.” He also said that Martin Luther King Jr. would not want the United States to “blow up the bridge” of affirmative action.
As acting director-counsel of LDF, Adegbile successfully argued against plaintiff Abigail Noel Fisher, a white woman who asserted that University of Texas Law School’s affirmative action admissions policy blocked her from securing admission to the school.
Adegbile served as the LDF’s director of litigation before the firm’s president, John Payton, died in March 2012. When LDF took the Abu-Jamal case, Payton threw out a series of red herrings in order to distract from the overwhelming evidence of the defendant’s guilt.
“Mumia Abu-Jamal’s conviction and death sentence are relics of a time and place that was notorious for police abuse and racial discrimination,” said Payton. ”Unless and until courts acknowledge and correct these historic injustices, death sentences like Mr. Abu-Jamal’s will invite continued skepticism of the criminal justice system by the African-American community.”
It’s nihilistic hogwash. The argument is more or less that obviously guilty defendants like Abu-Jamal should go free if there is police abuse or racial discrimination in their communities. That would be a racial variety of this pie-in-the-sky thing called social justice.
Although not too many Americans outside of the true believers of the professional Left and radical activist circles actually think Mumia Abu-Jamal is innocent, there is no reason to believe that Adegbile dissents from the views of his former boss.
He’s an ideologue who believes that the legal system should be used to dispense favors to non-whites. White Americans, he feels, should be treated as second-class citizens in order to make up for America’s past racial injustices, real or perceived.
Of necessity, he despises the Constitution.
This makes Adegbile an ideal Obama nominee.