Holder’s Lynch Mob in Ferguson

By Matthew Vadum

The cop-hating radical lawyers of Eric Holder’s Justice Department are reportedly continuing to feed the passions of the lynch mob in Ferguson, Mo., that is screaming for the blood of the white cop who shot and killed a young black man earlier this month in what now almost certainly appears to be an act of self-defense.

A white police officer’s racism, an allegation for which there is no evidence whatsoever, supposedly caused the unfortunate incident. But the leftists who run the federal government need this. They want it badly. A police officer has to be sacrificed to appease Democrats’ political base and to help fend off an increasingly likely Republican takeover of the U.S. Senate in November.

Federal civil rights charges may be in the works against Darren Wilson, the white police officer who shot Michael Brown after an intense physical altercation that left Wilson with severe head injuries.

The feds may simply ignore local authorities and go forward with a case against Wilson, says Hans von Spakovsky, who worked in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division under President George W. Bush. He is currently a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation and is co-author of the recently published Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department.

“Eric Holder has completely politicized the Justice Department,” von Spakovsky told WND’s Greg Corombos. “As we can see, unfortunately, this is happening in other places like the Travis County (Texas) D.A.’s office” that charged Texas Gov. Rick Perry with a crime for threatening to veto legislation.

Von Spakovsky said,

It is true that left-wing zealots who believe as an article of faith that America is racist insist, despite mounting exculpatory evidence, that Brown was murdered by a white policeman. They will not be dissuaded no matter how much proof accumulates that the officer fired on Brown because he believed his life was in danger.

Holder’s visit came as the Left’s narrative that the nearly 300-lbs. Brown, who had just robbed a convenience store minutes before encountering decorated policeman Darren Wilson, was an innocent gentle giant trying to surrender, continues to circle the drain. More witnesses are reportedly coming forward to identify Brown as the aggressor in a vicious attack on Wilson in which he tried to grab the gun of the six-year veteran of the Ferguson police force.

It is clear that the violent mob actions of the nearly two week-old freak show in Ferguson don’t actually bother Holder, who it seems safe to say is only feigning disapproval of the rampant criminality there. 

This shouldn’t surprise anyone who understands the Left. Mob rule, that is Marxist mobocracy, is the model of governance preferred by Marxist community organizers like Barack Obama. Civil unrest is an opportunity, not a tragedy. The more bodies, the better.

The Department of Justice has become a racial-grievance incubator since President Obama was sworn in.

Obama tried to install cop-killer advocate Debo Adegbile as the head of the DoJ’s Civil Rights Division whose ambulance-chasing radical attorneys are now looking for trouble on the ground in Ferguson. Adegbile is a race-obsessed lawyer who, when he was head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, tried to permanently free unrepentant cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, now a black leftist folk hero.

“Mumia,” as his fans call him, has parlayed his 1981 murder of white Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner into a career behind bars. Born Wesley Cook, the former Black Panther enjoys celebrity status on the Left and is a frequent guest speaker (via recorded audio) at college commencement ceremonies.

Adegbile’s nomination, which was rejected by the Senate earlier this year, was “an in-the-face appointment,” according to J. Christian Adams.

While at the NAACP’s legal arm, 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,” Adams said previously. “If he attempts to do the same at the Justice Department, it will be a catastrophe.”

Adegbile appeared to be an adherent of Critical Race Theory, the multiculturalist Left’s race-obsessed spinoff of critical legal theory. Federal appeals judge Richard Posner 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.

Although they would never say it in public, Holder and his ilk believe that obviously guilty defendants like Abu-Jamal should go free if there is police abuse or racial discrimination in their communities. Holder is 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.

Adegbile had been nominated to replace the notorious Thomas Perez, a radical who was barely confirmed by the Senate as labor secretary on a strict party line vote of 54 to 46. 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 helped to enact 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.

Lawyers from the Criminal Section of the Department of Justice’s (DoJ) Civil Rights Division are working behind the scenes, fanning the flames, trying to figure out how to stick it to the accused policeman.

J. Christian Adams of PJ Media said his organization had to sue Holder to get the resumes of the attorneys who work for the Criminal Section.

It turned out that “all of Holder’s attorney hires were leftists, some even with a history of anti-police activities,” said 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.

“Why does it matter that the DOJ unit that will investigate the Ferguson police is stacked with leftists and ideologues?” Adams writes. “Because anti-police biases of lawyers in this unit have resulted in gross prosecutorial misconduct against police officers.”

Here is one example. Federal prosecutors desperate to nail New Orleans cops on flimsy civil rights charges have surreptitiously used social media “to circumvent ethical obligations, professional responsibilities, and even to commit violations of the Code of Federal Regulations,” a judge found.

A prosecutor in the case, identified as Karla Dobinski, egged on other anonymous bloggers who “repeatedly posted vigorous pro-prosecution statements strongly condemning the defendants, their witnesses, and their entire defense.”

Remember that the DoJ under Holder has also collaborated with the ACORN-affiliated Project Vote to weaken electoral integrity laws.

To the Left, the ends justify the means.

Meanwhile, the so-called protesters that the media say have been peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights, have been throwing bottles of urine, presumably from humans, at the police in Ferguson. It’s a biohazard, a biochemical weapons attack of sorts, given that cytomegalovirus (CMV, also known as herpes) can be transmitted through contact with urine, according to medical literature. 

At least they’re not hurling pathogen-rich fecal projectiles, as their Occupy Wall Street brethren did.

Eager to consult with his comrades, the attorney general borrowed Vice President Joe Biden’s jet and visited the St. Louis suburb Wednesday in what was billed as an attempt to restore calm to a community that has erupted in almost daily violence since Michael Brown, an 18-year old black man, was shot Aug. 9 by a white police officer. Brown has been beatified by the media. Canonization can’t be far off.

And what an extraordinarily unusual thing it is for a U.S. attorney general to personally visit the site of an alleged civil rights violation. It’s as if the investigation of the killing of a violent teenaged criminal were somehow equivalent to FBI’s “Mississippi Burning” probe of the 1964 “Freedom Summer” murder of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, three out-of-state voter registration canvassers whose bodies were found in Neshoba County, Miss.

But the hype –and the prospect of distracting from the Obama administration’s daily debacles, both domestic and abroad– makes Ferguson irresistible.

It’s as if there has been a coordinated public relations campaign conducted, perhaps stage-managed by someone like David Fenton, a progressive Joseph Goebbels for the modern age. He may very well be behind some or all of this. Fenton, after all, frequently represents dangerous subversives such as the ladies of Code Pink. His public relations firm also counts some in-your-face Alinskyite groups as clients, including Americans for Financial Reform (founded by the neo-communist community organizer trainer Heather Booth), Center for Community Change, Health Care for America Now (or HCAN, an ACORN-led coalition that helped force Obamacare on the nation), and the gangsterish Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

Regardless of who helped invent and cultivate the image of Michael Brown as a martyr, Holder is hoping his efforts regarding the case in Ferguson will harness all the negative energy generated by the Brown saga and channel it into producing change that no sane American would ever want.

With 40 FBI agents reportedly on the ground doing Holder’s bidding, and who knows how many other DoJ employees lurking around and stirring the pot, the natural anti-police prejudices of left-wingers across the nation are quickly hardening into dogma. As each day passes, the white police officer, Darren Wilson, is increasingly vilified by howling demagogues. You’re a terrible person if you don’t believe Wilson is a murderer, the Left says. The unhinged left-wing governor of Missouri, Democrat Jay Nixon, has joined the mob, demanding charges be laid against the cop right now even in the absence of incriminating evidence.

Despite this mass hysteria, the streets of Ferguson have been relatively calm since Holder’s visit, reports say. This outbreak of serenity that caps nearly a fortnight of tumult is likely attributable to the fact that Holder was there promising goodies to the assembled neo-communists and racial grievance mongers, his longtime political allies. Something, anything, must be done.

Holder doesn’t care that white racism or police racism directed at blacks isn’t much of a problem in the United States today.

In fact Americans, including blacks, tend to believe that blacks are more racist than whites and Hispanics, according to polling. Blacks’ racial antagonism, which President Obama has deliberately exacerbated, is the elephant in the room.

This makes it easy for the Left to perpetuate the ugly urban myth that white cops routinely use blacks for target practice. This also shuts down discussion of the toxic racism and the inner-city pathologies that tragically infect the African-American community. The politically correct say we’re not allowed to talk about these things — unless we toe the PC line.

Blinded by his zeal, on Wednesday, Holder presided over an orgy of genteel, media-friendly cop-hating at meetings with Ferguson residents that were organized by the professional agitators of the DoJ’s Community Relations Service (CRS) office.

CRS has become the community organizing arm of the DoJ under Holder. Two years ago CRS staffers visited Sanford, Fla., in an effort to rub raw the sores of discontent after Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old black youth, was killed during a physical confrontation with community crime watch volunteer George Zimmerman. For a month and a half after Martin’s death, local police declined to press charges against Zimmerman, who was ultimately acquitted of murder, because they believed quite correctly that the criminal case against him was weak. CRS used taxpayer resources to help organize marches in which participants heightened racial tensions and loudly demanded that Zimmerman be prosecuted.

Underneath Holder’s words during his Ferguson whistle stop was an ideology-driven presumption that the white cop is racist and guilty of murdering Michael Brown.

One can almost imagine Holder raising his fist in a black power salute the next day in the nation’s capital when he mawkishly announced that the DoJ would “continue to stand with Ferguson” and that “few things have affected me as greatly as my trip to Ferguson.” Why he would have to stand with the people of Ferguson when he is only supposed to be conducting an impartial investigation of a potential crime is unclear.

On Wednesday Holder told Ferguson residents that the “eyes of the nation and the world” are on the township and that the issues raised by Brown’s death have been simmering “beneath the surface in more communities than just Ferguson.”

Holder spoke to students at a community college and said it was an “opportunity to sit down with some wonderful young people and to hear them talk about the mistrust they have at a young age.” Holder said change would not take place overnight, the Huffington Post reported, paraphrasing a meeting attendee.

Holder said to the students that he understands “the mistrust” between some residents and law enforcement. “I am the attorney general of the United States, but I am also a black man,” he said.

Holder recalled how in the past police had pulled him over on the New Jersey Turnpike, accused him of speeding and searched his vehicle. “I remember how humiliating that was and how angry I was and the impact it had on me,” he said.

“The same kid who got stopped on the New Jersey freeway is now the attorney general of the United States,” he said. “This country is capable of change. But change doesn’t happen by itself.”

After a meeting Angela Whitman told reporters that Holder told her “that he was here because he was concerned about everything that was going on and he wanted us to voice our opinions and what did we want to change, and that he was going back to the White House to report so we can get some funding, so we can get a game plan on how to help our community.”

Holder told students that together they were initiating “a good dialogue” but that it was “not enough.”

“We need concrete action to change things in this country,” he said.

“This dialogue is important. But it can’t simply be that we have a conversation that begins based on what happened on August 9 and ends sometime in December, and nothing happens. As I was just telling these young people, change is possible. The same kid who got stopped on the New Jersey freeway is now the attorney general of the United States. This country is capable of change. But change doesn’t happen by itself.”

Indeed it doesn’t. It needs people who hate America to grease the wheels.