Eric Holder’s Justice Department has exiled Christopher Coates to South Carolina.
Coates, you may recall, is a career attorney at Justice, the chief of the Civil Rights Division’s (CRD) Voting Section. More to the point, Coates recommended that the CRD file a lawsuit for voter intimidation against the New Black Panther party and several of its members.....
That brings us to the real bone of contention, the final reason Coates has been transferred: the voter-intimidation case against the New Black Panther party.
Political appointees at the Justice Department overrode Coates’s recommendation. They ordered him to dismiss the lawsuit against all but one of the defendants, even though they were in default because they did not defend themselves. The eventual injunction against the defendant with the weapon was laughably weak.
According to the Washington Times, Loretta King, whom Obama named the acting assistant attorney general of the CRD, ordered Coates to dismiss the case against three of the defendants despite their default. King apparently received approval from Associate Attorney General Thomas Perrelli to do so. Who else Perrelli spoke with in the Justice Department and the White House is the subject of continued stonewalling in response to the subpoenas served on Justice by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.
Meanwhile, the forced dismissal of the New Black Panther case turned out to be just the beginning of the misery heaped on Coates. According to multiple sources at Justice, King and the political appointees who came in soon after Obama’s inauguration — particularly Julie Fernandez, an ideological firebrand and former lawyer for the Leadership Conference for Civil Rights — put severe restrictions on Coates almost as soon as they arrived and began micromanaging all of his work.
The new political apparatchiks stripped Coates of virtually all discretionary authority, delegated responsibility for most decisions to more “results-oriented” underlings in the Voting Section, and rendered him a virtual figurehead.