Bringing the outside in at Eric Holder’s Justice Department

Attorney General Eric Holder tours the country proclaiming that he has “reinvigorated” the Civil Rights Division, compared to the Bush years. Reporters never ask precisely what he means. The American people might not like answer.Holder really means adopting outside activist agendas far beyond the American legal mainstream. It also includes hiring a swarm of activist lawyers to advance an outside agenda from inside the federal government.

In December, the Justice Department filed a religious discrimination lawsuit against the Berkeley School District in Illinois. The school district had refused to allow a new teacher to take three weeks off during final exams so she could go on a pilgrimage to Mecca, an unreasonable demand far beyond what federal law requires.

The lead Justice Department lawyer on the case says a great deal about why this case was filed. The senior career trial attorney who signed the complaint, and therefore was in charge of the investigation, is Varda Hussain.

Hussain used to be a lawyer at the Venable law firm in Virginia. In 2006, she received the firm’s Benjamin R. Civiletti Pro Bono award for spending “over 500 hours in the past year fighting to bring due process to our clients.”

Who were the particular clients Hussain spent so much time helping? Three Egyptian terrorists held in Guantanamo Bay. Although when the Venable firm wrote its internal newsletter that reported on this award, it called them merely “Egyptian clients,” here’s what they are: terrorists.

That sort of euphemism for murderous thugs who want to destroy America is needed at a law firm that doesn’t want to upset its business clients about the work Hussain was doing to help America’s deadliest enemies get away with murder and mayhem. She received an award for the work no less!

Other bizarre cases have come out of the Holder Civil Rights Division. DOJ stopped the debut of the Amazon Kindle because it was not in Braille. It attacked South Carolina for providing special treatment to inmates infected with AIDS. It demanded that Dayton, Ohio, hire black police officers who failed the competency examination.

The attorney hires have also been bizarre.

Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez hired Aaron Schuham from Americans United for Separation of Church and State, one of the most hostile organizations in the United States toward organized religion.

Founded as a rabidly anti-Catholic organization in 1947, the group has taken the lead in stopping public expressions of faith. Schuham’s new job in Holder’s Justice Department? Protecting religious liberty. Attorney hires like Schuham’s lead to reasonable questions about the administration’s motivation.

Who did Holder pick to head the unit inside civil rights to bring civil rights lawsuits against police departments and prisons? Why none other than Jonathan Smith, formerly of the Prisoners Legal Services Project and the D.C. Legal Aid Society, two anti-police and anti-prison guard antagonist groups. Hopefully America’s police unions will take note of Smith’s hiring when deciding presidential endorsements next year.

These attorneys are just the tip of the iceberg, but the DOJ is concealing the full scope of the problem. Pajamas Media submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the DOJ in the summer of 2010 seeking the resumes of all the new Obama hires inside the Civil Rights Division.

The Bush DOJ complied with an identical request from the Boston Globe after three weeks in 2007. Pajamas Media had to sue Holder in January, and the resumes still have not been provided. Phony transparency is worse than none at all.

When Holder speaks of “reopening and reinvigorating” the Civil Rights Division, what he is really saying is giving lawyers like Hussain, Schuham and Smith high-paying government jobs where they can use taxpayer money to push an agenda shared by outside activist groups.

Attorneys in the Civil Rights Division should be legal technicians, not activists. The division is the only division of the Justice Department where cases are initiated and brought by low-level line attorneys.

Every other division is reactive, not proactive. If adopting the agenda of outside activist groups constitutes “reinvigorating” the Civil Rights Division, the next Republican president needs to deinvigorate it soon after taking office.

J. Christian Adams served as a lawyer in the Civil Rights Division and covers election law at electionlawcenter.com.