RUTHFULLY YOURS

A catalog of government lawlessness is more discomforting to contemplate when the catalog is contemporary. We are all familiar with tales of mischief, corruption and abuse of power from other ages and in other places. We call it history. But the new book Obama’s Enforcer by Hans von Spakovsky and John Fund documents the rank lawlessness that has saturated Eric Holder’s Justice Department, and thus, the Obama presidency.

Von Spakovsky and Fund’s book releases June 10. It details the radical nest that the Justice Department has become. Their book echoes what I still hear from Justice Department employees across the Department still stuck working for a lawless radical attorney general: you simply cannot believe what is happening inside DOJ.

Eric Holder is Obama’s enforcer. The authors catalog Holder as an enforcer for a progressive gang spanning across all agencies of the federal government. Obama’s enforcer has successfully turned the power and prestige of the Justice Department into a radicalized agency for fundamental change. Holder is the enforcer that has used his power to turn America away from post-racial possibilities and toward race-obsessed legal policies. According to the authors, Holder is the single most important change agent inside the single most important change agency.

The book also covers territory never before touched – namely, why is Holder so radicalized?

I’ve worked at the Justice Department, written a New York Times bestseller about the DOJ, and never discovered what the authors reveal: how Holder’s wife played a central role in turning Holder into a racialist radical.

The authors secured an interview with one of Holder’s old buddies – Craig Donsanto. Donsanto was a lawyer at the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section. Donsanto worked with Holder early in Holder’s DOJ career and spent many long days travelling with Holder on DOJ business. What Donsanto shares might explain Holder’s radicalism about race, most famously on display when he described “my people” before a committee of Congress.

Holder “changed” after his marriage, says Donsanto. Holder himself admitted that his wife has an “edge” that he doesn’t have because he “never saw the reality of racism or felt the insecurity that comes with it.”

To think that a racialist African-American Lady Macbeth might have had her husband “screw”  his “courage to the sticking place” and use the Justice Department to push a radical radicalized progressive agenda would be a terrible sort of modern American tragedy.

So who is Sharon Malone? For starters, she owns a building all too happy to house an abortion clinic run by an indicted abortionist. But like her husband’s Justice Department, race is Malone’s primary (and angry) focus. Malone’s sister was one of the first to enroll at the University of Alabama, something Holder is keen to remind people about even 51 years later.  From the book:

Sharon Malone is a doctor in Washington who is very involved with organizations like the Coalition of 100 Black Women and makes no secret of her anger at the wrongs her family and other black Americans suffered, “to which the American government was, I wouldn’t say complicit, but at least indifferent.”

Malone must not have learned at Harvard that the “American government” sunk the treasure of two generations to free black Americans, and sacrificed the lives of hundreds of thousands of men working for the American government. But Obama’s Enforcer doesn’t stop at documenting Malone’s bitterness about race.  She’s also bitter toward America:

 Malone “drew a direct line from the sins of America’s racial past to the abuses of Guantanamo Bay detention center.”

Reading this part of Obama’s Enforcer, it isn’t hard to understand why Holder has upended civil rights law in the name of race, while at the same time supporting whatever is necessary to shut down Gitmo. In his family, the two are related.

But the book isn’t just about sourcing the roots of Holder’s racialism. Plenty of straight-up corruption by Holder is documented. Consider online gaming.

The Justice Department nullified portions of the Interstate Wire Act to effectively allow online gambling. The law had been interpreted consistently for years, across administrations, to ban online lotteries – that was until December 23, 2011, when Holder delivered a Christmas present when nobody was watching and reinterpreted the law to permit online gaming.

So why? The book suggests one answer: Holder’s old law firm Covington and Burling, when it wasn’t helping Gitmo detainees for free, was representing clients like Lottomatica, a company that benefited from the new policy.  It didn’t hurt that a top executive was a big donor to the Democratic Party either.

Such are the ways of gangster government.

The book goes on to catalog lawlessness and perjury by Justice Department officials – nearly all of them still working at the Department. It documents how Holder has transformed the public integrity units inside DOJ to extensions of the press affairs shop, using them to produce reports to provide political cover. Naturally, the authors describe how Holder is using the DOJ’s election units where I once worked to undermine election integrity, help Democrats win elections and provide powerful help to racial interest groups.

No other attorney general has behaved like Eric Holder has behaved. Even John Mitchell’s Watergate transgressions were a one-off. Mitchell was found guilty of conspiracy, obstruction and perjury relating to a single matter. Holder, on the other hand, has conspired to undermine the law and Constitution in dozens of ways, prevented and hindered numerous lawful inquiries, been properly found in contempt of Congress and has provided testimony at odds with the truth.

In short, Holder has institutionalized the kind of behavior that landed John Mitchell in prison. Mitchell had the decency to only do it once. Obama’s Enforcer details the dozens and dozens of lawless actions by this attorney general.

John Mitchell went to jail, but what will happen to Holder?  Odds are a big payday awaits him.  Expect Holder’s old pals at a Washington D.C. law firm somewhere to offer a nice new position.  They should read Obama’s Enforcer before they do to understand the sort of attention they’ll be bringing to their firm.

If you want to hear the author discuss Holder’s lawlessness, the Cato Institute is sponsoring this free forum on June 12 at 4p.m. I’ll be offering commentary afterwards so click the link, sign up and see you there.