Obama's Enforcer (13 page)

Holder denied the existence of the pervasive and extensive fraud that had been documented—fraud that probably encompasses the
majority
of the payments made. He falsely claimed “that there are steps that we have in place to limit the amount of fraud that goes on there, both in terms of getting sworn statements from claimants, from doing audits,” and that the
New York Times
“made the fraud seem more widespread than it actually is.”
36
When King asked whether efforts should be made to identify the specific employees at the USDA who had supposedly engaged in such discrimination and cost the American government so much money, Holder answered that he didn't think resources should be spent on that as opposed to compensating those who had been discriminated against. Of course, trying to find the nonexistent federal employees who had supposedly discriminated against the phantom claimants would be very difficult.

Holder's claim that getting a sworn statement from claimants was sufficient to deter fraud was ludicrous, as just about any experienced criminal prosecutor would tell you. His reference to “audits” referred to the fact that Congress had added a requirement to Pigford II that the Government Accountability Office “evaluate the internal controls” in the claims process. As GAO itself pointed out, however, it was limited in its ability to detect fraud in the claims process by the fact that the government had agreed in the settlement Eric Holder was so proud of that “most claims must be evaluated based solely on the information submitted by the claimants.”
37
So GAO had “no way of independently verifying that information.” In other words, the Justice Department itself had sabotaged the ability of the federal government to stop fraud and deter the scam being perpetrated on the American taxpayer.

Eric Holder agreed to settle what was in essence an unproven—if not frivolous—case, one in which the plaintiffs had been unable to provide any evidence of discrimination. And he set up a claims process that was the same as a prior one in the original
Pigford
settlement that had already been proven to engender massive fraud—which his department refused (with only a few exceptions) to prosecute, even the most obvious cases. Billions of dollars were paid out in taxpayer funds that should never have been paid, and the reason was clearly and obviously a political one. Eric Holder was helping Barack Obama make “reparations” to black constituents and was buying political support and votes not only with his Democratic allies in Congress, but of blacks, Hispanics, Indians, and women all over the country. It was a redistribution of wealth by any means necessary for cynical racial politics at the expense of the average American taxpayer.

In fact, according to the
New York Times
, at least $460 million designated for payment to Indian “farmers” has gone unclaimed because of the small number of Indian farmers who filed claims.
38
Instead of those funds being returned to the U.S. Treasury and the American taxpayer, they are going to be given to Indian nonprofit groups, an enormous funding mechanism for advocacy groups friendly to the president and his political party. According to Rich Lowry of
National Review
, these settlements occurred because “Barack Obama wanted to pander to rural blacks, then he needed to do catch-up pandering to Hispanics.”
39
And he and Eric Holder then added women and American Indians for good measure.

CHAPTER 6

The Holder Rule of Ignorance and Deceit

 

In his congressional testimony, Eric Holder has all too often displayed seeming incompetence, a lack of professionalism, a contempt for those questioning him, and a willingness to mislead if not outright lie to Congress. California representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) told one of the authors that for someone to be so unprepared and uncooperative, “he either is the pawn of others engaged in undermining the rule of law, or he is pleading convenient ignorance he is all too fully aware of.”

Holder's dismissive attitude toward Congress when it is carrying out its constitutionally mandated oversight function and his contempt for members was on full display in an oversight hearing of the Justice Department before the House Judiciary Committee on May 15, 2013. He was being asked questions by Representative Darrel Issa (R-CA) about a voice mail message left by Holder's subordinate, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Thomas Perez, about a quid pro quo deal Perez arranged to get rid of a Supreme Court case before the Court could issue a decision tossing out the administration's favorite legal theory: “disparate impact.”

Perez promised that in exchange, the Justice Department would give up a fraud claim under the False Claims Act worth potentially $180 million to taxpayers. In the voice mail, Perez told Greg Brooker, an attorney in the U.S. attorney's office in Minnesota, not to mention the deal about the Supreme Court case in his internal DOJ “declination” memo, a memo summarizing why Justice would not pursue the False Claims Act case.
1

Holder got upset over having to answer a series of legitimate and reasonable questions about the deal, about the attempt “to try to keep information out in order to disguise” what was going on (according to Issa), and about the Justice Department's refusal to provides copies of 1,200 personal emails that Perez sent in violation of the Federal Records Act on official Justice Department business, including the quid pro quo deal.
2
Issa's inquiries called into question the ethics of Perez's behavior as well as the Justice Department's unjustified refusal to cooperate, so Holder angrily countered that Issa's behavior in playing Perez's voice mail and raising these questions about Perez was “too consistent with the way in which you conduct yourself as a member of Congress. It is unacceptable and it is shameful.”

But what was really shameful was Holder's attempt to cover up Perez's misbehavior. Representative Issa stated that “the American people were denied the Highest Court considering a case” because of the deal Perez engineered and “[t]hat was an undeniable fact.” Holder still tried to deny it by saying, “That is incorrect,”
3
even though that is exactly what happened: the city of St. Paul, Minnesota, dismissed its pending Supreme Court case (in which the federal government was not even a party) after being told by Perez that the Justice Department would not purse the False Claims Act claim for reimbursement of upwards of $180 million.

Holder obviously resented being asked tough questions about controversial actions of the Justice Department, because at the same hearing, he at one point expressed his anger that he was not treated with the respect he thought he deserved as the “Attorney General of the United States.” This tirade from Holder came right after Representative Doug Collins (R-GA) expressed his amazement at Holder's “lack of preparation” and his inability to answer basic questions about his recusal from the Justice Department's investigation of a leak to the Associated Press that resulted in a 2012 story about a CIA counterterrorism operation in Yemen that stopped a plot to bomb an American airliner. Holder didn't know when it occurred, even though it was front-page news at the time, and was unable to answer numerous other questions (Holder said he didn't know the answer to various questions, at least fifty-seven times).

As Collins said to Holder: “Did you not think those questions were going to be asked of you today? That when you recused yourself from this . . . did you just honestly think those would not be asked today?”
4
Holder's answer was an unbelievable “I didn't think about whether or not you were going to ask me that question,” at which point Collins interrupted him with “You are kidding me? You come to this committee today with these issues like they are right now?”
5
Yet Holder continued to display his ignorance on the matter, telling the committee he couldn't even remember whether he had put his recusal in writing as required by law (he hadn't).

Another area of questioning that Holder expressed ignorance of was the reprehensible behavior of Tracy Schmaler, the director of Holder's Public Affairs Office. Through a Freedom of Information Act request that took the Justice Department nine months to answer, Matt Boyle of the
Daily Caller
obtained a series of emails showing that Holder's public relations director regularly enlisted Media Matters to attack reporters and others covering DOJ scandals.
6
Media Matters is a far-left advocacy group that masquerades as a nonpartisan truth-teller and media watchdog. One of its former staffers, Xochitl Hinojosa, also worked in the DOJ Public Affairs Office at the time.

In essence, Schmaler provided Media Matters with inside information and solicited attacks on former Justice Department lawyers such as J. Christian Adams, Andy McCarthy, and one of the authors, Hans von Spakovsky; as well as bloggers and journalists such as Mike Vanderboegh and William La Jeunesse of Fox News; and members of Congress such as Darrell Issa. Schmaler even sought an article from Media Matters attacking Judson Phillips, one of the founders of Tea Party Nation. All of this was intended to dampen public interest and distract attention from scandals like the dismissal of the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case or the investigation into Operation Fast and Furious.

Schmaler is the same person who yelled at former CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson about her covering the investigation into Operation Fast and Furious. Schmaler wouldn't put anything in writing in response to questions from Attkisson and complained about CBS's “unfair and biased” coverage because Attkisson—as opposed to the
Washington Post
and the
New York Times
—was “the only one who thinks this a story” and wouldn't give the administration favorable coverage.
7

This conduct was reprehensible and unethical, since it involved the use of government resources to abuse private citizens and journalists guilty only of reporting on the Justice Department's malfeasance. It was also unprecedented—there is no evidence that the Public Affairs Office at Justice of any prior administration, Democratic or Republican, ever enlisted outsiders to attack its critics.

But the attacks engineered by Schmaler on Christopher Coates were especially unethical and unprofessional. Coates is the former chief of the Voting Section who was forced out by Holder and Thomas Perez because he insisted on telling the truth about the New Black Panthers case and the racially discriminatory policies of the Civil Rights Division. At the time Schmaler was soliciting attacks on Coates from Media Matters, he was still an employee of the Justice Department, so Schmaler was directing attacks on one of the department's own employees at a time when he was prosecuting cases for Justice!

That is the kind of behavior one expects from banana republics, not from the chief law enforcement agency of the U.S. government. Schmaler was also potentially violating the federal law that bars retaliation against whistle-blowers like Adams and Coates, who had blown the lid off the false Justice Department claims that no political appointees had been involved in the decision to dismiss the Black Panther case.

Yet at his May 15, 2013, hearing when Holder was specifically asked by Representative Blake Farenthold (R-TX) if the Justice Department was “regularly still consulting with Media Matters for spinning your PR stories?” Holder's unbelievable answer was that “I'm not sure I know what you're talking about.”
8
There is no question that the attorney general would have been briefed by his aides about Schmaler's devious machinations with Media Matters once it became public even if he didn't know about it ahead of time.

In fact, there is little doubt that when the story first came out in the
Daily Caller
, it would have been at the top of the media summary that is received by the attorney general and other senior managers every day and which one of the authors reviewed regularly when he worked at the Justice Department. There is also no question that such a revelation would have been a matter of discussion in the attorney general's office by his staff. Unless Holder was suffering from acute memory loss, he knew exactly what Farenthold was talking about.

Unfortunately, Holder doesn't just have a contemptuous attitude toward the members of Congress and a dismissive attitude toward their oversight responsibilities. As an editorial by
Investor's Business Daily
pointed out in 2013, Holder also has a “long history of lying to Congress” about topics ranging from “what he knew about targeting reporters” to Operation Fast and Furious: “As early as the New Back Panthers case, Eric Holder had a problem with the truth.”
9

But this habit of Holder's started long before he ever became attorney general, when Congress was investigating the last-minute pardons issued during the final days of the Clinton administration, including clemency for wanted fugitive Marc Rich. During a hearing by a House committee investigating the pardons on February 14, 2001, he told Congress under oath that “Mr. Rich's name was unfamiliar to me” in 1999 when he helped Jack Quinn, Rich's attorney, get a pardon for Rich.
10

Yet when Holder was the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia in 1995, he sued a Swiss company for fraudulently obtaining government contracts by concealing its ties to Rich. The complaint that Holder personally signed specifically talked about Marc Rich and his concealed involvement with the company.
11
When Holder finally settled the case by getting a $1.2 million payment, the
Wall Street Journal
reported on Holder's announcement that the case over the fugitive financier's involvement in the company had been settled.
12
This settlement, “Holder told the
Journal
, ended a broader investigation his office had been conducting into Rich's business interests.”
13
Of course, that settlement did not resolve the outstanding criminal charges that caused Rich to flee the United States and were the subject of the pardon signed by Bill Clinton in 2001.

During his 2009 confirmation hearings, Holder repeated his supposed ignorance. But as discussed elsewhere in this book, Holder was well aware of the details of Rich's criminal behavior and the underlying facts of his record. So he blatantly misled Congress on two separate occasions about his involvement in the pardon and his prior knowledge of Rich's criminal activities.

The Justice Department consistently lied to the public and in sworn testimony about the 2009 dismissal of the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case. When Holder was specifically asked about this on March 1, 2011, before the House Appropriations Subcommittee (responsible for the Justice Department's budget), he falsely claimed that the “decisions made in the New Black Panther Party case were made by career attorneys in the department.”
14

But in a lawsuit by Judicial Watch over the Justice Department's failure to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request for internal communications on the New Black Panther case, federal Judge Reggie Walton specifically found, “The documents reveal that political appointees within DOJ were conferring about the status and resolution of the New Black Panther Party case in the days preceding the DOJ's dismissal of claims in that case, which would appear to contradict Assistant Attorney General Perez's testimony that political leadership was not involved in that decision.”
15

Based on Judge Walton's findings and the internal Justice Department communications discussed in his court order, there is no question that Holder misled Congress about the dismissal of the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case—testimony that the Justice Department has never corrected.

Holder also misled Congress about his knowledge of Operation Fast and Furious, the reckless Justice Department operation that supplied hundreds of weapons to Mexican criminal and drug cartels, as well as the Justice Department's handling of the contempt citation against him. The House of Representatives on June 28, 2012, held Holder in contempt of Congress for his failure to comply with a congressional subpoena for documents related to the investigation of this reckless Justice Department and ATF operation.
16

Normally, the Justice Department enforces contempt citations in court. Holder appointed Ronald Machen, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, to supposedly make that decision independently without consultation with anyone else at Justice. Machen reports to Holder, though, so he was not really an independent counsel—Holder refused to appoint a truly independent counsel. Representative Issa asked Holder at a May 15, 2013, oversight hearing whether Machen had made an “independent” decision not to enforce the contempt citation.

Holder answered as follows: “I did not order Mr. Machen not to do anything with regard—I will not characterize it—the contempt finding from this Congress. He made the determination about what he was going to do on his own. So I did not have anything to do with that.”
17

But, in fact, Eric Holder's deputy, James Cole, before the clerk of the House had even transmitted the contempt resolution to Machen, sent a letter to the Speaker of the House of Representatives saying that the Justice Department had “determined” that Holder's response to the subpoena for Operation Fast and Furious documents “does not constitute a crime, and therefore the Department will not bring the congressional contempt citation before a grand jury or take any other action to prosecute the Attorney General.”
18