The Justice Department has sidelined an honest attorney for enforcing the law

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, who were in paramilitary uniforms (one of them waving a nightstick) threatening elderly white voters at a polling station in Philadelphia during last year’s elections.

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.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has opened an investigation of the unexplained dismissal. It has subpoenaed Coates, but Justice has ordered Coates not to appear before the panel. Indeed, the partisan Democrats running the Civil Rights Division have barred Coates and another career lawyer, Christian Adams, from providing any assistance to the commission or the Republican congressmen investigating the matter. What are they so afraid will be revealed?

The decision to reassign Coates more than 450 miles outside the Capitol Beltway (and possibly out of range of that subpoena) was made by Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez, an Obama political appointee. It’s virtually inconceivable that the move was made without consultation and approval from the highest offices of the Justice Department.

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