Christopher Coates testimony on the Black Panther case

This really is riveting.
I'm not kidding.
Please watch this.


Please watch it. Christopher Coates was under pressure from the DOJ not to testify. He did anyway, as someone who worked for the Voter Rights division.
Coates testimony is that there were people inside of the DOJ who felt that Voter Intimidation cases should not be pursued if the victim is white. Furthermore, when the Obama administration took over the DOJ, they promoted those people into positions of power. Coates was then told that he should only pursue 'traditional' Voter Rights intimidation cases, which he understood as being where a non-white person was the victim.

Black Panthers, as covered by the American Prospect

Adam Serwer is a blogger on the American Prospect website. As someone who blogs about Civil Rights, Adam decided to throw himself headfirst into the whole Black Panther controversy.

Of course, instead of focusing on the Civil Rights case, the one that the Obama administration won and subsequently decided to reduce the charges on, Adam instead decided to focus on the criminal charges:

This means that the case was downgraded to a civil case 11 days before Obama was inaugurated, 26 days before Eric Holder became attorney general, and about nine months before Thomas Perez was confirmed as head of the Civil Rights Division

Go read the article. Then read the update:

So, I just wanted to clear something up: I wrote my post yesterday about the Justice Department's decision not to pursue criminal charges against the NBPP during the Bush administration because I had seen conservatives arguing that it was made by the Obama administration. It wasn't. I did not mean to suggest that the civil case, which the DoJ dropped in May of last year after receiving a preliminary injunction against the only NBPP member in Philadelphia who was walking around with a baton, was dismissed during the Bush administration. I apologize if any of my writing has been unclear on this point or any confusion has resulted because I misstated the accusation of who wanted the criminal case dismissed.

I haven't seen one conservative arguing about the criminal complaints, so I followed the links above to the Media Matter's article. Media Matters has O'Reilly talking to two legal analysts who both complain that they have no idea why criminal complaints were not pursued.

But the bulk of the story is why the civil suit was dropped after they won.

Getting back to Adam;
The comments pretty much say it all, but Adam had to 'update' his blog several times. It finally got to the point where he had to issue this blog.
Now I have to give Adam partial credit. In his original post, he does talk about the civil case.
However, its clear to me that he was trying to muddy the waters by talking about the criminal case. As I mentioned before, O'Reilly was the only one I heard talking about the criminal case, and only in that clip that Media Matters focused on.

The tagline of the American Prospect is "Liberal Intelligence". Skipping past the obvious oxymoron, I wish that the Prospect and Adam would adhere to their tagline.