Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R) breathed a little bit of life into a fringe idea that President Barack Obama will order that all black criminals not be prosecuted in the U.S.
Kobach made the comments Sunday in response to a caller on the Kris Kobach Show.
“Word is going to come down that there just won’t be any prosecutions of black criminals and I can see it happening,” the caller said, according to the Topeka Capital-Journal. “I don’t think I’m nuts for envisioning it.”
Kobach seemingly didn’t think the caller was completely nuts either.
“Well, it’s already happening, more or less, in the case of civil rights laws,” Kobach said in response. “So I guess it’s not a huge jump. I think it’s unlikely but, you know, I’ve learned to say with this president never say never.”
Kobach’s response referred to a November 2008 case in which two members of the New Black Panther Party were accused of voter intimidation at a polling station. The charges were later narrowed and then were dropped by the Justice Department. As a result, conservatives accused Attorney General Eric Holder of mishandling the case.
The caller said Holder’s mishandling revealed a larger plot by the Obama administration to protect black criminals from prosecution.
“We’ve already seen it from Eric Holder in his failure to prosecute the Black Panthers who, a strong case could be made, there was certainly enough to charge them with voter intimidation but that case didn’t go anywhere because the attorney general elected to ignore it,” the caller said.
“Well, he did more than ignore it,” Kobach said in response. “He basically made it true and gave us a clue, through various public statements that the civil rights laws were only to protect minority races and he was not going to be enforcing them to the benefit of white people who are discriminated against on the basis of their race.”
