DoJ Lawyers Sue Dems By Day, Are GOP Lawyers By NightYesterday, McClatchy ran a piece about the high number of Justice Department employees who are also apparently active members of the Republican National Lawyers Association. Here’s something to bring that story home for you.
The Justice Department, we like to think, is a nonpartisan institution. And yet, on the Republican National Lawyers Association website, you can find 25 Justice Department employees listed under “Find a Republican Lawyer”. The listings, according to McClatchy, “strike some current and former Justice Department lawyers as inappropriate, especially given that several members of the group work in the Justice Department’s voting section, criminal division or as assistant U.S. attorneys.”
Take two of those listed names in particular:, Christian Adams and Joshua Rogers, both lawyers in the voting section. As I detailed last week, the section, which is charged with protecting minority voters from discrimination, has filed only two cases on behalf of African American voters during the Bush administration (and one of those cases they inherited from the Clinton administration).
But the section has, remarkably, pursued the first case to allege discrimination against white voters ever filed under the Voting Rights Act.
That case is United States v. Ike Brown and Noxubee County. It’s a case essentially against the Noxubee County Democratic Party — it’s one of the named defendants in the complaint. And Ike Brown is chairman of the county Democratic committee. The complaint alleges that Brown has been trying to limit whites’ participation in local elections.
And who are the two lawyers in the section handling the case? Christian Adams and Joshua Rogers.
Do you think there’s an appearance of conflict there?
