By Willie Deutsch
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has vowed to proceed with a civil rights inquiry against George Zimmerman. With all the things on Holder’s plate, one has to wonder how he has the time for it.
Recently, Holder celebrated the one year anniversary of being held in contempt of congress by the House of Representatives. On two separate bipartisan votes Eric Holder was held in both criminal and civil contempt of congress. This was “the first time in American history that Congress has imposed the sanction on a sitting member of a president’s cabinet.” The Criminal Contempt vote was 255-67 with 17 Democrats voting in support, and the Civil Contempt vote was 258-95 with 21 Democrats voting in support. The vote was brought up because Eric Holder was obstructing a congressional investigation into what happened in Fast and Furious. While Eric Holder forces Congress to hold him in contempt for obstructing an investigation, does he really have the moral authority to launch a controversial investigation of this level?
You also have to wonder if Eric Holder has the man power to pursue this investigation. The head of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, Thomas Perez, is about to become the new Secretary of Labor. Thomas Perez is a highly controversial Obama appointee, but in light of the new filibuster deal it looks like his confirmation is imminent. This means Holder is about to be without a head of the division of the Department of Justice that would be responsible for prosecuting George Zimmerman.
The Department of Justice should also open up about cases that it is stonewalling. There are still unanswered questions about Fast and Furious, the president’s illegal gun running program that directly lead to a number of deaths. The Department of Justice should spend their resources to get to the bottom of this situation before injecting itself into one of many tragic deaths.
We are coming up on the one year anniversary of the Benghazi massacre, a tragedy that saw the death of a US ambassador and three other American patriots at the hands of a terrorist mob. The president promised an investigation and justice. We have received neither. There are growing unanswered questions in the recent IRS, NSA, and journalist spying stories. In each of these cases, we have seen very weak explanations from the government and indifference when it comes to reform.
All these scandals are situations the American people have been demanding answers to and have been stonewalled by the Department of Justice. Yet, the Department of Justice seems to have no time to insure the American people have a transparent government that they can trust. Instead the Department of Justice spends its time and money trying to encourage protests in the Zimmerman/Martin case, and is about to file a case based on political pressure.
The truth is that the legal bar that the Justice Department would need to meet to convict on civil rights charges is much higher than the manslaughter charges which the state of Florida was unable to prove, and moving forward with the case reeks of political mobilization rather than jurisprudence.
The Department of Justice seems to have some incredibly misplaced priorities if it believes a case that has proven to be impossible to prove on the facts is a better use of time than the many scandals that have broken the American trust in government. This needs to change. The Department of Justice needs to begin helping provide answers to the Obama administration’s many scandals. Holder also needs to look himself in the mirror and ask if someone held in contempt of congress is the right man to bring charges against anyone.
Willie Deutsch is Editor-in-Chief for NetRightDaily.com, and Social Media Director for Americans for Limited Government.
