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I certainly hope that next week's House Judiciary Committee questioners are duly prepared to ask about these serious matters when they are looking at Mr. John K. Tanner, DOJ Voting Section Chief, across the table. Resurrecting Jim Crow: The Erratic Resume of the Voting Section Chief07 May 2007 When John K. Tanner replaced Joe Rich as section chief of the Justice Department's Voting Section in 2005, a breathtaking politicization -- already under way after Alex Acosta was put in charge of the Civil Rights Division -- accelerated sharply. The exodus of talent, expertise, and knowledge of civil rights law in the two years under Tanner's stewardship is numbing. Roughly 50% of the staff1 -- attorneys, including many of the top litigators, researchers and analysts -- have left, and Tanner has waged an aggressive effort to remake the section in his own image -- not an image that most people who promote the core mission of the Voting Rights Act, which the Section is primarily responsible for enforcing, would support. ..... Tanner, the new Section Chief, who received his law degree by attending American University night school, cites his early civil rights bona fides in a recent FLA-Law piece "'I would go into the projects and knock on doors and take people to the federal registrars,' explained Tanner, who met King during this time."
Yet according to many insiders, Tanner -- who was born and spent his early years in Alabama, graduating in 1967 from Indian Springs School near Birmingham -- has in just a little over 2 years essentially gutted the ability of the Voting Section to protect the voting rights of these most vulnerable members of our society.
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Bob Kengle, in an May 1st interview, "Former DoJ Official: I left Due to Institutional Sabotage," reports that:
<...> by late 2004, I did not believe that I could ensure that following the law and facts would remain a higher priority than partisan favoritism. This was based partly upon my expectation that the Administration, if returned to office, would feel less constraint against heavy-handed management and biased enforcement than had been the case in the aftermath of the controversial 2000 election. To put it bluntly, before 2004 the desire to politicize the Voting Section's work was evident, but it was tempered by a recognition that there were limits to doing so. That such constraints diminished over time is evidenced by the well-known and ham-fisted handling of decisions involving Texas' congressional redistricting plan in late 2003 and Georgia's voter ID law in 2005.
Critics point to both of these widely-known instances (the 2003 Texas congressional redistricting plan and the Georgia voter ID law in 2005) as evidence that the political appointees or "front office" and their all too obliging protégés were using redistricting and voter suppression to manipulate elections.
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In sum, after John Tanner changed the memorandum policy, Voting Section analysts and attorneys could no longer make written recommendations that the Department object to a change in a state's voter laws that would infringe on minorities' voting rights. They could only 1) recommend that no objection be made or 2) provide arguments for and against objection. The ability to recommend an objection in writing has been completely stripped.
As former Voting Section Trial Attorney David Becker, now the Director of the Democracy Campaign at People For the American Way, explained it to ePluribus Media researchers: "The primary thing for which the career staff have been hired is to use their experience and judgment to make recommendations regarding their investigations and litigation. The only possible justification for forbidding such recommendations is to eliminate a paper trail, and thus avoid accountability. "
A third troubling precedent occurred in the aftermath of the 2004 election and accusations of widespread voter suppression in Ohio. Again, Tanner seemed willing to serve the political agenda of his bosses. A source who left the Voting Section in 2004 notes that Tanner's June 29th 2005 letter closing the investigation into the distribution of voting machines in Franklin Country, Ohio reads instead like a legal brief supporting the use of disparate numbers of machines in predominantly white and predominantly black precincts, arguing that such disparity did not violate the Voting Rights Act.
Described by sources as repugnant, Tanner's 4-page letter doesn't merely note that the investigation is closed, but also develops convoluted excuses for why black voters didn't have enough machines and white voters did. Ironically, and apparently undercutting its own excuse-making rationale, the letter whirls around again to praise the election Board's decision to increase the number of voting machines for Franklin county by two fifths, acquiring approximately 2,100 new machines, thus increasing totals from 2,904 to 5,000.
The letter is notable for two reasons. First, according to the source, historically the DoJ never writes such a letter when it finishes an investigation and determines that there is no reason to proceed. Traditionally, it merely writes that it is closing the investigation. Second, Tanner's signature is the only one that appears on the letter closing the investigation and no other DoJ attorneys were on the distribution list. So, apparently, Tanner was the sole attorney assigned to that investigation, itself unusual since Voting Section cases are always staffed by more than one attorney. The assignment is also odd because Section Chiefs rarely, if ever, handle investigations.
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These same sources suggest that after Tanner returned to the Voting section, he set out to undermine then-Section Chief Joe Rich, clearing the position for himself, a career move he is rumored to have planned since 1995. Apparently, once he achieved these goals, Tanner contributed to an environment that has forced out multitudes of career staff, people that had dedicated their professional life to Civil Rights and thus taking with them hundreds of years of civil rights law experience.
On the same day in April, for example, Joe Rich and Bob Kengle resigned and just like that, over 60 years of voting rights law enforcement knowledge left Justice. That lost knowledge of civil rights law and the experience have not been replaced. Many of these positions remain vacant; others have been filled by Federalist Society and Republican National Lawyers Association members.
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ePluribus Media has interviewed former DOJ employees and most of them have asked to be kept anonymous "for fear of retribution from the Department of Justice." The investigations of the firings of the U.S. Attorneys have revealed that some of these political appointees feared retaliation. Our sources tell us this was also the case with career staff. They are reported to have gone after individual attorneys' bar licenses and one source emphasized that these people will not only end one's career with the Justice Department, "they will take your livelihood ... anything else if you are so bold to speak the truth."Because the name Alex Acosta is mentioned in the above piece, I will include here some reasearch I've compiled on him. He is currently the USA for the Southern District of Florida. Another very shady character. "Is he a Bushie?", asked Harry Reid, about USA Alex Acosta, Southern District of Florida (Miami) |
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