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The requirement, which the administration intended to back using data from their own "Fast and Furious" gun smuggling, now faces multiple suits. Firearms retailers, a leading industry trade organization, and Americans’ most powerful gun lobby are making good on a threat to challenge the Obama administration’s attempt to assert gun control measures by executive fiat. The legal challenge is being supported by the Second Amendment Task Force, a bipartisan group of congressional legislators that asserts the ATF lacks the authority “to track the purchases of law-abiding Americans.”J&G Sales in Prescott, AZ, and Foothills Firearms in Yuma, AZ, intend to challenge...

DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz makes a revealing comment in an interview: The assistant attorney general for civil rights, Tom Perez, has assured Americans and members of Congress that the Voting Section [at DOJ] is looking very closely at the laws that have recently passed. They’ve acknowledged the concern that both I and others have expressed about the potential for these laws to have an undue and disproportionate impact on racial minorities and the poor. I trust that Tom Perez and Attorney General Eric Holder are reviewing these laws very seriously. This almost certainly means that the DOJ Voting Section is...

Attorney General Eric Holder finally got fed up Tuesday with claims that the Justice Department went easy in a voting rights case against members of the New Black Panther Party because they are African American. Holder's frustration over the criticism became evident during a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing as Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas) accused the Justice Department of failing to cooperate with a Civil Rights Commission investigation into the handling of the 2008 incident in which Black Panthers in intimidating outfits and wielding a club stood outside a polling place in Philadelphia. The Attorney General seemed to take personal offense...

President Obama and Harry Reid have used their appointment powers to stop the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights' investigation into the New Black Panther Party voter-intimidation case. (Don't miss James Poulos' PJTV interview with von Spakovsky and J. Christian Adams from CPAC.) For a while, at least, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights was investigating the Justice Department’s race-based decision to dismiss the New Black Panther Party voter-intimidation case — a case DOJ had effectively won. But now President Obama and Harry Reid have used their appointment powers to stop the investigation. Never mind the incontrovertible (and mounting) evidence that...

"The U.S. Justice Department denied a claim made to lawmakers that two guns sold in purchases sanctioned by federal firearms agents were later used in a shootout that left a Border Patrol agent dead near the Arizona-Mexico border,” the Associated Press reports. Assistant U.S. Attorney General Ronald Weich said in a letter obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press that the claim that firearms agents sanctioned or knowingly allowed the sale of assault weapons to straw buyers who then brought them to Mexico is false. Mike Vanderboegh of Sipsey Street Irregulars obtained the pdf file of Weich’s letter to Sen. Charles...

Inspector-general’s report criticizes Christie's travel as U.S. attorney Washington (AP) - New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who is raising his national political profile as a government cost-cutter, engaged in a pattern of abuse when he was U.S. attorney by billing taxpayers to stay at luxury hotels, the Justice Department's inspector general said . The inspector general found that the Republican governor, who recently killed the construction of a new rail line to New York under the Hudson River, did not comply with federal travel regulations or provide acceptable justification for lodging costs that exceeded the government rate. Christie was one...

Todd F. Gaziano is very angry at the Justice Department (DOJ). As one of the commissioners on the U.S. Commission of Civil Rights, he says ...

The news that Christopher Coates, former chief of the Justice Department’s Voting Section, is set to testify Friday before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is crucial to the panel’s investigation of allegations that the Obama administration has not enforced the nation’s civil rights laws in a race-neutral manner.The testimony by Coates, a career government lawyer, is expected to shed light on whether DOJ: • Discriminated against white voters in dismissing the voter-intimidation case against two members of the New Black Panther Party and the party itself that arose from incidents at a Philadelphia polling place on Election Day...

The Justice Department filed another lawsuit against immigration practices by Arizona authorities, saying Monday that a network of community colleges acted illegally in requiring noncitizens to provide their green cards before they could be hired for jobs. The suit against the Phoenix area Maricopa Community Colleges was filed less than two months after the Justice Department sued Arizona and Gov. Jan Brewer (R) over the state's new immigration law. It also comes as the department is investigating Joe Arpaio, the sheriff in Maricopa County, who is known for tough immigration enforcement. In Monday's lawsuit, Justice officials said the colleges discriminated...

(Reuters) - The government has launched a criminal probe into BP Plc's (BP.L) massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Attorney General Eric Holder said on Tuesday. Federal agencies, including the FBI, are participating in the probe and "if we find evidence of illegal behavior, we will be forceful in our response," Holder told reporters after meeting with state and federal prosecutors in New Orleans.

Despite repeatedly voicing concerns about Arizona's new immigration enforcement law in recent weeks and threatening to challenge it, Attorney General Eric Holder said Thursday he has not yet read the law -- which is only 10 pages long. "I have not had a chance to -- I've glanced at it," Holder said at a House Judiciary Committee hearing when asked by Rep.Ted Poe, R-Texas whether Holder has read the state law cracking down on illegal immigrants. "I'll give you my copy of it if you would like," Poe responded.

Can Attorney General Eric Holder rightly be called “the ugliest of things”? Without any doubt, Holder has proven to epitomize “the ugliest of things” as coined by esteemed philosopher John Stuart Mill. Mill speaks of a “degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling” as being “the ugliest of things”. Such ugliness is not about one’s personal appearance, rather, it refers to a defective and dubious character which causes one to abandon and scorn the sacred duty of protecting one’s nation. The brilliant words of John Stuart Mill are prophetic in describing Holder and his ilk nearly 150 years before these...

Attorney General Eric Holder says nine Obama appointees in the Justice Department have represented or advocated for terrorist detainees before joining the Justice Department. But he does not reveal any names beyond the two officials whose work has already been publicly reported. And all the lawyers, according to Holder, are eligible to work on general detainee matters, even if there are specific parts of some cases they cannot be involved in. Holder's admission comes in the form of an answer to a question posed last November by Republican Sen. Charles Grassley. Noting that one Obama appointee, Principal Deputy Solicitor General...

All seven Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee have signed a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder seeking to learn who made the decision to treat Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the accused Christmas Day terrorist bomber, as a criminal suspect rather than an enemy combatant. On the same day he tried to detonate a bomb aboard a Northwest Airlines plane in Detroit, Abdulmutallab, who was trained by al Qaeda in Yemen, was informed of his Miranda right to remain silent and given a government-paid lawyer. He then refused to cooperate with U.S. authorities. The letter is signed by GOP Sens. Jeff...

The Democrat-controlled House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday rejected by a 15-14 vote a resolution of inquiry that would have forced the Justice Department to tell Congress why it dismissed a civil complaint against members of the New Black Panther Party who disrupted a Philadelphia polling place in the November 2008 election. The party-line vote had been sought by Rep. Frank R. Wolf, Virginia Republican, who, along with Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, said they have been unable to get information from the department on the complaint's dismissal. "I am deeply disappointed that the...

The Justice Department told the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights to drop dead yesterday. The growing controversy is over a voter-intimidation case involving the radical New Black Panther Party and why Justice is carrying water for the villains. The department's intransigence should frighten Congress because Justice is asserting broad privileges that undermine congressional authority to oversee government's executive branch. That's why the timing is propitious today for the House Judiciary Committee to consider, and approve, a resolution of inquiry introduced by Rep. Frank Wolf, Virginia Republican. The Wolf resolution would direct Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to "transmit to...

By QHillyer on Jan. 12, 2010 into Water Cooler Much more on this later. For now, just a heads-up that the Justice Department "responded" to subpoenas from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, concerning the New Black Panther voting intimidation case, by citing (or inventing) seven different grounds to "object to each and every Interrogatory and Document Request" from the Commission......

WASHINGTON -- The nation's first black attorney general is defending Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid over racial remarks about Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign. Eric Holder tells The Associated Press that Reid is a good man, and as Holder put it: "I don't think that there is a prejudiced bone in his body."

...the American people played a sick practical joke on themselves by electing a clown (more like the Joker as portrayed by the late Heath Ledger) who promptly staffed his Administration with a collection of equally unqualified freaks as shown below. Unless voters close this sideshow by removing the Democratic majority in the House and Senate, its admission price will consist of trillions of dollars in taxpayer money and economic damage to the United States. Janet Napolitano demonstrated her total unfitness to lead Homeland Security when she defined gun owners, pro-lifers, veterans of our Armed Forces, and people who oppose illegal...

Reporting from Phoenix - The day after the federal government told Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio that he could no longer use his deputies to round up suspected illegal immigrants on the street, the combative Arizona sheriff did just that. He launched one of his notorious "sweeps," in which his officers descend on heavily Latino neighborhoods, arrest hundreds of people for violations as minor as a busted headlight and ask them whether they are in the country legally. "I wanted to show everybody it didn't make a difference," Arpaio said of the Obama administration's order. Arpaio calls himself "America's toughest...