Bias in the Justice Department

More allegations that the Justice Department was biased in its handling of the Black Panthers voter intimidation case:

Coates dismissed as weak the department's rationale for abandoning the case, saying the department let one of the Black Panther members off the hook because a local police officer had determined he was a Democratic Party poll watcher. Coates called it "extraordinarily strange" for the department to rely on this and urged the commission to consider what the legal backlash would have been if the Panthers had been members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Here's the transcript of the testimony of Christopher Coates before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. It appears that the problem goes far beyond the handling of a single case.


This could - and should - become a very big story.