doj – Moe Lane

Eric Holder tries to justify using DoJ planes for personal use.

Attorney General Eric Holder disputed a Government Accountability Office report on his use of Justice Department airplanes for personal trips, saying it overstated the number of trips he took and failed to recognize that some trips were job-related.

“My staff keeps telling me to take it easy, you know, well, this is one that gets me,” Holder told Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., during a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing. “There was this notion that we’ve taken — I think it was described as hundreds of personal trips. That was wrong. GAO counted flights, not round trips. And we looked at it and figured out from the time period that they were looking, we took not hundreds, but 27 personal, four combined — official and nonpersonal trips — and none of the trips that I took or that the [FBI] director took ever had an impact on the mission capability of those airplanes.”

Continue reading Eric Holder tries to justify using DoJ planes for personal use.

The New York Times sub rosa declares for the Obama administration in DoJ/AP dispute.

Or am I supposed to pretend that the fig lead of an ‘Op-Ed’ applies in this situation?

As former Justice Department officials who served in the three administrations preceding President Obama’s, we are worried that the criticism of the decision to subpoena telephone toll records of A.P. journalists in an important leak investigation sends the wrong message to the government officials who are responsible for our national security.

Personally, I give the NYT +1 for sticking to its status as a Democratic house organ, in the veritable teeth of opposition by pretty much everybody else in its ostensible profession; alas, I have to give them -10 for tacitly backing off of its official position from a week ago – and -100 for having to resort to Jamie Gorelick. I mean, not to poison the well or anything, here – but I’d check twice if Jamie Gorelick told me that the sky was blue. And then assume that she was right for entirely the wrong reasons.

So, yeah, I guess that I’m poisoning the well. But I’m right, dammit.

Moe Lane

PS: If the NYT wishes to smile and deny, they’re welcome to repeat their prior opposition to the DoJ’s targeting of the AP. They won’t – the Op-Ed is a lot more palatable to their commenters than the original editorial was, it seems – but they’re welcome to.

Eugene Robinson… points out troublesome behavior from Obama towards the press.

You know, Eugene Robinson, I can’t help but notice that… you are upset at the current administration’s policies on leaks.

The Obama administration has no business rummaging through journalists’ phone records, perusing their e-mails and tracking their movements in an attempt to keep them from gathering news. This heavy-handed business isn’t chilling, it’s just plain cold.

And that this situation you are now describing… is a troublesome one.

The unwarranted snooping, which was revealed last week, would be troubling enough if it were an isolated incident. But it is part of a pattern that threatens to redefine investigative reporting as criminal behavior.

And, indeed, this observation that you have now taken up – that we have been seeing this sort of thing from the Obama administration for some time – is… very much on topic. Yes.

:pause:

Thank you for pointing this out. And thank you for noting that prior administrations have shown more restraint in dealing with journalists.

Moe Lane

(Via Instapundit. Oh, my, yes: via Instapundit.)

QotD, The Huffington Post (!) Takes Media Matters To The Woodshed edition.

This is how you tell Lefty groups that have made it to the media from Lefty groups who have not: see which ones are upset that the Department of Justice secretly subpoenaed two months’ worth of Associated Press phone records.The Huffington Post is an example of the former; Media Matters for America is a good example of the latter. And the former is now taking the latter to task. Now, HuffPo is still Lefty, so you know that there’s still going to be some gratuitous stuff in there, but here’s a good bit.

If you’d like the press to listen to your urgings, you are probably not going to get that to happen while taking the position that it’s OK for the government to snoop through the phone records of reporters and editors. To the perspective of those reporters and editors who were subject to the DoJ’s probe, and to the journalists who take the AP’s side in this matter, you guys are just dicks for putting out these talking points.

Excuse the language. Not much else to say, otherwise, except to note HuffPo later notes that if Media Matters is going to be in a cleft stick if a Republican President ever does this. This is probably incorrect: after all, Media Matters’ corporate masters are indifferent to consistency. God knows that an objective look at the group’s success rate reveals that said masters are also indifferent to effectiveness…

Continue reading QotD, The Huffington Post (!) Takes Media Matters To The Woodshed edition.

Department of Justice: We hire Commies now!

Man, the Stephen Colbert thing must have been an unmitigated disaster for the Democrats: it actually shoved the Christopher Coates testimony on the New Black Panther Party situation onto the front page of the Washington Post. And not in an uniformly favorable way to the Department of Justice.

To do a quick review: back in 2008 a couple of Black Panthers engaged in a little voter intimidation in Philadelphia on Election Day. The Department of Justice went after that, it being against the law and everything… and then got told by the new administration in 2009 that only white people were going to be acceptable defendants of civil rights violations investigations done by the DoJ. We will now pause while the Left pretends that they are outraged, shocked, and indignant at the above. Well, they might be outraged: being a yellow-jacket doesn’t mean that you personally enjoy getting stung yourself. Quite the opposite, really.

Moving along, there’s been a steadily-growing controversy over the whole situation, and Coates’s testimony yesterday was a bombshell. Coates – who, as the WaPo itself notes, is a Clinton appointee with ties to the ACLU – essentially said everything that I did in the last paragraph, only much more formally, and with names liberally named. Which is why the front page, and not, say, the ombudsman’s; Christopher Coates is not an easy figure to dismiss. Although I expect that there’s a staffer over at MMfA, OfA, or the DNC with a new weekend project. Continue reading Department of Justice: We hire Commies now!

#rsrh Things got worse for NBPP apologists.

They may think that things got better, now that there’s apparently this big brouhaha over who is politicizing what in the DoJ/CCR dispute over the way the former let the NBPP walk away from sanctions voter intimidation. Nope! They got worse. Do you know why they got worse? Because now it’s becoming a mess. And do you know how they resolve messes in Dizzy City, particularly when high-ranking members of the opposition party are raising a stink?

Allahpundit knows:

Time for a special prosecutor to resolve the facts, perhaps?

If you didn’t wince, congratulations: you have not been captured by the Beltway yet. If you did, look on the bright side: it’s going to blow up in the Democrats’ faces this time. If you’re unhappy about that, well: kharma. It’s what’s for dinner; and besides, you can always get vicarious revenge in the next Republican administration. That’s how these things invariably go, really.

Moe Lane

PS: If you suspect that all of this means that I think that special prosecutors are a dumb idea in general… yup, I do. Because they are.