Justice stonewalls congress on Black Panther intimidation

For more than a year, I have been urging the U.S. Department of Justice to release all the documents surrounding the dismissal of U.S. v. New Black Panther Party and to make a genuine attempt to answer the questions asked by members of Congress and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights about the case. My requests have been rebuffed at each turn by the department.

As a strong supporter of the Voting Rights Act, I was deeply troubled by Justice's questionable dismissal of such an important voter intimidation case in Philadelphia, where I grew up and my father was a policeman.

My commitment to voting rights is unquestioned. In 1981, I was the only member—Republican or Democrat—of the Virginia delegation in the U.S. House of Representatives to vote for the Voting Rights Act and was harshly criticized then by the editorial page of the Richmond Times Dispatch, the state's leading newspaper. I was criticized, too, in 2006 by another newspaper in my district when I supported the act's reauthorization.

From the beginning, I have asked the question: why did the Justice Department dismiss this serious case? If this is not a clear case of voter intimidation, I do not know what is.

This case was brought in January 2009 by career attorneys in the department's Civil Rights Division against the New Black Panther Party and several of its members—one of whom brandished a nightstick—for deploying uniformed men to a polling station in Philadelphia on Election Day November 2008 to harass and intimidate voters.

One of the witnesses of the Election Day incident—Bartle Bull—a veteran civil rights activist who served as Bobby Kennedy's New York campaign manager in 1968, has publicly called this "the most blatant form of voter intimidation" he has ever seen.

Breitbart and crew sting Philly ACORN

The two independent filmmakers who posed as a pimp and a prostitute and received advice from ACORN employees in five cities on how to skirt tax and immigration laws claim the community organizer group lied when it said the pair were shown the door without receiving assistance from staffers in its Philadelphia office.

James O'Keefe, 25, and Hannah Giles, 20, played a heavily-edited video on Wednesday depicting their visit to ACORN's Philadelphia office on July 24. Giles, clad in a fur coat and leather skirt, posed as a prostitute, while O'Keefe played the role of her pimp. The pair claim they were not "kicked out" of the office without assistance from ACORN employee Katherine Conway-Russell, as has been reported.

"At no point were we kicked out and at no point were we asked to leave," O'Keefe told reporters at the National Press Club in Washington. "Why did the Philadelphia press report were we kicked out?"