Paul Kiel October 29, 2007, 11:50 AM

When John Tanner, the chief of the Justice Department’s voting rights section, goes before Congress tomorrow, he’ll have a lot to answer for.

One of the most uncomfortable topics, to be sure, will be continuing charges of discrimination in the section that is supposed to be the font of civil rights enforcement — charges that point squarely at Tanner himself. Things became so bad that a 33-year veteran analyst sent out an email to colleagues on her last day last December: “I leave with fond memories of the Voting Section I once knew, and I am gladly escaping the ‘Plantation’ it has become. For my colleagues still under the ‘whip’, hold on - ‘The Times They are A Changing.’”

In an interview with NPR, that analyst, Teresa Lynn, made clear who was holding the whip in that metaphor. It was “aimed toward the leadership of the section,” she said, “both the section chief [Tanner] and the deputy chief of section five [Yvette Rivera].” Lynn told NPR that she got “high fives” from her former colleagues for her parting shot.

We first reported on charges of discrimination in the section — charges that resulted in at least two Equal Employment Opportunity complaints from African-American employees — in May. But the same problems still persist today, Carl Goldman, executive director of AFSCME’s Council 26, the union that represents non-attorney staff in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, told me:

The employees feel that [Tanner] has decimated the voting rights program… and they’re glad that he is being called to task by Congress.

We’re hopeful that lawmakers will ask him about the problems the employees face: about the many employees who felt they had to leave due to his poor leadership, the atmosphere of fear that he has created, and the severe damage he’s done to the cause of voting rights.

In addition to the charges of discrimination against the non-attorney staff, Tanner will have to answer for the drain of African-American attorneys in the section. As of May, only two of the approximately thirty-five attorneys in the voting rights section were African-American.

Civil Rights Division