South Carolina

BREAKING: Justice Department Blocks South Carolina's Voter ID Law

Ryan J. Reilly | December 23, 2011, 4:03PM

Updated: Dec. 23, 2011, 5:28PM

The U.S. Department of Justice will block the voter ID provisions of an election law passed in South Carolina earlier this year because the state's own statistics demonstrated that the photo identification requirement would have a much greater impact on non-white residents, DOJ said in a letter to the state on Friday.

The decision places the federal government squarely in opposition to the types of voter ID requirements that have swept through mostly Republican-controlled state legislatures.

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Vern Buchanan

Sessions Defends Buchanan Over Allegations Of Illegal Campaign Finance Scheme

Ryan J. Reilly | December 16, 2011, 2:00PM

Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL)

Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, is defending NRCC Finance Chair Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL) over allegations he schemed to illegally reimburse employees of his former car dealership for donations to his political campaign.

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Joe Arpaio

Arpaio Critics: Want Reform? Sheriff Joe Has To Go

Ryan J. Reilly and Jillian Rayfield | December 15, 2011, 5:12PM

The findings in DOJ's investigation of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office didn't surprise many local longtime critics of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, many of whom said Thursday that his departure would be the only way to put a stop to his office's deep-seated bias.

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DOJ

DOJ Report: DEA Needs To Be More Covert About Their Undercover Airplanes

Ryan J. Reilly | December 14, 2011, 12:55PM

The Drug Enforcement Administration needs to keep their undercover aerial operations targeting narcotics trafficking along the Mexican border and in foreign countries a bit more hush-hush, according to a new report from the Justice Department's inspector general.

As of March, DOJ investigators searching the FAA aircraft registration database were able to find records of 25 domestically-based DEA aircraft that "should have been registered covertly to fictitious or cover organizations but that were not." As of Sept. 7, 13 DEA aircraft that should have been registered covertly still weren't (TPM found five planes registered still registered to the DEA in a search of the FAA's database on Wednesday).

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Eric Holder

Obama Administration Backs Bill Combating Voter Intimidation, Deception

Ryan J. Reilly | December 13, 2011, 6:05PM

United States Attorney General Eric Holder

The Obama administration is signaling support for a forthcoming Senate bill that would impose tough criminal and civil penalties on individuals who make and distribute campaign literature with false information intended to deceive voters and suppress turnout.

Attorney General Eric Holder will announce in a major speech on voting rights in Texas on Tuesday night that Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Ben Cardin (D-MD) will introduce the bill on Wednesday. The bill will be "narrowly tailored" to respect provisions of the First Amendment, according to Cardin's office. It will apply to "only a small category of false communications that occur during the last 90 days before an election, such as literature listing the wrong date or time for the election, giving inaccurate information about voter eligibility, or promoting false endorsements of candidates." A nearly identical bill was introduced by Schumer and then-Sen. Barack Obama back in 2007 but never passed.

In his speech at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library And Museum in Austin, Holder will call for election systems "that are free from fraud, discrimination, and partisan influence" and will say that protecting the right to vote and combating discrimination "must be viewed, not only as a legal issue - but as a moral imperative." Holder's speech also offers a challenge:

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Fast And Furious

Emails Show DOJ Trusted ATF Denials Of Fast And Furious 'Gun Walking' Allegations

Ryan J. Reilly | December 5, 2011, 3:06PM

Attorney General Eric Holder testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee in a hearing examining the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms' botched gun-walking operation, Fast and Furious. November, 8, 2011.

It was early 2011. Reports that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had let guns "walk" across the border to Mexico were only just starting to emerge. Sen. Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter to to the Justice Department on Jan. 27 asking if an assault rifle bought by a suspected "straw purchaser" during an ATF-authorized transaction with a firearms dealer was found at the murder scene of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.

If contemporaneous emails sent by Justice Department officials are any indication, they didn't have any clue what Grassley was talking about. And when officials in the U.S. Attorney's office in Arizona and at ATF headquarters assured them gun walking wasn't going on, they took them at their word and adopted that false position as the official stance of the Justice Department.

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