Intimidate Away

The Wall Street Journal is taking Holder's DoJ to task for allowing voter intimidation.

When Eric Holder became U.S. attorney general, he promised to administer the law in an objective, nonpolitical manner. So it's disappointing that the Justice Department had spent the last several months misinterpreting key voting rights laws for nakedly political reasons.

Exhibit A: Justice's inexplicable dismissal of a civil lawsuit for voter intimidation against the New Black Panther Party. The Black Panthers weren't content to endorse Barack Obama. They sent their members to the polls last November to "patrol election sites." Fox News aired a video of two Black Panthers in military-style uniforms in a Philadelphia precinct. One of them was carrying a nightstick.

The complaint the Justice Department filed in January (before Messrs. Obama and Holder took over) says the Panthers made "racial threats and racial insults" to voters and "menacing and intimidating, gestures, statements and movements directed at individuals who were present to aid voters." One witness, Bartle Bull, a civil-rights lawyer who worked with Charles Evers in Mississippi in the 1960s, called it the worst voter intimidation he had ever seen.

There's more.