I write at Greg's place about the conclusions of the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility that conservatives' accusations of racism and politicization at the Justice Department based on the NBPP voter-intimidation case are baseless:
It should come as a shock to no one that the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility has “found no evidence that the decision to dismiss the case against three of the four defendants was predicated on political considerations” or that there was “improper political interference or influence from within or outside the Department in connection with the decision in the case.” As Ryan J. Reilly reports, this comes after OPR interviewed numerous staffers and sifted through “thousands of pages of internal Department e-mails, memoranda, and notes.”
To sum up: The Black Panther tale — a years-long journey into the fevered right-wing imagination that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and led to no shortage of scurrilous accusations of racism against the first black president and attorney general — was a colossal waste of time and taxpayer resources.
Well, maybe not completely a waste of time, at least not for Republicans, who have spent the last two years using the case to bolster a white populist narrative of racism in the Obama administration. Just a waste of time for everyone else.
