The story comes out of South Carolina, one of more than two dozen states that have enacted laws requiring voters to show some type of official photo identification to vote. The idea is to prevent election fraud, but the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ) claims that requiring a photo ID at the polls discriminates against minorities because many are too poor to obtain them. The Florida congresswoman who chairs the Democratic National Committee, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, says voter ID laws are a “full-scale-assault” on minority voters designed to “rig” elections for Republicans.

The U.S. Supreme Court has disagreed with this assessment, upholding Indiana’s voter ID law in a 2008 ruling that says the state’s interest in protecting the integrity of the voting process outweighed the insufficiently proven burdens the law may impose on voters. “There is no question about the legitimacy or importance of the State’s interest in counting only the votes of eligible voters,” the nation’s highest court said in its decision.

Last spring the notoriously liberal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an Arizona requirement that voters show photo identification before casting a ballot. A renowned Latino rights group claimed the measure, approved by voters in 2004 to stop illegal immigrants from voting, discriminates against Hispanics because it creates a barrier for minorities that’s tantamount to a poll tax. If true, that would violate equal protection rights within the Constitution.

The rulings haven’t stopped the bloated civil rights division at Obama’s DOJ from wasting resources to legally challenge voter ID laws across the nation, most recently in Texas, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. Last week a federal court ordered the DOJ to pay South Carolina’s legal costs involving the multi-million-dollar challenge to a 2011 law requiring voters to show a photo ID before casting a ballot.

The DOJ tried blocking the measure, claiming that it disenfranchises hundreds of thousands of minority voters who don’t have a photo ID. A federal court disagreed and recently ordered the feds to pay a yet-to-be-determined portion of South Carolina’s $3.5 million legal tab over the “unnecessary” voter ID litigation. The DOJ is responsible for the high cost of the case, according to a South Carolina Attorney General rep quoted in a local newspaper story. For example, the DOJ delayed the case by 120 days and filed numerous frivolous motions.  

It’s an unprecedented move by any administration that’s outraged even the powerful leftist civil rights groups that usually support the president. The public was kept in the dark as the controversial measure was quietly enacted by Attorney General Eric Holder earlier this year without input or discussion from legislators under the auspice of fighting terrorism.

Details were uncovered by a mainstream newspaper that pieced together how the attorney general helped counterterrorism officials who wanted to create a government dragnet by sweeping up millions of records about U.S. citizens, even those not suspected of any crimes. Some top officials opposed the idea of this unprecedented government surveillance of U.S. citizens, according to the story, but Holder signed the changes into effect anyways.

The measure grants the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) the power to store dossiers on ordinary citizens, including flight records, casino-employee lists, those hosting foreign exchange students and other personal data for up to five years. There need not be any suspicion that the person presents any sort of danger or has committed any crimes. The idea is to study for “suspicious patterns of behavior.”

Under the changes the NCTC can also give foreign governments information on American civilians so that they can conduct analysis of their own on our citizens. One former senior Obama White House official calls it “breathtaking” in its scope. A top Homeland Security official who fought the changes says “this is a sea change in the way that the government interacts with the general public.”

Though little is known about the NCTC, it does appear to serve a purpose by keeping a database, known as Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), of more than 500,000 people suspected of terrorist activities or having terrorist ties. Under the new rules the government has the green light to gather and store anything it wants on any U.S. citizen, including everything from in health records to financial forms.

This seems to be in direct conflict with a law passed by Congress in the mid 70s specifically to prevent federal agents from rummaging through government files indiscriminately. The measure prohibits government agencies from sharing data with each other for purposes that aren’t “compatible” with the reason the data were originally collected.

Not surprisingly, the administration’s campaign to combat mosque intolerance is being heavily promoted while the shocking imam terrorist story gets swept under the rug. We only know about it because a central Florida reporter took the time to dig around and uncover the Orlando-area imam’s disturbing ties to an extremist group behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

The imam’s real name is Marcus Robertson but he goes by Abu Taubah and he preaches the Quran at the Masjid Al-Ihsaan Mosque in East Orange County. He also has an extensive criminal record, according to the news report. Imam Tubah is actually a convicted felon who has murdered people, attempted assassinations, taken hostages and tried to kill police officers. Last year, on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he planned an attack on U.S. military personnel overseas, according to prosecutors.

Authorities say Imam Taubah has deep ties to Islamic terrorists and that he was a bodyguard to Omar Abdel Rahman, the blink sheik behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The Egyptian-born militant Islamist was convicted after the ’93 attack of plotting to bomb several New York City landmarks and is currently in prison.

Hundreds of miles away in Miami last year, the feds raided a mosque with terrorist ties albeit under Obama’s new rules of engagement to assure cultural sensitivity towards Islam. A Pakistani imam named Hafiz Muhammed Sher Ali Khan and his relatives were charged with providing financial and material support to the Pakistani Taliban, which is associated with Al-Qaeda and has claimed responsibility for numerous attacks against American interests. Khan founded an Islamic school that supports the Taliban’s jihad while living in Pakistan and continued controlling and funding it as an imam in Miami, according to the federal indictment.

Considering these cases and others around the U.S., is it any wonder why some Americans may seem suspicious that a number of new mosques are popping up all over the country? The Obama Administration claims they are suffering unwarranted intolerance from what one top Department of Justice (DOJ) official calls “islamophobes.” In fact, a day after the Orlando terrorist imam story broke, the assistant attorney general in charge of the DOJ’s bloated civil rights division damned Muslim prejudice at the opening of a new mosque in Tennessee.

Addressing worshipers at the grand opening of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez said, “without question we are seeing real challenges to the civil rights of Muslim Americans,” especially in mosques. He referred to the offenders as “islamophobes” and assured that his agency is taking action, investigating over 800 incidents involving threats targeting Arabs, Muslims, Sikhs and south Asians. The DOJ is also working with state and local prosecutors in “numerous non-federal criminal prosecutions,” Perez said.

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The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (ATF) ran the once-secret program known as Operation Fast and Furious that allowed thousands of guns from the U.S. to be smuggled into Mexico so they could eventually be traced to drug cartels. Instead, federal law enforcement officers lost track of hundreds of weapons which have been used in an unknown number of crimes.

The lost guns have been linked to violence on both sides of the border, including the murder of a federal agent (Brian Terry) in Peck Canyon Arizona. In that case, the guns—assault weapons known as AK-47s—were traced through their serial numbers to a Glendale, Arizona dealer that led to a Phoenix man the feds repeatedly allowed to smuggle firearms into Mexico.

While this illegal government operation spiraled out of control, high-ranking officials at the DOJ were “absentee managers” who failed to provide leadership, according to congressional investigators. In a lengthy report made public this week, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee outlines a shameful management breakdown at the DOJ, which is responsible for supervising the ATF. “In fact, Fast and Furious had many enablers among the senior levels of the Justice Department,” the report says.

Making things worse, high-ranking DOJ officials with inside knowledge of the flawed gun-running scheme have refused to provide Terry’s family with accurate information. “Brian Terry’s family is still seeking answers 21 months after his death,” the report says, yet “two senior officials very close to the Attorney General who each had detailed knowledge of Fast and Furious, have been unable and unwilling to provide the Terry family any answers.”

Specifically, the report names Attorney General Eric Holder’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Monty Wilkinson, Acting Deputy Attorney General Gary Grindler and Associate Deputy Attorney General Ed Siskel as well as U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona, Dennis Burke. On dozens of occasions they repeated these lines when asked about the gun-running operation: “Did not recall” or “did not know.”

Last month the DOJ Inspector General issued its own 512-page report finding that four high-ranking agency officials, including Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer and Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jason Weinstein, knew about Fast and Furious yet took no action. Weinstein quickly resigned after the IG’s report was released, but Breuer remains in his office.

During testimony before a congressional panel, DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz said that the Obama White House obstructed his investigation into the botched gun-running sting by, among other things, refusing to provide internal communications crucial to the probe. Horowitz also blasted senior leadership at both the DOJ and ATF for doing “little in the immediate aftermath of Agent Terry’s shooting to try to learn how two weapons that had been purchased 11 months earlier by a previously identified subject of Operation Fast and Furious ended up at the murder scene.”

Judicial Watch launched an investigation into Operation Fast and Furious last summer and this month JW sued the DOJ and ATF for records requested under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) back in mid-July, 2011. Last fall JW obtained internal government documents that show the number of crimes connected to the gun-running experiment is significantly higher than the administration has chosen to disclose.  

The rate of violent crime increased by a whopping 17% last year, according to the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), marking the biggest jump since 1993. Property crimes also went up 11% last year. That means that in 2011 there were nearly 6 million violent victimizations and more than 17 million property victimizations, according to the DOJ figures.

In an apparent effort to downplay the alarming statistics the feds explain in a press release that the swelling of violent crime is due to an increase in the number of aggravated and simple assaults. There was no “statistically significant change” in the number of more serious crimes such as rapes, sexual assaults and robberies, according to the explanation.

The Obama Administration also asserts that the 2011 increase appears so large because crime rates were at historically low levels in 2010. The bottom line is that violent crime is growing at a much faster rate than the economy. One liberal news website quoted renowned criminal justice professor saying that the stagnant economy may be driving more Americans to break the law. It’s part of “larger problems,” the expert says.

Here are more unsettling statistics buried deep in the DOJ’s new crime report; there has been a large increase in the rate of violent victimizations for whites, Hispanics and younger people. That means white non-Hispanics and Hispanics experienced an increase in violent victimization rates, while the rate for black non-Hispanics was stable, according to the DOJ stats.

Additionally, crime rate in the suburbs is growing much faster than in the cities or rural areas, the government figures show. In 2011 suburbanites suffered a 20% in violent victimizations, according to the DOJ. Keep in mind that the feds admit in their report that the figures are probably much higher since only about 50% of violent victimizations were reported to police.

And what do they have in common? Shamefully, both are tight with the Obama Administration and wield tremendous influence in the government’s civil rights matters. We’re talking about Al Sharpton and the U.S.-based Hamas branch known as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

Later this month Sharpton, who has made the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ) his lapdog, will deliver the keynote address at CAIR’s annual shindig in Virginia. In its announcement, CAIR laughably refers to Sharpton as a “civil rights icon,” one of the “nation’s most respected civil rights leaders” and a “life-long advocate for social justice.”  

Sharpton and CAIR will take the opportunity to draw parallels between the current challenges faced by Muslims in the U.S. today and those faced by other minority communities throughout the nation’s history. After all, the CAIR statement says Sharpton has “been praised by President Obama as the voice of the voiceless and a champion for the downtrodden.”

Conveniently omitted from the press release is Sharpton’s shameful history, the fact that he’s a dangerous individual whose malicious rhetoric has led to serious violence and hatred of white people, especially Jews. Sharpton and his “community group,” National Action Network, were behind the deadly Harlem riots intended to drive Jewish businesses out of the area in the mid 1990s.

One of Sharpton’s picketers, an ex-con with an extensive criminal record, walked into a Jewish-owned clothing store with a gun, ordered all the black customers to leave and poured paint thinner throughout the store. He then set the place on fire, killing eight people. The whole thing started to protest the eviction of a black merchant subletting from the Jewish store owner who simply needed the space to expand his own business.

Sharpton made it a racial issue, created a “Buy Black” committee and rounded up troops to hit the streets. Jewish store owners were referred to as “crackers” and Sharpton proudly offered media sound bites that should still haunt him, but clearly don’t. Here are some excerpts: “We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so some white interloper can expand his business on 125th Street…There is a systematic and methodical strategy to eliminate our people from doing business on 125th Street….[O]ne of our brothers…is now being threatened.”

CAIR is an Islamic group that raises money for Hamas and was a co-conspirator in a federal terror-finance trial. It was founded in 1994 by three Middle Eastern extremists (Omar Ahmad, Nihad Awad and Rafeeq Jaber) who ran the American propaganda wing of Hamas, known then as the Islamic Association for Palestine. CAIR has extensive links to foreign and domestic Islamists, was a co-conspirator in a federal terror-finance case involving the Hamas front group Holy Land Foundation and is largely funded by Islamic terrorist-supporting countries. Read more in a 2007 Judicial Watch special report.

Regardless, the Obama Administration is tight with CAIR. In fact, a few months ago a news report revealed that President Obama’s deputies are holding hundreds of closed-door meetings with CAIR. The meetings are held so that government departments and agencies can discuss a “range of issues,” with CAIR, according to a White House director quoted in the story.

It’s bad enough that the Obama DOJ takes orders from Sharpton. Earlier this year Sharpton demanded the DOJ investigate a state matter involving the shooting of a black Florida teenager who had been suspended from school. It was a local case to be handled by authorities in the area where the incident occurred and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney made the administration’s intentions clear: “obviously we’re not going to wade into a local law enforcement matter.” A day later the feds took over at Sharpton’s request.    

This despite the fact that three defendants in the case against a Los Angeles-based labor recruiting company (Global Horizons) pleaded guilty. You can’t make this stuff up. The DOJ went from one extreme to another, after dedicating two years and blowing millions of taxpayer dollars, and what do Americans get? A vague government statement that obviously conceals details of the scandal.

The three defendants who pleaded guilty will now receive the opportunity to retract their pleas, as if nothing ever happened. Here is why; a team of government attorneys and agents determined the government is “unable to prove the elements of the charged offenses beyond a reasonable doubt,” according to a DOJ spokeswoman quoted in a local newspaper covering the case in Honolulu. The paper called it a “stunning turnaround.”

Less than a year ago a similar case against a different company was also dropped because the same federal prosecutors evidently screwed up. In that case the DOJ accused the owners of Hawaii’s Aloun Farms of utilizing illegal tactics to keep foreign workers in their service. Charges were dismissed after the lead prosecutor misstated the law in front of the grand jury, according to a news report. Where did these folks go to law school? 

The Global Horizons case got going in 2010 when the feds, with great fanfare, obtained a grand jury indictment against the firm for exploiting hundreds of Thai workers and keeping them as indentured laborers on farms in several states, including Hawaii and Washington. In all, six people were charged in the human trafficking conspiracy and the DOJ claimed they faced decades in prison.

A year later half of the defendants pleaded guilty and the number of exploited workers went up to 600. The DOJ issued a press release announcing the guilty pleas and Thomas Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, said it was the “largest human trafficking scheme ever seen by the Department of Justice.” Perez reiterated his agency’s commitment to “prosecuting cases of human trafficking, both large and small, in order to protect some of the most vulnerable people in our country.”

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the agency responsible for enforcing work place discrimination laws, also filed a lawsuit against Global Horizons, saying it was the largest human trafficking case in agriculture to date. At some farms the Thai workers were forced to live in dilapidated housing infested with rats and insects and they were forbidden from leaving the premises, according to the EEOC. On the job, they endured screaming, threats and physical assaults.

 “Foreign workers should be treated as equals when working in the U.S., not as second class citizens,” said an EEOC district director announcing his agency’s lawsuit. “All workers – foreign and U.S. – are protected under the law and have the right to complain of such employment abuses which poison the moral fabric of our society.”

The controversial law, Transparency and Responsibility Using State Tools, or TRUST Act, allows local law enforcement agencies throughout the state to essentially blow off federal immigration rules requiring that all arrestees suspected of being in the U.S. illegally be reported to the feds. The measure is expected to get final Assembly approval in August and Governor Jerry Brown is sure to sign it.

When the controversial bill officially passes, the question is will the Department of Justice (DOJ) go after the Golden State for defying federal law the way it has pursued others for passing measures that “undermine the federal government’s exclusive immigration enforcement duties.” Using this argument, the DOJ has taken legal action against Arizona, Alabama, South Carolina and Utah. In each case, the DOJ asserts that “a state cannot set its own immigration policy, much less pass laws that conflict with federal enforcement of the immigration laws.”

It appears that California is doing just that. The TRUST Act specifically defies the federal government’s Secure Communities program, which requires local authorities to check the fingerprints of arrestees against a federal database. The program has helped deport a number of dangerous criminals, many of whom have fallen through the cracks over the years. In fact, the elected sheriff (Lee Baca) who operates jails in Los Angeles and patrols a huge chunk of the sprawling county insists that Secure Communities works and has led to the deportation of many serious criminals.

Prior to implementing Secure Communities a “growing number of criminal illegal immigrants who were taken into custody” were eventually released back into the community, according to Baca who has been sheriff since 1998. Among them is a felon who lived in the area despite three drug-trafficking convictions and six deportations and another who had been previously removed after getting convicted for killing a child in the late 1990s.

More than 70,000 undocumented aliens have been deported in California under Secure Communities and the powerful open borders movement claims many of them are simply hard-working people in search of a better life. The TRUST Act will forbid detention on the basis of an immigration hold after the arrestee becomes eligible for release from criminal custody. It will also require local governments detaining suspects on federal immigration holds to adopt a plan guarding against racial profiling.

Just a few weeks ago the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a key provision of Arizona’s law (SB 1070) allowing police officers to check the immigration status of individuals arrested or stopped for questioning. Last spring, at the request of the Obama Administration, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld an injunction against enforcement of some of the law’s provisions.

The Obama Administration responded to the Supreme Court ruling by saying that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will not dispatch officers to remove individuals who don’t pose a public safety or border security threat.

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and fights government corruption, announced today that it filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit on June 11, 2012 against the Obama Department of Justice seeking records pertaining to a six-week pilot program designed to test the Obama administration’s new standards for the dismissal of immigration charges against certain illegal aliens. The Obama administration tested this program first in the cities of Baltimore, Maryland and Denver, Colorado beginning on December 4, 2011.

Judicial Watch seeks the following records pursuant to its original November 23, 2011 FOIA request to the Executive Office of Immigration Review (“EOIR”), a component of the Justice Department:

 i. Any and all records regarding, concerning or related to the six-week pilot program in Baltimore and Denver that is scheduled to begin on December 4, 2011 and under which the immigration-related charges against certain undocumented residents may be subject to dismissal. This request includes, but is not limited to, any and all policy guidelines, implementation plans, training materials, and directives regarding the pilot program.

ii. Any and all records of communication between any official, employee or representative of the Executive Office for Immigration Review and any official, employee or representative of any other government agency, office or department (including, but not limited to, the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Executive Office of the President, the City of Baltimore, and the City of Denver) regarding concerning or related to the pilot program.

The Justice Department acknowledged receipt of Judicial Watch’s FOIA request on November 28, 2011 and was required by law to respond by January 11, 2012 at the latest. As of the date of Judicial Watch’s lawsuit, the Obama administration has failed to turn over any records responsive to the request, indicate which records are exempt from disclosure, or notify Judicial Watch when a response is forthcoming.

On June 30, 2010, John Morton, Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sent a memo to all ICE employees instructing local immigration officials to use their discretion in “prioritizing” illegal immigration deportation cases. On June 17, 2011, John Morton followed up with another memo to all field officers, special agents and to the chief counsel further defining the term “prosecutorial discretion,” which, in essence, asked immigration officials to focus deportation proceedings on illegal aliens convicted of crimes. However, Judicial Watch uncovered documents proving immigration officials considered suspending the deportation of illegal aliens convicted of violent crimes.

In November 2011, as reported by CNN, the Obama administration announced that on December 4, 2011 it would begin a pilot program in Baltimore and Denver to “test the process for reviewing cases pending before the immigration court.”

“The Obama administration has been playing games with its immigration policy from the beginning in its attempt to evade Congress and implement illegal alien amnesty,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “First Obama administration officials tried to implement stealth amnesty outside of the public eye, and then when the cat was out of the bag, they doubled down on the policy in open defiance of the law. The American people are tired of the obfuscation and gamesmanship from the Obama administration on such a serious issue. The message is simple: No more secrecy. No more games. Release the records.”

On Friday, June 15, 2012 the Obama administration announced it would no longer deport unlawfully present alients immigrants under age 30 who came to the United States as children, a policy described by Politico’s Steve Friess as “a temporary, de facto implementation of a part of the stalled DREAM Act,” that sends “a loud message to Hispanic voters to remember Obama in November.”

It wasn’t enough for Eric Holder to earn the accolade of being the nation’s first sitting Attorney General to be found in criminal contempt by Congress for stonewalling the investigation of a disastrous experiment conducted by his office. Known as Operation Fast and Furious, the project allowed Mexican drug traffickers to obtain U.S.-sold weapons. Many of the guns have been linked to serious crimes, including the murder of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Arizona.

Judicial Watch has sued the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the various agencies that operate under it for records related to the Fast and Furious. As part of that ongoing investigation, last fall JW obtained internal government records that show the number of crimes connected to the failed gun-running venture is significantly higher than previously disclosed. This led to the broader congressional probe that Holder has impeded.

As the House publicly admonished him, Holder was at a fancy Disney resort in Florida praising a Latino civil rights group—League of United Latin American Citizens LULAC— best known for accusing a Mexican fast-food eatery of a “hate crime” for using a Chihuahua in a commercial. In the 1990s a top LULAC official accused the food chain of the hate crime by saying that “Mexican Americans are treated like dogs, they have to work like dogs, and now they’re being portrayed as dogs.”

Yet there was the country’s top law enforcement officer praising about 1,000 LULAC delegates at an upscale Disney resort, repeatedly chanting “all for one and one for all” in both English and Spanish. Holder bragged that his DOJ has filed more civil rights cases than in any previous period in the nation’s history and he highlighted an ongoing witch hunt against an Arizona sheriff known for cracking down on illegal immigration.

“I want to assure communities in Arizona and around the country, and you, that the Department of Justice will continue to vigorously enforce federal prohibitions against racial profiling and ethnic discrimination,” Holder told the crowd. He also assured that his department is pursuing “careful, thorough and independent” assessments of voter identification laws that Democrats assert discriminate against minorities.

He continued: “On these and other critical issues, you’ve succeeded in bringing a diverse range of partners together. You’ve proven the power of unity – and the virtues of diversity.  And you’ve breathed new life into the old adage that – more than 80 years ago – gave voice to LULAC’s mission and vision: Uno para todos, todos para uno.

This enduring ideal – of all for one, and one for all; and the common understanding – that, here in the United States, we rise and fall as one people, and that we will only succeed if we work together as one nation – has been at the heart of the success we’re gathered to celebrate today – and to advance. ”