◼ Attorney general Eric Holder and Missouri Democratic leaders need to apologize to the law-enforcement community for impugning officers’ motives in light of the unrest in Ferguson, Mo., according to one prominent county sheriff. - Andrew Johnson/National Review Online
Milwaukee County sheriff David Clarke, who gained notoriety last year for encouraging gun ownership within his Wisconsin community, said Holder, Governor Jay Nixon, and Senator Claire McCaskill made the situation in Ferguson worse with their “irresponsible, inflammatory” comments about the city’s police force and its supposed problem with race relations. Clarke argued on Fox News on Friday that the trio was “insinuating that our law-enforcement officers across the United States engage in some nefarious or systematic and cultural attempts to violate people’s civil rights.”
“I thought that was a slap in the face to every law-enforcement officer in America who puts on the badge and the uniform everyday to go out and risk their lives in service to their community,” he said.
Clarke specifically called on Holder to either further explain himself or apologize to law enforcement for “adding hot sauce to this volatile situation.”
◼ ERIC HOLDER’S 'FAIR' INVESTIGATION IN FERGUSON? - by HANS VON SPAKOVSKY AND JOHN FUND/Breitbart
Attorney General Eric Holder travelled to Ferguson, Missouri, Wednesday to personally intervene in the investigation of the police shooting of Michael Brown, an unprecedented and highly questionable move. In a column published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Holder claimed that the Justice Department would conduct an investigation that would be “fair” and “independent.” But given Holder’s biased views on race and the history of his tenure at DOJ that we outline in our new book, “Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department,” we have serious doubts that his department can conduct an impartial investigation....
The unrest in Ferguson has obviously been triggered by unproven – and increasingly unlikely, given the emerging evidence – allegations that Brown was targeted by Officer Darren Wilson because of his race. Brown is not only a suspect in the robbery of a convenience store, but Wilson was apparently severely injured in the struggle with Brown. The notion that Wilson deliberately targeted Brown, let alone used vastly excessive force in the interaction, seems a bit dubious at this point. Still, Holder has dispatched a team of lawyers from the Criminal Section to supervise over 40 FBI agents sent to Ferguson to investigate this tragic situation. The attorneys “deployed to lead this process,” says Holder, are the “Civil Rights Division’s most experienced prosecutors.”
What Holder did not say is that it is these “experienced prosecutors” in the Criminal Section who he is so “proud of,” along with lawyers in the U.S. Attorneys’ office in New Orleans, who were accused last year by a federal judge in Louisiana of “grotesque prosecutorial abuse.”
...Frankly, the Justice Department should step back and allow state and local officials to investigate what happened. There is no evidence that these local officials are not conducting a competent, objective investigation. And given the biases and checkered history of the Attorney General and the Civil Rights Division, as well as the complete politicization of DOJ by Holder, we can have no confidence in the credibility of an investigation by his Department.
