by John Fund
The Obama administration wanted to ensure, as one email from a liberal lawyer in the Voting Section said, that “the Section be free from enemy hands.”37 The IG report is clear that Coates’s “ideology was a factor in the discussions among senior Department and Division officials about removing or reassigning Coates.” He was driven out as the chief of the Voting Section because he believes in the equal protection of the law. That is one of the most shameful but enlightening revelations in the entire IG report—that Eric Holder believes discrimination is acceptable—as long as the “wrong” people are being discriminated against.
When, in a hearing before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies on March 1, 2011, Eric Holder was asked by Representative John Culberson (R-TX) about the “overwhelming evidence that your Department of Justice refuses to protect the rights of anybody other than African-Americans to vote,” Holder tried to claim that the Justice Department “does not enforce the laws in a race-conscious way.”38 But Culberson’s persistent questioning about the dismissal of the New Black Panther voter intimidation case by the Civil Rights Division clearly got under Holder’s skin. He angrily responded that it was “a great disservice to people who put their lives on the line for my people” to compare what happened in Philadelphia in 2008 to what happened in the South. The “my people” line was very revealing. Holder’s slip of the tongue made it very clear that he interprets everything through the prism of how it affects “his” people—black Americans, not all Americans—and that he considers it insulting to “his people” to get upset over the intimidation committed by the jackbooted, paramilitary Black Panthers in Philadelphia (although Holder did admit their attempt to intimidate voters was “inappropriate”).
Holder’s attitude about “his people” may have begun when he was an undergraduate at Columbia. It was there in 1971 that Holder apparently started carrying around a clipping of a quote from Harlem preacher Rev. Samuel D. Proctor, that he has kept “in wallet after wallet over the ensuing decades,” according to J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department lawyer.39 The quote:
Blackness is another issue entirely apart from class in America. No matter how affluent, educated and mobile [a black person] becomes, his race defines him more particularly than anything else. Black people have a common cause that requires attending to, and this cause does not allow for the rigid class separation that is the luxury of American whites. There is a sense in which every black man is as far from liberation as the weakest one if his weakness is attributable to racial injustice.
Adams says that when Holder was asked to explain the passage, he replied, “It really says that . . . I am not the tall U.S. attorney, I am not the thin United States attorney. I am the black United States attorney. And he was saying that no matter how successful you are, there’s a common cause that bonds the black United States attorney with the black criminal or the black doctor with the black homeless person.”40
In other words, Holder apparently believes that a person’s skin color is first and foremost his most defining feature and more important than anything else. “Race comes first for Holder,” says Adams, a regrettable attitude for the chief law enforcement official of the country. After all, there is a reason that Lady Justice wears a blindfold.
But the purpose of the Civil Rights Division is to enforce the law equally and fairly, without regard to race, in a manner that meets the highest ethical and professional standards. Too many of the employees, and that includes Eric Holder, do not, as the IG report says, “appreciate the importance of public confidence in the impartial legitimate enforcement priorities set by” the division. In fact, they see its authority as a powerful tool that can be used to benefit Democratic candidates and to force their progressive social ideology on public hiring, public education, and many other areas.
They also do not believe that the division’s enforcement responsibilities should be pursued in a race-neutral manner that protects all Americans from discrimination. As the IG report says, professionalism means “operating in a manner that consciously ensures both the appearance and the reality of even-handed, fair and mature decision-making, carried out without regard to partisan or other improper considerations.”41 That type of professionalism does not exist today in the Civil Rights Division.
Former Voting Section chief Christopher Coates says that Eric Holder and Tom Perez appear to suffer from the same “deficiency that the old segregationists such as Ross Barnett, George Wallace and Richard Russell suffered from when they refused to enforce the anti-discrimination provisions of the Constitution for the benefit of African-American citizens.” According to Coates, “none of these folks in the current Justice Department, including Holder, seem to be capable of understanding the need for race-neutral enforcement of the law when the victims of discrimination are not their ‘people.’ ”42
When Tom Perez was asked about the operations of the division during the Bush administration, “he became visibly agitated,” claiming that “the whole process of decision-making was completely obliterated! Hiring processes were hijacked! They weren’t allowed to bring certain kinds of cases. They weren’t allowed to make certain kinds of arguments. I think history will judge the prior administration as the darkest hour in the division’s history.”43 Without realizing it, Perez gave a very accurate description of how he and Eric Holder have run the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.
CHAPTER 5
THE BILLION-DOLLAR PIGFORD SCAM
Nothing demonstrates Eric Holder’s divisive racial politics and his willingness to suborn justice and the best interests of the public than the multibillion-dollar swindle known as the Pigford settlement, which Department of Agriculture employee John Stringfellow calls the “largest scam against federal taxpayers in the history of the United States.”1 Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, said it was “like something out of a Tom Wolfe novel” and that “it would be hard to invent a more damning fable of modern government.”2 In fact, Pigford is a prime example of how Eric Holder (and Barack Obama) have used taxpayer funds to buy votes and political support while at the same time using litigation as a cover for providing something that radical black nationalists have demanded for years: “reparations” for black Americans. Although it started in the Clinton administration, it was made exponentially worse by the Obama administration.
The Pigford scam started out as a lawsuit filed in 1997 by Timothy Pigford, a fourth-generation black farmer in North Carolina. Pigford believed that he and other black farmers had been discriminated against by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which they claimed had not extended them loans on the same basis as white farmers, although two different government reports that year (including one by the Government Accountability Office) “found no evidence of ongoing, systematic discrimination.”3 Pigford had gotten some loans from the USDA, but “he was convinced he wasn’t getting a fair shot at success, even as white farmers who worked nearby land were getting loans to expand their operations.”4 This lawsuit and a subsequent, highly questionable lawsuit filed by Hispanic, Indian, and women “farmers” quickly “became a runaway train, driven by racial politics, pressure from influential members of Congress and law firms that stand to gain more than $130 million in fees.”5
In 1999, a federal court turned Timothy Pigford’s case into a class-action lawsuit, Pigford v. Glickman, which meant that it was now a lawsuit on behalf of all black farmers similarly situated to Pigford who had also been potentially discriminated against, originally about four hundred. The Clinton administration decided to settle the case for a billion dollars and a consent decree was approved by the court. That this was done for political reasons as opposed to the actual evidence in the case was pretty clear—the New York Times in its exposé on the scandal quoted a lawyer who said it was “more a political decision that a litigation decision.” Bill Clinton had even asked a senior adviser to the Democratic National Committee who was an expert on black voter
turnout to get involved to “make sure his home state, Arkansas, benefited.”6
Even if one acknowledges “that the original Pigford class of about 400 plaintiffs had made a credible case that they were real victims of racial discrimination,”7 the class expanded exponentially, since the claims process established in the consent decree allowed individuals to make claims with no evidence other than their own assertions that they had suffered any bias or that they were even legitimate farmers. It was almost as if the claims process implemented by the Justice Department was designed to encourage fraud, since individuals could receive automatic $50,000 payments by simply filling out a claim form in which they asserted they had “attempted to farm” and had made an “oral” complaint of discrimination to the USDA. According to the judge, claims would be paid with “little or no documentary evidence” and that is exactly what happened. It is estimated that 92 percent of the successful claimants were part of this “attempted to farm” class.8 Claimants were essentially encouraged to lie—they would get paid if they had just “thought” about farming or tried to grow tomatoes in their backyard.
The number of claimants quickly expanded from the original four hundred black farmers to 14,000 and $1.25 billion was paid out. But claims kept coming even after the original October 12, 1999, deadline passed, so that total is now over 100,000. This, despite the fact that “a 1997 agricultural census found only 18,500 black farmers nationwide.”9 The biggest individual settlement was $13 million, which was paid to New Communities, Inc., a land trust established by Charles and Shirley Sherrod for a communal farm in Georgia. The Sherrods and several other participants in the farm shared in the pay-out. Three days after her case was settled, Shirley Sherrod was hired by the Obama administration to work in the Department of Agriculture. She was fired in 2010 over controversial remarks she made in a speech, but later was offered her job back by the Obama administration.10
While there has been no allegation of impropriety with respect to the New Communities claim, there is no question that there was massive, undeterred, and unprosecuted fraud in many of the other payouts made under the Pigford settlement. Decisions on USDA loans were made by committees of local farmers in many counties. Yet the Pigford settlement imposed the rule that discrimination was universal, even in places like “Jefferson County, Ark., where numerous discrimination claims came in despite the fact that all the supervisors at that office were black.”11 The New York Times analyzed sixteen zip codes in Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and North Carolina and found that “the number of successful claimants exceeded the total number of farms operated by people of any race in 1997.”12 Nearly everyone in two adjoining apartment buildings in Columbus, Ohio, filed claims.13 Arkansas received hundreds of claims from black women despite the fact that a USDA employee said that in his fifteen years in Arkansas, “he had only ever seen one black female applicant for a loan.”14
Eight Pigford applicants came from a single family—they were all paid off despite their obvious fraud: “Pigford was basically legalized extortion . . . it reached the point where they were just handing money to people,” said another USDA employee.15 Claims coming in from affluent areas like Palm Beach, Florida, and Palm Springs, California, were paid, as well as one applicant who claimed the nonexistent Chicago USDA office had discriminated against them.16 In fact, thirty percent of the payments went to entirely urban areas where there are no farms.17
All of this went on to the disgust and chagrin of some of the original Pigford plaintiffs, like Abraham Carpenter Jr., a black farmer in Grady, Arkansas. As he complained to the New York Times, “why did they let people get away with all this stuff? Anytime you are going to throw money up in the air, you are going to have people acting crazy.”18
Despite this massive fraud, the FBI and Justice Department prosecutors refused to take action, and almost no cases were prosecuted. The standards for a successful claim were “so low that it was almost impossible to show criminality”19 and prosecutors were fearful “of the racial politics that would have attended”20 their cases. The USDA “appears to have turned a blind eye to blatant irregularities” despite the fact that employees such as John Stringfellow said that 80 percent of the claims he reviewed were for individuals who “had never applied to USDA assistance programs, nor farmed at all.”21
But these mostly fraudulent claims kept rolling in even though the court-imposed deadline had passed. So then-senator Barack Obama—six months after he announced his presidential run—became the sole sponsor of the Pigford Claims Remedy Act of 2007 (Pigford II), which was attached as an amendment to the massive farm bill. Obama’s bill extended the deadline for filing claims to 2008 (which would cover the tens of thousands of claims that had continued to come in after the 1999 deadline) and appropriated an additional $1.25 billion in funds for payouts.
Obama’s bill came after the head of the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association, Gary Grant, promised Obama “all the financial and ballot support the BFAA could marshal in the rural South in exchange.”22 Grant made it very clear that the Pigford settlement had nothing to do with farmers—it was all about African-Americans “collecting what [their] grandparents didn’t have the opportunity to.”23 In other words, reparations. But Obama’s ploy worked:
Supporters of Obama’s presidential campaign argued the then-Illinois senator’s move to resolve late Pigford claims would endear him to Southern black voters during the tough Democratic primary race against former Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY). At the time of the bill’s introduction in 2007, Obama was finding his footing as a candidate and polls suggested he was struggling to attract black voters. He later won almost unanimously among this group against Clinton.24
Former Alabama congressman Artur Davis, who had endorsed Obama, said that while the average voter had never heard of the Pigford settlement, “it was critical, however, among some key Democratic constituencies in the South” and that he had “yet to do a town hall meeting” where he was not asked about it. It was “a supremely large issue in the black rural community in the South.”25
Congress overrode President George Bush’s veto of the 2008 farm bill with Obama’s amendment but appropriated only $100 million for Pigford claims. Obama asked Congress for more money and in February 2010 Eric Holder settled the Pigford II claims for $1.25 billion, contingent on Congress appropriating more money—which it did with the Claims Resolution Act of 2010, in December of that year. Holder heralded the settlement saying that the “plaintiffs can move forward and have their claims heard—with the federal government standing not as an adversary, but as a partner.”26
In addition to the Pigford case, the Justice Department had been vigorously defending a similar lawsuit that had been filed during the Bush administration by Hispanic, Indian, and women farmers. There was almost no evidence that these groups had suffered any discrimination of any kind. Many of their individual claims were “shaky” and federal judges “had already scornfully rejected the [damages] methodology of the plaintiffs’ expert.”27 The government’s expert, Gordon C. Rausser, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, had produced a 340-page report showing that Indian farmers “had generally fared as well as white male farmers.” In fact, if the Justice Department had gone to court, Rausser said “the government would have prevailed” and he was “astounded” that the case was settled.28 Neither the Hispanic nor the female claimants had been able to convince the courts to certify them as a class because their claims were too individually distinct—there was no pattern of bias and they had been denied loans “for a variety of reasons, including inadequate farm plans and lack of funds.”29
But racial politics entered once again and interfered with the resolution of these cases. Members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and Democratic senators led by Robert Menendez (D-NJ) “grew increasingly agitated as the plaintiffs’ cases appeared to falter” and complained to the White House.30 They were angry that black farmers were receiving payouts while Hispanic farmers were
not and claimed (despite the complete lack of evidence of discrimination by the USDA) that there was “no legitimate reason to delay action for any of the affected groups.”31
In 2010 three meetings were held in the White House led by Daniel J. Meltzer, Obama’s principal deputy White House counsel, with senior Justice and Agriculture officials, including Associate Attorney General Thomas J. Perrelli and Assistant Attorney General of the Civil Division Tony West (who supervised the Pigford litigation). West had been profiled by the San Francisco Chronicle in 2008 when he was the California finance cochair for the Obama campaign and described as an “Obama power broker.”32 At those meetings, all of the “vehement objections” of “career lawyers and agency officials who had argued that there was no credible evidence of widespread discrimination” were overridden.33 They were ordered to settle the case and pay out more than $1 billion “to compensate not just the 91 plaintiffs but thousands of Hispanic and female farmers who had never claimed bias in court.”34 And the very same fraud-ridden claims process was put in place to allow payments of up to $50,000 without any proof or documentation. By an “odd” coincidence, the claims process opened in September 2010, just six weeks before the midterm congressional elections.
Eric Holder was asked about the massive fraud in the Pigford settlements by Representative Steve King (R-IA) at a Justice Department oversight hearing on May 15, 2013, less than a month after the New York Times exposé. This was three years after it had been uncovered by Andrew Breitbart and Daniel Foster at National Review (and promptly dismissed by the liberal and progressive media establishment as just conservative anger at remedying proven racial discrimination).35
