Holder Expands Ferguson Witch-Hunt

My article from today's FrontPage magazine:

Holder Expands Ferguson Witch-Hunt

By Matthew Vadum

Despite the continuing absence of any evidence whatsoever that race was a factor in the police shooting of Michael Brown, the Department of Justice will be conducting a race-baiting witch-hunt aimed at the entire police force in Ferguson, Mo., Attorney General Eric Holder announced yesterday.

The new investigation is nothing more than a taxpayer-funded Democratic Party voter registration drive disguised as a civil rights investigation. Such hoaxes are the stock in trade of the radical community organizers who run the Obama White House. Statistics, by the way, suggest Ferguson is far from the hotbed of crime the media has portrayed it as. Ferguson reportedly has an average level of crime.

“When I visited Ferguson two weeks ago, I promised that the U.S. Department of Justice would continue to stand with the people there long after the national headlines had faded,” Holder said, according to the text of prepared remarks. Egged on by violent left-wing mobs and racial tension profiteers like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson Sr., federal officials were already conducting what will almost certainly prove to be a fruitless civil rights-centered investigation of Brown’s death.

“Today, with our investigation into the Ferguson Police Department and our reform efforts in St. Louis County, we’re taking significant steps to keep that promise,” Holder said. “As these efforts unfold, my colleagues and I will keep working with the people in Ferguson to ensure that a fair, thorough investigation occurs; to see that dialogue can be translated into concrete action; and to facilitate lasting, positive change – that brings together police officials, civil rights leaders, and members of the public – to bridge gaps and build understanding.”

Except perhaps for what some critics said was an initially heavy-handed and overly militaristic approach to crowd control used by Ferguson police, there is no evidence much, if any, change is actually needed in the St. Louis-area township.

To repeat, this expanded federal investigation of a local incident has absolutely nothing to do with justice and everything to do with electoral politics. Although at least 40 federal agents have reportedly been on the ground in the St. Louis area desperately searching for proof of racial animus on the part of Darren Wilson, a decorated Ferguson police officer who shot Brown Aug. 9 after the 18-year-old suspected gang member beat him and tried to take his handgun, such evidence remains elusive.

That figure of 40 agents is apparently more than the Obama administration has assigned to all the other major scandals embroiling the administration combined. Those other scandals include Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi bungling, IRS persecution of conservative groups, New Black Panther Party voter intimidation charges, the Fast and Furious gun-running episode, and the NSA’s domestic spying.

All the racial grievance-community organizing complex currently has to go on is the fact that the decedent was black and the policeman was white.

It is, of course, no coincidence that the investigation was announced as President Obama’s approval rating with the public dipped to record lows. At an anemic 38 percent according to Gallup’s three-day rolling average, it is now descending into President Nixon territory. Obama is anxious to change the conversation to issues that don’t matter like raising the minimum wage and income inequality.

The announcement of an expanded federal investigation in Ferguson comes three weeks after the race-baiting members of the far-left Congressional Black Caucus demanded a federal lynch mob be assembled to put the mostly white Ferguson police department in its place.

In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio), who heads the CBC, Reps. Lacy Clay (D-Mo.), and John Conyers (D-Mich.) demanded the political persecution of Ferguson cops because in their view Brown’s killing “may be part of a continuing pattern of the use of deadly force by police against unarmed African-Americans.”

Brown’s shooting raises “potentially serious concerns” about law enforcement in St. Louis, the lawmakers wrote. Holder’s Department of Justice should take over the probe because, they claim, the St. Louis County Police Department “may not be the most objective or credible body to investigate civil rights matters involving law enforcement given evidence of racial profiling by that department in the recent past.”

“Only the federal government has the resources, the experience, and the full independence to give this case the close scrutiny that the citizens of Ferguson and the greater St. Louis area deserve,” the letter said.

While Brown’s body was still warm, Democrats set up a voter registration booth where Brown died, as if the suspected gang member were some kind of martyr. They are now trying to leverage his death nationally for partisan purposes.

“This is going to go past Ferguson,” said John Gaskin III, a spokesman for the St. Louis County, Mo., NAACP and a member of the group’s national board of directors.

“What I’ve told people is I want them to be aware that there’s a Ferguson near you, near every city,” he said. “I don’t think people will run out of steam on this one.”

Holder’s announcement also comes days after Brown was laid to rest following a grotesque political rally led by the abominable racial arsonist Al Sharpton.

The politically correct lie that a helpless 6’4″ 292-lbs. Brown was shot in cold blood, arms raised while attempting to surrender to white police officer Wilson, instead of the less convenient truth that Brown was beating the cop while reaching for his gun, refuses to die.

In the minutes before he attacked Wilson, Brown was captured on video bullying a much smaller East Indian shopkeeper during a robbery, an act that some might consider a hate crime.

The image of a huge robber manhandling a much smaller victim won’t run out of steam anytime soon, either.