CHAT 212 COMMENTS
Is this the Dallas cop killer at a New Black Panthers march?
In 2009 and 2010, lawyers working at the United States Justice Department warned top Obama political appointees and other Justice Department officials about the dangerous threats of New Black Panthers to kill police officers and other whites. I was one of those lawyers who delivered those warnings.
Our warnings came in the context of the Voting Rights Act case I and other lawyers brought against the New Black Panthers on behalf of the United States in 2009, a case the Obama administration ultimately abandoned. Both top DOJ officials, including now Labor Secretary Tom Perez, as well as rank and file employees in the Civil Rights Division, were warned but did not take the New Black Panther threat seriously or otherwise considered the organization to be a laughable joke.
Allies in the media echoed the narrative that the defendants in the voter intimidation case were harmless clowns.
Among the information presented to top officials was a video produced by the New Black Panthers entitled "Training Day." The video proposes killing police officers by ambush. I wrote about the video:
Another New Black Panther posing in the above photo and kneeling with a shotgun is "Field Marshal" Najee Muhammad. As I wrote in my bookInjustice: One of them was Panther “Field Marshal” Najee Muhammad, who is seen in a Panther video called “Training Day” in which he encourages blacks in DeKalb County, Georgia, to don ski masks, lie in wait behind shrubs, and kill police officers with AK-47s. Following that exhortation he mocks the hypothetical victims’ grieving widows.
Justice Department employees ridiculed the video and noted very few were in the video's audience, apparently oblivious of the role and power of social media to reach people not sitting in an auditorium.
Attorneys working on the voter intimidation case made an effort to broadly educate employees of the Civil Rights Division about the murderous rhetoric of the New Black Panthers. We planned a screening of a National Geographic special on the New Black Panthers where members could be heard threatening to kill white babies. We widely disseminated information about the screening in a Justice Department conference room. On a floor with nearly one hundred employees,exactly two DOJ employees showed up to watch the screening, and one of them was the paralegal on the case.
As we shall see, Obama allies in the media could also be counted on to ridicule the seriousness of the New Black Panther organization.
