Liberal Bias

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J. Christian Adams is an attorney that worked in the Voting Section from 2005 until 2010. After leaving the Justice Department, Adams wrote a book released in 2011 titled Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department. In Injustice, Adams noted several instances of working with Christian Herren, including times when Herren, according to Adams, showed a liberal bias, or at the very least, a deference towards the activist liberals working in the Voting Section.

 

Adams wrote in Injustice that Herren opposed sending election monitors to monitor runoff elections in Noxubee County, Mississippi in 2003. Noxubee County is a county with a high Democratic enrollment advantage,  as well as a majority black population. Shortly after the Democratic primary in 2003, then-Senator Thad Cochran sent a letter to the DOJ that included complaints by white citizens and white candidates in Noxubee County that described, according to Adams, “corruption and lawlessness that had subsumed the primary.”[4] These were serious allegations that minority white voters in Noxubee County were being systemically suppressed by the black majority Democratic machine, and Adams said almost no attorneys in the Voting Section were interested in pursuing further investigation. 

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Adams noted that Herren wrote a memo that argued against sending election monitors to Noxubee County. Adams said that Herren made a “purely political argument" that sending election monitors to Noxubee County would "upset civil rights groups":

 

…But one attorney had a different view—Chris Coates, then a Special Litigation Counsel inside the Voting Section. Unlike his colleagues, Coates believed in race-neutral law enforcement—that civil rights violations should be prosecuted the same way regardless of the race of the alleged perpetrator or the alleged victim. Coates recommended sending monitors to observe the Noxubee runoff elections slated to be held a few days later. But his recommendation immediately sparked opposition from within the Voting Section. Current Obama administration Voting Section chief Christopher Herren wrote a detailed memorandum arguing against sending monitors to Noxubee to protect white voters. Instead of basing his analysis on the facts or the law, Herren offered the purely political argument that sending monitors would upset civil rights groups. The move was also opposed by Voting Section chief Joseph Rich…

--- Adams, J. Christian. Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department (Kindle Locations 730-737). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.     

 

Adams also noted in his book that Chris Herren was cited by radical Stanford Law professor Pamela Karlan (whom AAF previously exposed at PamelaKarlan.com) in an article she wrote that alleged that the Bush Administration only brought one Voting Rights Act case during five of the Administration's eight years, and that that case was to protect white voters, which Adams disputes:

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…These arguments—that the Brown case was the first Section 2 case brought by the Bush DOJ, and that for five years no case was brought to protect minority voters—are common untruths told by critics of the Bush administration. Stanford Law professor Pam Karlan peddled this nonsense in a published law review article that falsely states “for five of the eight years of the Bush Administration, [they] brought no Voting Rights Act cases of its own except for one case protecting white voters.” In a footnote, Karlan says she relied on Obama Voting Section chief Chris Herren for information for her article…

---Adams, J. Christian. Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department (Kindle Locations 2375-2380). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.

 

Additionally, a DOJ Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report released in March 2013 investigated allegations of bias in the Voting Section. The report assessed, among several things, the Voting Section’s hiring practices. The report noted that the Voting Section undertook a recruitment effort to hire new attorneys which entailed sending email notifications to various outside organizations with experience in election issues. The report says that Herren emailed recruitment notifications to at least 11 individuals from liberal civil rights groups (such as the ACLU and NAACP) and that Herren emailed ZERO recruitment notifications to individuals associated with conservative groups:[5]

 

…In addition to the notifications sent by the HR Department, AAG Perez sent a Division-wide e-mail in December 2009 requesting staff to “inform your friends and networks” about vacant positions. Our review of Voting Section emails and information provided by Herren revealed that Herren sent e-mail notifications to a variety of individuals and organizations, many of whom had no readily apparent ideological or partisan affiliation. Herren sent notifications to at least 11 individuals from “liberal” civil rights organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Education Fund (NAACP LDF), and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights under Law (LCCR). We found that Herren did not send any e-mail notifications to “conservative” civil rights organizations. Herren told us he attempted to reach a wide audience and that he did not pick to whom he sent the ads based on ideology…

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There is an overwhelming liberal bias among career trial attorneys in the Voting Section, and the Section's leader, Christian Herren, is no exception.