President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice is being run by ideologues with a history of partisan enforcement of civil rights laws.
The latest offender is Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Pam Karlan. You may remember Karlan from former President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial. She made headlines when, during her testimony, she made a tasteless joke about the president’s youngest son.
This month, Karlan wrote to Arizona state Senate President Karen Fann, claiming the Maricopa County audit could be in violation of federal voting and civil rights laws. This is completely wrong on the law and an attempt by the Department of Justice to exercise a nonexistent power to conduct oversight of the Maricopa County audit.
An audit of a past election does not violate the Voting Rights Act or any other federal election law. In the entire history of the DOJ, the department has not interfered with or investigated an audit because it has no legal authority to do so. This is a brazen abuse of power.
Karlan has proven herself a surrogate for the Democratic Party, not an objective law enforcement official. Her behavior should come as no surprise given her history of partisanship and scholarly dishonesty.
Prior to joining the DOJ, Karlan played a key role in censoring information about vulnerabilities in our election system. She was a member of the Facebook Oversight Board, a group of “experts” that helps the social media giant decide what posts should be censored. Additionally, she has a history of false statements about prior Republican administration actions to protect voting rights. She incorrectly claimed that in the last five years of the Bush administration, there were no Voting Rights Act cases to protect minorities. Despite this claim being proven incorrect, she has refused to retract this statement.
Karlan is now blatantly trying to intimidate Arizona and interfere in the Maricopa County audit. This is a partisan, politically motivated abuse of power.
People deserve better from the nation’s top law enforcement agency. They also deserve an analysis of the irregularities that occurred in 2020.
J. Christian Adams is the president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a former Justice Department attorney, and current commissioner on the United States Commission for Civil Rights.
