Attorney General Eric Holder has enforced the law with a decided racial bias, and has used his power and resources to force ill-advised, "Obama-approved" changes on police departments across the country, a former chief assistant U.S. attorney from New York told
Newsmax TV on Monday.
Andrew C. McCarthy, who successfully prosecuted the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case, told "MidPoint" host Ed Berliner that President Barack Obama's Justice Department, under Holder, has wielded federal civil rights laws unfairly and unevenly against local police departments.
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"They've had their thumb on the scales from the beginning," said McCarthy, a National Review Online contributor, and author of several books on law, radical Islam, politics and government, including this year's
"Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama's Impeachment."
McCarthy cited a string of federal civil-rights investigations into some 20 police departments, including Ferguson, Missouri's, which he said the Justice Department has approached with a presumption of racial guilt.
"They are not enforcing the law in a racially objective and dispassionate manner, which is what the civil rights statutes require," he said.
McCarthy, who
has questioned the grand jury decision to clear a white New York police officer in the death of black Staten Island resident Eric Garner, said that he understands the public interest in cases where unarmed citizens have died at the hands of police.
But he said the Justice Department has no grounds for a civil-rights prosecution in Garner's death.
"They'd have to show that the police in this individual case willfully schemed to deprive somebody — essentially Mr. Garner, in this case — of his civil rights," said McCarthy.
"Any time you have a situation — and I don't think anybody can contest this — where you have a good-faith arrest, which is what was going on in Staten Island, and the police are in the position of using force because he's resisting, you can argue about whether they used too much force," he said.
"That's all fair, and I've done it myself," he continued. "But the thought that they actually schemed ahead of time to willfully deprive somebody of their civil rights — motivated by racial animus, usually, but whatever you think their motivation was — that seems to me to be preposterous."
McCarthy suggested that Holder understands as much, but has used the
threat of civil-rights criminal indictments to instead extract consent decrees from various municipalities and impose his own, race-conscious notion of proper policing on local law enforcement.
McCarthy rejected the argument that a major overhaul of police procedures and practices is needed at a time of heightened racial tensions.
"If we take the New York City Police Department as just an example, there were 250,000 misdemeanor arrests last year and no incident like the one we had in Staten Island," he said. "This is an aberration, and it's not nearly what the problem is here."
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