Bev1962 retweetet
Kristen Clarke did not leave the Justice Department quietly. She left, took the general counsel position at the NAACP, marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday in March, and then sat down to explain precisely what was done.
The cases her division spent years building — carefully constructed voting rights enforcement actions — were "withdrawn from the courts, dismissed without basis, without any justification offered to the public." No explanation. No legal rationale offered. Gone.
She documented what replaced the people who built those cases: "reckless, sloppy work." Missing filing deadlines. Typos in court filings. An official who accidentally revealed a federal civil rights probe in a social media post. "Its ranks are now being filled by people who are inexperienced, who don't know what they're doing, who've never enforced federal laws before."
The Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department is the unit that enforced the Voting Rights Act, pursued discriminatory redistricting, and brought cases against jurisdictions that systematically blocked minority voters. Clarke calls it "nothing more than a shadow of its former self."
She is now general counsel at the organization that will litigate against the department she built. The person who wrote those cases is now the person who will try to bring them back in court.
That is not a footnote. That is the next chapter.
Marc E. Elias@marceelias
NEW: In 2021, Kristen Clarke became the first Black woman to serve as the Department of Justice’s civil rights chief. Five years later, she says the department has “fully retreated from the mission.” democracydocket.com/news-alerts/wa…
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