Author Archives: J Christian Adams

Tom Perez – more concerned about leaks than perjury

Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez today went to the Voting Section to announce the internal talking points to soften the devastating Inspector General report that paints a picture of disfunction inside Department of Justice.  Part of the report details racial harassment of black employees who were willing to work on civil rights cases against black defendants, as well as DOJ employees who lied under oath in the Inspector General investigation about harassment of conservative lawyers by blogging on the internet about them.

Did Perez raise any of this in his 12:30 meeting in the Voting Section Conference room?  No, he had bigger fish to fry, like leaks.  He didn’t become animated or upset at the perjury detailed in the report, or the racial harassment of black interns.  Indeed, most of the guilty parties still get federal paychecks.

Instead, Perez was upset there were leaks in the Voting Section that portrayed his tenure in a negative light. 

Priorities.  Senate Labor Committee take note.

If you are doing business with the DOJ Voting Section. . .

If you happen to be a state official, such as Luther Strange in Alabama, Delbert Hosemann or Greg Abbott in Texas, this part of the Inspector General Report page 128:


In addition, we found postings by Section employees that contained heated political and even racist commentary, frequently attacking Republicans, particularly administration officials, and those Democrats who were perceived to support the Republican administration in order to promote their own careers. Multiple comments asserted that administration officials or Voting Section managers who implemented their policies were bigoted against Blacks or other racial minorities, and one used the expression “po’ Niggrahs” in describing a manager’s attitude toward Blacks. In one posting, one of the employees that we identified characterized the ideal neighborhood of one reportedly conservative career Section attorney as “everyone wears a white sheet, the darkies say ‘yes’m,’ and equal rights for all are the real ‘land of make believe.’” Several posts by Section employees criticized the administration’s enforcement priorities, particularly the Voting Section’s decision to sue Black defendants in Noxubee, Mississippi. Another post by a career Section employee asserted that “a good, ethical Republican” is a “seeming oxymoron.”

DOJ IG Report: “potential threat of physical violence”

From the Report at page 127:


We found other postings by career Voting Section employees that contained intimidating comments and statements that arguably raised the potential threat of physical violence. For instance, one of the employees wrote the following comment to an article concerning an internal Department investigation of potential misconduct by a Section manager: “Geez, reading this just makes me want to go out and choke somebody. At this point, I’d seriously consider going in tomorrow and hanging a noose in someone’s office to get myself fired, but they’d probably applaud the gesture and give me a promotion for doing it….” Some postings by Section employees contained statements that could be viewed as disturbing, such as comments that monitored managers’ movements in the office and described their actions.

Your Tax Dollars at Work

From the IG Report Page 127:

During this period, at least three career Voting Section employees posted comments on widely read liberal websites concerning Voting Section work and personnel. The three employees who we were able to identify with certainty included three non-attorney employees. Many of the postings, which generally appeared in the Comments section following blog entries related to the Department, included a wide array of inappropriate remarks, ranging from petty and juvenile personal attacks to highly offensive and potentially threatening statements. The comments were directed at fellow career Voting Section employees because of their conservative political views, their willingness to carry out the policies of the CRT division leadership, or their views on the Voting Rights Act. The highly offensive comments included suggestions that the parents of one former career Section attorney were Nazis, disparaging a career manager’s physical appearance and guessing how he/she would look without clothing, speculation that another career manager was watching pornography in her office, and references to “Yellow Fever,” in connection with allusions to marital infidelity involving two career Voting Section employees, one of whom was described as “look[ing] Asian.”

Harassment of Black Employee Willing to Enforce Law Equally

From the IG Report, page 121, et seq.

We found that as a result of their hostility to the Noxubee case, some career staff harassed a Black Voting Section intern who volunteered to travel to Mississippi to assist the trial team, and mocked Coates for his work on the case.


The intern told the OIG that two career Voting Section employees made disparaging comments directly to him about his involvement in the trial. In particular, the intern recalled being questioned directly and indirectly about why he participated in this trial and told the OIG that Voting Section personnel made comments like: “You know why they asked you to go down there,” “They used you as a token,” and “People are saying, ‘Why did you go down there?’”


According to a memorandum drafted by Section management summarizing the incidents, the intern told a Section manager that the Voting Section employees informed him that someone who was attending the trial was reporting his activities and, therefore, the employees knew exactly where he was sitting in the courtroom and what he did at the trial.


The intern stated that those employees also told him about disparaging comments by other career CRT career employees who questioned why he would work on the case and insinuated that he was assigned to the matter because he was Black and that he had been used as a “token.” The intern told the OIG that he understood that those employees included Pat Tellson, an attorney in the Voting Section, and Ellen Sydney, an attorney in a different CRT section who used to work in the Voting Section.

The intern stated that he understood from one or more Voting Section employees that Sydney had stated words to the effect that: “They only wanted you down there because you are a black face. How would it look for four white men down there prosecuting all these black people? They wanted you down there to show that it is not white against black. They used you because you were black and they needed a black face.” The intern said that similar comments were directed at his mother, who was employed in a different component of the Division. For instance, the intern stated that one of the Voting Section employees approached his mother and said something to the effect that: “They got [the intern] down there working on this case on behalf of white voters. Why did you let them go down there?”96 According to the intern, he perceived a broader “whisper campaign” in the office about his participation in the Noxubee case after returning from the trial, and he told us that this campaign continued for roughly one year.

The intern told the OIG that the remarks angered and insulted him by suggesting that he was duped into working on the matter. He stated the assertion that he was being used by the Noxubee team was incorrect, noting that he requested to work on the case numerous times. He said the comments affected his ability to do his job because they made him feel ostracized in the office. He said that as a result he kept to himself and stayed in his cubicle to avoid questions about the case. The intern stated that, although he never felt like he was a “token” while working on the case, those statements made him feel as though his participation in the case was wrong.

Sydney denied to the OIG that she made disparaging comments about the intern and his involvement in the Noxubee trial, but stated that she witnessed comments of that nature, including that Tellson had called the intern something to the effect of a “turncoat” in front of his mother. Tellson told the OIG that she believed the intern was being used in the Noxubee matter so that “they could have a black face at counsel table,” but did not recall making comments about the intern’s involvement in the trial. Tellson stated, however, that she told the intern’s mother that it was “just wrong” that the

King also interviewed the intern’s mother about the incident and, according to King’s contemporaneous memorandum of the interview, the intern’s mother said that Sydney made statements to her to the effect that the reason her son was working on Noxubee was that the trial team “need[ed] a black face” at their reverse-discrimination trial. The mother also told King that two career non-attorneys later made similar statements to her. The mother told King that she declined to file a formal complaint about these incidents at the time the comments were made because she thought the people were just “being nosy.” In an e-mail about the incidents to the attorney’s supervisor, however, King described the conduct as “quite egregious.”


The OIG also uncovered e-mails in which current and former Voting Section attorneys criticized and mocked Coates’s work on the Noxubee case. For instance, in an e-mail sent to four former Voting Section attorneys after the Noxubee complaint had been filed but before the trial began, Sydney referred to Coates as a “klansman.” Likewise, a non-attorney employee in the Voting Section wrote in an e-mail to a Section attorney: “[P]ersonally i think that the architects of the [Voting Rights Act] and those who fought and died for it are rolling over in their graves with that perversion of the act … im sorry, but [White people] are NOT covered for a reason.” During the course of the Noxubee trial, a group of current and former Section attorneys exchanged e-mails that celebrated perceived setbacks for the Department’s case and appeared to express hope that Coates and the Department would lose the Noxubee trial.

We found as a result of our e-mail review that after the Noxubee case concluded, current and former Section attorneys who were opposed to the case continued to make derisive comments about Coates and his prosecution of the matter.98 We found no evidence that Division leadership or Coates were made aware of these particular messages at the time, although Coates has on numerous occasions stated that he was the subject of overt hostility in the Section because of his role in the Noxubee case.



Are the Harassers Still Employed at DOJ?

“Karen Lorrie, a non-attorney employee in the Voting Section, initially denied under oath to us that she had posted comments to websites concerning Voting Section personnel or matters.

Later in her second OIG interview she admitted that she had posted such comments, identified several of the statements that she had posted, and acknowledged that she had lied under oath in her first OIG interview. She also told the OIG that she understood that the comments she had posted would remain on the Internet and follow the targets in the future. Lorrie told the OIG that she posted comments online as a way of “relieving the never-ending stress on the job. . . .


Many of the career and political employees who were involved in the most  troubling incidents described in this report have left the Department and are no longer subject to administrative discipline. However, several of the incidents involved conduct by current Department employees and we are referring those matters to the Department for a determination of whether discipline or other administration action with respect to each of them is appropriate.”

A mess

From the IG Report:

“Many of the career and political employees who were involved in the most

troubling incidents described in this report have left the Department and are

no longer subject to administrative discipline. However, several of the

incidents involved conduct by current Department employees and we are

referring those matters to the Department for a determination of whether

discipline or other administration action with respect to each of them is

appropriate.


The conduct that we discovered and document in this report reflects a

disappointing lack of professionalism by some Department employees over an

extended period of time, during two administrations, and across various facets

of the Voting Section’s operations. In the Department, professionalism means

more than technical expertise – it means operating in a manner that

consciously ensures both the appearance and the reality of even-handed, fair

and mature decision-making, carried out without regard to partisan or other

improper considerations. “