Heavily sanctioned election lawyer Gerry Hebert knows a thing or two about “lacking facts to back up a claim.” Just ask the defendants in United States v. Jones, where Hebert lacked the facts to back up his claims of racially discriminatory intent in a voting case brought against an Alabama jurisdiction. Naturally, Ryan Reilly at Huff Post makes no mention of Hebert’s history of court imposed sanctions when he decided to use Hebert as a source for this article about New Hampshire bailouts.
I discussed Heberts sanctions in my New York Times bestseller Injustice thusly:
“In United States v. Jones, the Voting Section was sanctioned $86,626 for bringing a frivolous case in Alabama. The DOJ brought the suit under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to block over fifty white voters from participating in an election in a majority black district. The appeals court ruled that the lawsuit was filed “without conducting a proper investigation of its truth [and was] unconscionable.… Hopefully, we will not again be faced with reviewing a case as carelessly instigated as this one.” The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals did not mince words in its scolding of DOJ lawyers including then-Voting Section attorney Gerald Herbert, who would later become a vociferous critic of the Bush DOJ:
A properly conducted investigation would have quickly revealed that there was no basis for the claim that the Defendants were guilty of purposeful discrimination against black voters.… Unfortunately, we cannot restore the reputation of the persons wrongfully branded by the United States as public officials who deliberately deprived their fellow citizens of their voting rights. We also lack the power to remedy the damage done to race relations in Dallas County by the unfounded accusations of purposeful discrimination made by the United States.
We can only hope that in the future the decision makers in the United States Department of Justice will be more sensitive to the impact on racial harmony that can result from the filing of a claim of purposeful discrimination.”
Never mind, sanctions don’t matter in some corners, particularly in academia and the Huffington Post where sanctions imposed against someone like Hebert must be ignored to make the narrative work.