Shameless wingnuts are smearing a Biden Nominee for the Justice Department by saying she is in favor of reducing sentences for white supremacists. She ran the Civil Rights division during the Obama years. You read that correctly. Right wingers are accusing a civil rights lawyer of being soft on white supremacy. It’s just too much.
President Joe Biden’s nominee for the No. 3 position at the Department of Justice is coming under attack from a right-wing group trying to smear her as anti-law enforcement. But a number of conservatives and law enforcement organizations have enthusiastically endorsed her nomination, and even the nation’s largest police union ― which twice endorsed former President Donald Trump ― praised her as someone they looked forward to working with, saying she could “find common ground even when that seemed impossible.”
Vanita Gupta, the former leader of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during the final years of the Obama administration, is Biden’s nominee for associate attorney general. During the Trump era, Gupta headed up the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of more than 200 civil rights organizations sometimes referred to as the lobby for the civil rights movement. If confirmed, she’d oversee a number of key Justice Department divisions and take a leadership role in what the DOJ describes as a “broad range of civil justice, federal and local law enforcement, and public safety matters.”
Top Justice Department leadership positions tend to be filled by attorneys who built their careers as prosecutors or corporate lawyers. Gupta would be the first Justice Department official since Thurgood Marshall (the former solicitor general and Supreme Court justice) to have built a high-profile career in civil rights and then be named to a top leadership role at DOJ. Gupta ― who has spoken out passionately on issues such as structural racism, police misconduct, mass incarceration, police militarization, voting rights and the “disastrous” war on drugs ― would arguably be one of the most progressive top Justice Department officials in history.
But Gupta also has a long list of allies and supporters in conservative circles and in law enforcement, and has shown a remarkable tact for building bridges across partisan and ideological divides. Her nomination was endorsed or positively received by the Major Cities Chiefs Association, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, the Hispanic American Police Command Officers Association, the Police Executive Research Forum and, perhaps most surprisingly, the National Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), which twice endorsed Trump.
That’s why some law enforcement leaders were taken aback by an attack ad released Thursday by the Judicial Crisis Network. The ad, even by the low standards of political attack ads, is pretty detached from reality, fluctuating between falsehoods and misleading claims. Titled “Dangerous Appointee,” it features imagines from riots over the summer of 2020 and claims that Gupta supports “defunding the police,” led a group to “reduce punishments on white supremacists” and wants to “let convicts out of jail.”
As Politico reported, the article the Judicial Crisis Network ad cites to support its claim that Gupta favors defunding police “does not actually say that she favors defunding the police.” The claim that Gupta wants to “reduce sentences for white supremacists” comes as a voiceover atop an image of Dylann Roof ― the white supremacist killer whose prosecution Gupta oversaw while at the Justice Department. (The ad cites a letter ― sent by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights to Biden more than a month after Gupta took leave from the organization because of her nomination ― that calls for Biden to commute all federal death sentences. Such a commutation would “reduce” Roof’s penalty insomuch as it would condemn him to a natural death behind bars rather than death by lethal injection.) And her statement last summer that “COVID-19 is killing people in federal prison who could be released” is one that even former Attorney General William Barr would agree with.
The Judicial Crisis Network’s attempt to portray Gupta as some sort of anti-police radical flies in the face of the experiences of law enforcement organizations that have actually worked with her, even in somewhat adversarial settings.
Patrick Yoes, the national president of the FOP, wrote in a letter to Congress that Gupta ― even in the aftermath of high-profile police shootings and Justice Department investigations in Chicago, Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri ― was dedicated to dialogue and “always worked with us to find common ground even when that seemed impossible.” While the FOP had and continues to have disagreements, Gupta’s “open and candid approach has created a working relationship that is grounded in mutual respect and understanding,” which they expected would continue if she’s confirmed, he wrote.
Jim Pasco, the FOP’s executive director, told HuffPost on Thursday that there was a natural “dynamic tension” between Gupta and the FOP ― “the regulator and the regulated” ― during her time as the head of the Civil Rights Division. But he said some tension could be “healthy” as long as there’s communication, which Gupta always worked to maintain.
“The real crisis in this country is not a judicial crisis,” Pasco said, when asked about the Judicial Crisis Network ads. “The real crisis in this country is partisan demagoguery and the politics of personal destruction.”
“We’re not necessarily ready to wade into a fight with well-heeled so-called think tanks, but if they pick one and we feel it’s detrimental to our objectives, we’ll do our best to refute their assertions,” Pasco said. “We’ll go to bat for the truth.”
I wouldn’t have expected that sort of clarity from the FOP. But maybe after Trump’s thugs beat the shit out of cops on January 6th some of the cop organizations are rethinking their affinity for the extremist right wing. It’s not good for their health.