The left is jumping up and down screaming “Gotcha!” over a post at American Prospect by Adam Serwer that purports to debunk the New Black Panther voter intimidation story.

Serwer’s headline:  “When Was the Black Panther Case Downgraded” is an important part of the obfuscation that runs through the reaction to his post as left-leaning media types desperately try to make his “find” mean something that it doesn’t.

First, let’s watch the highest-profile regurgitation of Serwer’s storyline, Keith Olbermann:


Seems pretty cut and dried, right?  The charge that Obama’s Justice Department dismissed the case against the Panthers is patently false because it was actually the Bush DOJ that dismissed them.

Well, at least that’s what Olbermann and his poor, tortured producers and staff want you to think.

Remember I pointed out that Serwer’s headline is the beginning of the obfuscation?  Read it again:  “When Was the Black Panther Case Downgraded.”

Get it?

A simple reading of the Serwer piece will show that his point is not about when the charges were dropped and by whom, it is about when the charges were downgraded to civil rather than criminal charges and by whom.

But Olbermann and Serwer’s entire thesis is based on a misrepresentation of the controversy itself.  Conservative media outlets have not been decrying that the charges were downgraded.  They have been decrying that the Obama Department of Justice had convictions in hand for the civil charges and then they unilaterally dropped them.

As Olbermann points out in his piece, the Bush DOJ filed four civil complaints against the Black Panthers.  Three of those charges were dropped in May, 2009 by the Obama DOJ as reported last year by Fox News:

The Obama administration won the case last month, but moved to dismiss the charges on May 15.

Republican Congressmen on the House Judiciary committee immediately requested explanations from Justice and in December the Washington Times reported on the inquiry:

Two senior lawmakers on Wednesday said the Justice Department, after five months of “repeated questions,” again refused to say why it “wrongfully dismissed” a civil complaint against members of the New Black Panther Party who were accused of voter intimidation at a Philadelphia polling place during the November 2008 presidential elections.

There are no doubts as to the facts of this case despite the seemingly willful obfuscation from Serwer and Olbermann:

  • Four civil charges were brought in this case by the Bush Justice Department including a charge against the New Black Panther Party itself and its leader, Malik Zulu Shabazz
  • The defendants in this case did not show up to defend themselves and summary judgments were obtained
  • Those judgments were unilaterally dropped in three of the four cases (including against Malik Shabazz and the Party itself) by the Obama Justice Department in May.

Olbermann can rant and Adam Serwer can behave as though he has found a smoking gun of hypocrisy, but blaming your opponent of being wrong on a position that they never took is not called a “Gotcha” moment… it’s just pathetic grasping at straws, repetition of Media Matters talking points, and a desperate attempt to confuse the public.

One nice little touch in Serwer’s “blockbuster” post, the final line, seemingly thrown in as an afterthought, says:

UPDATE: More on the subsequent decision not to further pursue the civil case here.

“Oh yeah.. someone eventually decided to not pursue the civil case… but that’s not important to explore here. ” Even though it is the crux of the conservative criticism of this case.  No, that will get in the way of Serwer pretending he’s caught conservatives in a trap.  Pathetic.  Almost as pathetic as the people who believed it and repeated it.

MSNBC, Olby, American Prospect, and Serwer all could have figured this out before they went live with their mega non-scoop… but that might have required literally minutes of fact-checking (i.e. legit journalism) on Google.