Last week, Hans von Spakovsky testified before the Senate Rules Committee that he’d been something of a wallflower when he worked at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. His critics had it all wrong, he said. Despite claims that he’d led the Department’s efforts to overturn the voting rights section’s traditional work protecting African-American voters — using the division’s power instead to spread the myth of voter fraud and purge state voter rolls — von Spakovsky said that he’d merely been there in an advisory capacity. People asked his opinion and he gave it, that’s all.
But those who actually worked under him in the voting rights section say otherwise, calling him the de facto head of the section.
And in a letter to the Senate Rules Committee yesterday (the committee is considering von Spakovsky’s nomination to be a commissioner at the Federal Election Commission), a group of former voting rights professionals in the Department laid out the numerous areas where von Spakvosky had been less than forthright in his testimony. You can read the letter here.
Not so many months ago, I would sit down at the computer and try not to write about the same things over and over. I’m writing this blog as a way of keeping myself from driving everyone around me crazy talking about it all the time. But, the revelations were so slow in coming, it was hard to come up with much more to say than "what I said yesterday is still a problem."
These days, things are happening so fast that it’s hard to keep up. Von Spakovsy’s seat in the Congressional Hearing room is still warm, and here we have an insider rebuttal already. Read it. It’s a scorcher…
huh..this just in.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/06/19/portman.resigns.ap/index.html
There sure are a lot of “Personal reasons” resignations. Curious.