Hot on their success bringing down ACORN using false reporting and deceptive video editing, the Republican Party propagandists at Fox News are ginning up outrage among their viewers by deliberately misreporting the outcome of Department of Justice investigation into a purported voter intimidation incident on Election Day in 2008.

In its coverage of the DOJ response to a complaint against three members of the New Black Panther Party, an insignificant fringe group unrelated to the Black Panthers activist organization in the 1960s, Fox on-air personalities made the false claim that no sanctions were levied against the NBPP thugs and and lied again by stating that there was no precedent for the DOJ’s handling of the event.

The lies are demonstrably deliberate because, in the same segment, the Fox personalities quoted other sections from testimony by a DOJ official involved in the case in which both the DOJ sanction against NBP and the precedent case were discussed.

As with its trumped up case against ACORN — a nationwide nonprofit group that focused on housing for the poor as well as voter registration, and so was on the Republicans’ hit list for years — by distorting the facts, Fox is attempting to gin up racist resentment among its viewers, purporting that the African-American thugs were given a pass by the DOJ because both Pres. Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder are black.

Conversely, a much clearer case of overt preferential treatment based on race can be made in the precedent incident. In 2006, in Arizona, members of the Minutemen, a white supremacist, anti-immigrant militia-style group showed up at a predominantly Latino polling station brandishing a 9mm Glock automatic and bullying voters. The U.S. congressman from the district, Rep. Raul M. Grijalva, a Democrat, was among the voters who were subjected to heckling by the hooligans that day.

But after an perfunctory investigation by the Bush DOJ, no action against the Minutemen was taken, even though the ringleader, Roy Warden, has a record of confronting Latino-Americans, including at least one instance of disrupting services at Catholic cathedral, in which he appeared outside the church with a weapon and used a bullhorn to shout threats at worshipers inside the building.

In the New Black Panther’s case, three members of the group appeared outside a predominantly African-American precinct in Philadelphia on Election Day 2008:

At 11 a.m. … [the] local McCain-Palin campaign office got a call from a man who’d had trouble voting at the 14th ward, 4th division polling place, inside a senior citizens’ apartment complex in a heavily African-American neighborhood. The man was scared away by Samir Shabazz and Jerry Jackson, two members of the New Black Panther Party, a fringe radical group unrelated to the 1960s political organization. Shabazz and Jackson stood outside the polling place dressed in black leather, gripping nightsticks. Morse sped over to the polling place and shot video of the two men, who sniped at him for filming. He filmed the police who ushered the men away. Finally he filmed Shabazz angrily leaving the scene with a final insult: “That’s right, you’re gonna be ruled by a black man!”

In May 2009, the Department of Justice won an injunction against Jerry Jackson but had insufficient cause to prosecute other members of the group.

However, Fox reported that the Obama/Holder DOJ let the NBPP off with no sanctions. The Republican Party media outlet also failed to refer to the Minuteman case, despite quoting elsewhere from testimony by a DOJ official at a hearing earlier this year:

In his May 14 testimony before the Commission on Civil Rights, [Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez of the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ] highlighted a case that completely undermines the notion that the DOJ’s decisions in the Black Panthers case were unprecedented or racially motivated. Perez testified that in 2006, the DOJ “declined to bring any action for alleged voter intimidation” “when three well-known anti-immigrant advocates affiliated with the Minutemen, one of whom was carrying a gun, allegedly intimidated Latino voters at a polling place by approaching several persons, filming them, and advocating and printing voting materials in Spanish.” [U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 5/14/10 (PDF)]

Instead, Fox personality Megyn Kelly interviewed Christian Adams, a former DOJ employee who was among the political operatives that Bush White House political director Karl Rove inserted into the department to support Republican causes and efforts and subvert investigations into the Bush administration. According to Media Matters:

Fox News is trumpeting completely unsubstantiated allegations made by GOP activist and former Justice Department attorney J. Christian Adams that the DOJ improperly dismissed voter-intimidation charges against members of the New Black Panther Party for political reasons. But Adams, a longtime Republican activist, relied on hearsay and charges made by others, rather than firsthand knowledge, in making his allegations.

The DOJ’s handling of the NBPP case has been referred to the Bush-appointee dominated Civil Rights Commission, but even the Republican vice chairman expressed doubts about the investigation:

While promoting the U.S. Civil Rights Commission’s “kangaroo court” hearings into the Justice Depatment’s decision not to pursue additional charges against members of the New Black Panther Party Fox has begun playing reel after reel of NBPP footage, notably President Malik Zulu Shabazz and Minister King Samir Shabazz screaming about wanting to kill “cracker babies.”

But as Republican Vice-Chair of the Commission Abigail Thernstrom pointed out back in April, the investigation into the DOJ’s decision to drop some of the charges hinges on whether allegations of voter fraud can be substantiated, not whether NBPP is a bad group. We know NBPP is a bad group.

In April Thernstrom criticized her fellow commissioners for a line of questioning that attempted “to establish the fact that the New Black Panther Party is exactly as they describe themselves…not a pretty picture” saying that that line of questioning didn’t “really get to the matter of the internal DOJ decision to dismiss this lawsuit.”

The propagandists who run Fox are usually too cagey to reveal what their true motives are. However, last fall Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), who will become chairman of the House Judiciary Committee if Republicans win the House in November, signaled the real intent of this latest faked up controversy.

“The Justice Department’s decision to drop a case against political allies who allegedly intimidated voters on Election Day 2008 reeks of political interference,” said Smith in September.

The NBPP is of course in no way an “ally” of the Obama administration or any other mainstream group, African-American or otherwise. Unfortunately, however, if the ACORN case is a guide, Republicans will find success with this latest race-baiting attack on the president and his party.