WE all know the Justice Department’s report on the Michael Brown case ABSOLUTELY destroyed the lie that Officer Darren Wilson was not justified in shooting Brown, But, Eric Holder did not like the evidence, so, he did his damnedest to bury the facts with his “RAAAAACISM in the Ferguson Police Department report. Heather MacDonald blows the lid off of that at The Weekly Standard
Attorney General Eric Holder was clearly not happy that his own agency had so resoundingly shredded the incendiary story of a pacific Michael Brown gunned down by a trigger-happy cop while trying to surrender. And so he provided the mechanism for sidelining his own department’s report. A few days before its release, he told Politico that he wanted to lower the standard of proof in civil rights cases. The subtext of this announcement: The decision not to pursue civil rights charges against Officer Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown was forced on DOJ by an overly stringent evidentiary standard; under a more realistic standard, Wilson would have been prosecuted. Voilà! The media had their angle. “The Justice Department announced on Wednesday that its investigation did not support federal civil rights charges against Darren Wilson,” the New York Times acknowledged morosely in an editorial, before immediately turning to the good news: “Still, the department found overwhelming evidence of entrenched racism in Ferguson’s police force [emphasis added].” The Huffington Post said that the Justice Department had decided “not to file federal charges against Wilson for fatally shooting Brown last July.”
“Did not support”? Decided “not to file”? Such understatement massively misrepresents the content of the Brown report. This was not a question of evidence “not supporting” high-threshold civil rights charges; it’s a question of evidence eviscerating virtually every aspect of the pro-Brown, anti-Wilson narrative. Under no imaginable standard of proof could Wilson be found guilty of civil rights violations—or, for that matter, murder. As the report states: “Multiple credible witnesses corroborate virtually every material aspect of Wilson’s account and are consistent with the physical evidence.” Those “material aspects” include Wilson’s testimony that Brown punched and grabbed him while Wilson was in his SUV, that Brown tried to seize his gun, and that Brown charged at Wilson after Wilson had exited his car. Wilson had first seen Brown walking in the middle of Canfield Drive with another young man. Wilson suspected that Brown was the thief who had just robbed a convenience store and roughed up its owner a few minutes before, since he saw the stolen boxes of cigarillos in Brown’s hands. Wilson asked Brown to move to the sidewalk. Brown responded: “F— what you have to say.” Wilson called for backup and then tried to block Brown from proceeding. At that point, Brown reached into Wilson’s car and starting pounding him and grabbing his gun. Wilson fired and Brown ran off. Wilson gave chase on foot. Brown then turned and charged towards Wilson. At no point did Wilson fire at Brown when Brown’s back was turned or when he was on the ground. As for the now-iconic “Hands up, don’t shoot” claim—the DOJ report is withering:
There are no credible witness accounts that state that Brown was clearly attempting to surrender when Wilson shot him. As detailed throughout this report, those witnesses who say so have given accounts that could not be relied upon in a prosecution because they are irreconcilable with the physical evidence, inconsistent with the credible accounts of other eyewitnesses, inconsistent with the witness’s own prior statements, or in some instances, because the witnesses have acknowledged that their initial accounts were untrue.
In other words, no prosecutor with any understanding of his professional duties would think of going forward with this case, since there is no evidence to support it. This is not a standard of proof issue, it is an absence-of-any-case-whatsoever issue.
The report also explains why Brown’s body lay on the ground for four hours after he was killed before being taken away by an ambulance, another plank in the “Black Lives Matter” indictment of the allegedly racist treatment of Brown. The crime scene detectives’ efforts to process the scene were continuously interrupted by protesters who were encroaching on their work chanting, “Kill these motherf—ers” and “Kill the police.” What sounded like automatic gunfire was reported in the area, resulting in further suspension of activity until more backup arrived.
Could it be more clear? Yet, Holder decided to do what he could to keep the narrative alive. To the Left, remember, truth is meaningless. The Leftist message is ALL that matters. So what if witnesses were threatened to the point of being afraid for their lives? So what if those threatening those witnesses KNEW that Officer Wilson was innocent. None of that matters to the Left.
Eyewitnesses who corroborated Wilson’s account were under a reign of terror not to cooperate with the police. The Canfield Green neighborhood where the shooting occurred was plastered with “Snitches get stitches” signs. A 74-year-old black male who believed that the shooting was justified had told a friend two days after the incident that he “would have f—ing shot that boy, too.” He refused to give formal statements to county or federal authorities, however. He would rather go to jail than testify before the grand jury, he said, so enormous was the community pressure to support a “hands up” surrender narrative. A 53-year-old black male called a police tip line after seeing Brown’s companion lie about the incident on national television. He, too, stated that the shooting was justified, but told authorities that he would deny everything if his phone call were traced. He was served with a grand jury subpoena but refused to honor it. A 27-year-old biracial male said that it appeared that Wilson’s life was in jeopardy, describing Brown as a “threat” moving at a “full charge.” At the scene, as angry crowds were gathering and collecting false narratives about the shooting, two black women asked him to recount what he had seen into their cell phones. When he told them that they would not like what he had to say, they called him a “white motherf—er” and other racial slurs. A 31-year-old black female initially told investigators that she had seen Wilson fire shots into Brown’s back as he lay dead in the street. When challenged with the autopsy findings that revealed no shots to the back, she confessed to making up her story. “You’ve gotta live the life to know it,” she said. In fact, she then admitted, it looked like Wilson’s life was in danger as Brown was charging him. When authorities tried to serve her with a subpoena, however, she blocked her door with a couch.
This is what the Left is my friends. Morality? That definition of that word has been so bastardized by the Left as to be meaningless. Morality to the Left is defined as supporting Leftism. If that means lying, or railroading innocent people, or threatening witnesses, then so be it. As I have said often when they see by any means necessary, they damn well mean it. If this is not evil, then what is? Please go read the rest of the MacDonald piece, it is so crucial because it eviscerates the “narrative”. And it makes clear how far the Left will go to wage their war on the police (the Left much prefers a national police force because the Left wishes to centralize all power in the federal government). But the police are not the only targets. Your right to self-defense is in the Left’s cross hairs as well, as is our entire justice system.
