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Ashcroft's Justice Dept:
Florida Election 2000 was Legitimate

Agency's Threats of Suits in Florida Called a Protective Sham

Bush Brothers and Katherine Harris Shielded by Hocus Pocus

By Jack Nichols

Washington, D.C.-Attorney General John Ashcroft's Justice Department announced Tuesday in a letter to Congress that it has found no credible evidence that thousands of Florida voters were intentionally disenfranchised during the presidential election.

The Justice Department had, on May 21, 2002, threatened to sue three Florida counties for violations of voters' civil rights, including, it had been hoped, the purging of thousands from the rolls of mostly African-Americans. But the Justice Deparment emphasized that these projected suits were threats only, and that the accused Florida counties were likely to settle out of court.

George W. Bush and a slogan created by gubernatorial candidate Bob Kunst about the Florida 2000 Presidential Election

Senator Edward Kennedy (Democrat of Massachusetts on the Judicial Committee) immediately complained:

"I question why these investigations have taken 18 months and why, with the primary season only a few months away, the Department of Justice has not mobilized a plan to make sure these voting rights abuses do not occur again."

Greg Palast, an award-winning investigative reporter for BBC-TV and the author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy says the proposed suits were merely a public relations sham to protect the Bush brothers and Jeb Bush's Secretary of State, Katherine Harris.

Palast writes:

"The U.S. Justice Department's suit is a sham - the beneficiaries of the voting disaster, Bush's agencies, have figured out a way to do the least possible damage to candidates Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush. They have aimed their fire at blameless county officials when the disaster was created in Tallahassee - a disaster for Black voters, though a blessing to the highly partisan Secretary of State's office. I feal this is an attempt to undercut the suit by the NAACP against Harris and others more directly."

Ms. Harris, currently a candidate for the U.S. Congress, announced yesterday that she too will be the author of a new book to be titled: Eye of the Storm: Practical Leadership in a Time of Crisis.

Ms. Harris once naively expected to receive public acclaim following 2000's suspect presidential election but she was booed by an angry crowd of 19,000 South Florida racing fans as she approached the podium during the presentation of a racing trophy. Following the controversial election, computers in Ms. Harris' offices were found to have been purged of their contents.

In its May 28 letter to Congress, the Justice Department, represented by Assistant Attorney General Ralph Boyd, said:

"While the Civil Rights Division discovered evidence of significant confusion and delay in the three counties, there were relatively few voters who actually did not vote because of these problems."

The Justice Department's letter insists that the "few voters" disenfranchised "doesn't reasonably cast any doubt on President Bush's several hundred vote margin of victory in Florida."

Openly gay candidate Bob Kunst, Florida's veteran human rights activist and currently running for the governor's office, told GayToday:

Related Stories from the GayToday Archive:
Ashcroft says: Legitimate Political Dissent Aids the Enemy

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Fat Cat Corporate Chislers Censor the News

Related Sites:
Florida Civil Rights Initiative

GayToday does not endorse related sites.

"Ashcroft is continuing the cover-up. He's not seriously looking for the problem. One example-Senator Bill Nelson (D-Fla) got 285,000 more votes than Al Gore. That's not possible.

"Ashcroft isn't capable of an investigation any more than the FBI was capable of reading all the warnings it had to stop 9/11. The key, of course, is that the FBI is under fundamentalist Ashcroft's supervision. He's just too busy covering the breasts of a statue in his Department of Justice. And he's protecting Bush no matter what."