Major Blow to DOJ Sheriff Joe Law Suit, ICE Had Already Investigated & Blessed His Dept.

Uh-oh, it looks as if Attorney General Stedman Graham, er Eric Holder may have screwed up a bit. Yesterday Holder's Department of Justice filed suit against Sheriff Joe Arpaio alleging that his department was refusing to cooperate with an investigation into whether Arpaio's officers were discriminating against Latinos while trying to enforce immigration laws.

Sheriff Joe not one to "take a punch," hit back at the Administration calling the DOJ back stabbers and saying that it was about time that America see this administration for what it really was "Calculating, underhanded at times and certainly not looking out for the best interests of the legal citizens residing in this country."  Along with the Sheriff's statement, his lawyer issued a statement saying that they had indeed been cooperating with the DOJ

Byron York is reporting that the Sheriff's Attorney received some interesting information via a freedom of information act request, six months before Holder began his investigation the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) did their own investigation and gave Arpaio's Maricopa County Sheriff Department its blessing.

ICE officials evaluated how the sheriff's office performed under a law that allows specially trained local law enforcement officers to enforce parts of federal immigration law. The Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, which is the largest sheriff's office in the Arizona, has 189 officers who have been trained by ICE to enforce federal immigration statutes.

The report, crammed with acronyms and bureaucratese, is not light reading. But struggle through it, and the key sentence is this: "The OI and DRO supervisors consider the conduct and performance of the MCSO ... officers to be professional and meeting the requirement of the MOA." Translated, that means officials from the Homeland Security Department's Office of Investigation (OI), along with officials from the Detention and Removal Operations office (DRO), concluded that the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office (MCSO), in its handling of illegal immigrants, acted in a professional manner and complied with a memorandum of agreement (MOA) under which the government gave them the authority to enforce federal law. That agreement included a ban on racial profiling.

ICE investigators also interviewed top federal officials involved in illegal immigrant cases in Arizona. They found an "excellent" working relationship between the sheriff's office and the feds. ICE talked as well to federal prosecutors in Phoenix, who described the cases brought by Maricopa County as "high quality."

And there's more along with the contents of the evaluation, one of the documents released was an email from a Justice department official dated right after the DOJ announced its investigation where

Arpaio's lawyers found a March 11, 2009, e-mail, sent just after the Justice Department investigation was announced, from an ICE employee to John P. Torres, then the acting assistant secretary of ICE. "Did you see this?" the e-mail said, attaching a news report on the investigation. "Yes," Torres responded a few minutes later. "Interesting politics at play."

York concludes

Failing to find proof of real discrimination in Maricopa County could ultimately doom the administration's entire crusade in Arizona. The much-publicized suit against the new immigration law is based on the possibility that it might result in future discrimination, but at the same time the department is struggling to find evidence of civil rights violations in Arpaio's office, which uses enforcement techniques similar to those outlined in the new law. There's a real chance that in the end Obama's war on Arizona will come to nothing.

This is clearly a politically motivated which hunt. The administration wants to make an example of Sheriff Joe because he is probably the most visible symbol of Americans trying to protect the boarders, which conflicts with the administrations "open border" policy.

Under President Obama and AG Holder, the Department of Justice has become the political enforcer of the Administration. The voter intimidation case of the New Black Panthers was dropped,  an action against ACORN who systematically committed voter fraud across the country was never filed, and the trial against the Islamic terrorists who attacked the USS Cole was put on hold, but this Justice department has filed suit against a man whose crime is enforcing the law. And now we know that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has certified that he is enforcing the law in a professional manner and according to ICE procedures.