GOP activist and former Department of Justice lawyer J. Christian Adams has recently leveled unsubstantiated allegations that the Obama Department of Justice improperly decided not to pursue additional charges of voter intimidation against the New Black Panther Party for an incident that occurred outside a Philadelphia polling place in 2008.

A December 23, 2009, Main Justice article titled “The New Black Panther Case: A Legacy of Politicized Hiring” sheds further light on the political climate surrounding the DOJ at the time Adams was there.

The Main Justice article reported on Adams' ties to Bradley Scholzman:

Adams is a career Voting Section lawyer. He is also a foot soldier in the conservative movement, hired into the Justice Department during the Bush administration under a process the department's Inspector General concluded was improperly politicized.

Adams's background helps explain how a relatively minor incident in Philadelphia during the 2008 presidential election involving two members of an anti-white fringe group blossomed into a political controversy for the Obama administration.

[...]

Hired in 2005 by Bradley Schlozman, a Bush-era political appointee who drove out veteran Civil Rights Division attorneys perceived to be liberal, Adams appears to be one of the “right-thinking Americans” with conservative affiliations that Schlozman improperly seeded throughout the bureaucracy.

Main Justice further reported Bush-era DOJ official Hans von Spakovsky's full-throated defense of Adams and his attacks against “political hacks” in the Justice Department:

Spakovsky worked closely with Schlozman. He helped oversee the Noxubee case in Mississippi and assisted in the controversial purge of veteran lawyers in the division perceived to be liberal. The Democratic-controlled Senate in 2007 refused to confirm Spakovsky as a Federal Election Commission member.

Spakovsky has also worked at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights for commissioner Todd Gaziano, an official at the conservative Heritage Foundation who's been the driving force behind the push to investigate the Black Panthers matter.

Von Spakovsky told Main Justice said he hadn't spoken with Adams about the case. “I know Christian just like I know all the lawyers, but I have not talked to him about the case,” he said.