Now DOJ whitewashes Holder speech on that task force lie.

[Ichingcarpenter]

It turns out that Barack Obama's Justice Department, in the person of Attorney General Holder, didn't just grossly overstate the success of its Mortgage Fraud Task Force. In what at best is a bonehead mistake, the Department channeled 1984 and whitewashed a web page, re-transcribing an old speech of Holder's to better reflect the "updated" version of the mortgage facts.



Two days after that appearance, a pair of pain-in-the-ass Bloomberg reporters, Phill Mattingly and Tom Schoenberg, reported that at least one of the cases Holder was citing was a Bush-era prosecution, and multiple others had been filed long before the Task Force existed. "There is no attempt to fudge the numbers," an FBI spokesman grumbled lamely at the time.

Subsequently, Bloomberg writer Jonathan Weil continued to follow up, pestering the DOJ for a list of the cases Holder was talking about. He repeatedly asked a DOJ spokesperson for the list, and whether the delay was coming from the FBI (which had the information) or the DOJ, he never got the information he was after.

Last Friday, the reason for that stalling finally emerged. The DOJ issued a revised press release, admitting that it had not, in fact, prosecuted 530 individuals in the program, but 107 – as Weil noted, an 80% decrease. Wrote Weil this weekend, in a piece entitled "Eric Holder Owes the American People and Apology":



Now, the new, revised DOJ press release came with a big banner at the top announcing their screwup, along with a full-paragraph mea culpa in which they basically admit to gaming the numbers for press purposes in multiple ways. The new press release reads like a Capitol Hill version of horror fiction. Emphasis is mine:



Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/doj-compounds-stat-screwup-by-whitewashing-old-eric-holder-speech-20130814#ixzz2by7eXa3L
Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter | RollingStone on Facebook

[rusty fender]

1. Kick

thanks for posting this

[Wilms]

2. What are they smoking?

Someone was gonna ask.

[Mc Mike]

3. No complaints from the repugs about Holder's performance on THIS issue.

Almost like they approve of it.

They're usually crying about what a threat he is to America.

[Rex]

4. Sure why not!

Not like we expect them to be honest and transparent. Evidently those days are long gone.