During his confirmation hearing, Trump district court nominee Thomas Farr told the Senate Judiciary Committee that, although he was a lawyer for Senator Jesse Helms’s 1990 campaign, he didn’t know anything about the 100,000 postcards that Helms sent to black voters to suppress their votes. Unfortunately for Farr, former Deputy Chief of the Justice Department’s voting rights section J. Gerald Hebert has the receipts. Literally.
Hebert’s handwritten notes from the DOJ’s investigation of the campaign’s voter suppression plan show that Farr attended a meeting about “ballot security” in October 1990, before the postcards went out. Upon questioning, Farr admitted he attended the meeting, but maintained he knew nothing about the postcards or voter suppression strategy.
Farr’s claims of innocence might have gotten more traction had he not continued to participate in efforts to suppress the African-American vote in North Carolina. Remember that voter ID law that the Fourth Circuit, the court that hears federal appeals from Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and the Carolinas, said targeted black voters with “almost surgical precision”? Farr’s one of the lawyers who fought to defend it.
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights is demanding Farr withdraw his nomination; the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Washington Post editorial board are urging the Senate Judiciary Committee to question Farr more fully.