By David Thomas
March 25 (Reuters) – Kristen Clarke, who led the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division under Democratic President Joe Biden, will serve as the NAACP’s general counsel as the largest U.S. civil rights group looks to counter what it describes as escalating attacks on voting rights.
The group on Wednesday said it was expanding its “legal firepower” by hiring Clarke, who was the first woman and the first Black woman to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate as assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division.
The NAACP over the past year has mounted legal challenges against new electoral maps in North Carolina and Texas that are designed to add more Republicans to the U.S. House of Representatives, as well as a lawsuit accusing Virginia state election officials of disenfranchising students.
“Kristen Clarke is exactly the legal mind this moment demands,” NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson said in a statement.
In Republican President Donald Trump’s second term, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, led by Harmeet Dhillon, has turned to conservative priorities like gun rights and pushing back on transgender issues. It withdrew from pending agreements with the Minneapolis and Louisville police departments over widespread civil rights abuses and rescinded prior police abuse findings.
Under Clarke, the Justice Department division challenged voting restrictions in Arizona and Georgia, and reached consent decrees with Minneapolis and Louisville to reform their respective police departments after federal investigations of civil rights abuses.
“Our communities are under relentless attack — from the ballot box to their wallets — and this moment demands that we use the full weight of the law to promote justice and accountability,” Clarke said in a statement released by the NAACP.
Reuters reported last month that the unit within the Civil Rights Division responsible for prosecuting potential wrongdoing by law enforcement, including during the crackdown on illegal immigration in Minneapolis, has lost two-thirds of its prosecutors and was under orders to scale back its investigations of excessive force.
(Reporting by David Thomas; Editing by David Bario and Franklin Paul)
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