originally by: PhillyNow
published: 11 March 2014
After the U.S. Senate rejected former NAACP Legal Defense Fund Head Deb Adegbile for the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division on Wednesday, pundits and writers everywhere began explaining the peculiar vote.
After all, Adegbile was clearly qualified. Problem is, he had some degrees of separation with Philadelphia cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal, and that was enough for Republicans and conservative Democrats to cast a “no” vote.
After the media ran every last opinion on the situation, the person perhaps most responsible for Adegbile’s defeat gave his own response.
In a statement recorded for Prison Radio, Mumia Abu Jamal called the vote, which ended 47-52, “the triumph of fear and lies over reason and fact.”
Abu-Jamal blames the Fraternal Order of Police’s public campaign against Adegbile for the rejection. “The Broad Street Bullies, also known as the FOP, had other ideas, and they didn’t let truth get in their way,” he says in the recording.