The “free coat drives” were not warm jackets or comfortable winter coats.
Yesterday, U.S. Congressman Jerrold Nadler announced a probe is coming in 2019 looking at hate crimes.
The Washington Post reports, “The expected incoming chairman of the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to top Trump administration officials Tuesday warning that when Democrats take over the chamber, they will investigate the rise in hate crimes.”
The CDLU has spoken to and briefed Nadler’s office while we were in New York City and Washington, D.C. two weeks ago.
Will ex-Balch partner and former Southern Company lobbyist Jeffrey H. Wood or Southern Company CEO Tom Fanning be brought before the House Judiciary Committee to answer questions about the North Birmingham Bribery Scandal?
Will they be grilled about the $30,000 contribution from a Southern Company subsidiary to the Oliver Robinson Foundation, the entity used in a bribery scheme to suppress poor blacks from having their toxic and contaminated property tested by the EPA?
North Birmingham’s population is 92.5 percent African-American.
Let us not forget the targeting of poor black children at Tarrant Elementary School, a school that is 95 percent minority, predominately black.
Was the environmental injustice and targeting of residents and their children in North Birmingham a hate crime or not?
We learned that the “free coat drives” targeting poor black children and spearheaded by convicted ex-Balch & Bingham partner Joel I. Gilbert and his paid AstroTurf consultants were not warm jackets or comfortable winter coats.
The phony and insidious “coat drives” were allegedly the distribution of $50 gift cards to Burlington Coat Factory.
Maybe Congressman Nadler can dig into who paid for these $50 gift cards, from where, from whom, and with what resources and under whose direction.
Obstructing the EPA in an African-American community while shelling out $50 a pop to silence the residents appears to be worse that an alleged bribe; it truly looks like an alleged hate crime as poor African-Americans and their children continue to be poisoned by (and allegedly die from) a toxic and contaminated environment.
