Obama Justice Department's Secret Blogging Team?

Does the Obama Justice Department have a secret blogging team? If so, it is not so secret now. Warner Todd Huston, Publius Forum reports:

Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, has apparently hired a cadre of left-wing, Democrat campaign bloggers to troll through the Internet looking for news stories and blog posts that denigrate the Obama agenda. After such websites are found it is the job of these secret lefty bloggers to leave comments that come to the support of Obamaism in the comments sections. It seems that Eric Holder has created his own little propaganda unit in a valiant effort to become the Bloggi Riefenstahl of the Obama era.

As reported at The Muffled Oar, a blog that first broke the story of Holder’s secretive blogging unit - dubbed the “Blog Squad” by blogger Isaac Muzzey - Holder has housed this unit in the Office of Public Affairs at the Department of Justice. . . . If indeed this is what DOJ media outreach [then] it would most certainly qualify as “astroturfing.” Astroturfing is the action of using fake commenters and multiple screen names on all sorts of sites to push a similar opinion to create the appearance of a grass roots movement and make it seem as if there are all sorts of individuals naturally supporting a product or political movement.

It most certainly is a creepy, propagandistic sort of effort that Holder’s office is involved in and it is one that certainly seems an immoral one. After all, it most certainly is lying to the public if there are a handful of DOJ employees casting about on hundreds of different websites pretending that they are just your average citizen coming to the support of the Obama administration. But is it illegal? . . . .

[Mr. von Spakovsky] wonders if the Obama administration will ever learn the difference between political campaign and the “entirely different responsibility it now has to enforce this nation’s laws in an objective, nonpartisan, nonpolitical manner”? I think that the question is a good one. After all, after nearly a year in office, we have yet to see the end Obama’s constant blaming of Bush for every little problem he runs up against not to mention the constant campaign speeches and appearances on TV at every hour, day and night. One gets the uneasy feeling that President Barack Obama has yet to put in an actual day’s work as he constantly campaigns for office instead. . . .

Warner Todd Huston: The Obama Justice Department's Secret Blogging Team . . . Is it Illegal?

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