I was watching Fox News in my office this morning as they interviewed two customs officers involved in finding Faisal Shahzad and getting him pulled off his airplane before it left the country. They certainly deserve credit for their quick action, but I was struck by the fact that these are front-line career employees — exactly the same kind of employee that the Justice Department is refusing to let testify in the New Black Panther voter-intimidation case. They’re basing their refusal on the false claim that they don’t allow their career employees to testify before Congress or appear elsewhere (congressional Democrats demanded and got testimony from the career chief of the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division during the Bush administration).

So here were two customs officers speaking on national television about what they did in this case, revealing to the world (and any terrorist networks) the strengths and weaknesses of our airline-security system. They obviously could not appear without having gotten permission from the highest levels of the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department, which is handling the prosecution of this case. Yet Eric Holder refuses to let his front-line Voting Section employees talk about what happened in the New Black Panther case (even purely factual matters having nothing to due with any DOJ deliberations), unlawfully defying subpoenas from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

It is quite a stark contrast. And it is hard to imagine that the political (and public-opinion) benefits to be gained from the story of customs officers doing a good job and the political (and public-opinion) loss that would be suffered in the voting case if the truth came out were not factors in the attorney general’s decisions, national security and compliance with the rule of law notwithstanding.