Enemies List?

Positively Nixonian. [Link]

The Justice Department has been caught colluding with left-wing media "watchdog" Media Matters to suppress critics who've embarrassed the Obama administration. What is this, Hugo Chavez's Venezuela?

Based on a cache of internal Justice Department e-mails obtained by the Daily Caller, Attorney Gen. Eric Holder's press staff has been collaborating all along with left-wing media "watchdog" Media Matters to smear any reporter asking uncomfortable questions, to discourage whistle-blowers, to discredit political watchdogs and to suppress damaging news about what's going on in the Obama administration.

The Daily Caller found dozens of pages of e-mails between DOJ Public Affairs Director Tracy Schnakler and Media Matters staffers planning and discussing how to attack reporters who covered scandals such as the Black Panther voter suppression case, and the Fast and Furious scandal where DOJ sold thousands of guns to Mexico's notorious crime cartels — the truth of which DOJ didn't want to get out.

These weren't just instances of over-sharing between political allies or a quest for access, such as the New York Times was caught doing when one of its reporters submitted an unpublished story to a CIA flack.

This was the Obama administration planning and directing operations from on high in a grotesque example of the state with all its powers using an off-the-books nuisance organization to harass its critics.

After the acts, the DOJ then praised them: "Great piece," gushed Schmaler after Media Matters attacked DOJ whistle-blowers J. Christian Adams and Christopher Coates.

Incredibly, this isn't happening in some totalitarian dictatorship or banana republic, but here in the U.S.

And its implications are serious.