This week's syndicated column

Watching the Justice Department under President Obama transform into a dirty weapon of political manipulation to divide Americans into warring camps of class and race is enough to make a citizen feel helpless. I am referring, of course, to the federal government’s outrageous reaction to the jury verdict in the George Zimmerman case.

Innocent, the jury said, finding no evidence that Zimmerman intended to kill Trayvon Martin.

Not good enough, said the feds, now soliciting “tips” for a possible “civil rights” indictment against Zimmerman, even though an FBI investigation last year concluded there was no evidence of what the government defines as “racial bias” in Zimmerman’s background.

Having ripped off its blindfold, Justice makes no bones about wanting a guilty verdict. To be sure, they went to a lot of trouble to ensure a trial in the first place. How do we know? A Freedom of Information Act request by Judicial Watch yielded documents that prove Attorney General Eric Holder sent a division to Florida in 2012 to aid anti-George Zimmerman protests. These included an event “starring” race-relations flamethrower Al Sharpton, who threatened civil disobedience if Zimmerman were not arrested. In other words, using your tax dollars, the Justice Department effectively funded mob rule. It worked. Zimmerman was arrested. The trial went forward. Everything was perfect until the jury ignored the fact that the Holder-Sharpton fix was in.

That’s a problem – for the Justice Department. But it’s also a problem for America. Justice is supposed to be “blind,” not blindly following Al Sharpton.

There is another problem for the Justice Department, also coming out of Florida. It concerns the same attempt to manipulate narrative for political purposes. The hot-button issue here, however, isn’t race, but terrorism, and the government’s position is not to fan flames, but to squelch them.

This is the frightening story of the Saudi support cell in Sarasota, Fla., linked to Florida-based 9/11 hijackers including Mohamed Atta. It revolved around a home inside a gated community where two Saudi couples lived: Abdulaziz al-Hijji, his wife Anoud, their small children and her parents, Esam and Deborah Ghazzawi. At least, that’s where they all lived until on or around Aug. 30, 2001.

That’s when these Saudis fled, abandoning the premises and everything in it: recently registered cars, clothes and furniture. After the 9/11 attacks, neighbors notified the FBI about their abrupt disappearance.

Never heard of this before? Neither did Congress during its inquiry into 9/11, and neither did the 9/11 Commission that followed. That’s because the FBI didn’t tell them about its investigation. The Sarasota story didn’t break until the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and only then due to the diligence of dogged reporters at the BrowardBulldog.org.

Esam Ghazzawi, it turned out, had been an adviser to a senior figure in the Saudi government, Prince Fahd bin Salman bin Abdulaziz al Saud, nephew of King Fahd. Known in pre-9/11 America as the owner of the Kentucky Derby winner War Emblem, Salman would later be identified by a senior al-Qaida honcho as an al-Qaida financier. In July 2002, Salman would die prematurely and in strange circumstances – and within days of the equally premature and strange deaths of two other senior princes similarly identified as al-Qaida financiers.

This FBI failure to be forthcoming was not an isolated event. “The FBI’s failure to tell the Inquiry about the Sarasota investigation was similar to its failure to provide information linking the Sept. 11 hijackers to other Saudis in California,” former Sen. Bob Graham recently wrote in a sworn declaration attached to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit the BrowardBulldog.org is bringing against the FBI and the Justice Department. Graham served as co-chairman of the Congressional Inquiry into 9/11.

Might there have been – or still be – other Saudi cells in the U.S.? Has the FBI, first under George W. Bush, now under Barack Obama, kept more Saudi secrets from the American people and their representatives? In this context, it is worth considering Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi, the Saudi “person of interest” in the Boston Marathon bombings, who, poof, disappeared from the investigation after Saudi foreign minister Prince Saud al-Faisal met with top Obama administration officials, including the president himself.

The Broward Bulldog is pressing “whether the FBI, in order to protect the Saudi government or for other reasons, concealed or withheld such evidence from Congress, other U.S. government officials responsible for investigating the 9/11 attacks, the American public and news media.”

A vitally important question that leads to another: Why are Justice and the FBI running amok and what can we do about it?