The Editors of National Review have an excellent entry today in which the Pigford scandal is explained, Pigford Forever.
Here is a key point which is not often understood, that the payments were tied to Obama’s political maneuvering (emphasis mine):
But as the Times reports in great depth, instead of closing the spigot, in 2010 the Obama administration did not just acquiesce to, it spearheaded the expansion of, the Pigford con on the taxpayer’s dime, and saw to it that not just black Americans, but any woman, Hispanic, or Native American who could so much as gesture at discrimination had access to a billion-dollar pool of easy money.
It did this over the objections of career lawyers in the Justice Department. It did this by dubiously tapping a Justice Department fund reserved for court-ordered, not politically dispensed, payouts. And it did this, in most cases, under evidentiary standards even looser than the ones governing the original settlement….
None of this sorry, shameful, and outrageous mess approaches the realm of “justice.” Pigford and its spawn instead resembles in organization and aim a criminal conspiracy of breathtaking proportions, and one in which the federal government was first complicit and then ultimately responsible. The Times report exposes — as Dan Foster did in his piece for us two years ago — Senator, Candidate, and President Obama’s advocacy for the settlements as barely alloyed quid pro quo, in which Pigford profiteers promised to help Obama run up the score against Hillary Clinton in the rural South in exchange for his work on their behalf. Similarly, the Hispanic case was negligently settled at the urging of the polluted Senator Robert Menendez, who threatened to make noise if the Department of Justice did not give Hispanics the same deal the president gave blacks.
Read the whole thing.
And also head over to Media Matters and let me know if they have apologized yet to Andrew Breibart.
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Comments
I’m so cynical, I have to wonder why the New York Times latched onto Pigford.
They did not get excited when Evercore Partners (founded and run by former Clinton Asst. Treasury Secretary and Democrat Party bigwig Roger Altman) ripped off tax payers to the tune of almost $60 million with the GM and Chrysler cronyism fiascos. They did not get very excited that taxpayer funds were used to guarantee loans and bail out major Obama and Democrat Party donors in the alternative energy scams. They did not get excited about Fast and Furious, approved by the Democrat Attorney General. They did not care much about Benghazi, which happened on likely future Democrat Party presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s watchful eye. All these “scandals” involved very high level Democrat operatives, but the New York Times couldn’t get very excited about them.
But they are interested in Pigford. A case scattered over thousands of “beneficiaries”, none of whom individually have any political clout. Maybe the Ag Secretary gets his image tarnished.
It’s interesting that of all the scandals the New York Times could have latched onto, the one it decided to make a big deal about involved nobody politically powerful in the Democrat Party. Aside from the president, who never assumes responsibility for anything that happens in his administration.
Patterico has a chilling clip of Neal Rauhauser reagarding Breitbart. Will never understand why his death was never questioned .
“Similarly, the Hispanic case was negligently settled at the urging of the polluted Senator Robert Menendez, who threatened to make noise if the Department of Justice did not give Hispanics the same deal the president gave blacks.”
These thugs need to be in prison.
Of course, the Holder Racial Justice Dept. should all be prosecuted, too.
In the Obamabanana Republic, the outlaws are running the courthouse. Which only leaves the people to impose the limits of our laws.
Tar…feathers.
Thar’ ain’t ’nuff tar ‘n feathers left in the country to do justice to the injustices that this administration is inflicting onto the law abiding citizen/taxpayer.
Y’ suppose that the guv’ment bought all that oily feather stuff like they’re doing with ammo?
Something smell real bad…
[…] cases is a great example of a federal program abused from inception but there was no political courage to […]
Claiming that individual recipients of Pigford have no political clout is a diversion. Collectively they have a lot of power, especially their lawyers. I have seen no data on how much of the settlement money was then passed back to the pols who ramrodded this fraud. Thousands of fraudulent claimants, with their fraudulent lawyers, and the PR frauds who fully exploited this scam, each passing a small percentage back to the originators of the settlements is a sizable sum. It probably went to the party, individual candidates, “initiatives and challenges”, study groups, propaganda entities, and any other number of funding operations for personal and future use. This is how it is done in Chicago and it is now gone national. It is organized crime as the boss gets a cut at every level.