Thread: PIGFORD: NYT PEGS OBAMA FOR VOTE-BUYING SCHEME

PIGFORD: NYT PEGS OBAMA FOR VOTE-BUYING SCHEME

by LEE STRANAHAN 26 Apr 2013

The New York Times has vindicated the news sense of Andrew Breitbart and years of Breitbart News coverage of the Pigford scandal with a front page, above the fold blockbuster of investigative journalism that adds new details about the fraud in the USDA farmer settlements and the key role that Barack Obama has played in Pigford dating back to his days as a Senator.

Andrew Breitbart worked tirelessly to expose the Pigford fraud scheme only to have the clear evidence of manipulation by politicians and plaintiff lawyers ignored by the mainstream media. The story involved politicians and lawyers hijacking a lawsuit by black farmers against the USDA designed to make up for years of discrimination and turning it into a multi-billion dollar fraud where people claiming to have 'attempted to farm' were able to collect $50,000 checks with no proof. The Obama administration expanded the program for Native Americans, Hispanics, and women, using the same low "attempted to farm" standard that invited massive, undetectable fraud.

The Times piece was written by a team led by Sharon LaFraniere, who worked on the story for months and according to the article "was based on thousands of pages of court and confidential government documents, as well as interviews with dozens of claimants, lawyers, former and current government officials and others involved in the cases over the past 14 years."

Here are some highlights from the article, including a number of details not previously reported:

Questionable Legal Moves

The Times story gives a great deal of detail about how the Obama administration certified its own settlement in the cases of the Native American, women, and Hispanic farmer settlements, sidestepping both the legal system ad Congress. Breitbart News has reported on the Obama administration's expansion of Pigford previously, but the Times brought shocking new information to light. For one thing, there were only a total of 91 plaintiffs actually filing suit; 10 women and 81 Latinos. This is a very small number and it certainly would have been possible to handle any actual discrimination claims on a case-by-case basis. However, the Times points out that the government was very skeptical even about those cases.

“Some of these folks have never made a loan payment in their entire history with U.S.D.A.,” Lisa A. Olson, the lead government litigator against the 81 Hispanic plaintiffs, told Judge Robertson in August 2009. “There may even be folks who are under criminal investigation.”

The Obama Administration made a choice to create a settlement mechanism on their own. The Times says "the Obama administration’s political appointees at the Justice and Agriculture Departments engineered a stunning turnabout: they committed $1.33 billion to compensate not just the 91 plaintiffs but thousands of Hispanic and female farmers who had never claimed bias in court."With pressure mounting from some in Congress, "The Obama administration made the 'legally questionable' decision to sidestep Congress and pay the woman and Hispanic farmer claims out of a special Treasury Department fund known as The Judgment Fund. "The small number of actual cases is also significant because of the disparity in the number of actual suits and the number of claims filed so far in the cases; only ten women were actually filing suit but an incredible 24,000 have filed to get $50,000 under the settlement still active at the FarmerClaims.gov website.

Pigford Was About Buying Votes

Even the New York Times has trouble getting Department of Justice officials to speak on record on the story. The Times says, "Acting Associate Attorney General Tony West, who supervised the civil division and oversaw the handling of the cases, canceled an interview. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. also declined to comment."This 2008 article from the San Francisco Chronicle profiles Tony West, who was then the California finance co-chair for the Obama campaign and is described as an "Obama power broker." West, a deep Obama campaign insider, oversaw the settlements for the Obama administration.

This is another indication that the Pigford scandal was about vote buying and elections for the politicians involved. Much of the original Pigford corruption traces to Arkansas. That was no accident but was at the behest of the man who was President when the first Pigford settlement was designed, Bill Clinton. From the Times:

Mr. Clinton asked Carol Willis, then a senior adviser to the Democratic National Committee who was known for his expertise in black voter turnout, to get involved. Mr. Willis said the president wanted to make sure his home state, Arkansas, benefited.

During the 2008 elections, the Times details how the Obama administration used Pigford for election purposes. From the Times:

..legislators from both parties, including Mr. Obama as a senator in 2007, sponsored bills to grant the late filers relief.

Mr. Boyd said Mr. Obama’s support led him to throw the backing of his 109,000-member black farmers’ association behind the Obama presidential primary campaign. Hilary Shelton, the N.A.A.C.P.’s chief lobbyist, said Mr. Obama’s stance helped establish him as a defender of the concerns of rural African-American communities.

And the Times makes it clear that others felt the settlements were buying off special interests. A professor from U.C. Berkley testified for the government that there was no pattern of discrimination by the USDA against Native American farmers.

Professor Rausser was astounded when, with both sides gearing up for trial in late 2009, the government began settlement negotiations. “If they had gone to trial, the government would have prevailed,” he said.

“It was just a joke,” he added. “I was so disgusted. It was simply buying the support of the Native-Americans.”

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Governm...ves-On-Pigford

http://www.alipac.us/f9/nytimes-conf...icated-277178/

PIGFORD FRAUD WORKSHOP STILL DRAWS HUGE CROWDS AFTER NYT EXPOSÉ




by LEE STRANAHAN
29 Apr 2013

On Friday, April 26th, the New York Times ran a front page exposé on the Pigford farmers settlement scandal. The Times article ended with the story of Tom Burrell, the head of a group called the Black Farmers Agricultural Association, who still travels around the country giving workshops allegedly instructing people how to commit undetectable fraud in the farmers settlements and receive tax free checks for $50,000.

The Times article closed with this quote from Mr. Burrell:

He closed with a rousing exhortation: “Let’s get the judge to go to work writing them checks! They have just opened the bank vault.”

On Saturday, April 27th, Burrell was giving another series of workshops. This time, Burrell was in Houston, Texas; thanks to promotion from an article in the Houston Chronicle, Burrell was playing to an absolutely packed house at the Communications Workers of American union hall, a 4,000 square foot modern events facility.

It was standing-room-only in the main hall, as about 500 people--the majority of them Afrcan-American--listened as Burrell took them step-by-step through the process of filing a successful claim in the Pigford black famers settlement. Meanwhile, dozens more waited outside for Burrell's next session in a line that ran around the building. The turnout was so large that two people in green vests were outside helping to direct traffic.

The event went on despite the Times devastating portrayal of Burrell and his workshop just the day before:

On a recent Thursday at the Greater Second Baptist Church in Little Rock, several hundred African-Americans listened intently as Mr. Burrell told them they could reap $50,000 each, merely by claiming bias. He left out the fact that black men are no longer eligible, and that black women are eligible only if they suffered gender, not racial, bias.

“The Department of Agriculture admitted that it discriminated against every black person who walked into their offices,” he told the crowd. “They said we discriminated against them, but we didn’t keep a record. Hello? You don’t have to prove it.”

In fact, he boasted, he and his four siblings had all collected awards, and his sister had acquired another $50,000 on behalf of their dead father.

She cinched the claim, he said to a ripple of laughter, by asserting that her father had whispered on his deathbed, “I was discriminated against by U.S.D.A.”

“The judge has said since you all look alike, whichever one says he came into the office, that’s the one to pay — hint, hint,” he said. “There is no limit to the amount of money, and there is no limit to the amount of folks who can file.”

The New York Times piece was not, of course, the first time that Burrell has been exposed. I personally interviewed Burrell two years ago at his office in Memphis, Tennessee, and Breitbart News secretly recorded one of his meetings over two years ago. Breitbart News released the entire audio of that meeting, showing that Burrell was clearly coaching people in how to commit undetectable fraud, at a press conference to kick off CPAC 2011.

The well-attended press conference in 2011 featured Rep. Steve King, Rep. Michele Bachmann, Georgia farmer Eddie Slaughter, and Andrew Breitbart. I did a presentation playing audio of Mr. Burrell explaining exactly how to commit fraud--the same presentation, more or less, that the Times wrote about and that Mr. Burrell gave this past weekend, down to the line about a father saying something on his deathbed.

That 2011 press conference with clear proof of how Tom Burrell was teaching people to commit fraud--with nearly two hours of unedited, undercover audio presented as proof--was ignored by the mainstream media.

After the Times piece hit on Friday, however, online newsmagazine Slate ran an article by Dave Weigel entitled "Listen to a Seminar on How to Get Unearned Cash from a Government Settlement With Black Farmers"that focused on audio released by Breitbart News in 2011.

Burrell walks his audience through the easily-avoided traps keeping them from settlement cash.

"Judge says, here's my first question," says Burrell. "Did you own or lease or attempt to own or lease farmland?"

"I'm filing on behalf of my father," says the woman.

"Ah haaaa!" says Burrell. He walks through more possible issues, then re-casts the hypothetical question as a sob story.

"'The night before he died, he leaned over and told me 'Baby girl, I attempted to get that money,'" says Burrell.

"I'm just telling you what Congress aid they'll do for you. Now you have to go home and pray about how you'll answer that."

For a very long time this story was a confusing-sounding distraction only mentioned by a few Republicans and conservative scribes. That's not true anymore.

It is entirely possible that the people being taken advantage of at these seminars are not the taxpayers but the seminar attendees themselves. As the Times reported:

Last October, a court-appointed ombudsman wrote that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people had given money to individuals and organizations in the belief that they were reserving the right to file a claim under the second settlement for black farmers, only to learn later that their names had never been forwarded to the authorities. People familiar with that statement said it was directed in part at Thomas Burrell, a charismatic orator and the head of the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association, based in Memphis.

Mr. Burrell has traveled the South for years, exhorting black audiences in auditoriums and church halls to file discrimination complaints with his organization’s help, in exchange for a $100 annual membership fee.
In an interview last month, Mr. Burrell said he had dedicated his life to helping black farmers after biased federal loan officers deprived him of his land and ruined his credit. He said his organization had misled no one, and had forwarded the names of all those eligible and willing to file claims.

Even though the filing for Pigford is closed, the women and Latno farmers settlements are still open for new claims. I saw only two people who might have been Hispanic or Latino in the crowd in Houston on Thurday, and the group seemed to be about half men.

The seminar was promoted with a big story in Houston Chronicle by reporter Cindy George; it served more or less as an advertisement for the seminar and was published the day before the Times expose broke. The current version of the story attempts to walk back some statements made by Burrell but the turnout for the Saturday even was still massive.

How has Burrell been able to get away with this for years?

One answer could be that exposing Burrell would mean exposing the entire Pigford scandal; something that, until now, the mainstream media seemed reluctant to do.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Governm...aws-Huge-Crowd

REP. KING: HOLDER, VILSACK KNEW PIGFORD CLAIMS FRAUDULENT



by TONY LEE 2 May 2013

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) accused U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack of knowing that women and minority farmers fraudulently claimed discrimination to receive taxpayer-funded settlements, and they knowingly initiated more programs to facilitate more of these payments.

"It is my sense they know what they are doing," King said on "Breitbart News Sunday" on Sirius XM Patriot channel 125. "That's a heavy statement, but they knew what they were doing. They knew these were fraudulent claims."

King said as he "watched the actions of the USDA" under Agriculture Secretary Vilsack and the Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder, both of whom he has questioned as a member of the Agriculture and Judiciary Committees, he determined that Vilsack and Holder were not only "facilitating what was already there" regarding Pigford when they arrived.

He charged them with initiating more actions to help Hispanic, Native American and female farmers get settlements even with the knowledge that many of those were fraudulent.

King said Holder and Vilsack knew the program was "rife with fraud" and noted Holder currently has access to and control of the fund used to dole out settlement dollars while Congress does not have oversight over it, which King hoped would change.

The Iowa Representative said the New York Times investigative report needs to be used to "turn the pressure up" and "create the momentum so Congress is compelled to act" like after the ACORN tapes were released.

King said, like with Pigford, Americans did not know what ACORN was until they saw James O'Keefe's undercover tapes.

He said the public's "revulsion" after watching those tapes forced Congress to act quickly to defund ACORN and the more "public understands what Pigford is, Congress will not have the will to fund it any longer."

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Governm...ere-Fraudulent

This is another indication that the Pigford scandal was about vote buying and elections for the politicians involved. Much of the original Pigford corruption traces to Arkansas. That was no accident but was at the behest of the man who was President when the first Pigford settlement was designed, Bill Clinton. From the Times:

The Obama Administration made a choice to create a settlement mechanism on their own. The Times says "the Obama administration’s political appointees at the Justice and Agriculture Departments engineered a stunning turnabout: they committed $1.33 billion to compensate not just the 91 plaintiffs but thousands of Hispanic and female farmers who had never claimed bias in court."With pressure mounting from some in Congress, "The Obama administration made the 'legally questionable' decision to sidestep Congress and pay the woman and Hispanic farmer claims out of a special Treasury Department fund known as The Judgment Fund. "The small number of actual cases is also significant because of the disparity in the number of actual suits and the number of claims filed so far in the cases; only ten women were actually filing suit but an incredible 24,000 have filed to get $50,000 under the settlement still active at the FarmerClaims.gov website.

Oh no say it isn't so!!!!!

Reparation comes to mind

I remember when I brought some of this information over here a long while back...boy was that a big topic of disdain for a few here.....