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Jewish World Review August 3, 2010 / 23 Menachem-Av, 5770 Winner in Sherrod's threatened suit against Breitbart may surprise you By Jack Kelly
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Shirley Sherrod has difficulty recognizing when her 15 minutes of fame are up. This may hurt Barack Obama.
Ms. Sherrod, you'll remember, was fired as director of rural development for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Georgia July 20 because her superiors feared Glenn Beck of Fox News was about to air a two and a half minute excerpt of a speech she made to an NAACP audience in which she described her reluctance to help a farmer because he was white.
Ms. Sherrod was canned so fast she wasn't given time to explain the point of her speech was how she overcame racial prejudice to assist the farmer.
When the full 43-minute tape was made public, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and President Barack Obama apologized to Ms. Sherrod. They offered her a new, better job at the Department of Agriculture.
The administration hoped the story would end there. Ms. Sherrod wasn't invited to appear on any of the Sunday talk shows July 25, despite the fact hers had been perhaps the biggest news story of the preceding week.
Willie Brown, the former Democratic mayor of San Francisco, who is black, said in his column in the San Francisco Chronicle July 25 there was more to the story than has been reported.
"As an old pro, though, I know that you don't fire someone without at least hearing their side of the story unless you want them gone in the first place," Mr. Brown wrote.
Now, thanks to Ms. Sherrod, the rest of the story may be told. In a speech to black journalists July 29, she said she planned to sue Andrew Breitbart, the conservative activist who posted the speech excerpt on line, for defamation.
If she does file a suit, Ms. Sherrod will have to demonstrate she is not a public figure, which is difficult for a government official to do, and that Mr. Breitbart posted the excerpt knowing it gave a false impression of her entire remarks.
Mr. Breitbart said his source gave him only the excerpt.
Even if Ms. Sherrod could prove Mr. Breitbart acted "with reckless disregard," she'll have a hard time proving harm. It wasn't Mr. Breitbart who fired her, and those who did swiftly offered her a better job.
And since Ms. Sherrod made the baseless charge on CNN that Mr. Breitbart "would like to get us (blacks) stuck back in the times of slavery," he could countersue.
Ms. Sherrod has had success suing before. Just days before she was hired by the USDA in July, 2009, the Agriculture department awarded her and her husband, Charles, $150,000 each in settlement of a lawsuit.
Willie Brown thinks this is the reason Secretary Vilsack was so quick to fire her. "This woman has been a thorn in the side of the Agriculture department for years," he wrote. "She has been operating a community activist organization not unlike ACORN."
In 1997 Timothy Pigford and 400 other black farmers brought suit against President Clinton's Agriculture secretary, Dan Glickman, alleging racial discrimination in price support and disaster relief loans. In 1999 Secretary Glickman agreed to pay $50,000 to every farmer who had wrongfully been denied a loan.
Ag has so far paid out roughly $1 billion in settlements to 16,000 black farmers. The largest of these -- $13 million -- to New Communities Inc., a communal farm started by Ms. Sherrod and her husband.
In 2008, Sens. Charles Grassley, R-Ia, and then Sen. Barack Obama lobbied to have added to the settlement some 70,000 additional people whose claims had been denied. On Feb. 23 of this year, the Ag department agreed. This brought to 86,000 the total number of claimants to be compensated.
Some think this is fishy, because there were fewer than 40,000 black farmers in the entire country at the time the discrimination was alleged to have taken place.
So it's understandable why the administration would want Ms. Sherrod to go away, quietly. But if she sues Mr. Breitbart, that won't happen. People who are sued have a right to discovery.
"If having to defend a suit of dubious merit allows Breitbart to put Sherrod's life on trial, to conduct an inquiry into the NAACP and Sherrod's connections in the movement, and to take depositions of administration officials, that just might be a price Breitbart is happy to pay," said Web logger William Jacobson, who teaches law at Cornell.
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JWR contributor Jack Kelly, a former Marine and Green Beret, was a deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration.
© 2009, Jack Kelly |
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