As we've been saying all along, Peter Schweizer honed his craft at the feet of Andrew Breitbart and his crew. It's just too bad the New York Times didn't investigate him or his smear books.
In 2011, Schweizer, a BigGovernment.com contributor, appeared on End Times conspiracy theorist Rick Wiles’ “Trunews” program to discuss the allegations, defending Breitbart’s role in the Sherrod affair and repeating discredited talking points about a supposed cover-up and a black-vote-buying scheme championed by Obama.
Schweizer defended Breitbart by saying the conservative media star “didn’t see the original” video of Sherrod’s remarks and “apologized for that,” adding that “the principle was still there, that there was selective justice taking place.” He also agreed with Breitbart’s false claim that the administration only “went after” Sherrod as a result of the Pigford episode: “What we believe happened is that when Sherrod became the public figure as a result of this incident, it gave people a peek at Pigford.”
“Why was there this amazing reaction to this incident? Why was Shirley Sherrod such a hot figure, as it were, that the White House itself intervened and wanted to drop it so quickly? And we believe it was because they did not want attention given to Pigford,” he said. Several months before the interview, the Los Angeles Times reported that USDA emails at the time show that the deceptive video and the resulting conservative media firestorm were the causes of Sherrod’s ousting.
Schweizer also wondered why Obama, then a “senator from Illinois where there are only, as far as we can tell, maybe a handful of black farmers, and of course he comes from an urban background, he’s not a rural senator,” had such a “long and personal interest in Pigford” and wrote letters “to the USDA telling employees to shut up about the fact that they believed there was widespread corruption.”
And more, because this is what Schweizer and Co do. This time it's about the Pigford case, which is what they used to cover up the smear of Sherrod:
Schweizer told Wiles that then-Sen. Obama tried to “shut up” Pigford whistleblowers: “That’s really because Barack Obama and others see this for their benefit as a way to buy votes. They are passing out $50,000 checks to people who they believe, and I think he’s correct, will ultimately be voting for him. So it’s wealth redistribution, it’s passing the money around to your patrons and it’s sticking taxpayers with a bill that to date is more than $2 billion.”
Now NBC News has come out and said the New York Times story doesn't hold up well, and I'm sure more will follow.
In the meantime, Schweizer is scheduled to make the Sunday show rounds, so you can expect more Breitbart-like equivocation and distraction from him then.
