- Section 1: The Pigford Report
- Section 2: The Whistle-Blowers
- Section 3: PigiLeaks
- The Big Government Feed Featuring All Stories Related to Pigford
The Pigford Report
The Pigford Shakedown: How the Black Farmers’ Cause Was Hijacked by Politicians, Trial Lawyers & Community Organizers — Leaving Us With a Billion Dollar Tab
By Gary Hewson, Peter Schweizer, and Andrew Breitbart
“It [Pigford] is a fair settlement, it is a just settlement, we think it’s important for congress to fund that settlement. We’re going to continue to make it a priority.” –President Obama, September 10, 2010 press conference
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Me & Mrs. Sherrod — And The $1.25 Billion Pigford II Black Farmers’ Settlement
By Andrew Breitbart
“I stumbled on the Pigford story in my defense of the Tea Party, so it’s a sweet irony that the Pigford story is exactly the kind of mess that makes the Tea Party so necessary. Politicians and trial attorneys bonded together to rip off the taxpayer, and even those farmers that were discriminated against were royally screwed.
Let me be clear, our investigation convincingly leads us to believe the USDA practiced discrimination against black farmers. Those wrongs must be rectified. But Pigford is wrought with a grotesque amount of fraud, while the truly aggrieved were mostly left high and dry.”
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Pigford: Obama’s Down Payment on the 2012 Rural South Vote
By Gary Hewson
“The judge in the Pigford case refused to re-open the settlement for these late claimants, and in 2007 Barack Obama single-handedly ignored the checks and balances of our system of government, and overturned the work of our judicial branch and a Clinton-appointed judge.”
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Pigford: It’s the Fraud, Stupid (Not Race)
By Peter Schweizer
“Eddie Slaughter, with the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association, has looked at the USDA numbers which show that there are far more claims than there were black farmers in America. He has said, “What that means is that most of these people were never farmers, because the farmers had loans.” Another organization, Concerned Black Farmers of Tennessee, tracked 70 individual Pigford claims in Tipton County and foundthat 63 percent of those that were approved had no records to establish that they had ever even farmed. Yet, each of those individuals received a check from the USDA for $50,000.”
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Obama Using Pigford Cash to Pay Campaign Debts?
By Dan Riehl
Supporters of Obama’s presidential campaign argued the then-Illinois senator’s move to resolve late Pigford claims would endear him to Southern black voters during the tough Democratic primary race against former Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.). At the time of the bill’s introduction in 2007, Obama was finding his footing as a candidate and polls suggested he was struggling to attract black voters.
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The Pigford Killings: Double-Murder, Double-Cross, and Decapitation in the Delta
By Gary Hewson
Two days after she denied knowing that federal witness Clovis Reed would be killed, Levon Edmond admitted Thursday that she agreed to the slaying and alleged one of her accomplices had killed another woman earlier.
The second woman’s body is buried in the same area where Reed’s headless and handless corpse was found in Simpson County in 2003, Edmond told U.S. District Judge Henry T. Wingate.
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Pigford Whistle-Blowers
‘If You’ve Got a Potted Plant,
That Makes You a Farmer’
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Jimmy Dismuke, whistle-blower on Pigford fraud, relays how attorneys were recruiting claimants for the class-action settlement against the USDA.
A Black Farmer Blows the Whistle on the Black Farmer Settlement
by Jimmy Dismuke
“I personally know of people who have no connection to farming at all who got Pigford checks. People with potted plants in their apartments claimed to be farmers and got paid. I saw an instance where eight Pigford checks went to one house. There are drug addicts and pushers who have received payments who have never farmed a day in their life.”
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Pigford Witness Report: Applicant Claimed Discrimination by Nonexistent Chicago USDA Office, Was Paid Anyway
“There was a lot of fraud. People collected money who had never stepped in the door of a USDA office. They had to prove they had been discriminated against to get their money so to get around that fact they would say they were never given an application. That’s how they got around the fact that there was no evidence of them having visited the USDA.”
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Pigford Whistle-Blower: Despite USDA Denials, Fraud Is ‘FBI Documented’
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The Dept. of Agriculture has claimed that there were only three cases of fraudulent claims filed for Pigford settlement money. Jimmy Dismuke, one of the original farmers who brought suit against the USDA, told Big Government that he was personally aware of many more cases that the FBI investigated and documented in Arkansas, but for political purposes they have not been made public.
Pigford Witness Report: Black Applicants Claim Racial Discrimination Against Black USDA Officials
The legal standard for Pigford was supposed to be a preponderance of evidence in order to be granted a claim. But pretty soon they began giving money to whoever filled out a form. Sometimes it was just strange the claims that they granted. There were a lot of claims of racial discrimination against the USDA offices in Jefferson County, Arkansas, for example. But the supervisors there were all black.
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Pigford Witness Report: 700 Claims Filed with My Name on Them, Many From Hundreds of Miles Away
From a USDA employee with close to 30 years experience:
Lawyers were churning applications. My name starts turning up on documents as someone who denied someone services. Trouble was those people were hundreds of miles away. I think there was something like 700 forms filed with my name on them–it was outrageous. I had never heard of any of them. I discovered that my name had been put on leaflets, which charges that I was a racist, and people just put my name on Pigford applications.
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PigiLeaks
Pigileaks: Documents Suggest Pigford Lawyer Sabotaged Mediation That Would Have Saved Tax Payers Billions
This is a copy of a three-page letter between Michael Sitcov, Chief of the DOJ Federal Programs Branch, who is defending the government against the Pigford suit, and class action Pigford lawyer Al Pires. This letter shows Sitcov’s obvious anger at the shenanigans of Pires, and the fact that a well-running mediation, that would have saved taxpayers billions, has been sabotaged.
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Pigileaks: The Pigford Applications
These are redacted Pigford applications that are all done by the same lawyer. All of the claimants come from Arkansas (two are related) and the stories they write on the application are clearly boilerplate, probably done by the same paralegal. Some of the words are even misspelled consistently through the documents.
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Pigileaks: We Helped Get You Elected, Now Give Us Our Money: NBFA President John Boyd Letter to President Obama
In our report, we document two organizations, the Black Farmers and Agriculturists Association and the National Black Farmers Association. These two groups, and the Pigfored issue, hold huge sway over the rural black vote, and as you can see from this letter from the President of the BFAA John Boyd, Boyd is eager to get rewarded for helping to put President Obama into office.
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