Retraction Request: MSNBC's David Shuster

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In an interview with Andrew Breitbart last week on MSNBC, David Shuster asserted that Mr. Breitbart hired the private investigator who uncovered the dumped documents outside of a San Diego ACORN office (exchange begins approximately 4:30 into video):

November 23, 2009, you reported that ACORN had been involved in an obstruction of justice because a private eye that you hired went to the ACORN offices in San Diego and found lots of documents.

At no point did Mr. Breitbart hire the private investigator who uncovered the ACORN documents dumped in San Diego.

Additionally, Mr. Shuster suggested that the documents uncovered from the dumpster at ACORN San Diego did not contain sensitive information:

When people actually looked at the documents, let’s see, they were documents of old fliers, food stamp applications, canvassing forms…

As has been well chronicled at BigGovernment.com, Private Investigator Derrick Roach found privacy-protected documents in the ACORN dumpster, including but not limited to credit reports, mortgage loan information, and bank customer records. As Mr. Roach pointed out in his initial post at BigGovernment.com:

The laws governing how sensitive, personal information such as social security numbers, driver’s license numbers, immigration records, tax returns, etc. must be treated are very stringent, and thus it seems as if ACORN may have committed serious violations in that department alone, with thousands upon thousands of potential plaintiffs.

Given this information, it is clear that Mr. Shuster misrepresented the facts in regards to the ACORN document dump by intentionally highlighting only certain documents while ignoring other relevant ones.

We respectfully ask that Mr. Shuster issue a correction/retraction.