From Lee Stranahan writing at the Huffington Post:

While I was conducting a video interview with a Georgia farmer named Eddie Slaughter a couple of weeks ago, he made a surprising and stunning allegation: that he had told his congressman about fraud in the multibillion dollar Pigford v. Glickman settlement and that the congressman responded by telling him that an investigation into Pigford would “shut it down.” Mr. Slaughter’s congressman — a man you may not have heard much about despite his nearly two decades as a Blue Dog Democrat and Congressional Black Caucus member — is Sanford Bishop.

I followed up with Mr. Slaughter and I asked him if others were in the meeting with Congressman Bishop. I’ve since interviewed two of those farmers — one on the phone and one, farmer Willie Head, on video. Both confirmed Mr. Slaughter’s story.

Here’s a a segment of my interview with Mr. Slaughter where he says:

We went to him [Sanford Bishop] several times about this fraud. [We asked] ‘why don’t you have them tell you how many of these people that are getting this money have an actual farm ID number and are actual farmers?’ [Bishop responded] ‘no, no, no — man, they’ll shut this thing down.’

And here is Willie Head:

I posted these videos to my YouTube account and then wrote pieces for Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com site. The controversial Mr. Breitbart is funding the documentary I’m working on but has given me complete journalistic freedom and has had no direct involvement in shooting any of the more than 12 hours of video interviews I’ve done so far. As a liberal, I disagree with Breitbart on most issues, but I also found him to be a very different person than he’s been portrayed as in the media, and working with him has been a great experience, just like my previous work for MoveOn.org and Brave New Films. I also don’t believe he’s a racist. If he were, I wouldn’t be working with him. (more…)

From the South Carolina Times and Democrat:

Although Congress has approved settlement funds in the Black Farmers Discrimination case, a local state legislator says making payments to claimants is still at least a year away.

State Rep. Bakari Sellers, D-Denmark, works with Strom Law Firm of Columbia, which represents 10,311 South Carolina claimants in the Pigford v. Glickman class action lawsuit. Combined with similar lawsuits, the action is known as the Black Farmers Discrimination Litigation.

“I’ve been working on this since law school,” Sellers said. “South Carolina has the third largest number of claimants in the case behind only Mississippi and Alabama.

“We now have the funding, but we have a settlement timeline we have been working since 2007. We have to get it approved by a federal judge and set up a claims process.” (more…)

Pigford v. Glickman was supposed to help black farmers discriminated against by the USDA. Instead, it’s diverted hundreds of millions of dollars to people who never farmed and diverted attention away from the plight of real farmers.

The people helping to perpetuate the Pigford fraud have myriad motivations. There’s the lure of proximity to a multibillion-dollar pile of cash. There are complex ideological reasons related to racial injustice both real and perceived. There are political motivations that balance bringing a stealth stimulus back home to constituents with a lockstep party loyalty. There are personal rivalries and a clinging desire to maintain relevance and minor celebrity. Some mix of all of these motivations exists in many of the personalities surrounding Pigford but whatever the motive, the most aggrieved victims are the black farmers themselves.

But don’t take my word for it. Just ask black farmers like Willie Head and Eddie Slaughter. These Georgia farmers were among the first few hundred to file claims in Pigford before the settlement was hijacked by tens of thousands of people who claimed to have “attempted to farm” and received $50,000 checks using the intentionally low bar of proof that was required.

I’ve been traveling around the South the past month interviewing people close to the Pigford settlement and it’s clear to me that the people who this fraud has hurt the most are hard-working Americans like Eddie and Willie. They have been pressured not to talk about the fraud, in some cases by members of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Here, Willie Head discusses how improper claims in the Pigford settlement have hurt him:

There’s proof that Pigford is being sold as reparations behind closed doors while the defenders of the current settlement call critics racist for questioning Pigford.

Eddie Slaughter discusses how members of the Congressional Black Caucus see the Pigford claims as reparations.

The mainstream media has treated accusations of large-scale fraud in the Pigford settlement with overt skepticism and a distinct lack of journalistic curiosity. The press has blindly repeated the Obama Administration’s claim that there are only a handful of fraud cases among the twenty thousand or so paid Pigford claims.  Worse, the media has helped promote the narrative that those raising concerns about fraud in Pigford are racist.

You’re about to watch a video clip where Othello Cross, an attorney for Pigford claimants with about fifteen years of experience on the case, admits that he is personally aware of hundreds of cases of fraud in the state of Arkansas alone. Furthermore, he explains how easy it was to commit that fraud and receive a $50,000 check from the government; it’s appropriate to deduce from Cross’s revealing statement that the actual number of fraudulent claims is likely much higher than the hundreds he knows about.

You’re about to watch this clip for the first time, but the USDA watched it over a week ago — I sent it to them for comment about 10 days ago.

After a number of phone calls to the USDA, I was given the response that Secretary Vilsack now acknowledges around ten cases of fraud, up from his original statement that there are only three known cases. If I were inclined to spin the government’s response, I’d praise the USDA for finding 300% more instances of fraud in just a few days, but the reality is that the USDA can watch a video where a pro-Pigford claimant lawyer says in no uncertain terms that he knows about hundreds of cases of fraud — over ten million dollars worth at bare minimum — and still will only acknowledge ten cases.

As Andrew Breitbart points out, the media simply doesn’t want to cover Pigford. I also sent this video to a few major media outlets that stated they wanted to “research” this. I haven’t heard back from any of them. (more…)

As we have been chronicling in our Pigford coverage this week, the amount of evidence suggesting massive fraud is staggering and will continue to build and build.

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack came out last week to say there have only been three cases of fraud out of the 20,000 claims.

Well Mr. Vilsack, why don’t you try this on for size?  And by the way, we will be bringing more crime rings your way very soon.

All excerpts from the Mississippi Clarion Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi:

Suspect admits she OK’d slaying

Date:  Jan 13, 2006

By Jimmie Gates

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.

(more…)

WASHINGTON (AP) – American Indians and black farmers will be paid $4.6 billion to address claims of government mistreatment over many decades under landmark legislation President Barack Obama signed Wednesday.

The legislation “closes a long and unfortunate chapter in our history,” Obama said. “It’s finally time to make things right.”

At a signing ceremony at the White House the president declared that approval of the long-delayed legislation “isn’t simply a matter of making amends, it’s about reaffirming our values on which this nation was founded: the principles of fairness and equality and opportunity.”

Obama promised during his campaign to work toward resolving disputes over the government’s past discrimination against minorities. The measure he signed settles a pair of long-standing class-action lawsuits. The measure also settles four long-standing disputes over Native American water rights in Arizona, New Mexico and Montana. (more…)

One key to understanding the Pigford travesty is realizing how Barack Obama came to the point where today he is giving away billions in taxpayer dollars for potentially fraudulent Pigford-related claims. What may have begun as a legitimate 100 million dollar effort to repair genuine damages caused by alleged USDA discrimination evolved into what amounted to a pay-for-play scam with two linked goals – to defeat Hillary Clinton in the Democrat primary, then get Barack Obama elected president. The Hill, not Big Government, let that cat out of the bag back in April of 2009:

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. He later won almost unanimously among this group against Clinton and then in the general election against Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

Now Obama may have to face off with several of his own campaign supporters over how best to compensate discrimination claims by black farmers. Clay, Davis and Thompson endorsed Obama during the presidential primaries.

Just as Obama is today caving to Republicans on a a tax deal, instead of standing up for American taxpayers regarding potential Pigford-related fraud, Obama is also opting to write a check for billions American taxpayers can ill afford – all to satisfy what can rightfully be called a campaign debt. (more…)

From a USDA employee with close to 30 years experience:

Pigford was a nightmare. There was lots of money to be made—most of it by the trial lawyers. There were legitimate claims. It happens that people do sometimes discriminate and those people should be compensated. But really everyone was put in the crosshairs. They were indicting the entire USDA.

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. I finally had to get black farmers to vouch for me. They all said I treated everyone fairly, which is what I tried to do. (more…)

In our report, we document two organizations, the Black Farmers and Agriculturists Association and the National Black Farmers Association.  These two groups round up tens of thousands of Pigford litigants and then lobby politicians with promises of votes and campaign cash in exchange for championing and funding their causes such as Pigford.

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.

Boyd’s reward comes today as President Obama signs Pigford II funding into law, and the circle of quid pro quo is complete.

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.

From an anonymous source in the capitol:

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.

We don’t know the outcome of these apps but if they were successful claims it shows how little the claimants actually had to provide to get $50K.  This is the kind of information that we can’t wait to subpoena.

*** (more…)

Although the Pigford settlement story is a complex one that has major political implications, at the heart of it is a very simple question: does the settlement contain a significant amount of fraud?

If the Obama administration is telling the truth and there are only three cases of fraud out of 15,000 settled claims, then there’s no story here. If the fraud does exists, the attempt to silence people like Rep. Steve King or Andrew Breitbart aren’t just wrong but are a clear sign that some people will say anything to keep the truth about Pigford from coming out.

But you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.  Eventhough the mainstream media has been silent on this story, there are witnesses. One brave whistleblower is Arkansas farmer Jimmy Dismuke, who recently sat down for an extensive, exclusive interview about Pigford. That entire interview will be made available on BigGovernment in the near future but today’s clip is powerful testimony about how simple it was for people — and by extension, their lawyers — to collect those $50,000 Pigford payments.

The following is based on an interview with a current employee at the U.S. Department of Agriculture:

I’ve worked with the USDA for more than 25 years.  The situation with Pigford has been horrible.  There were cases of discrimination.  Perhaps 100 cases in the whole state of [redacted].  But the federal government paid out thousands of claims, a lot of them churned by attorneys who made a lot of money.

Attorneys caught on to the fact that the federal government doesn’t keep records.  They either don’t keep them well in terms of who they are meeting with or they are destroyed after a couple of years.  Attorneys recognized this and exploited it in Pigford.

My name started to appear on Pigford claims as someone who had discriminated against applicants.  I had to develop a chronology listing where I worked when, because almost all of the claims just didn’t make sense because I didn’t even work in those areas.  Names got out that you were a USDA employee and lawyers would just have people put them on an application. (more…)

In the pantheon of civic behavior, ex-politicians leaving DC to become lobbyists to advocate on behalf of private interests against taxpayer interests is right up there among the most undesirable.

What’s even worse?  When a former Secretary of Agriculture – who is African-American – leaves his post and now spends his time trolling for and representing litigants suing the USDA citing discrimination against African-Americans during the time he was in charge of the agency.

Why isn’t he suing himself, and paying the claims out of his own pocket? Instead, the USDA has admitted “no wrongdoing” (i.e. no one has been fired for the wholesale discrimination) and the taxpayer is completely and exclusively on the hook.

As Big Government will continue to show over the next few weeks, Pigford is a universe of its own filled with crooked politicians, cover-ups, greedy attorneys, and crime rings. And one of the brightest stars in the Pigford universe is Mike Espy:

MIKE ESPY (Alphonso Michael Espy) is the former Secretary of the United States Department of Agriculture, and a former U.S. Representative from the 2nd District of Mississippi. He currently works as a private sector attorney, counselor, and agricultural advisor, having his own law and consulting firms: Mike Espy, PLLC, and AE Agritrade, Inc.

Prior to his appointment as USDA Secretary, Mike Espy served for seven years as a Member of Congress. While there, he served his bi-racial district as a member of the Budget and Agriculture Committees.

Before his election to Congress, Mike worked as a trial lawyer and served as Assistant Attorney General.

In 1997, Espy was indicted on 30 criminal charges of receiving gifts from food companies. Tyson Foods, the largest poultry producer in the U.S., was found guilty of paying Espy more than $12,000 in illegal gifts and was fined $6 million for the transgression. In another case, Sun Diamond was fined $1.5 million for giving Espy $6,000 in illegal gifts. (more…)

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.

We also print the mediation letter dated a few months earlier that shows that Pires and the government were close to a relatively inexpensive solution to a large portion of the Pigford suit.

The following is based on an interview with a current US Department of Agriculture employee who has worked for more than 20 years for the USDA:

It’s been ten years and I’ve really dealt with Pigford. It was a hard time. Frankly, I don’t like to talk about it anymore.

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.

The burden of proof in Pigford was basically on us, the USDA, to prove that we didn’t discriminate against someone. How do you prove a negative like that? It’s really impossible.

I was assigned to Washington for a while to process Pigford claims. We saw claims come in from affluent areas. There were claims from Palm Beach and Palm Springs, and they said they were black farmers. One applicant said they were discriminated against by the Department of Agriculture’s Chicago office. There is no USDA office in Chicago. They got paid anyway. (more…)

While we certainly hope the possibility of multi-billion dollar fraud was enough to pique your outrage, what may be the most frightening revelation from our research is that Pigford may be the proverbial tip of the farmer scam iceberg.  Fox News published this report suggesting as much:

The congressional approval of a whopping $4.6 billion settlement for black and Native American farmers who claimed they were discriminated against has cleared the way for a similar pair of costly lawsuits — drawing complaints that the government may be buckling to pressure and rewarding dubious claims.

The so-called “Pigford” case involving black farmers who allege the Agriculture Department cheated them for decades drew to a close Tuesday when the House joined the Senate in approving the second settlement in the case to date. But the lawsuits don’t end there. Though Pigford has attracted the most attention, a separate set of cases filed by Hispanic and female farmers has been working its way through the courts since shortly after Pigford was filed more than a decade ago.

Those cases are set for a hearing in federal District Court in the nation’s capital on Friday, and once again a large pot of taxpayer money is on the line. The farmers were offered a $1.3 billion settlement back in May, but the plaintiffs have since then pushed for more. Some Democratic lawmakers argue they deserve it. (more…)

On April 14. 1999, Judge Paul Friedman signed a Consent Decree in the class action law suit PIGFORD, BREWINGTON v GLICKMAN and the US Department of Agriculture.

Following is a portion of the opinion written by Judge Friedman:

Forty acres and a mule. As the Civil War drew to a close, the United States government created the Freedmen’s Bureau to provide assistance to former slaves. The government promised to sell or lease to farmers parcels of unoccupied land and land that had been confiscated by the Union during the war, and it promised the loan of a federal government mule to plow that land. Some African Americans took advantage of these programs and either bought or leased parcels of land. During Reconstruction, however, President Andrew Johnson vetoed a bill to enlarge the powers and activities of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and he reversed many of the policies of the Bureau. Much of the promised land that had been leased to African American farmers was taken away and returned to Confederate loyalists. For most African Americans, the promise of forty acres and a mule was never kept. Despite the government’s failure to live up to its promise, African American farmers persevered. By 1910, they had acquired approximately 16 million acres of farmland. By 1920, there were 925,000 African American farms in the United States.

…

Most fundamentally, these objections result from a well-founded and deep-seated mistrust of the USDA. A mistrust borne of a long history of racial discrimination. A mistrust that is well-deserved. As Mr. Chestnut put it, these objections reflect “fear which reaches all the way back to slavery. . . . That objection, you heard it from many today, it really asks you to retain jurisdiction, over this case in perpetuity. Otherwise they say USDA will default, ignore the lawful mandates of this Court, and in time march home scot-free while blacks are left holding the empty bag again.” Transcript of Hearing of March 2, 1999 at 172, The Court cannot guarantee class members that they will never experience discrimination at the hands of the USDA again, and the Consent Decree does not purport to make such a guarantee. But the Consent Decree and the Court do provide certain assurances. (more…)

I am shocked by the recent passage of legislation by the US Congress that provides a settlement for discrimination lawsuits filed by black farmers against the United States Department of Agriculture.  With today’s focus on deficit spending and unaffordable government debt, Congress has decided to double the amount of dollars spent to date to settle these claims.  Given the fact that there are more claims of discrimination than there are black farmers, I wonder if members of Congress knew the facts if they would have voted to spend another $1.2 Billion to settle claims.

After my nomination and subsequent unanimous confirmation as Secretary of USDA, I set about to learn as much about the Department as fast as I could.  One initial briefing was by the Under-Secretary for Civil Rights.

Included was a brief on several class lawsuits against the Department alleging discrimination against minority farmers.  Also, it was noted that there were allegations of the Department dragging its feet in getting claims accredited and processed for the court ordered settlement with black farmers in the Pigford class action litigation. I soon had several visits from organizations representing black farmers urging me to settle all claims quickly.

I was concerned about the Department’s handling of discrimination claims and asked that the paperwork be expedited.  It was then that I was made aware that there were possibly many claims that were fraudulent and much due diligence was warranted.  Understanding that validation and verification of the claims slowed down the process, it was felt that since taxpayers money was at stake that investigations into the propriety of claims were prudent and warranted. (more…)

I have 200 acres in Arkansas and have raised hogs.

Pigford is the biggest rip-off this country has ever known, and there are lots of people in positions of power that know it.  Politicians are using it to buy votes.  Trial lawyers are using it to get rich.

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.

There was discrimination at the US Department of Agriculture. It needed to be dealt with. I was suing the USDA before Timothy Pigford even filed suit.  I wrote to attorney Al Pires, who eventually filed a class action lawsuit against the USDA,  but he saw that there wasn’t going to be a huge amount of money for him.  So he passed. What he did find was a way to work a scam from inside the Star City, Arkansas USDA office by paying a USDA employee to process claimants.   This employee would take from $5,000 to $25,000 for each successful Pigford claim.  Pires was in this totally for the money.  He’s made far more money than any black farmer. (more…)