Breitbart Acknowledges His Months-Long “Obsession” To Vindicate His Smear Of Shirley Sherrod

Yesterday, appearing on The Grandy Group radio show, Andrew Breitbart said that the Pigford black farmer discrimination case “has become my obsession for the last seven months” ever since he was “hit upside the head” over his false accusation that Shirley Sherrod (a Pigford claimant) was racist. He also said that one of the results of his investigation was that it turns out the administration fired Sherrod because of her status as a Pigford claimant, not because administration officials thought, based on Breitbart's out-of-context video, that she had made a racist comment. Today, he said that he began that investigation about a month after his initial attack on Sherrod.

But here's the funny thing: Breitbart was making the claim that Pigford was the reason for Sherrod's firing less than a week after Shirley Sherrod was fired. Yes, even before his investigation supposedly began, he was claiming that Pigford was the real reason Sherrod was fired. Now, it appears that after all those months of “obsess[ing]” about Pigford, his investigation has led him to the same conclusion he had before he knew anything about Pigford at all: That Sherrod was not fired because people believed his false claims that she was racist; she was fired because of Pigford.

Breitbart released the deceptively cropped videotape that falsely painted Sherrod as a racist on July 20, 2010. Less than a week later, he went on Michael Savage's radio show and said that Obama “quickly fired” Sherrod because he didn't want people looking into Pigford.

And this week, he's made three important statements:

1) Yesterday, he claimed on The Grandy Group that Pigford has been his “obsession for the last seven months” because people told him that “They pulled out the $1.15 billion in Pigford II, the same week that they pulled -- that they fired Shirley Sherrod. She was set to make $13.3 million and didn't want to draw attention to whom she was as it relates to Pigford. So I had to research this to figure out why I got hit as hard as I did.”

2) Today, he said that while trying to figure out why Sherrod was fired, “people started sending me emails, hundreds of email. This is about Pigford. This is about Pigford. Well, a month later I had to -- you know after getting hit upside the head, I started to look through those emails, and I started to realize that a lot of those emails came from actual black farmers telling me about the Pigford case.”

3) And finally, a couple of days ago, Breitbart said he “can prove” that Sherrod was fired because of Pigford.

So either (a) Breitbart amazingly guessed correctly about Pigford and Sherrod before he knew anything about the issue or (b) Breitbart's seven-month investigation is actually just a fraud, meant to prove that he was right to attack Sherrod. Given that contemporaneous emails show that Sherrod was fired because of the deceptively-edited videos, I'm going with option (b).

Listen to Breitbart's claims about Sherrod and Pigford below the fold.

From the July 26, 2010, broadcast of Talk Radio Network's The Savage Nation:

From a February 8 talk Breitbart gave at George Washington University:

From the February 9 edition of WMAL's The Grandy Group:

From a February 10 press conference at CPAC: