E-mail points to White House involvement in USDA’s firing of Shirley Sherrod
Source: Washington Post
A 2010 e-mail from Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack says his department was “waiting for the go-ahead” from the White House before accepting the resignation of Shirley Sherrod, according to newly released documents, despite Obama administration assertions that her ouster was Vilsack’s decision alone.
The e-mail, which was made public Friday in an ongoing federal court case over the matter, shed more light on the evening of July 19, 2010, when the USDA hastily asked Sherrod to resign after a video showing her making supposed racist remarks surfaced on a conservative Web site. Her dismissal turned into a racial firestorm after it became clear that the video had been edited and her remarks were meant to tell a story of reconciliation.
Both the White House and Vilsack have repeatedly said that the agriculture secretary made the decision to ask for Sherrod’s resignation without White House input. The e-mails, along with earlier e-mails obtained by the Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act in 2010 and 2012, make it apparent that Vilsack wanted Sherrod to leave the department and ordered her resignation. But a newly released e-mail sent by Vilsack himself suggests that he was awaiting a decision from White House officials on how to proceed.
... The correspondence is evidence in a federal defamation case that Sherrod filed in 2011 against the late blogger Andrew Breitbart, who posted the video, and his colleague Larry O’Connor. The Justice Department has been pushing to keep the e-mails sealed but lost Friday afternoon when U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon ruled that they did not have to be kept private.
Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/e-mail-points-to-white-house-involvement-in-usdas-firing-of-shirley-sherrod/2014/11/03/df70188c-63a8-11e4-9fdc-d43b053ecb4d_story.html
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