The Obama administration deployed government-paid community organizers to Sanford, Florida after the shooting death of Trayvon Martin last year in order to foment racial tensions, newly released government documents show.

The news came as the administration publicly pretended to be concerned at the prospect of ugly race riots breaking out across America should defendant George Zimmerman be acquitted in the case.

The Community Relations Service of the U.S. Department of Justice sent taxpayer-funded political agitators to Sanford after 17-year-old Martin was killed on Feb. 26, 2012, during a physical confrontation with neighborhood watch volunteer Zimmerman. For a month and a half after Martin’s death, local police declined to press charges because they believed the criminal case against him was hopelessly weak.

DOJ documents provided to Judicial Watch under the Freedom of Information Act show that in the weeks before Zimmerman was charged, CRS burned through thousands of dollars helping to organize marches at which participants exacerbated racial tensions and loudly demanded that he be prosecuted. In theory CRS employees are supposed to try to defuse combustible situations in communities.

According to the document dump, CRS employees were involved in “marches, demonstrations, and rallies related to the shooting and death of an African-American teen by a neighborhood watch captain”; providing “support for protest deployment in Florida”; rendering “technical assistance to the City of Sanford, event organizers, and law enforcement agencies for the march and rally on March 31”; and providing “technical assistance, conciliation, and onsite mediation during demonstrations planned in Sanford.”

In April, CRS “set up a meeting between the local NAACP and elected officials that led to the temporary resignation of police chief Bill Lee, according to Turner Clayton, Seminole County chapter president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,” the documents state.

Of course, in a sense this kind of government-subsidized pot-stirring is nothing new. For a half century, the Left has been using taxpayer dollars to fund efforts to advance radical, subversive causes in the United States.

Changes in federal social policy in the mid-1960s helped to lay the groundwork for this insidious leftist astro-turfing. Under the worse-than-useless War on Poverty, the federal government has been handing out taxpayer money since 1965 to liberal and radical groups to help them agitate against the status quo. One could say America declared war on itself and conscripted Saul Alinsky-inspired pressure groups to do the fighting.

In the Zimmerman case, the Obama administration simply cut out the middleman and “insourced” the work instead of doling out grants to left-wing street protest groups.

This isn’t the first time President Obama has used DOJ employees as his personal Alinskyite stormtroopers.

Uniformed field representatives of the CRS also assisted Occupy Wall Street and anarchist activists outside the Republican National Convention in Tampa last year.