The oft-entertaining website The Smoking Gun came out with a bombshell report on Monday that Reverend Al Sharpton, civil rights leader cum racebaiting, attention seeking cad, worked as a stoolie for the FBI who helped build a case against the mafia. He performed this government service during his 1980s salad days of custom track suits, outrageously large medallions, and enough pomade to choke a horse. The Smoking Gun does not mince words in their must-read:

When friends and family members gathered recently at the White House for a private celebration of Michelle Obama’s 50th birthday, one of the invited partygoers was a former paid FBI Mafia informant.

That same man attended February’s state dinner in honor of French President Francois Hollande. He was seated with his girlfriend at a table adjacent to President Barack Obama, who is likely unaware that, according to federal agents, his guest once interacted with members of four of New York City’s five organized crime families. He even secretly taped some of those wiseguys using a briefcase that FBI technicians outfitted with a recording device.

One wonders how the Good Reverend ever found the time to work as the feeb’s “Confidential Informant Number Seven.” After all, as a man of the cloth he must be constantly burdened with the spiritual concerns of his flock. Not surprisingly, Sharpton himself has dialed back the claims of the report. From the New York Daily News:

“I was not and am not a rat because I wasn’t with the rats,” he said. “I’m a cat. I chase rats.”

Sharpton called a press conference at the Harlem headquarters of his National Action Network to respond to a story by The Smoking Gun website detailing his undercover work.

He said he went to the feds after his life was threatened by mobsters — and that in his mind, he was not an informant, even though the government referred to him in court papers as CI-7, short for Confidential Informant 7.

“I don’t know if I’m C-7 or B-19. I don’t know none of that,” he said. “I know I was threatened. I did what anybody would do…other than a thug. And I cooperated.”

Lest we confuse Sharpton as someone who might perform a valuable service to law and order without qualification, his argument essentially boils down to “I am not a rat because the people I informed on were not my own.” He doesn’t know if he was C-7 or B-19? Bullsh*t Bingo!

The claim that 1980s Al Sharpton was concerned with behaving like anything other than a thug is particularly rich. No New Yorker, and indeed, no person of good conscience should ever have forgotten the case of Tawana Brawley. At around the time that Sharpton was cozying up with the Feds, the teenager claimed that she had been raped by a group of white men and left in a garbage bag smeared with feces, racial epithets scrawled upon her body. The case turned out to be a self-perpetrated hoax, but not before Reverend Al was brought in to handle Brawley’s publicity. He disingenuously lit the fuse on a racial powder keg, falsely claiming that government officials were trying to cover up Brawley’s “case” out of racist motives, and bizarrely accusing Dutchess County Assistant District Attorney Steven Pagones of being one of the prepetrators of the “rape.” 

Being fabricated nonsense, the case never made it past a grand jury. Pagones was cleared of any wrongdoing and won a civil judgment against Sharpton, as well as Brawley’s lawyers. But Sharpton himself has stuck to his guns, maintaining that the jury was wrong and never apologizing to Pagones. He was only a spokesman,he says. Brings to mind other such innocents like Joseph Goebbels. Of course the Tawana Brawley case is not the only example of Sharpton sowing racial discord for his own aggrandizement. Rather, it is part of a disturbing pattern. Kind of hard to reconcile that with the fact that the viewers of his MSNBC program “PoliticsNation” consider themselves to be for “justice” down to the last man.

So the question is not whether Sharpton is a rat–he most certainly is. And it’s not because of his limited work against organized crime. The real question is why this man is taken seriously in liberal circles despite the horrible deeds he has not apologized for.