WASHINGTON – Lawyers for conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart asked Tuesday that a federal judge throw out a defamation case that former government employee Shirley Sherrod brought against him.
Sherrod was ousted from her job as a Georgia rural development official last year after Breitbart posted an edited video of her making supposedly making racist remarks. She sued Breitbart, his employee Larry O’Connor and an unnamed defendant for defamation and emotional distress. Sherrod’s lawyers say the unnamed defendant is the person who they believe passed the video on to Breitbart.
The video on Andrew Breitbart’s website turned out to be edited, and when Sherrod’s full speech to an NAACP group earlier that year came to light, it became clear that her remarks about an initial reluctance to help a white farmer were not racist but an attempt at telling a story of racial reconciliation. Once that was obvious, Sherrod received public apologies from the administration — even from President Barack Obama himself — and an offer to come back to the Department of Agriculture, which she declined.
In the first hearing in the case Tuesday, exactly a year to the day Sherrod was ousted, lawyers for Breitbart argued that Sherrod’s case is an attempt
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