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Rep. Peter King: 'Disgraceful' Obama Invites 'Racial Con Man' Sharpton to White House
Friday, March 13, 2015 11:14 AM
By: Melissa Clyne
With racial tensions in America at a fever pitch, it's "disgraceful" that President Obama is giving "con man" Al Sharpton a seat at the table in the debate on race relations.
“It's absolutely disgraceful that the president of the United States has any dealings with Al Sharpton,” King said on Newsmax TV's "America's Forum" on Friday. “I've known Sharpton for a number of years and he can be personally engaging, but the fact is his bias is out of control and he’s a demagogue.
"You can go back to cases in New York and he has just been constantly fanning flames and to me he's a con man," King added. "He [owes] over $3 million in taxes and yet, he's invited to the White House and he's sitting there. Sharpton is given a role of senior statesman and to me he's a racial con man.”
King had kinder words for Attorney General Eric Holder for his condemnation of this week’s shootings of two police officers in Ferguson, Missouri. But, he said, the jury is still out on President Obama’s handling of all the tumult in Ferguson, dating to the August shooting death of black teen Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson.
At a Thursday press conference, Holder called the shootings of police “a pure ambush," committed by “a damn punk."
Using the word “punk” was “the right thing to do, King said.
"I wish he'd in the past, shown more concern toward the police and not been so quick to embrace the whole Michael Brown scenario," King said.
Releasing a report showing Wilson was justified in shooting Brown at the same time as another that suggested the Ferguson Police Department "was infused with racism" was an attempt to detract from exonerating Wilson of wrongdoing while drawing attention to the racism narrative, according to King.
"The fact is they were talking about two emails from two police officers who are no longer with the force and that was an attempt to cover up the fact that for the previous six months the administration had been giving credibility to Michael Brown's story and all these people walking around with their hands up and everything," he said.
"To me that was a disgrace the way it was handled. That poor cop was smeared and I don't see any apology coming from the president to Officer Darren Wilson."
The administration also failed to put the report about the department in context, he said.
"To say that a police department is biased or bigoted because it has a higher number of traffic stops or arrests, one group over another without putting it in perspective, is wrong. That does not necessarily mean racism," King said.
"They also used all these racist emails and it comes down to two police officers and both of them are no longer on the job. You start looking at university professors or anywhere around the country and you're going to find people sending out these stupid emails.
"To indict an entire police department and to do it in the context of the shooting of Michael Brown, have this come out after that, somehow implying that Wilson was guilty or there was a justification for what Michael Brown was doing or the demonstrations afterwards, had nothing to do with each other.
"Michael Brown was a thug and that's the reality. He went after a police officer and he was shot. It's unfortunate he died, but the police officer did what he had to do."
The proximity of the Ferguson and Staten Island incidents – they occurred three months apart – helped create the false impression that "racism is everywhere," according to King.
"There's always going to be a certain degree of racism, but the situation in the U.S. today is light years ahead of where it was," he said. "There was no connection between any alleged racism in Ferguson and Michael Brown. Michael Brown was a criminal and a thug. He was charging at a police officer and attempting take a police officer's gun and yet, the whole narrative … is that that police officer was guilty."
The Obama administration perpetuated the narrative that "the cops were guilty and that Michael Brown was an innocent freedom fighter," he said. Ditto for the incident in Staten Island, King added. The administration needs to own that.
In December, a man executed two NYPD officers during an ambush as they sat in their patrol car. In Ferguson this week, two officers were shot during a protest following the resignation of the city's embattled police chief.
"Both the president and the attorney general for too many months forced this belief that racism is rampant and implied that there's a justification for violent protests," King said.
"Once you give any justification, implied or not, to violent protests or give an understanding of why people carry out criminal acts, then the next logical step is what we saw in New York and Ferguson, people started using deadly force."
