As MSNBC host and advocate Al Sharpton faces both a lawsuit and the potential end of his weekday show, a new video from the conservative Project Veritas shows family members, supporters and lawyers for Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Trayvon Martin criticizing Sharpton as primarily interested in monetary gain through their civil rights cases.
Erica Snipes, Garner's oldest daughter, said Sharpton was about money first and foremost in an undercover video, rubbing her fingers together to show her point, and she also criticized Sharpton's advocacy group, the National Action Network.
"You think Al Sharpton is kind of like a crook, in a sense?" the investigator is heard asking Garner’s oldest daughter.
"He’s about this," Snipes replies, rubbing her fingers together.
"He’s about money with you?" the undercover asks.
"Yeah," Snipes responds.
Snipes, 24, also complained that the Staten Island director of Sharpton’s National Action Network, Cynthia Davis, scolded her for handing out street fliers about her father’s case that did not include NAN’s logo.
"She started attacking me. ‘Oh, I see that you got this flier out, how come you didn’t add the logo?’ ’’ Snipes said.
The undercover then asks, "They want their logo on your fliers?"
"Instead of me, he wants his face in front," Snipes says, referring to Sharpton
"But it’s not about them, it’s about your dad," the undercover says.
"Exactly," Snipes responds.
"Al Sharpton paid for the funeral. She’s trying to make me feel like I owe them," she adds.
Bishop Calvin Scott of the Ferguson, Mo. Believers Temple, said of Sharpton "to some degree, he sort of incites people for the wrong reason." Sharpton and his team arrived soon after the unarmed Brown was killed in August, and Ferguson made international headlines for its rioting and racial unrest after Officer Darren Wilson was not indicted on any charges for Brown's death. Scott also criticized Sharpton using the Brown case as a way to raise money for NAN.
A Trayvon Martin Foundation donor told another Project Veritas reporter, who was pretending to be a Martin Foundation supporter, that he didn't blame him for keeping his money away from Sharpton. "At the end of the day, you've got maybe 10 percent of what you've donated really going and hitting the streets," he said of Sharpton's group, adding they were "shakedown guys."
The New York Post reported several subjects of the piece said they were taken out of context by Project Veritas, and Sharpton himself commented that "they’re splicing and dicing stuff together."
"It was a distortion," he said. "Erica is a sincere victim. She was not trying to infer anything with me."
This comes on the heels of Monday's news of a $20 billion lawsuit filed against Sharpton and NBC parent company Comcast for racial discrimination. The plaintiff alleges Sharpton and other advocacy groups for blacks have been "bought off" and are "facilitating discrimination," according to The Hollywood Reporter. Sharpton has dismissed the charges as frivolous.
Finally, media outlets are buzzing that as part of a larger shakeup, MSNBC is going to boot Sharpton's PoliticsNation off the 6 p.m. weekday time slot and exile him to weekends, where such programming as Sex Slaves and Caught on Camera currently resides. The liberal network has already canceled two shows in the past week, Ronan Farrow Daily and The Reid Report, and The Daily Beast reports that Chris Hayes is likely next to be axed or moved.