As extensive reporting from Breitbart.com, National Review, and, lately, the New York Times, makes clear, the Pigford affair is a sprawling mess of fraud and corruption that implicates unseemly trial lawyers leeching for fees, politicians eager to leverage shaky claims of discrimination into rewards for favored interest groups, and a panoply of opportunistic confidence men who acted individually and in concert to exploit the settlement process.
Perhaps the most visible figure in the latter class is Thomas Burrell, president of the 10,000-strong Black Farmers & Agriculturalists Association (BFAA) and an all-around gadfly who has been crusading for nearly 15 years to turn the original Pigford settlement into a one-stop shop for the adjudication of racial grievance via cash settlement.
Burrell tells the group that five of eight members of his own family filed for claims in Tennessee, and that the other three members originally thought it was a “scam . . . until the checks hit the table.”
Odd Man Out
Despite the fact that the first Pigford settlement was personally and professionally lucrative for Burrell, he was not happy with the second round of settlements that came to be known as Pigford II. The New York Times may have cited Pigford II as critically vulnerable to fraud, owing to its low evidentiary standards and lack of oversight, but Burrell criticized it for different reasons: because it focused on other minority groups, and placed new limits on total awards and appeals for black male farmers.
In a 2011 letter to members he warned that the terms of Pigford II are not as favorable to blacks as to women, Hispanics, and Native Americans. Burrell promised to fight so that black farmers are not forced to “give our legal winnings up to other minority groups.”
In January 2012, Burrell organized a group of black clergy to travel to Washington to protest the settlement. Interestingly, an article from a local newspaper makes clear that the group did not blame President Obama, who sponsored Pigford II as a senator and signed it as president, for the suboptimal outcome. One clergyman appearing with Burrell said, “I don’t think those around [the president] gave him the benefit of what Pigford II meant.”
Legal Mishaps
One of the reasons Burrell may have found Pigford II unsatisfactory is that a combination of his own ineptitude, his putative counsel’s desire to distance themselves from him, and a federal judge’s low regard for his character conspired to keep BFAA out of the legal proceedings.
Burrell’s relationship with the group of ambitious trial lawyers who secured the Pigford I settlement had long been fraught, with Burrell convinced that they were content with taking the easy fees from the first round of settlement checks and calling it a day, instead of fighting to keep the rolls open for as long and to as many as possible. Finally, on August 7, 2004, he sent a letter to each of the co-counsel representing the class, declaring that he was terminating their services on behalf of the BFAA. The lawyers ignored it, and filed a motion to enjoin Burrell and his own lawyers from talking about the matter. Later, in 2008, BFAA became a plaintiff in litigation that consolidated various suits and would eventually become Pigford II. They were again represented by class counsel, this time the firm Morgan & Morgan. But by the time the plaintiffs and the government had reached settlement in 2010, Burrell had come to disapprove of this process, as well, and hired another lawyer, Dedrick Brittenum, to represent his group.
When Morgan & Morgan became aware that Brittenum was intervening separately on behalf of the BFAA in court, it had the BFAA removed as plaintiffs from its own case. But by the time Morgan lawyers were able to contact Brittenum to discuss the matter, he informed them that he, too, had been let go by Burrell. Indeed, neither Morgan, nor the court, nor anybody for that matter, seemed to be able to figure out who BFAA’s lawyer was until one Paul A. Robinson Jr. filed a motion to have BFAA added back to the list of plaintiffs in the Pigford II settlement. A D.C. circuit judge not only rejected that motion, but strongly admonished Burrell for his long history of “misleading representations,” and “for misusing the Court’s docket, improperly purporting to speak on behalf of all plaintiffs, and lodging baseless claims of misconduct against defendant’s counsel.”
Wrote the judge:
The BFAA and Mr. Burrell have consistently failed to demonstrate that they have a sound grasp of the legal issues surrounding the rights of Pigford claimants. . . . Even more important, the Court is deeply concerned that some of the BFAA’s and Mr. Burrell’s conduct and representations have created a serious risk of misleading and in fact harming the interests of the very individuals on whose behalf they purport to advocate.
In a footnote, the judge added:
Such conduct by Mr. Burrell is not a new development, and this is not the first time that the Court has taken him and the BFAA to task for misleading would-be claimants. In 2005, the Court explained that Mr. Burrell had “given false hope to thousands of African American farmers” by claiming publicly that the Consent Decree from the original Pigford case would be reopened and modified, a patently unfounded prediction.
The court found that this “false hope,” when paired with Burrell’s false claim in a BFAA letter that only “dues paying members” of his organization would be eligible for new money, “almost resembles an act of extortion.”
The Beat Goes On But by all accounts Burrell has not been discouraged by his legal setbacks. The latest update on the BFAA website dates to March 24 of this year, and announces the filing of a motion to intervene for “its members who were unable to obtain a determination in Pigford to be permitted to file claims now under the administrative claims process being offered to females and Hispanic farmers.”
— Daniel Foster is news editor of NRO.
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