First, I am not really familiar with the website "Smoking Gun", so if it is biased, or has a tendency to "polish" the truth, please forgive me. I did minimum checking on the site and could find nothing negative.

I find this so interesting with all the talk about the Rev Al Sharpton. The article basically speaks of the suspension to Brian Williams and then tells a story that I had heard of in pieces but since Sharpton IS and speaks FOR MSNBC and so on......

"So, What About Rev. Al Sharpton's Suspension?
In light of Brian Williams sanction, MSNBC host's lies deserve review"

That was the headline...

"In the wake of last year’s lengthy TSG report about Sharpton’s secret work as a paid FBI Mafia informant, the MSNBC host sought to blunt the story’s disclosures with a series of lies told at a pair of press conferences, on his nightly “Politics Nation” program, and in a report on Williams’s own NBC Nightly News (which was rebroadcast on NBC's Today show).

Sharpton, 60, cast himself as a victim who first ran into the FBI’s warm embrace when a scary gangster purportedly threatened his life. He was “an American citizen with every right to call law enforcement” for protection, Sharpton told his MSNBC audience. His sole motivation was to “try to protect myself and others.”

He needed the FBI’s help, Sharpton claimed, because his relentless advocacy on behalf of African-American concert promoters had angered wiseguys with hooks in the music business. “I did the right thing working with the authorities,” Sharpton assured viewers. As for being branded an informant, that was a label for others to worry about. “I didn’t consider myself, quote, an informant. Wasn’t told I was that,” said Sharpton.

These claims, broadcast by NBCUniversal, were demonstrably false.

Sharpton was once an organized crime associate who got caught up in an FBI sting and immediately agreed to join Team America to stay out of prison. The street-smart preacher’s decision to become an informant was borne out of fear and a desire for self preservation, a calculus not unique when someone is cornered by men with badges.

Now, if NBCUniversal cared to examine the televised claims Sharpton has made about his work as an informant, the company’s newly formed internal affairs division could review hundreds of pages of FBI documents chronicling Sharpton’s work as “CI-7,” short for confidential informant #7, and they could track down members of the FBI-NYPD organized crime task force for which Sharpton surreptitiously recorded his meetings with gangsters.

And company brass would certainly want to review the first story to expose Sharpton as a snitch, a January 1998 Newsday piece authored by a Murderers Row of reporters: Bob Drury, Robert Kessler, Mike McAlary, and Richard Esposito. If that last guy’s name rings a bell, well, it is probably because Esposito--now senior executive producer of NBC's investigative unit--is heading the network’s review of Williams’s Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina claims.

So, What About Rev. Al Sharpton's Suspension? | The Smoking Gun

If you read this entire thing...while not surprised I am shocked. I posted it here instead of simply laughing about it...because this man is an advisor to the President, the lead in race relations we are told.

Read the entire thing..it reads like a cheap dime novel.