RNC Nixes Event With Breitbart

RNC Chairman Michael Steele and conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart
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The Republican National Committee has postponed (or perhaps canceled) its scheduled event in mid-August that was to feature none other than Andrew Breitbart.

As we reported last week, Breitbart and RNC Chairman Michael Steele were supposed to co-headline a fundraiser in Beverly Hills.

But now the event has been called off.

As Jonathan Martin reported over the weekend:

A finance official with the party emailed donors Friday night to alert them of “a scheduling change” regarding what was billed as the “RNC Election Countdown” and was to take place in Los Angeles between August 12-14. The email, obtained by POLITICO, said it would be rescheduled for September.

Asked if the event featuring the controversial Breitbart would ever actually take place, RNC spokesman Doug Heye would only say: “We are working on scheduling and we fully plan to have another event based on existing trips to California.”

As CNN reported, an RNC spokesman told them that the fundraiser was cancelled “To better capitalize on the fall fundraising season that happens post-Labor Day, while also lowering costs by utilizing existing trips to California.”

The timing of the event had seemed quite odd, in light of Breitbart’s role in circulating the infamous misleading video clip of Shirley Sherrod, an African-American official at the Department of Agriculture, seeming to tell a story about how she would not help a white farmer who was down on his luck 24 year ago. Sherrod was quickly forced to resign. Of course, the full context of the video showed that Sherrod was discussing how she did not discriminate against the farmer, and that the event was her own personal turning point in race relations in the south.

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