Al Sharpton Gets Testy With Lesley Stahl When Asked About FBI Role In 2011
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- President Barack Obama is coming to New York City Friday to address the Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network.
The visit comes days after revelations surfaced that Sharpton worked with the FBI. The topic also came up in a 2011 '60 Minutes' interview with Lesley Stahl weeks before the debut of "Politics Nation."
In outtakes posted from that interview, Stahl asked Sharpton if he was an FBI informant.
The exchange got testy at times when Stahl continued to question Rev. Al about his "informant" role.
Stahl: When you were in your 20s, you were an informant for the FBI.
Sharpton: No, well it's according to how you define informant but go ahead.
Stahl: Tell us about that. How do you define it? What was that?
Sharpton: They tried to entrap me. When it didn't work...
Stahl: The FBI you mean?
Sharpton: Yeah. And when it didn't work, I was working on some things about crack houses at the time and we ended up working on some drug cases and they were also doing a boxing investigation and they talked to me a lot about boxing and what I knew about Don King.
Stahl went on to talk about the FBI running a sting against Don King, to which Sharpton said he didn't know.
Sharpton said Tuesday that he went to federal authorities after low-level mobsters warned him and others they would be harmed if they continued to compete for a stake in the music business — a claim he recounted in his 1996 book, "Go and Tell Pharaoh."
"I was never told I was an informant with a number," Sharpton said Tuesday.
"In my own mind, I was not an informant. I was cooperating with an investigation."
Watch a clip from the '60 Minutes' interview below: