Al Sharpton: I'm no FBI rat. 'I'm a cat.'

On Monday, The Smoking Gun reported that MSNBC host and civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton secretly informed on the mob for the FBI in the 1980s. According to the site, hundreds of pages of FBI affidavits revealed that Sharpton recorded the conversations of members of the Genovese crime family for a joint NYPD/FBI team, amassing intel that ultimately helped secure several convictions.

Yet while admitting that he did in fact record mob conversations for law enforcement agencies, Sharpton on Tuesday pushed back against the "rat" characterization, instead framing his spying as noble.

"Rats are usually people that were with other rats," he said, in remarks flagged by the New York Observer. "I was not and am not a rat, because I wasn't with the rats. I'm a cat. I chase rats."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

"It is interesting to me, as we deal with the whole criminalization of many in our community, that the premise of a lot of this media is that I should have been with the mob rather than with the government," he added.