A blog for all seasons; A blog for one; A blog for all. As the 11th most informative blog on the planet, I have a seared memory of throwing my Time 2006 Man of the Year Award over the railing at Time Warner Center.
Justice. Only Justice Shall Thou Pursue
Ah, the fresh smell of another ACORN office whose moral and ethical flexibility are on full display. This time, it's the ACORN office in Philadelphia.
I can't wait to hear Bertha Lewis try to explain this latest video away, claiming that this is yet another isolated incident and that it doesn't reflect on the organization as a whole.
UPDATE: Bob Owens notes that the video has been marked private, which suggests that Andrew Breitbart may have accidentally released the video early. Bob also notes the following:
ACORN Philadelphia Office Director Katherine Conway-Russell flat-out lied on camera to the media. ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis continues to lie to the media, claiming that these incidents are isolated. The media repeated their claims unquestioningly.
Now that ACORN has been exposed—yet again—as lying about their willingness to support the creation of brothels for the purpose of juvenile prostitution, will the media outlets that repeated those falsehoods decide to re-report on the truth of this story? Will they issue corrections?
Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe have shown the unedited footage from every ACORN visit they've made, from Baltimore, Washington DC, New York, San Bernardino, San Diego, and the unedited video from Philadelphia will soon be released. Other videos from other ACORN sting operations are rumored to be lurking in the wings.
Also, recall that ACORN has a spinoff political group the WFP, which has engaged in documented voter fraud in New York. This is a group that stinks to the core.
UPDATE: The video link has been updated as it is now operable, via Big Government.
UPDATE: Don't hold your breath to wait for Media Matters or other media outlets to issue corrections and retractions of their claims that this was merely an isolated incident and in particular, how the Philadelphia office managers lied about their activities and conduct, particularly in light of the video released today showing their complicity.
ACORN officials must be besides themselves and are tired of trying to attempt to defend the indefensible actions of their employees who have been revealed to be unethical and promoting illegal activities on a multitude of video tapes.
They're angry. They're pissed. And they've called out the lawyers.
They don't want blood. They want millions in damages and they're suing James O'Keefe, Hannah Giles, and Andrew Breitbart for illegal wiretapping in Maryland because Maryland law requires that both parties consent to the taping.
This isn't going to go well.
Even Admiral Ackbar knows one when he sees one. It's going to be a trap. It's not a good idea to bring a lawsuit when you're angry and haven't had a chance to suss out the possible outcomes, and not just in the courtroom. This is a situation that has media scrutiny written all over it, particularly because Breitbart is being sued. He's not going to let this issue die; he's going to use it to drive continuing traffic to his websites and will continue pushing matters on any news outlet he can get himself booked on, particularly Fox News.
ACORN would have been better off letting the issues slide, because attacking the messenger and pushing ahead with a lawsuit guarantees more news coverage and additional scrutiny on ACORN actions. ACORN could conceivably win on the lawsuit, but they'd lose the war - as their political allies (like Barney Frank) distance themselves to avoid the omniscient stink as media outlets actually are forced to cover the story.
Bear in mind that Breitbart had let on that there were seven sets of videos and only five had been made public. ACORN could have waited this out and let the interest die out and its political allies regained their nerve (although Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid refuses to hold hearings on the matter). Now, there's an incentive for Breitbart to push ahead with releasing the videos at some unspecified date to keep the pressure on ACORN.
Moreover, ACORN fired the two employees in the Baltimore video as a result of their conduct on the video. Those two former employees would have a far stronger case than ACORN, but this is route that ACORN is taking. Instead, they're going to face a potential jury pool that isn't going to take what was seen on the videos lightly when compared to the alleged violation of Maryland wiretapping laws, particularly when ACORN leaders have said that they were thankful for the videographers for outing a few bad apples.
Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour (R) has cut funding to ACORN amid the widening scandal facing the group.
"I have instructed the State Fiscal Officer to conduct a comprehensive review of the state's relationship with ACORN, and all state agencies are to cut off funding for any current contracts with ACORN to the extent the law permits," Governor Barbour said.
Mississippi joins a growing list of states severing ties to the group after a video was released showing employees in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Brooklyn, N.Y., advising two undercover activists posing as a pimp and a prostitute to lie about the prostitute's profession, suggested they launder the money and advised how to hide underage prostitutes.
San Diego's Board of Supervisors might go back and audit the group's voter registrations. Nice. Isn't that a little late? Considering that the group has repeatedly been caught engaging in voter registration fraud - a separate and distinct issue from actual voter fraud - it should have opened an investigation long ago. The ACORN office in San Diego says that if their voter registrations should be audited, so should all the other registrations. Good point (even if broken clocks are right twice a day). Local and state elections officials have repeatedly shirked their responsibilities to confirm that those who register to vote are actually eligible to vote (including failing to cull the deceased from voter rolls). But, special scrutiny should be paid to ACORN-related registrations primarily because of the flexible moral and ethical conduct of ACORN employees as witnessed on the multitude of videos.
Maryland Attorney General has finally launched an investigation into ACORN activities, stemming from the video showing the Baltimore office's gross misconduct. That's after Baltimore officials appear more than willing to overlook matters:
Hours after the Justice Department's inspector general announced Monday that he plans a review of funding to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), Maryland's top law enforcement officer also moved to launch an investigation.
Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler (D) asked and received permission from Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) to investigate and, if necessary, prosecute "conduct involving" ACORN.
Gansler's investigation effectively usurps Baltimore City State's Attorney Patricia C. Jessamy. She had called the secret taping of ACORN employees giving tax advice to a man and woman posing as a pimp and prostitute illegal under Maryland's requirement for two-party consent for audio recordings.
"As time went on, it became clear that the local authorities were not going to look into it," said Raquel Guillory, Gansler's spokeswoman. "It's obviously something that needed to be looked into, and that's why we've taken this step."
Baltimore's more interested in prosecuting James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles than going after the gross misconduct at ACORN. Curious how that works. Instead of trying to deal with the huge mess that O'Keefe and Giles kicked over with their expose, Baltimore's prosecutor wants to hit the duo. Nice.
It's also good to see that the US Justice Department is finally opening an investigation. They're going to look for improprieties in any funding obtained through the Department. I would suggest that Housing and Urban Development and Health and Human Services likewise open investigations given that ACORN may have obtained funds through both of those agencies as well as part of their homeowner assistance programs and other community programs.
Such investigations are long overdue (going back years in fact), but there is no way one can possibly ignore the mess.
It isn't something he's followed closely? Why is that? The videos are shocking enough, but ACORN's response has been even more shocking in claiming that these were merely isolated cases and that fault rested with the duo who filmed the incidents. They got rolled by Andrew Breitbart, who pushed a video a day over the span of a week to show just how badly ACORN is operated nationwide. One video would have been dismissed. Two videos would have been a coincidence, but now that we're up to five separate locations filmed showing ACORN employees providing advice on how to break the law, and you can no longer simply ignore the evidence.
Law enforcement and attorney generals nationwide should be opening investigations and auditing the books and records of ACORN to see what kind of mess is truly going on there, but ACORN has powerful friends that are more than willing to look the other way. ACORN has a dual mission - providing homeowner assistance and political organizing.
The homeowner assistance program has been suspended because of the videos, and one has to wonder what they've been advising customers for years on end. Employees with a certain moral and ethical flexibility are more than willing to provide advice on how to engage in illicit conduct, and ACORN employment practices appear not to weed out those people who are willing to break the law or look the other way.
Government funds ACORN operations across the nation via pork (member items) and outright grants through Housing and Urban Development to provide homeowner assistance. All these programs and funding needs to be scrutinized because of the level of advice being offered.
Politicians that are willing to overlook this criminality ought to themselves be scrutinized for their willingness to continue funding organizations that do a grave disservice to the communities they claim to represent. After all, politicians provide member items (pork to ACORN), and ACORN and its affiliates, including the WFP support and organize on behalf of political candidates.
One of them is Bill de Blasio, the Brooklyn city councilman in a tough runoff election for Public Advocate against Mark Green.
In January, ACORN endorsed de Blasio, who spent nearly $43,000 in campaign funds to hire an ACORN affiliate, N.Y. Citizens Services Inc., for "field staff," "consulting" and "canvassing" leading up to last Tuesday's primary.
As a councilman, the Brooklyn Democrat sponsored or co-sponsored a total of $115,000 in taxpayer dollars for ACORN and an affiliate, the New York Agency for Community Affairs.
He was also endorsed by the Working Families Party, which ACORN helped create and shares office space with, after spending $67,740 to hire WFP's for-profit arm, Data and Field Services, for campaign consulting. He also got $33,000 as a "consultant" for a WFP affiliate.
That's just the most egregious case. There are others:
In the last three years, more than 20 Council members, state assemblymen and state senators sponsored nearly $1.75 million in taxpayer money for various ACORN groups in New York.
That raises conflict of interest questions for pols who also seek the group's endorsement.
Dick Dadey of the nonpartisan watchdog group Citizens Union said the conflict was "more perceived than actual," but added it "doesn't look good" for ACORN's political committee to endorse pols when a related entity gets money "from those same officials."
In this election ACORN, endorsed de Blasio and dozens of council members, including controller hopeful John Liu, as well as many state legislators.
The latest video, coming from San Diego, shows one of ACORN's employees soliciting Hannah Giles for sex in exchange for providing assistance on smuggling girls into the US to engage in child prostitution.
ACORN has tried to cast these videos as random and isolated incidents, but the fact that it was so easy to get this kind of response from workers at multiple offices shows that ACORN's problems run much deeper than that.
They hire people with a certain moral and ethical flexibility, who show a depressing absence of understanding right from wrong. If they were so quick to provide assistance on how to break the law on any number of issues (child prostitution, tax evasion, etc.) what other kinds of questionable advice are they providing to the communities they claim to assist.
After all, ACORN claims that they want to help the lower classes advance and yet we see that their definition of advancement includes turning a blind eye to child prostitution and tax evasion.
So, while ACORN has fired several people in connection with the videos, the ACORN leadership has thus far escaped serious civil and criminal repercussions.
I expect that to change with the release of these videos and subsequent investigations opened in places like New York City and New York State. It would be a gross dereliction of duty on the part of state attorney generals around the nation not to take a closer look at whether ACORN's activities there are legal - including whether they are operating without licenses as in the case in Maryland.
Until ACORN can show that it has cleaned up its act, it should get no government assistance and any money earmarked to housing assistance should be reappropriated to other groups that have legitimate programs, such as Nehemiah Housing.
ACORN makes a big deal about providing homeowner assistance to underprivileged communities, and yet one has to question the kind of advice and assistance provided based on these videos. People coming in for assistance need to know the proper and legal methods of handling the real estate transactions they're interested in, and evading the law perpetuates problems within the community. Excusing such behavior as the ACORN leadership has done by claiming that this is a problem limited to a small group of its employees doesn't wash. It throws into question all of their operations nationwide, and ACORN has repeatedly had egg on its face by claiming that this was first an isolated incident, and then by claiming that its other offices weren't taken in by O'Keefe and Giles. They lost credibility - rightfully so.
Cuomo has to investigate these groups, and promising that he will insure that monies for ACORN goes solely to the homeowner assistance programs is insufficient. Member items (also known as earmarks and as pork) in New York are doled out to groups all across the state, and ACORN gets its share of member items. They don't specify that the money goes to homeowner assistance, but rather to the group generally.
That's a reappropriation of those monies. It doesn't specify what program the money goes to. It is the same for all the other programs listed in the budget bills.
Legislators know, or should know, that the money goes to a variety of operations within the groups it funds. For ACORN, they know it covers overhead, the homeowner assistance programs, and the political organizing, even though such organizing would conflict with its tax exempt status.
The best way for the Attorney General to get to the bottom of matters in New York is to conduct a full audit of ACORN operations to see where all the money has gone. Simply promising to ensure that the money goes to homeowner assistance doesn't address systemic problems within ACORN. Moreover, it doesn't address the questionable advice provided by ACORN to those seeking assistance.
It was bipartisan, but some of the usual suspects wanted to protect ACORN's funding, including Democrat Charles Rangel (D-Tax Cheat, NY). All 75 voting to protect ACORN's funding were Democrats. Birds of a feather.
UPDATE: ACORN is finally trying to strike back at O'Keefe and Giles, claiming that their Philadelphia office called the cops on O'Keefe. They have a copy of a police report claiming that O'Keefe caused a disturbance at the office on 7/24/2009. However, the precise nature of what happened in the office on that day isn't clear, and someone ought to ask O'Keefe about it.
It has everything to do with James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, who posed as a pimp and prostitute and got at least three ACORN offices to provide all kinds of advice on how to carry out prostitution, political activities, tax evasion, and other criminal acts while seeking to obtain a home through the organization. They've released a series of videos showing Baltimore, Washington, DC, and Brooklyn offices providing very similar advice to the couple.
ACORN had tried to claim that the Baltimore office was an isolated incident. That's when the second video was released. When ACORN again tried to claim it was an isolated incident and that they fired the two Baltimore workers, the second set of videos were released showing the DC office. When ACORN attempted yet again to claim it was a setup and that the New York offices didn't respond to O'Keefe and Giles, the third video was released showing the Brooklyn office providing the same kind of information as the other two.
There is also word that there are more videos to come.
Biggovernment.com, which released the videos (and is part of Breitbart.com), hopes that RICO charges be filed against ACORN.
The reality is, there are at least a half-dozen state and federal laws that could have been broken here. Even though the undercover girl is not a prostitute and there are no El Salvadoran girls either, this could still meet the legal standard for conspiracy to commit these various crimes. At a bare minimum, depending on the state, it likely fulfills the elements for the crime of attempted conspiracy, which usually carries the exact same penalty as the underlying crimes themselves (prostitution, tax fraud, etc.).
What’s important about prostitution and human trafficking is that they are specific triggers for the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, better known as RICO. The RICO law is designed to enable the Justice Department to go after criminal enterprises. It defines “racketeering activity” as including importing illegal aliens for immoral purposes, falsifying identification documents and immigration papers, mail and wire fraud, and the sexual exploitation of children, among others.
These are all implicated on the video tapes. The ACORN workers rattle off their how-to instructions on carrying out these crimes without needing to do more than skim a couple books that they have on hand. The clear implication is that these workers are seasoned pros on how to carry out these crimes, subsidized by federal taxpayer money.
As to the Senate vote yesterday, Sen. Gillibrand voted against the provision to cut funding, whereas even Sen. Chuck Schumer voted to cut funding.
Gillibrand's office said she found the actions of certain ACORN employees "reprehensible" but added, "The truth remains that thousands of New York families who are facing foreclosure depend on charitable organizations like ACORN for assistance."
Those families have no one to blame but the actions of ACORN and the failure to properly oversee and train offices to act in a legal fashion. Providing information that can be used to hide illegal activities is not an activity that can or should be carried out at any of the ACORN offices, and yet it was all too easy to get virtually identical advice from at least three offices. That's the kind of mess that starts at the top and rots its way down to the core of the group.
There are other more worthy community groups that can provide the kind of assistance to families without the criminality or the appearance of criminality. That includes all manner of church groups, which serve many of the areas in which ACORN operates. Housing advice could be farmed out to Nehemiah and its partners, affiliates, or similar organizations.
That the group's shutdown may adversely affect families going forward should not prevent the group from being stripped of funding if it is breaking the law as is the case on those three videos. Moreover, stripping the funding will not necessarily shut down the group altogether as it takes in private donations as well. It would continue to serve but at a much reduced level.
The only thing left to consider is just how far law enforcement wants to take matters and whether they'll pursue the RICO charges or other criminal charges against not only those in the videos but their superiors. That remains to be seen.
UPDATE: Instapundit links. Thanks! Now, there is a possibility that the House will not vote the cutoff since the Democrats still control the House, but that they're allowing the GOP to make this move shows just how far the ACORN has fallen. ACORN's credibility is shot, and the possibility of more videos being released will only further savage ACORN's last remaining bit of credibility and support in Congress.
UPDATE: Via Instapundit, Biggovernment.com has found that ACORN was not licensed to do business in Maryland since November 2006 (ACORN Housing, a separate entity, was operating illegally since November 2008). So, while the Maryland Attorney General is making headlines for threatening to prosecute O'Keefe and Giles, he should have been focusing on ACORN's right to do business in the state - a far more egregious and damaging issue.
According to Maryland law, the following penalties are imposed on business entities that operate without a license: (1) Officers and agents are guilty of a misdemeanor and may be fined up to $1,000; and (2) the corporation subject to $200 fine.
What isn't clear is why the ACORN entities forfeited their right to do business in the state. It is possible that they failed to make a required annual filing.
UPDATE: Via Hot Air, not only are Senate Republicans demanding an investigation, but there's going to be another video released this afternoon (4pm) :
Or, make that four. Big Government plans to release another video this afternoon at 4 pm ET, apparently taken at an ACORN office in Southern California. According to Twitter chatter, this one has some politicians named, as well as a surprising admission from the ACORN staffer on tape.
UPDATE: San Bernardino, here we come:
UPDATE: Is anyone at the San Bernardino District Attorney's office following along with all this? It looks like the woman in the video, Tresa Kaelke, admits to at laundry list of crimes, including prostitution, failure to report income, and those are the tame issues. I'm sure the IRS would love to hear more about this too.
UPDATE: The ACORN website notes that it trains its employees on how to "to recruit members, build an organizing committee, turn people out to meetings and events, develop campaign strategy, work with leaders, do grassroots fundraising, write press releases, and much more." Apparently, engaging in child prostitution, tax evasion, and other sundry activities falls into the "much more" category.
UPDATE: To quote a favorite movie of my wife, ACORN seems to employ people with a certain moral flexibility. Is it not so unreasonable to believe that their hiring practices across the country attract the same kind of people, and if presented with facts (the child prostitution ring and political aspirations and the need to hide such information on the down low), that they'll revert to type?
The rank criminality of ACORN continues to get little play in the New York Times and other national media outlets despite the fact (or perhaps the reason for the inattention) that the organization has close ties to the Obama Administration. ACORN has repeatedly stated that criminality of a few of its offices do not represent the national organization and are a few bad apples.
One time is a fluke, twice is a coincidence. Three times? That's a pattern and bodes poorly for ACORN. This is a group with significant power within the Democratic party and forms a grassroots base. The stupidity and criminality of providing advice to the duo of O'Keefe and Giles posing as pimps on how to break the law, engage in child prostitution and other criminal acts is breathtaking in its scope.
The ACORN workers providing in great detail how to break the law and what to do is just astounding to watch. After all, do these people not realize what they're talking about? They're telling the duo how to break the law, and it's a surprisingly similar answer from the three offices.
Where's the rest of the media to follow up on this and keep the pressure on ACORN, as well as law enforcement who might want to learn who else has taken advantage of ACORN's generous advice.
UPDATE: Don Surber also notes the scandal and that the organization should have its union and government funding cut off.
