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As reported by The Washington Post 9-24-09

ACORN Sues Over Damaging Video -Secret Recording In Baltimore Violated Wiretapping Law, Liberal Group Says

ACORN, the community organizing group embarrassed recently in a video sting, said Wednesday that it needs to determine whether it has major internal problems, but it also struck back, filing a lawsuit against the people who conducted the secret investigation.

Bertha Lewis, head of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, told reporters in a conference call that ACORN does not support criminal activity and that it thinks the filmmakers should have obeyed Maryland laws. In the state, where one video that embarrassed ACORN was made, the act constituted illegal wiretapping, the suit says.

The videos airing in the past two weeks show ACORN housing counselors advising two young conservative activists posing as a pimp and a prostitute on how to conceal their criminal business.

Lewis said she wants a newly hired investigator to find the organization’s weak spots, and she said she will make public the findings. Scott Harshbarger, a former Massachusetts attorney general hired for the investigation, vowed a “robust, no-holds-barred” review that would be “transparent.” Lewis said ACORN in the meantime will have to turn away many low-income clients it normally helps with threatened foreclosure or tax preparation.

“We want to be sure that before we start helping people with services that our operation is running well,” she said. “It doesn’t hurt us financially. It does hurt the poor people we have served for many years.”

Congress voted last week to ban federal funding for ACORN, and the organization hired Harshbarger to investigate and recommend changes.

On Wednesday, the new head of the federal Census Bureau revealed his reason for dropping ACORN as an agency partner. He said the bureau’s link to ACORN was hurting efforts to get Americans to participate in the count. And Rep. Darrell Issa (Calif.), ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, on Wednesday asked the House Judiciary Committee to summon Lewis, ACORN founder Wade Rathke and other ACORN officers for a hearing on its activities.

Lewis said Wednesday that rumors that ACORN is no longer registering low-income and minority voters — the part of its mission for which ACORN is best known and most controversial — are false.

“ACORN is going to make sure its members participate in the political process,” she said.

Lewis notified the Internal Revenue Service on Monday that ACORN would shut down its free tax-help clinics for low-income people, a partnership with the IRS, until an external review of ACORN’s work.

“As you know, ACORN has been the target of a sustained attack from conservative forces for a number of years,” Lewis wrote. “Recent videos generated by conservative activists, including one from our tax clinic in Baltimore, MD, have raised questions about our service programs.”

Meanwhile, the departed founder of ACORN said many of the accusations about the group are distortions meant to undermine President Obama and other Democrats.

In an interview, Rathke said conservative claims that ACORN is a “criminal enterprise” that misuses federal and donor funds for political ends — an allegation contained in a report by House Republicans — are a “complete fabrication.” He said exaggeration and conjecture about the group are being passed off daily on cable television and blogs as documented fact.

Of the videos, Rathke said some of the “sneak films are too sad and painful for me to watch.”

“If any of the employees violated the ‘do right’ rule, then they should be dismissed,” he said.

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As reported by The Washington Post 9-23-09

ACORN Sues O’Keefe, Giles and Breitbart.com

By Garance Franke-Ruta
The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) announced Thursday it had filed a lawsuit against James O’Keefe, Hannah Giles and Breitbart.com LLC for what it alleged was “illegal videotaping” of ACORN employees in Baltimore.

The group filed its suit in the Circuit Court for Baltimore City and is seeking “a preliminary and permanent injunction against further distribution” of a hidden-camera tape made by O’Keefe and Giles that aired on BigGovernment.com, a Web project of Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart.com company, along with compensatory and punitive damages.

In the video, former Baltimore ACORN employees Shera Williams and Tonja Thompson give tax advice to O’Keefe and Giles, who are posing as a pimp and prostitute.

“The video and audio footage was taken without the knowledge of Williams and/or Thompson and in violation of Maryland’s Courts and Judicial Proceedings Code §§ 10-402(a) and 10-410, which requires two party consent to all electronic surveillance. Violation of the law is a felony, and entitles parties whose rights were violated to sue,” ACORN said in a statement announcing the suit.

ACORN’s general counsel, Arthur Schwartz, said the acts of O’Keefe and Giles in making the hidden-camera taping were “clear violations of Maryland law.”

The ACORN legal team will include Andy Freeman of the Baltimore firm Brown, Goldstein and Levy ; A. Dwight Pettit; Arthur Schwartz, from Schwartz, Lichten & Bright, PC in New York; and C. Justin Brown from Baltimore.

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As reported by the Associated Press 9-23-09

IRS severs ties with ACORN over scandal

The IRS says it is severing ties with ACORN the community activist group involved in a scandal after employees were caught on video giving advice to a couple posing as a prostitute and pimp.

The IRS said Wednesday it would no longer include ACORN in its volunteer tax assistance program. The program offered free tax advice to about 3 million low- and moderate-income tax filers this spring.

The IRS said ACORN, which is short for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, provided help on about 25,000 returns.

The House and Senate voted earlier this month to sever federal funding to ACORN. And the Census Bureau severed its ties with the group for the 2010 national head-count.

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As reported by RedState.com 9-23-09

Inside The ACORN Rolodex: ACORN Has Its Own Political Party Other Than the Democrats

Above is a word cloud of the associations in the Bertha Lewis contacts list we received. Some are legitimate business dealings. Forest City Ratner, for example, is both bailing out ACORN and relying on its support for its construction projects. But others are more intriguing.

The larger the name, the greater the frequency of the name appearing in the contacts list. For many years it has been speculated that SEIU and ACORN share a common foundation. This seems to suggest as much. In fact, in at least one appearance on the contacts list, an SEIU official has an ACORN email address.

But were this picture a tree, the trunk would be the Working Families Party. Roger Stone has suggested the Working Families Party is ACORN. Bertha Lewis’s contacts list suggests as much.

Lewis is both the head of ACORN and also the Co-Chair of the Working Families Party. As you can imagine, ACORN would have us believe that those are separate roles. However, information suggests otherwise and we also know that ACORN has a habit of creating political parties for its own ends.

To understand how the Working Families Party is part of ACORN, we need to understand the concept of “fusionism.”

I’ve written about this concept before and it is essential to ACORN’s political strategy.

As I noted back in 2008, ACORN played a vital role in the Chicago area New Party — the far left political party that endorsed Barack Obama.

From my 2008 article on Obama’s New Party ties:

Fusion is a pretty simple concept. A candidate could run as both a Democrat and a [Working Families Party] member to signal the candidate was, in fact, a left-leaning candidate, or at least not a center-left DLC type candidate. If the candidate, let’s call him Barack Obama, received only 500 votes in the Democratic Party against another candidate who received 1000 votes, Obama would clearly not be the nominee. But, if Obama also received 600 votes from the [Working Families Party], Obama’s [Working Families Party] votes and Democratic votes would be fused. He would be the Democratic nominee with 1100 votes.

The fusion idea set off a number of third parties, but the New Party was probably the most successful. A March 22, 1998 In These Times article by John Nichols showed just how successful. “[The Wall Street] Journal’s editorialists fretted last fall about how the New Party was responsible for a labor movement that was drifting leftward …. As [openly declared socialist] Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) puts it, ‘If the Wall Street Journal editorial page goes after you, you can pretty well bet you’re doing the right thing.’”

ACORN knows all about Fusion because it worked with the New Party in Chicago as if the New Party were ACORN’s political party.

In These Times reported on February 17, 1997, that “the [New] [P]arty, with 80 members in the [17th] ward, many of whom are also active in the Service Employees International Union and the advocacy group ACORN, has begun to build a parallel precinct organization.”

With the experiences it garnered in Chicago, ACORN knows how to deploy fusion in elections.

That brings us to the Working Families Party (”WFP”) in New York.

In this “fusion” system, candidates appear on the ballot lines of all the parties that endorse them. The WFP, thus, leverages power by selectively awarding its line to candidates who support its agenda. So, for example, Hillary Clinton in 2000 received 102,000 votes for U.S. Senate on the WFP line, meaning 102,000 people sent her a message that their support was contingent on her supporting the WFP’s agenda. According to WFP Executive Director Dan Cantor, this message gets louder down the ballot. “We brand our endorsed candidates right on the ballot so that voters who might not know the candidate still know how to vote on the important issues,” he says.

According to Elizabeth Benjamin in the New York Daily News,

Even the Democrats – who have become the WFP’s closest allies since the party helped them win a slim majority in the state Senate – are looking to distance themselves. They’ve got plans to build their own field organization.

That would enable Dems to rely less onthe WFP’s controversial for-profit arm, Data & Field Services, which has drawn scrutiny from the city Campaign Finance Board.

This is important because, following ACORN’s pattern of practice, the WFP set up Data & Field Services to skirt around election laws as a for-profit entity. Unfortunately for them, the New York Campaign Finance Board ruled Data & Field Services is part and parcel WFP. That means it has to comply with campaign finance rules.

If it were shown that ACORN is joined at the hip to WFP in the same way Data & Field Services is, then ACORN might also have to comply and disclose — something it does not have to do now.

As it stands now, with the close association between the two, a candidate can get on both the Democratic ballot in New York and the WFP ballot and signal that they are the ACORN approved candidate. With ACORN’s growing negative reputation, it is only a matter of time before it spills over to the Working Families Party.