ACORN demanded and received changes to a congressional report that -surprise, surprise- fails to find ACORN did anything wrong.
Matthew Vadum (BigGovernment.com, June 16, 2010)
Longtime ACORN lawyer Arthur Z. Schwartz sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) which was examining federal grants to ACORN, under orders from Congress. Schwartz's demands appear at pages 32 and 33 of the report which is called "Preliminary Observations on Funding, Oversight, and Investigations and Prosecutions of ACORN or Potentially Related Organizations." The paper is available at GAO's website.
ACORN's election fraud assurance division, Project Vote, which used to employ President Obama, even threw in a few helpful suggestions in an effort to trick Americans into believing it no longer has anything to do with ACORN. Project Vote lawyer Brian Mellor's letter appears at pages 35 and 36 of the report.
The preliminary -as in incomplete, insufficient, and downright superficial- report is less than enlightening. I got the distinct impression while reading it that its authors hadn't actually been following ACORN's troubled history. You can't expect much from a federal investigation when the question posed, namely, whether some of the grants ACORN received, were misused. Instead of doing actually shoe-leather investigating, all GAO appears to have done is talked to other government agencies and compiled existing data.
Table 4 at p.19 of the report indicates that of the six major federal agencies GAO asked questions of only ONE (!) has provided responses so far. Talk about "preliminary"!
It is amazing that GAO's lukewarm threshhold-level probe is considered an investigation at all.
The real issues that have yet to be explored are whether ACORN engaged in violations of RICO through money-laundering of taxpayer funds designated for nonpartisan activities, engaged in partisan activities, and violated ERISA (the federal pension statute) by shifting pension funds around in order to conceal a million dollar embezzlement perpetrated by the ACORN founder's brother (Dale Rathke) - for starters! ACORN's criminal activities stretch almost all the way back to the group's founding in 1970 in Arkansas.
Only a proper racketeering investigation will shed light on ACORN's decades of lawbreaking.
Meanwhile, ACORN hagiographer and radical left-wing community organizer John Atlas, author of Seeds of Change, crows that ACORN has been "vindicated" by the new preliminary report by the GAO.
When he's not agitating people in the inner cities to rise up against their government, Atlas is a full-time unicorn breeder.
MATTHEW VADUM, Senior Editor, Capital Research Center
1513 16th Street NW, Washington, DC 20036-1480
Formerly a CRC research fellow, veteran journalist Matthew Vadum edits Organization Trends and Foundation Watch. During his seven years in the Washington bureau of The Bond Buyer, a daily financial newspaper based on Wall Street, he covered Congress, the Supreme Court, housing, and state and local finance.
While a reporter for the Central Penn Business Journal in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, he won an award for outstanding legal journalism from the Pennsylvania Bar Association for an article that focused on employment law. He holds an M.A. in American Studies from Georgetown University. An expert on the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), Vadum has written somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 feature articles on the group and hundreds of blog posts.
