The newly released list of visitors to the Obama White
House makes the president’s claim he’s clueless about his former
employer ACORN — and its election fraud trials and tribulations
— especially difficult to believe.
Of particular significance is the visit by
ACORN spokesman Scott Levenson who met with White House
political director Patrick Gaspard in March. The purpose of the
meeting with Gaspard, a
former ACORN employee himself, was not
disclosed.
Levenson, who is also a registered
lobbyist for New York ACORN, is the charming fellow whom
Glenn Beck threw off his set May 6 for calling the TV host a
racist. He’s been helping to coordinate ACORN’s public
disinformation strategy which relies heavily on lies
and
misdirection.
It is worth noting that Levenson’s
visit to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue wouldn’t in itself be
untoward except that Obama claims — unconvincingly — to be out
of the loop regarding ACORN.
After the undercover prostitution sting videos first
surfaced in September the American public began to realize
that ACORN is a vast criminal conspiracy whose reach extends to
the highest levels of the U.S. government.
Obama said at the time he was barely
aware of ACORN’s problems.
“This is not the biggest issue facing the country.
It’s not something I’m paying a lot of attention to,” he told
ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.
After the undercover prostitution sting videos surfaced in
September, Levenson helped to spread ACORN’s
official lie that the videos had been dishonestly altered to
make law-abiding ACORN employees seem willing to facilitate
criminal behavior. Almost two weeks ago after the latest video
from ACORN’s Philadelphia office debuted, Levenson tried to
change the subject by blaming Fox News for carrying on a vendetta
against his poor, persecuted radical group.
“This is another example of Fox Entertainment treating
concocted video as if it’s actually news,”
Levenson said, echoing the Obama administration’s current
line that Fox News isn’t real journalism.
Gaspard, who came to the White House after a stint as
executive vice president of SEIU Local 1199, has ties to ACORN
that go way back.
Years before he joined the Obama administration, Gaspard
was ACORN boss Bertha Lewis’s political director in New York.
Current “chief organizer” or CEO of ACORN, Lewis was head of New
York ACORN before she took over as national leader of ACORN.
(Erick Erickson of the website RedState
did an
excellent job explaining the
relationship of Gaspard to Lewis and President Obama.)
Gaspard also worked for
New York’s Working Families Party, which is an appendage of
ACORN. Lewis is a co-founder of that party — which endorsed
Obama last year — and has close ties to Rep. Jerrold Nadler
(D-New York) who has been most reluctant to have the House
Judiciary subcommittee he chairs investigate ACORN.
Nadler is even
providing advice to ACORN through its lawyer Arthur Z.
Schwartz but he refuses to address this huge conflict of
interest. The congressman’s press office won’t return my
calls.
Now that ACORN is public relations poison, the White House
and ACORN deny Gaspard ever worked for ACORN even though his
employment was acknowledged by no less an authority than ACORN
founder Wade
Rathke himself. Pretending to be
a senile old man, Rathke now says he was mistaken about
Gaspard working for ACORN. Only some Democrats and a few gullible
journalists believe him.
It’s always been easy for ACORN to disavow ties to someone
working for an affiliate within the ACORN network.
ACORN has a confusing structure and its network of
who-knows-how-many taxpayer-funded tax-exempt nonprofit
affiliates. As I’ve written ad nauseam, this is deliberate. ACORN
identifies its affiliates as ACORN affiliates when it is
convenient and claims the same entities are not ACORN affiliates
when it is not. This game of nonprofit musical chairs is standard
operating procedure at ACORN whenever things get hot.
MEANWHILE, A PARADE of leftists, Big Government
capitalists, and favor seekers were shown to have
visited the White House, according to the data dump executed
by the Obama administration on Friday.
All these luminaries dropped by the executive mansion
between Jan. 20 and Sept. 15: Al Gore; Center for American
Progress president John Podesta (17 times!); Planned Parenthood
president Cecile Richards; AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka (7
times); National Organization for Women president Kim Gandy (15
times!); Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton; Goldman Sachs CEO
Lloyd Blankfein; and GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt. Exxon Mobil CEO Rex
Tillerson visited card-carrying socialist climate change czarina
Carol Browner at the White House on Feb. 12 for an undisclosed
purpose.
Andy Stern, president of Service Employees International
Union (SEIU), visited the White House 20 times. As Stephen
Spruiell notes at NRO, “Stern has openly bragged about the SEIU’s
$61 million investment in Barack Obama. It certainly bought him a
lot of access.”
SEIU has strong, longstanding ties to ACORN but has
recently tried
to distance itself from the group.
Two of ACORN’s most important financial backers also
visited the White House.
Radical billionaire George Soros, who funds ACORN through
his Open Society Institute, visited the White House four times
this year.
Soros acolyte Gara LaMarche, president of the Atlantic
Philanthropies, dropped by the executive mansion twice.
LaMarche’s Bermuda-based charity
has pumped $25 million into an ACORN front group called
Health Care for America Now (HCAN) that is pushing for socialist
healthcare.
A post on
LaMarche’s blog dated Sept. 18, which is after the first
round of ACORN undercover sting videos were released, suggests he
doesn’t give a farthing’s cuss about ACORN corruption and
criminality.
The attacks on ACORN are part of “a deliberate and
sustained strategy to hobble a political movement to improve the
lives of poor and working people at a moment when it has finally
gained some larger public traction,” wrote LaMarche,
formerly vice president and director of U.S.
Programs at Soros’s Open Society Institute.
The Obama administration probably feels the same way, but
it doesn’t have the cojones to admit it.
