ACORN’s relentless death march continued last week as undercover
sting videos surfaced in which the group’s employees counseled
reporters posing as a pimp and a prostitute on how to set up a
house of ill repute using tax dollars.
The sensational undercover video
showed ACORN Housing employees in the group’s Baltimore
office trying to help the two journalists set up a brothel. The
pair told ACORN employees that underage girls from El Salvador
were ready to enter the U.S. and start working as child
prostitutes.
The video, first shown on Andrew Breitbart’s new website Big
Government, was featured that day on Glenn Beck’s TV program.
Hannah Giles, who portrayed the prostitute in the video, told
Beck she got involved in the project “to expose ACORN.”
“I saw them as a thug organization that was getting my tax
dollars,” said Giles.
But guess who might be facing prosecution for exposing the group
best known for its never-ending voter registration fraud
scandals? You guessed it — the conservative journalists involved
in the undercover reporting of course!
Obama supporter Patricia Jessamy, Maryland State’s Attorney for
Baltimore City, released a statement saying the video might
violate the state’s anti-wiretapping law that was used against
Linda Tripp after she recorded telephone conversations with
President Clinton’s Oval Office paramour Monica Lewinsky. The law
requires consent to the recording by both parties in a
conversation.
Always ready to smear conservatives, left-wing journalist Joe
Conason said on the Sept. 10 “Lou Dobbs Tonight” that the
filmmaker who portrayed the pimp may not be making himself
available to the media because he feared prosecution for unlawful
recording, as if the First Amendment’s press protections don’t
apply in the state of Maryland.
Fox News contributor, former Judge Andrew Napolitano, said that’s
bunk. The Maryland statute does not apply to videotape recordings
— only to phone calls or other electronic “communications,”
Napolitano said.
Meanwhile, the radical group and crime syndicate that is a
longtime ally of President Obama went into damage control
overdrive after the videos showed ACORN officials advising the
pretend prostitute and her procurer about how to get taxpayer
funds, launder money, commit tax fraud, and commit who knows how
many other crimes.
When ACORN learned of the video Thursday it
fired the workers, called Fox News racist for airing the
footage, and threatened a lawsuit.
Stuart Katzenberg, lead organizer for ACORN’s Maryland branch,
said that the employees were canned because they “did not meet
ACORN’s standards of professionalism.” Sonja Merchant-Jones, head
of Baltimore City ACORN, said that the workers were low-level
part-time workers unsupervised by senior staff at the time.
Another video showing a similar scenario surfaced the next day.
This time it was a slightly different undercover operation in
which Washington, D.C. ACORN employees were only too willing to
participate in the prostitution scam. ACORN promptly
cashiered those employees too, screaming it was a victim of a
“smear” campaign.
Marcel Reid, who is officially chairwoman of the D.C. chapter of
ACORN, said that Katzenberg took over as lead organizer for
Maryland and the District of Columbia after ACORN’s national
board expelled her last November for asking uncomfortable
questions about the group’s finances.
While Reid is chairwoman in name, she has been barred from the
D.C. office since her expulsion from the board. She co-founded a
reform group called ACORN 8.
When in charge of D.C. ACORN, Reid said she had no authority over
ACORN Housing employees working in the D.C. ACORN office.
Employees of ACORN Housing, a nonprofit legally separate from
ACORN, share office space in ACORN offices across the country.
After Reid was booted out, Katzenberg became head organizer for
Maryland and D.C. He was a key campaign official for Rep. Donna
Edwards (D-Maryland) and ACORN Maryland went all-out last year to
get Edwards elected.
It is also unclear why national ACORN officials such as chief
organizer and CEO Bertha Lewis have gotten involved in
spin-doctoring this latest corruption crisis. ACORN frequently
likes to point out that ACORN Housing, which has taken in tens of
millions of dollars in government grants, is a separate and
distinct legal entity.
But that wasn’t the end of ACORN’s worst public relations week
ever.
In addition to ACORN’s underage illegal alien sex slave scandals,
the U.S. Census Bureau
announced Friday it was severing ties with ACORN regarding
next year’s decennial census. Census Director Robert M. Groves
sent a letter to ACORN national president Maude Hurd explaining
that “ACORN’s affiliation with 2010 Census promotion has caused
sufficient concern in the general public, has indeed become a
distraction from our mission, and may even become a
discouragement to public cooperation, negatively impacting 2010
Census efforts.”
Employing polite euphemism, Groves wrote that “recent events
concerning several local offices of ACORN have added to the
worsening negative perceptions of ACORN and its affiliation with
our partnership efforts.” Officials at the Census Bureau “no
longer have confidence that our national partnership agreement is
being effectively managed through your many local offices.”
Just months earlier former ACORN organizer Gregory Hall
warned of the dangers of allowing the group to be involved in
the upcoming census while the Obama administration lied about the
extent of ACORN’s involvement in next year’s national head count.
The administration
had said the idea ACORN would be involved in any Census count
was “baseless.” A response to a Freedom of Information Act
request filed by Judicial Watch revealed that ACORN was given the
opportunity to “recruit Census workers” to participate in the
count and “organize and/or serve as a member on a Complete Count
Committee,” which, according to Census documents, helps “develop
and implement locally based outreach and recruitment campaigns.”
Next it was revealed that ACORN founder Wade Rathke didn’t have a
problem with domestic terrorists trying to kill delegates at the
Republican Party’s national convention in 2008, according to
former radical community organizer
Brandon Darby.
After Darby worked with the FBI to stop a left-wing terrorist
bomb plot at the RNC convention in Minnesota, Rathke denounced
him for breaking the radicals’ code of silence. In January Rathke
suggested on his blog that it’s better to let innocents die than
squeal on your comrades in the struggle. It’s “one thing to
disagree, but it’s a whole different thing to rat on folks,”
wrote the former organizer for the ultra-left Students for a
Democratic Society, the same group that gave birth to Bill
Ayers’s Weather Underground.
This is the same Wade Rathke who orchestrated an eight-year
coverup of his brother’s nearly $1 million embezzlement of ACORN
funds. When that conspiracy was unearthed last summer, Rathke was
given the bum’s rush from the organization he founded in 1970. He
remains unapologetic about the scandal, claiming that if it had
been disclosed when it happened the “right wing” would have used
it to discredit ACORN.
As an added bonus, ACORN’s name was thrown about as an epithet by
speakers and other participants at the 9/12 national tea party
rally outside the U.S. Capitol on Saturday.
Who knows what the coming weeks will bring.
