FBI Documents Show Depth of ACORN Corruptionby Capitol Confidential
“ACORN HQ is wkg [working] for the Democratic Party,” so say the newly released FBI records. The handwritten notes provide a laundry list of underhanded activities related to elections in St. Louis, Missouri, in 2007.
The documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by Judicial Watch, a conservative government watchdog group in Washington, DC, concern the arrests of eight workers from the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, aka ACORN, for violations of election laws and voter fraud in Missouri.
ACORN is a collection of “community organizations” purportedly promoting various social issues relevant to low-income families, and large-scale voter registration drives have been a significant aspect of that outreach since the 1980s. During the 2006 mid-term elections there were numerous reports of voter fraud on the part of ACORN’s canvassers, which led to investigations in numerous states. The 2006 federal investigation of the allegations in Missouri led to several convictions, but after a similar investigation in Connecticut was halted by the Obama Justice Department in 2009, Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain the documents produced by the earlier investigation.
The result was a collection of FBI documents which included copies of arrest warrants and court documents and over one hundred pages of handwritten notes from the FBI investigators regarding the ACORN employees’ attitudes and actions.
The investigators were told that ACORN had “told employees not to talk to the FBI“, and that “anyone who was against PV (Project Vote) or ACORN’s goals [were] ‘right wing.’” The investigators noted that Project Vote paid ACORN “whether the [voter registration] cards were fake or not” and one of the employees they interviewed “said ‘You treat the cards like $ (cash).’” Despite knowing that submitting fake voter registration cards was against the law, employees detailed several methods for creating fake cards. One explained that they would get “some names…right from the phone book and made up the rest.” Another “thought if she used a completely fake name it would be less like ID theft.”
The Connecticut and Missouri investigations are not stand-alone incidents, however. ACORN has a long history of encouraging falsification of voter registration cards. Between 2004 and 2006, they had been implicated in investigations in 12 states, and in 2007 were involved in the largest instance of voter fraud in Washington state’s history. In 2009, ACORN was investigated by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee which issued an 88 page report which declared that “[t]he weight of evidence against ACORN and its affiliates is astounding.”
Astounding, indeed. These documents show the need for a national criminal investigation by the Obama Justice Department into ACORN. Is Attorney General Holder doing nothing because of Obama’s close connections to ACORN and Project Vote? The information in these new documents has national implications that cry out for further investigation,” stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.
