ACORN Sues Conservative Filmmakers Over Baltimore Video
By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
washingtonpost.com
Wednesday, September 23, 2009 7:12 PM
ACORN, the community organizing group embarrassed recently in a video sting, said Wednesday that it needs to regroup and determine if it has a major internal problem -- but it also struck back, filing suit against the filmmakers who made undercover videos and the Web site whose publication of them prompted a national outcry.
The secretly taped videos show ACORN housing counselors advising two young conservative activists, James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, who were posing as a pimp and prostitute, on how to conceal their criminal business. The videos were taped in Baltimore, Washington, New York and California, and their airing in the past two weeks has sent the organization reeling.
Named in the suit, filed in the Circuit Court for Baltimore City, were O'Keefe, Giles and Breitbart.com LLC, who owns the Web site BigGovernment.com. The lawsuit asserts that neither O'Keefe nor Giles obtained consent from ACORN workers for videotaping them, as state law requires.
ACORN executive director Bertha Lewis told reporters in a conference call that ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, does not support criminal activity and believes the filmmakers should have obeyed Maryland laws.
Meanwhile, ACORN's founder says many of the accusations about the group are distortions meant to undermine President Obama and other Democrats.
In an exclusive interview with The Washington Post, founder Wade Rathke said conservative claims that ACORN is a "criminal enterprise" that misuses federal and donor funds for political ends -- a claim 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 Web blogs as documented fact.
"It's balderdash on top of poppycock," said Rathke, who was forced out last year amid an embezzlement scandal involving his brother. "It is a tactic they are trying to aggressively use to attack Obama . . . to paint the president and anybody else they can as radicals."
In the wake of the videos' release, Congress voted last week to ban federal funding for ACORN. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, asked the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday to summon Rathke, Lewis and other group officers for a hearing on ACORN activities and funding.
Also Wednesday, the new head of the federal Census Bureau said he decided to drop ACORN as an agency partner because the connection was hurting efforts to get Americans to participate in the count.
"The negative press on ACORN was becoming a distraction, and hurting our overall effort to get the facts [about the census] out," Robert M. Groves said at a news conference.
Rathke said some of the filmmakers' "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.
A handful of workers in Baltimore, Washington, New York and California have been placed on leave pending an ACORN internal investigation.
Lewis said she wants a newly hired investigator to find the organization's weak spots and will share the findings with the public. The former Massachussetts attorney general hired for the investigation vowed a "robust, no-holds-barred" review that would be "transparent." In the meantime, Lewis said, ACORN 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."
Lewis notified the Internal Revenue Service on Monday that ACORN would shut down its free tax help clinics for low-income residents until an external review of ACORN's work is completed.
But she committed to ACORN continuing to register low-income and minority voters -- the part of its mission for which ACORN is best known and most controversial.
"ACORN is going to make sure its members participate in the political process," she said.
In the last presidential election, ACORN reported signing up roughly a million new poor and minority voters, groups that are more likely to vote Democratic. Some of its affiliated organizations, notably ACORN Housing, receive federal grants to provide housing help to low-income people. It has received an estimated $53 million in federal funds since 1994, funding that could be in jeopardy under some legislative proposals.
Long a conservative target, ACORN has been badly wounded by the unprofessional behavior shown on the videos.
But Rathke, who left ACORN after not disclosing that his brother had embezzled nearly $1 million from the organization years earlier, said that the list of falsehoods about the group grows by the day. They include claims that ACORN is in line to get $8.5 billion in federal funds under Obama, that he secretly still runs ACORN, and that Obama managed an ACORN organization.
The $8.5 billion includes $3 billion in stimulus funds set aside for revitalization efforts nationwide, and $5.5 billion in federal community development grants. The number assumes ACORN would apply for and win every project and grant in the country, while ACORN says it is not applying for any of the stimulus funds.
Obama did manage a registration effort for Project Vote in Chicago, but that was several years before Project Vote joined a partnership with ACORN.
"But in the vast, viral messy word of the Internet, it's all the same, it's all fact," Rathke said. "This is part of the neo-McCarthyism that's going on this country right now."
Rathke, who began as an organizer of welfare recipients and draft-resisters in the 1960s, co-founded the organization in Arkansas in 1979 to unite the poor and working-class in a shared agenda. He said the mission has always been controversial, and attacked by the right for years.
"ACORN has a reputation of being an aggressive advocate of the kind of programs that improve low-income and moderate-income communities, " Rathke said. "It's never been a popular or dominant theme here" in the United States.
Rathke said an investigation conducted recently by Issa internal and congressional investigations, recently cited by the Post as having found evidence that ACORN was engaged in loose finances and could misuse public funds for political ends during his 38-year tenure, were "rookie" endeavors. He said Issa's investigation was "off the rails" in alleging that ACORN structured itself so it could improperly commingle funds for partisan purposes.
"This was done by a sophomore intern in the office and wheeled out like it was a real investigation," Rathke said of Issa's July report. "Whether people like it or not, there are reasons for corporate divisions. Money is not fungible."
Rathke said an auditor working at ACORN who tried to review some financial records last year wrote up a "speculative report" about money transfers but later backed away from her claim that poor documentation on those transfers suggested funds may have been misused.
"It was gross speculation and probably was the emotion of the moment," he said of the period after the board learned he had not fully disclosed Dale Rathke's $1 million embezzlement back in 1999 and 2000.
An Issa spokesman acknowledged the House Republican investigation never found tangible evidence of misuse of federal funds. But it did find ample reasons, including the embezzlement scandal and internal concerns about ACORN financial management, to be fearful of such misuse.
"The basis of our report is there is this lack of transparency and this lack of protective firewall between their political activities and their charitable activities," spokesman Kurt Bardella said Wednesday afternoon. "ACORN is structured in a way that it's challenging to ascertain what is going where. Because of the registration fraud and investigations and internal embezzlement scandals, there's been good reason to examine how ACORN has been operating."
Bardella said an internal ACORN report cited by Issa's investigation stressed that "fences need to be erected to wall off types of election-related activity that must be kept completely separate. . . . The political world of ACORN lacks the protective "walls" needed to ensure that various types of activity are kept sufficiently separate. . . . There are potential liabilities and problems of proof."
Rathke himself has been the target of Republican ire -- and criticism from within his own organization. His board was furious that he and a few top officials arranged a confidential repayment plan to cover his brother's embezzlement. After his forced resignation in June 2008 from ACORN U.S.A, the umbrella group for ACORN, he severed ties and now runs ACORN International, a separate tax-exempt group focused on helping poor residents of mega-slums in other countries, including India, Peru and Argentina. It does no work in the United States, he said.
About the embezzlement, Rathke said he advised senior leaders at the time and the "decision was made by the executive committee and management council to keep these matters private in order to protect the organization."
He called it a "personal and organizational tragedy."
This week, Rathke said he's still one of ACORN U.S.A.'s biggest fans and is paying for his founding role. He's now cooperating with a grand jury subpoena for records he says he does not have on the New Orleans ACORN office, and being pinged second by second with hate mail.
"If you can read my e-mails, I mean, yowza," Rathke said. "They take the paint off a Chevy. Ad hominem attacks. Violence. There's nothing under this God's sun they won't call you."
Staff writers Garance Franke-Ruta and Carol Morello and research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report. |
