ACORN investigation by Conyers

[atprm]

do not think for 1 minute that he is doing taxpayers any favors -- he is a SNAKE, and his wife (Monica Conyers -- Detroit City Council Prez) is just as bad --
neither are fit enough to carry any type of gov't title. Monica Conyers is under Federal Investigation for a sludge deal (buying contracts) and for her involvement into the Kwame Kilpatrick debacle that has plagued Detroit for over 2 years.

I have a suspicion this is just a smoke job....a "Cover Your Azz" job.

With that said ... Conyers is raising an investigation into Voter Fraud by ACORN.


~*~


Conyers weighing probe of ACORN
Defies voices in own party

Opponents of the liberal activist group ACORN have found an unlikely champion in House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr., who is clashing with his own party to pursue hearings on accusations that the group has committed crimes ranging from voter fraud to a mob-style "protection" racket.

"I still want to do it and I probably will," Mr. Conyers, Michigan Democrat, told The Washington Times on Tuesday.

He dismissed the argument made by fellow Democrats that accusations of voter fraud and other crimes should be explored by prosecutors and decided in court, not by lawmakers in Congress.

"That's our jurisdiction, the Department of Justice," Mr. Conyers said. "That's what we handle - voter fraud. Unless that's been taken out of my jurisdiction and I didn't know it."

Mr. Conyers' continued commitment to hearings bristles Capitol Hill Democrats because it threatens to rekindle criticism of the financial ties and close cooperation between President Obama's campaign and ACORN and its sister organizations Citizens Services Inc. and Project Vote.

The groups came under fire during the campaign after probes into suspected voter fraud in a series of presidential battleground states, including Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Mexico and Nevada.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, New York Democrat and chairman of the Judiciary subcommittee with the jurisdiction to conduct the hearing, said he does not think Congress is the place to hear criminal charges.

"It's not our business to say ACORN is terrible or ACORN is wonderful. That's not a congressional job," Mr. Nadler said. "The evidence - I've listened to it - I think most of it is nonsense. If it's true, it's a law enforcement matter."

However, he said he would bow to Mr. Conyers' request for a hearing. Mr. Conyers said he hasn't "pushed him yet."

ACORN officials, who have consistently denied any wrongdoing, said they welcomed a congressional probe.

[Jolie Rouge]

Democrat Rep. John Conyers backs down from his pledge to investigate ACORN fraud: Bok, bok, bok. http://spectator.org/archives/2009/05/07/conyers-kills-acorn-probe/


Some coincidences live in infamy.

It would have been hard Monday for Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan) not to understand how Bill Ayers felt the day the World Trade Center and Pentagon were attacked. Unforgiving history records that on Sept. 11, 2001, the retired domestic terrorist's "I don't regret setting bombs" comment ran in a New York Times profile.

While obviously of a much lesser magnitude, the House Judiciary Committee chairman's May 4 statement exonerating ACORN couldn't have come out at a worse time. "Based on my review of the information regarding the complaints against ACORN, I have concluded that a hearing on this matter appears unwarranted at this time," Conyers said in a statement aired that night on CNN's "Lou Dobbs Tonight."

Just hours earlier his fellow Democrats in Nevada, Secretary of State Ross Miller and Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto dropped a bombshell. ACORN and two former senior ACORN employees in the state, they announced, had been charged with a total of 39 felony counts related to voter registrations.

"By structuring employment and compensation around a quota system, ACORN facilitated voter registration fraud in this state," said Masto. "Nevada will not tolerate violations of the law by individuals nor will it allow corporations to hide behind or place blame on their employees when its training manuals clearly detail, condone and, indeed, require, illegal acts in performing the job for the corporation."

Nevada alleges that last year ACORN paid canvassers between $8.00 and $9.00 per hour to register people to vote, but canvassers who fell short of the quota of 20 voter registration forms per shift were fired. This illegal policy was "clearly outlined in the training materials the organization used to train new employees," according (pdf) to the state.

Nevada claims ACORN also offered canvassers additional compensation in the form of a bonus program called "Blackjack" or "21+" that paid canvassers a $5.00 bonus. Each canvasser who brought in 21 or more completed voter registration forms per shift would receive the bonus. Such schemes are illegal in the state because they give canvassers an incentive to file fraudulent forms.

Nevada alleges the bonus program "was created by employee Christopher Edwards, the Field Director for the Las Vegas office," and that ACORN timesheets show the group's management knew about it and "failed to take immediate action to terminate it." The state claims that ACORN's Deputy Regional Director Amy Busefink knew about the bonus program and "aided and abetted the scheme by approving" it.

An initial hearing in the criminal case has been scheduled for June 3 in Las Vegas.

But no hearing has been scheduled by Conyers.

When on Wednesday this reporter asked Conyers spokesman Jonathan Godfrey to explain the decision not to move forward with a probe, he declined to do so and instead emailed the same statement that was aired on CNN earlier in the week.

It's unclear what exactly crystallized Conyers's thinking, but his reversal is all the more puzzling given the enthusiasm the 23-term congressman showed for holding an ACORN hearing mere weeks ago.

On March 19, after hearing the testimony of GOP lawyer Heather Heidelbaugh about ACORN's many misdeeds, Conyers said the allegations were "a pretty serious matter."

Heidelbaugh testified the nonprofit group violated a host of tax, campaign finance, and other laws. She said the presidential campaign of Barack Obama sent ACORN its "maxed out donor list" and asked two of the avowedly nonpartisan group's employees "to reach out to the maxed out donors and solicit donations from them for Get Out the Vote efforts to be run by ACORN."

Heidelbaugh said the New York Times had the donor list story but editors there spiked it the month before the election, a claim she repeated on "The O'Reilly Factor" two weeks later. The newspaper told the Philadelphia-based Bulletin that "political considerations played no role in our decisions about how to cover this story or any other story about President Obama."

Rep. James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, the ranking Republican on the committee's panel on the Constitution, civil rights, and civil liberties, said the Obama campaign's alleged involvement with ACORN might violate federal election law. "ACORN has a pattern of getting in trouble for violating federal election laws," he said.

He also slammed the Old Gray Lady herself. "If true, the New York Times is showing once again that it is a not an impartial observer of the political scene," Sensenbrenner said. "If they want to be a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party, they should put Barack Obama approves of this in their newspaper."

Heidelbaugh also testified that ACORN has rendered protest-for-hire services for other left-wing groups and extracted donations from the targets of demonstrations by shaking down those targets as part of its "muscle for the money" program.

Back on March 19, Conyers seemed genuinely disturbed by the claims. He pushed the chairman of the subcommittee Sensenbrenner is ranking member of, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-New York), to hold his own hearing.

A blasé Nadler said he "would certainly consider a hearing on ACORN, if I ever hear any credible allegations." Referencing Heidelbaugh's testimony, Conyers replied, "Whoa. Wait a minute. This is a member of the bar here that got a successful partial injunction against ACORN."

A fortnight later Conyers reiterated his support for an ACORN probe, telling the Washington Times he still wanted to do it and he "probably will." Conyers, whom the article called an "unlikely champion" for ACORN opponents, rejected arguments from fellow Democrats that his committee should steer clear of the issue.

"That's our jurisdiction, the Department of Justice," he told the newspaper. "That's what we handle – voter fraud. Unless that's been taken out of my jurisdiction and I didn't know it."

Alas, it was too good to be true. The investigative zeal of the Judiciary Committee chairman soon waned.

It was always hard to believe that the ultra-liberal Conyers, who is very sympathetic to ACORN's policy goals and who as recently as October called the radical group "a longstanding and well regarded organization that fights for the poor and working class," really wanted to investigate his longtime ally in the leftist movement.

Conyers, who received a 100% rating from ACORN in its 2006 legislative scorecard, showed how truly in sync he was with ACORN when he spoke at the group's national convention last June 22.

"I'm through with deregulation," said Conyers. "It doesn't work because the capitalist predators who are waiting unregulated are going to take advantage of it."

Last fall Conyers seemed on hair-trigger alert, ready to pounce on anybody who tangled with ACORN. After media reports surfaced that one ACORN worker was assaulted by an irate homeowner, some ACORN workers were threatened, and two ACORN offices might have been vandalized, Conyers speculated –in the absence of any evidence that the incidents were connected— that a massive anti-ACORN conspiracy might be afoot.

"If true, these reports appear to describe possible federal crimes such as criminal civil rights crimes [sic] including conspiracy to deprive the victims (and others) of federally protected constitutional rights, mail and wire offenses, and other more basic offenses such as assault and battery," Conyers wrote in an Oct. 20 letter urging the attorney general and the FBI director to act.

"Depending on the circumstances and the possible involvement of a group of individuals, the conduct also raises serious questions under the federal RICO law," he wrote.

Yet the allegations of racketeering made against ACORN at the Judiciary Committee hearing in March don't seem to interest Conyers.

continues ....

[Jolie Rouge]

There is so much about the Alinskyite group that a congressional probe could explore.

Former ACORN employees say ACORN makes no effort to remove bogus voter registrations. "There's no quality control on purpose, no checks and balances," Nate Toler, who worked on an ACORN voter effort in Missouri told the Wall Street Journal in 2006. "The internal motto is 'We don't care if it's a lie, just so long as it stirs up the conversation,'" he said.

When accused of breaking the law, ACORN's usual approach is to deny, deny, deny, and then accuse somebody, usually Republicans or law enforcement officials, of racism and voter suppression. In early October when the group's Las Vegas office was raided on orders from the state's Democratic attorney general and secretary of state, Matthew Henderson, ACORN's southwest regional director, was glib.

"The raid was a stunt designed perhaps to make them look tough on voter fraud," Henderson said. "We don't think fraud is a rampant problem. This was a politically motivated stunt, that is all there is to it because those new voters can reshape the electorate of Nevada."

On the May 6 edition of the Glenn Beck Program, after a heated interview about the new charges in Nevada, the host ejected ACORN spokesman Scott Levenson from the studio following an off-camera altercation. "I threw him out of the studio, get the hell out of my studio," Beck told viewers he said after Levenson accused him during the commercial break of being "afraid of black people."

Although ACORN is an enthusiastic supporter of government regulation of the economy, it can't tolerate being burdened by those same regulations. In 1995, it sued California for an exemption from the law that requires it to pay its own employees a minimum wage. With a mendicant fervor, ACORN argued that keeping its employees in poverty helps to boost their zeal to help the poor. It lost.

The group also supports the continued imposition of equal employment opportunity laws on the rest of America, but argued it shouldn't have to comply with those same laws. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had to sue ACORN to force it comply with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the crown jewel of the civil rights movement's legislative accomplishments.

The taxpayer-subsidized ACORN network, which owes millions of dollars in back taxes, also played a role in the subprime mortgage mess that has undermined Americans' support for free market problem-solving and set off a worldwide chain of financial troubles.

Then there's ACORN's eight-year-long coverup of the million-dollar embezzlement by founder Wade Rathke's brother. When ACORN board members Marcel Reid and Karen Inman demanded to see the financial documents last year, they were expelled from the group. Reid and Inman have since become whistleblowers and formed a group called ACORN 8 that aims to reform ACORN.

And let's not even get started on ACORN's history of union-busting.

Surely Conyers has all, or at least some, of this information.

What happened in recent weeks that changed his mind?




Matthew Vadum zeroes in on the right question: What happened in a mere two weeks to change Conyers’ mind? Did he get a call from friends of ACORN in high places? Did he get something else? Why drop the call for a congressional probe in the very same week that ACORN criminal charges have been filed in Nevada http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,519155,00.html *and* Pennsylvania http://www.thepittsburghchannel.com/politics/19395414/detail.html

What gives? Or who gives?


Related ACORN news: $53 million taxpayer funds for ACORN since 1994 and now the group is eligible for up to $8 billion more, according to Kevin Mooney at the Examiner.

[gmyers]

Doesn't surprise me I never thought they'd be investigated .

[SurferGirl]

I think the only reason he was going to do it was to prevent anyone else from doing it. We all know the democrats love ACORN.

[Jolie Rouge]

ACORN officials, who have consistently denied any wrongdoing, said they welcomed a congressional probe.


Killing A Story: How It's Done
May 17, 2009

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/05/023580.php

In today's New York Times, Public Editor Clark Hoyt reveals the result of his investigation into the charge that the paper killed a story during the 2008 Presidential campaign in order to help Barack Obama. Hoyt concludes that the claim is "nonsense."


ON March 17, a Republican lawyer, quoting a confidential source for a Times reporter, testified to Congress that the newspaper killed a story last fall because it would have been "a game-changer" in the presidential election.

The charge, amplified by Bill O'Reilly on Fox News in April and reverberating around the conservative blogosphere, is about the most damning allegation that can be made against a news organization. If true, it would mean that Times editors, whose job is to report the facts without fear or favor, were so lacking in integrity that they withheld an important story in order to influence the election.

But the facts as related by Hoyt don't rebut the charge; they support it.

Times reporter Stephanie Strom was looking into ACORN, and she had a source, a former ACORN employee named Anita Moncrief. Moncrief told Strom that she had evidence of "constant contact" between ACORN's Project Vote and both the Obama and Clinton campaigns:


On Sept. 7, Moncrief wrote to Strom that she had donor lists from the campaigns of Obama and Hillary Clinton and that there had been "constant contact" between the campaigns and Project Vote, an Acorn affiliate whose tax-exempt status forbids it to engage in partisan politics. Moncrief said she had withheld that information earlier but was disclosing it now that the conservative columnist Michelle Malkin was "all over it."

"I am sorry," she wrote, "but I believe in Obama and did not want to help the Republicans."

key part of Moncrief's story was that the Obama campaign had furnished ACORN with lists of maxed-out donors so that ACORN could mine them for contributions. In fact, Moncrief provided the Times reporter, Strom, with such a list that ACORN allegedly obtained from the Obama campaign. Hoyt does not dispute that this story, if true, was evidence of violation of the campaign finance laws.

So why did the Times pull the plug on Strom's ongoing investigation? The story became public because a Republican lawyer named Heather Heidelbaugh testified, apparently based on information she got from Anita Moncrief, that the Times had been working on an Obama-ACORN story but that "Ms. Strom reported to Ms. Moncrief that her editors at The New York Times wanted her to kill the story because, and I quote, 'it was a game-changer.'" Hoyt undertakes to show that this charge was false.

He admits, though, that Strom's editor, Suzanne Daley, "called a halt to Strom's pursuit of the Obama angle." So the Times did kill the investigation and any further reporting. The only question is why. Hoyt uncritically accepts Daley's explanation:


"We had worked on that story for a while and had come up empty-handed," Daley said. "You have to cut bait after a while." She said she never thought of the story as a game-changer and never used that term with Strom.


But wait!

Hoyt also relates that shortly before Daley pulled the plug, "Moncrief finally agreed to go on the record" and Strom had scheduled a meeting with her. It was when she called Moncrief to cancel the meeting that Strom allegedly told her that her bosses had killed the investigation to protect Obama. Obviously, if Strom was about to hit pay-dirt with an on-the-record witness, Daley's assertion that she killed the story because Strom "had come up empty-handed" is false.

Hoyt doesn't appear to notice the contradiction. He does, however, labor manfully to defend the Times. He goes to great lengths to refute the claim that Strom told Moncrief the Times killed the story because it was a "game-changer," as though that particular phrase had some talismanic significance. Yet, if you read Hoyt's column to the end, you find that in an email to Hoyt Moncrief attributed exactly that statement to Strom:


She said Strom told her "it was their policy not to print a game-changer for either side that close to the election."

Hoyt also argues that the story about Obama and ACORN would not have been a "game-changer" in that it would not have swung the election to John McCain. I agree. But since when is that the standard? Is Hoyt telling us that the Times' policy is only to print stories that have the potential to change the result of a Presidential election? Of course, if the story did have the potential to change the outcome of the election, that, too, would have been offered as a reason not to print it.

Hoyt also volunteers that Moncrief had a "credibility problem" because she had been fired by ACORN for putting private expenses on an ACORN credit card. So she is that classic newspaper source, a disgruntled former employee. Is Hoyt telling us that the Times doesn't run stories on the basis of leads from disgruntled former employees? Hah! If the paper followed that policy, it would lose out on its best exposes. And it bears repeating that Moncrief was attesting to first-hand information, not just passing along a rumor she had heard at ACORN. By her account, "it was her job to identify" maxed-out Obama donors who might contribute to ACORN's Project Vote.

Hoyt interviewed Strom, of course, but--rather remarkably--he does not reveal what Strom told him about her conversation with Daley in which Daley killed Strom's ongoing investigation. That's a rather significant omission, isn't it? Instead, Hoyt merely quotes Strom's observation that she did write a story on ACORN that appeared on October 22:


[B]efore they were to meet, Strom said, another source gave her an internal report detailing concerns about impermissible political activity by Acorn and its tax-exempt affiliates. The resulting article was published on Oct. 22.

That story is here. It addresses another topic entirely, the lack of any real distinction between ACORN and Project Vote. It does, however, address the Obama controversy, very briefly: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/22/us/22acorn.html?scp=11&sq=ACORN&st=cse


Republicans have tried to make an issue of Senator Barack Obama's ties to the group, which he represented in a lawsuit in 1995. The Obama campaign has denied any connection with Acorn's voter registration drives.

There you have it. That's the last word the Times' readers got on Obama's very likely illegal relationship with ACORN.

If the Times didn't kill the story for the reason illogically asserted by Daley--it hadn't panned out--then why did they kill it?

Perhaps Stephanie Strom's email reply to Anita Moncrief, quoted by Hoyt, suggests an answer:


Am also onto the Obama connection, sadly. Would love the donor lists. As for helping the Repubs, they're already onto this like white on rice. SIGH!

For the New York Times, Republicans are simply the enemy. By October 2008, it was time to circle the wagons.