American Maggie

In the last week, a couple of young documentary film amateurs have done more to expose corruption inside ACORN than all of the major networks despite Fox News’ attempts to bring light to the issue. 

While James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles used unconventional tactics to gain some of the video footage of statements by ACORN employees, the facts remain that low to mid-level employees of ACORN in four cities across the country gave similar advice to the same question. O’Keefe and Giles, posing as a pimp and prostitute, asked the ACORN employees how to obtain government assistance for a house so that the two could bring in a dozen young girls from El Salvador to “turn tricks” in the house. In Baltimore, Brooklyn, San Bernadino and the District of Columbia, the responses by ACORN employees had one thing in common — they encouraged the young couple to list their business as anything but prostitution, including “freelancer,” “performing artist” and “massage parlor” so that the two might obtain the necessary tax status.

If someone walked into the same department store in four different cities and attempted to return an item, and the clerks in each store all gave the same or similar responses, it would be considered a business practice of the company. American taxpayers now must ask whether this is a business practice of ACORN and demand to know if ACORN and its affiliates, which have received over $50 million of taxpayer money in the last couple of decades, regularly engages in the practice of encouraging people to defraud the very government from which they get their funding.

Since the release of O’Keefe’s first video from the Baltimore office of ACORN, the left-leaning powerhouse that helped elect Barack Obama is starting to crumble. On Friday, the Census Bureau said, “No thanks, we don’t need your help, ACORN.” On Monday the Senate voted 83-7 to block funding to ACORN. And yesterday, top GOP leaders in the House of Representatives introduced legislation commonly being called the “Defund ACORN Act” to cut off all federal funding to the group. With significant funding coming from the federal government, those are three pretty darn big blows to the group.

Bertha Lewis, spokeswoman for ACORN, issued an official statement today announcing major steps to address the issues brought to light by the recent videos. Even White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs stated that the “conduct on the tapes is inexcusable.” Gibbs is right on this one. It’s too late for ACORN to do the right thing now. American taxpayers must demand to know the truth behind the giant shell of ACORN and insist that the Department of Justice begin investigations into the business practices of this “community organizing” mammoth.

It seems there are only two options — either these employees were trained to assist individuals in defrauding the IRS or they lacked the training to know they should not help their clients commit a crime. Either way, my guess is that Americans will decide it should not take any training at all to know it is wrong to help anyone cheat the government out of taxpayer money to possibly house child prostitutes.

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Leslie Rutledge is the Former Counsel to Huckabee for President and the Former Deputy Counsel at the NRCC.

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