Newly discovered evidence shows the radical advocacy group
ACORN
has a man in the Obama White House.
This power behind the throne is longtime ACORN operative
Patrick Gaspard. He holds the title of White House
political affairs director, the same title Karl Rove held in
President Bush’s White House.
Evidence shows that years before he joined the Obama
administration, Gaspard was ACORN boss Bertha Lewis’s political
director in New York.
Lewis, the current “chief organizer” or CEO of ACORN, was
head of New York ACORN from at least 1994 through 2008, when she
took over as national leader of ACORN. With Gaspard at work in
the White House, Lewis might as well be speaking to President
Obama through an earpiece as he goes about his daily business
ruining the country.
Erick Erickson of the website RedState recently did
an excellent job explaining the relationship of Gaspard to
Lewis and President Obama so I won’t take up space here recalling
all his valuable insights. Suffice it to say Erickson reported
that Gaspard figures prominently in Lewis’s rolodex, which
Erickson has in his possession.
Skeptics among you may ask, How do we actually know the
low-profile Gaspard, who prefers to work outside the public
spotlight and who can hardly be found in Nexis searches at all,
was Lewis’s right hand man?
Because Gaspard’s employment with the Association of
Community Organizations for Reform Now is acknowledged by no less
an authority than ACORN founder Wade
Rathke himself. Rathke writes at his blog:
Tell me that 1199’s former political director, Patrick
Gaspard (who was ACORN New York’s political director before
that) didn’t reach out from the White House and help make that
happen, and I’ll tell you to take some remedial classes in
“politics 101.”
The “before that” time period Rathke is referring to is
2003 when Gaspard was executive vice president for political and
legislative affairs for 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East.
According to publicly available disclosure documents, Gaspard
registered
as a federal lobbyist for SEIU on Oct. 22, 2007. The registration
and subsequent disclosures indicate he lobbied Congress on SCHIP,
the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.
Incidentally, the lines between ACORN and radical left-wing
SEIU, whose acronym stands for Service Employees International
Union,
become fuzzy in places.
SEIU Locals 100 and 880 are part of the ACORN network of
organizations. Local 100 in New Orleans is headed by Rathke. SEIU
Local 880 in Chicago is headed by longtime ACORN insider Keith
Kelleher.
You’d never know about the SEIU connection from visiting
ACORN’s website, www.acorn.org. That’s because the website has
been receiving a thorough scrubbing in recent months. On ACORN’s
affiliated organizations page, references to the two SEIU locals
mysteriously disappeared.
It’s worth noting that Gaspard’s ties to ACORN, SEIU, and
Lewis go way back.
According to the Complete Marquis Who’s Who, Gaspard has a
long history of political involvement stretching back to at least
1989 when he volunteered for the David Dinkins mayoral campaign
in New York City. In 2003 he became acting field director for
Howard Dean’s presidential bid. He was national field director in
2004 for America
Coming Together, a now-defunct get-out-the-vote operation
that received a $775,000 fine for campaign finance abuses. In
2006 Gaspard was acting political director for SEIU
International.
Gaspard also worked for New York’s Working Families Party,
which is an appendage of ACORN. Lewis is a co-founder of that
party — which endorsed Obama last year — and
has close ties to Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-New York) who has been
most reluctant to have the House Judiciary subcommittee he chairs
investigate ACORN.
Nadler invented the incredibly creative argument that
recent legislative language aimed at depriving ACORN of federal
funding constitutes an unconstitutional “bill of attainder.”
Perhaps singling out the mafia for a federal funds cutoff would
be unconstitutional too in his eyes.
Meanwhile, the American public is beginning to realize that
ACORN is a vast criminal conspiracy whose reach extends to the
highest levels of the U.S. government.
Obama’s statement that he’s
barely aware of ACORN’s problems is nothing short of
ridiculous, especially so because Patrick Gaspard was a political
director for ACORN New York.
Last year he worked as national political director for the
Obama campaign followed by a stint as associate personnel
director for the Obama-Biden transition team.
As the old Washington saying goes, politics is personnel.
Who knows how many administration officials were put in place by
Gaspard with direct input from ACORN’s Bertha Lewis. It boggles
the mind.
We also now know the Obama administration was lying about
ACORN’s high level involvement in the 2010 Census. The
coordination between ACORN and the Census was revealed as a
result of a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the
relentless investigator Tegan Millspaw of Judicial Watch. The
Census and other government agencies have cut ties with ACORN as
the ACORN scandal widens.
We have to wonder: when it comes to ACORN, what else is the
Obama administration lying about?
