Leaders of the resurrected radical group ACORN are lobbying the
Obama administration in what appears to be a concerted effort to
game the electoral system to help Democrats, new evidence
suggests.
At least five Association of Community
Organizations for Reform Now leaders have visited the White House
this year alone. One of those ACORN officials has been involved in
vetting Department of Justice hires who may help to enforce the
voter fraud-enabling National Voting Rights Act
(NVRA), also known as the
Motor-Voter law. The Department has come under fire for refusing to
enforce Section 8, which requires states to remove the names of
ineligible felons, the dead, and non-residents from voter rolls,
while zealously enforcing Section 7,
which requires states to register voters at welfare
offices.
As I argue in my book published earlier this
year, Subversion Inc.: How
Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and
Ripping Off American
Taxpayers, those on
relief tend to support Democrats,
so Section 7 amounts to a taxpayer subsidy for
Democratic candidates. Project Vote founder Sanford Newman openly
admits his group’s work helps the Left
almost exclusively. “While our work is
nonpartisan, it is realistic to assume that upward of 90 percent of
the people we register on unemployment and other
social service distribution lines will oppose
politicians who have supported cuts in the programs on which they
rely,” he said.
“They are likely to vote Democratic in most
instances.”
President Obama long ago endorsed the strategy
of using welfare recipients to expand the size and scope of
government. “All our people
must know that politics and voting affects their lives
directly,” he said in 1992.
“If we’re registering people
in public housing, for an example, we talk about aid cuts and
who’s
responsible.”
According to documents obtained by Judicial
Watch under the Freedom of Information Act, former ACORN attorney
Estelle H. Rogers, who is now director of advocacy at
ACORN-affiliated Project Vote, wrote T. Christian Herren, Chief of
the Voting Section in the
DOJ’s Civil Rights Division,
recommending three prospective new DOJ
employees.
Project Vote is the unit of the ACORN network
that President Obama worked for in 1992 when he ran a successful
get-out-the-vote drive in Illinois that helped to solidify his
reputation as an effective leader and organizer. Obama went on to
train ACORN activists and represent ACORN in court as the
group’s lawyer. Project
Vote’s official position is that voter
fraud is a myth invented by Republicans to disenfranchise
Democratic voters. The group vilifies as a racist anyone who thinks
voter ID requirements are a good idea and constantly presses to
make voting requirements even more lax than they now
are.
In a Feb. 23, 2010 email to
DOJ’s Herren, Rogers
wrote, “I want to heartily recommend two
candidates to you.” (The names of the
candidates were redacted.) In a follow-up email dated April 20,
2010, Rogers wrote, “I look forward to
continuing to work with you, Chris. And please let me know if you
need any more feedback regarding hires.”
In an Oct. 21, 2010 email, Herren told Rogers his door
was always open. “If you have any issues
that come up that you want us to be aware of, please feel free to
shoot us an email…”
In a Dec. 7, 2010 email that DOJ redacted
heavily before releasing, Rogers wrote,
“I’d still love to talk
for real, but in the meantime, the main reason I called is that you
have an applicant for the [REDACTED] position [REDACTED] qualifies
her beautifully for your position, and I hope you will give her
every consideration. [REDACTED] So she would be a great fit, and I
recommend her without reservation. Please let me know if I can tell
you more. And give me a call if you possibly
can.”
The DOJ document dump also revealed
that “civil rights
groups” met with Associate Attorney
General Thomas J. Perrelli on March 17,
2011 to discuss Section 7 of NVRA. The groups involved were Project
Vote, American Association of People with Disabilities, Demos,
League of Women Voters, Lawyers’
Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Brennan Center
for Justice, Fair Elections Legal Network, NAACP Legal Defense
Fund, and Paralyzed Veterans of America.
Rogers has been working with the Obama
administration before it took office on Jan. 20, 2009. She filed
what Project Vote called a
“voting rights agenda”
submission with the Obama-Biden presidential transition
team in 2008.
It is now becoming clear what that agenda
consists of. Project Vote and allied groups have filed a rash of
lawsuits recently in several states in an attempt to pressure state
officials into backing off investigations into voter fraud
allegations, Kevin Mooney
reported last
week.
“The lawsuits are coming out of nowhere in
multiple states and they are coming fast,”
said Anita MonCrief, a former Project Vote employee who
has testified in court against Project Vote and
ACORN. “This is part of a coordinated
effort,” said MonCrief.
“These groups are very well-funded, and they have
lawyers doing pro bono work.”
Rogers appeared to foreshadow the litigation
offensive in a July 13, 2010 email to
DOJ’s Herren and DOJ
political appointee Julie Fernandes. Rogers wrote that she would be
bringing Project Vote election counsel Niyati Shah to a meeting at
DOJ. Shah “will be working on a lot of
the litigation we’ll be telling you
about.” Rogers indicated Nicole Kovite
Zeitler, director of Project Vote’s
public agency registration project, would also attend the meeting.
Zeitler “manages Project
Vote’s efforts to advocate for
enforcement of Section 7 of the National Voter Registration Act of
1993 through technical assistance and litigation across the
country,” according to her bio on Project
Vote’s website.
According to former DOJ lawyer J. Christian
Adams, author of
Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the
Obama Justice
Department, Fernandes
told lawyers in the
DOJ’s Voting Section that the Department
would not enforce Section 8 of Motor-Voter because it
“doesn’t have anything to do
with increasing minority turnout.”
It needs to be noted that registering welfare
recipients to vote on the public dime is an idea that was heavily
promoted by the small-c communists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox
Piven. Not coincidentally, Cloward and Piven were instrumental in
designing and lobbying for the Motor-Voter law. Even now Piven is a
member of Project Vote’s
board of directors.
In a 1983 article titled
“Toward a Class-Based Realignment of American
Politics: A Movement Strategy,” that ran
in ACORN’s magazine,
Social Policy, the
Marxist duo said “massive numbers of new
voters” had to be registered in order to
bring “fundamental change”
to the nation.
Meanwhile, in addition to collaborating with
DOJ officials, Rogers also visited the White House on March 2,
2011, according to the White House visitors database. During that
visit she met with Shasti Conrad, a senior aide to Obama
uber-adviser Valerie Jarrett, and Jon Carson, director of the White
House Office of Public Engagement. Carson was previously chief of
staff at the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ)
serving under Van Jones, the self-described communist who was known
as Obama’s green jobs
czar.
Separately, a group of seven individuals
visited the White House on March 22, 2011, meeting with White House
policy assistant David Pope. They are Brian Kettenring, Darlene D.
Battle, Steven Fletcher, Leigh Dingerson, Charese Jordan Moore,
Aaron Brown, and Darren Browning.
At press time the professional and political
affiliations of Brown and Browning were
unclear.
However, Kettenring was deputy director of
national operations for ACORN, working for the group from 1995 to
2009.
Battle was head organizer for ACORN in
Philadelphia. She is now executive director of Delawareans for
Social and Economic Justice (DSEJ), one of two dozen new ACORN
front groups that have sprung up around the nation. ACORN, the
shell corporation that ran
ACORN’s network of 370
affiliated groups, filed bankruptcy in November 2010 after ordering
its state chapters to incorporate themselves separately in order to
carry on ACORN’s work. Two of
ACORN’s new front groups, Alliance of
Californians for Community Empowerment, and New York Communities
for Change, have been deeply involved in organizing and financing
the radical Occupy Wall Street movement.
White House visitor Fletcher is the former
head organizer for ACORN in Minnesota. He is now executive director
of Minnesota Neighborhoods Organizing for Change (MNNOC), another
new ACORN front group. MNNOC denies any connection to ACORN but the
facts suggest otherwise.
According to Judicial
Watch
research,
MNNOC’s chairman of the
board is Sunday Alabi. Alabi, who has been involved with ACORN
since at least 2000, was also a member of the board of directors of
ACORN-affiliated Citizens Services Inc., the company the Obama
campaign paid $832,598 to 2008 to work against then-presidential
candidate Hillary Clinton.
Billie Jean Campbell, who was co-chairman of
East St. Paul ACORN, and Steve Nelson, who was the Minneapolis
northside ACORN chapter leader, are members of
MNNOC’s board. Peter
Molenaar, who was Minnesota ACORN chairman, and Sherman Wilburn,
who was Minnesota ACORN board chairman, are MNNOC
officers.
White House visitor Dingerson worked as a
community organizer with ACORN between 1978 and
1982.
White House visitor Moore, who is director of
Communities for Excellent Public Schools, does not appear to be
affiliated with ACORN. She was, however, deputy director at
Interfaith Worker Justice (IWJ), a network of Saul Alinsky-inspired
activist groups. When IWJ was created in 1996, Roman Catholic
Monsignor John J.
“Jack” Egan was on the
founding board of directors. The socialist priest,
who died in 2001, worked
closely with Rules for
Radicals author
Alinsky, who died in 1972. IWJ founder
Kim Bobo was a trainer for the Midwest Academy, a school for
training radical community organizers. IWF has close ties to the
AFL-CIO. Arlene Holt-Baker, executive vice president of AFL-CIO, is
on the IWF board.
It is unclear what the seven visitors
discussed with Pope, but it seems a safe bet that the Motor-Voter
law came up.
