ACORN did the right thing in firing employees who advised a
couple on the finer legal points of establishing a child
prostitution ring but ACORN officials who covered up a nearly $1
million embezzlement for eight years still have their jobs, the
ACORN 8 declared in a statement today.
Members of ACORN 8, a
reform group founded by former ACORN national board members
Marcel Reid and Karen Inman, released a
statement today regarding the three videos that have surfaced
so far that show ACORN employees telling two undercover
journalists posing as a pimp and prostitute how to launder money,
evade taxes, defraud banks, and conceal the fictitious scenario
the duo cooked up.
Although the ACORN workers caught behaving badly "were
immediately terminated for behaving unprofessionally...senior
staff members who assisted and concealed a million dollar Rathke
embezzlement remain employed," ACORN 8 said in the release.
Reid and Inman were expelled from the ACORN board after they
asked uncomfortable questions about ACORN's finances in the wake
of an embezzlement scandal involving ACORN founder Wade
Rathke.
Rathke covered up his brother Dale's circa 2000 theft of
$948,000 in ACORN funds but the long-hidden misappropriation
was revealed last year and this led to the founder's expulsion
from the group. Reid and Inman were appointed by the board to
probe the group's finances.
When they tried to actually do so, the same people who helped
Rathke engineer and sustain a coverup showed them the door.
