ACORN hagiographer and radical left-wing community organizer John Atlas crows that ACORN has been “vindicated” by a new preliminary threshhold-level report by GAO.

Would it were so.

The preliminary -as in incomplete, insufficient, and downright superficial- report is called “Preliminary Observations on Funding, Oversight, and Investigations and Prosecutions of ACORN or Potentially Related Organizations.” It is available at GAO’s website.

The report is less than enlightening. I got the distinct impression while reading it that its authors hadn’t actually been following ACORN’s troubled history. You can’t expect much from a federal investigation when the question posed, namely, whether some of the grants ACORN received, were misused. Instead of doing actually shoe-leather investigating, all GAO has done is talked to other government agencies and compiled existing data. It is amazing that GAO’s probe is considered an investigation at all.

Table 4 at p.19 of the report indicates that of the six major federal agencies GAO asked questions of only ONE (!) has provided responses so far. Talk about “preliminary”!

The real issues that have yet to be explored are whether ACORN engaged in violations of RICO through money-laundering of taxpayer funds designated for nonpartisan activities, engaged in partisan activities, and violated ERISA by shifting pension funds around in order to conceal the million dollar embezzlement — for starters!

Only a proper racketeering investigation will shed light on ACORN’s decades of lawbreaking.