Professor Peter Dreier, an ACORN apologist who portrays himself as an independent analyst, is really anything but.

As Andrew Breitbart articulated on BigGovernment November 25th, regarding a “study” Dreier produced critical of media coverage of ACORN:

At the end of the piece Professor Dreier offers the following biography: Peter Dreier, E.P Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and director of the Urban & Environmental Policy Program at Occidental College.

Why did Professor Dreier choose to leave out the critical information regarding his advisory relationship to ACORN? Isn’t sitting on an advisory committee of ACORN the definition of a conflict of interest in writing a fair and balanced piece on the organization? In fact, Dreier has been shilling for ACORN at least since 2003.

So when Dreier proclaimed ACORN “Not Guilty” in one of his recent columns on TalkingPointsMemo, I must admit I threw up a bit in my mouth.  Some of Dreier’s most pathetic conclusions:

ACORN is getting a bum rap — in the news media, among politicians, and even by some foundations. That’s the conclusion of an independent report released Monday, which acknowledged that ACORN needs to improve its management structure, but that it did not engage in illegal activities. . .Since last year, ACORN has been under attack by conservative media outlets like Fox News, Republican Party operatives, and business groups.

That’s a tenuous conclusion, considering the fact that ACORN’s Las Vegas office was raided by Nevada’s Democratic Secretary of State and was put on trial by the state’s Democratic Attorney General. Additionally, ACORN’s New Orleans office was raided by Louisana’s Democratic Attorney General. But those inconvenient truths probably slipped Dreier’s mind.

ACORN is now well known, but what most Americans know about it is wrong, based on controversies manufactured by the group’s long-time enemies, Drier wrote.

Does he mean the pesky Democratic state officeholders who keep hauling ACORN into court?

According to Dreier, the Harshbarger report is having the intended effect, providing a thin cover for ACORN’s radically liberal allies to welcome it back into the fold.

After Harshbarger released his report, various progressive groups — including SEIU, People for the American Way, the Alliance for Justice, the Campaign for America’s Future, NAACP, U.S. Action, and others — expressed support for ACORN and for the recommendations in the Harshbarger report.

In fact, SEIU president Andy Stern said, “What Mr. Harshbarger did find is something the media should have caught: the freelance ’sting’ operation that did so much damage to ACORN’s reputation last fall is deeply suspicious and deserving of increased scrutiny.”

For those on the left, ACORN is too big and important to fail.  And with the stubborn support of Andy Stern and others, ACORN isn’t going away any time soon.

“The media and Congress, which made an ill-informed rush to judgment based on incomplete or suspect evidence, should take their time to assess this report and give ACORN the impartial assessment it deserves,” Stern said.

Impartial assessment? Based on what? The work of Drier and Harshbarger, two unapologetic ACORN cheerleaders?

ACORN critics will only pay attention when a truly independent source, who isn’t being paid by ACORN, does a thorough investigation of the situation.

“We’re looking for corporate records and financial documents” states Investigator Scott Bailey; which are essentially the same things the ACORN 8 sought nearly 18 months ago. “We also wanted ACORN real estate records” states Marcel Reid, President of ACORN 8.

“We sent letters to the entire ACORN Board of Directors nearly a year ago, stating that it was either provide this information through the ACORN 8’s Writ of Mandamus (request for books and records) or we were going to go to the Police” continues Reid.

“It could not have happened at a better time” states Michael McCray, National Spokesman for the ACORN 8. “We believe that ACORN is trying to flee this jurisdiction. Since Louisiana seems to be the only government agency that is seriously investigating ACORN.”

“If ACORN hopes to survive then the know nothing, see nothing, do nothing board of directors must by replaced by individuals with the strength and capabilities to fulfill their fiduciary obligations and the courage to reign in corruption within ACORN’s senior management ranks” continues Reid.

“ACORN as we know it today is finished.  It’s a 40 year old business model that never adopted to changing political times or new technology” McCray continues, “and a do nothing board of directors can not operate such a high-profile multi-national corporation.”

ACORN is still reeling after a barrage of bad press and negative government reaction following undercover videos of “pimps and prostitutes” seeking ACORN assistance; and is desperately struggling to remove itself from this legal imbroglio.

In a letter that ACORN Attorney Schwartz sent to “ACORN Friend’s in the Legal Community” stating, “We need some top-notch bankruptcy advice and maybe representation. The reorganization may involve the creation of new nonprofit entities in each state where ACORN functions, as ACORN considers moving from a centralized corporate structure to a decentralized federated structure. ACORN will need help from people who have handled rebranding …”

“That’s like putting lipstick on chitterlings” states McCray, “If ACORN was afraid of the independent audit and forensic examination which  eight ACORN board members demanded; I can’t imagine what they will do once a U.S. Bankruptcy Trustee is appointed to investigate ACORN.”

“The ACORN 8 have always sought a forensic examination and an independent audit of ACORN and its related entities. And we were thrown off the board for attempting to investigate a $1 Million embezzlement” continues Reid.

Recently, Eric Eve senior vice president of Global Consumer Group, Community Relations, at Citigroup also unexpectedly resigned from the ACORN Advisory Council. The “new” board charged with assisting Bertha Lewis, ACORN Chief Organizer to investigate and reorganize ACORN. This advisory council includes John Podesta, head of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank; Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union; and former Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend.

“ACORN’s organizational structure and management culture creates real conflicts for anyone who truly seeks to exercise their fiduciary obligations for the benefit of the membership and not just to appease management” concludes Reid.

While not everyone has always approved of ACORN’s confrontational tactics, many know some of the impressive results achieved for poor people over the years. Living wage laws to fight poverty. Partnership with unions to assist workers. Housing programs to get Americans one step closer to the American dream. Those are real, tangible victories that improve people’s lives.

“We just only hope and pray that ACORN’s  mission to serve the underserved, and give meaningful voice to low and moderate income families can continue” states McCray. The ACORN 8 is dedicated to doing just that. Quoting the late Senator Edward Kennedy, an ardent ACORN supporter, McCray concludes “the work goes on, the cause endures, hope still lives, and the dream will never die.”

Amid the paperwork associated with a search warrant served on ACORN’s New Orleans headquarters Friday is a one-sentence acknowledgement by the embattled activist group’s attorneys that it is has been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury.

“Regarding the federal grand jury subpoenas, ACORN does not object to the provision of information and documents to the federal government…” reads a letter from Abbe David Lowell of the Washington law firm of McDermott, Will & Emery. 

The letter was included in court filings from ACORN explaining the legal basis for why they weren’t complying with a subpoena issued by Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell, which seeks a wide range of accounting information regarding the group’s many affiliated agencies. 

Lowell disclosed the federal investigation as he was writing to a New Orleans lawyer representing ACORN’s local outside accountants. The accounting firm of Duplantier, Hrapmann, Hogan & Maher was served with a subpoena from Caldwell, and, apparently, at least two from federal officials. In the letter, Lowell said ACORN was asserting accountant-client privilege, which is recognized in Louisiana, but not at the federal level.

Neither Lowell nor William Wright of the New Orleans firm of Deutsch, Kerrigan & Stiles, to whom the letter was sent, returned calls for comment regarding the federal subpoenas. An official with the office of Jim Letten, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana, said the office couldn’t confirm nor deny any investigation. The letter from Lowell does not make clear where the grand jury was convened. 

After learning ACORN was not going to comply – and hearing that two former ACORN employees had cleared their offices of everything, including computers – Caldwell’s office executed a search warrant Friday and seized more than 100 computers and other records from the activist group’s New Orleans headquarters. 

“We were not in the mood to sit around and wait a whole long time,” said David Caldwell, the assistant attorney general over Public Corruption and Special Prosecutions and son of the attorney general. “Now we don’t have to worry about anything walking off…unless it’s already gone.” 

As he spoke outside the ACORN headquarters at 2609 Canal St., investigators inside continued to load up scores of seized desktop and laptop computers, as well as other evidence. Caldwell said his office would copy the hard drives and return the computers to ACORN, perhaps within a week. 

He said attorneys representing ACORN alerted him to the fact that two employees, whom he did not identify, removed computers from the offices. ACORN national officials recently fired longtime local ACORN leader Beth Butler, the common-law wife of ACORN founder Wade Rathke. 

Caldwell credited ACORN and its attorneys for calling the computer removals to his attention and said they acted in good faith. Still, the search warrant was necessary, Caldwell said, because “they can’t watch everybody.” 

Armed investigators in SUV’s arrived about 8 a.m. at the organization’s headquarters at 2609 Canal Street. By 2 p.m., they had loaded four vehicles with computer hardware. Caldwell spokeswoman Tammi Arrender said ACORN employees were polite and cooperative with officials, though they were irritated by the presence of reporters and news media cameras. 

The attorney general has been investigating the national activist groups since June on allegations of payroll tax fraud, covering up an embezzlement, and mismanaging a retirement fund, among other things. 

The attorney general has already served subpoenas on the former head of ACORN, Rathke, whose brother is alleged to have improperly charged at least $1 million to ACORN-related credit cards. Whitney Bank and the accountants have also been hit with subpoenas. 

Rathke and his brother, Dale, who worked on the financial side of the house, were ousted from their positions with the primary ACORN organization, though Wade Rathke continues to work with an international offshoot. 

Buddy Caldwell made headlines nationally recently when he said in court documents that Dale Rathke might have embezzled up to $5 million, though ACORN officials have disputed that amount. ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis has said that figure was cited as the amount needed to clean up the mess created by the Rathke brothers, not the amount taken and later repaid.

More than two years before an ersatz pimp and prostitute raised troubling questions about Acorn Housing Corp.’s financial advice, Louisiana officials criticized the organization’s bookkeeping as it denied the group tens of thousands of dollars from a potential $1.5 million state contract.

The office overseeing the contract recommended against rehiring Acorn Housing in part because it couldn’t document its work.  The contract was designed to inform low-income residents about the Road Home program and help them apply for post-hurricane benefits.

A much smaller $53,000 contract that Acorn Community Land Association had with the state attorney general’s office also was criticized for thin financial justification, though the group got its full payment and was recommended for future work. The contract was to tell hurricane victims of non-discriminatory housing policies as they sought temporary rentals.

In both contracts, the state files contain promotional materials extolling the virtues of paying for an ACORN membership – a solicitation expressly forbidden under the contracts.

“If you are not rich, you need to join your ACORN community group and work on the problems affecting you,” reads one flier in the attorney general’s file.

Several governors, including Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, have frozen payments to ACORN or its hundreds of affiliated groups. The state has no current contracts, but records revealed the two expired contracts that paid the organizations more than $700,000.

ACORN officials did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

In the larger of the two state contracts, Acorn Housing was paid $671,000. However, it asked for much more: $801,000.

In the final evaluation of the contract, the state said Acorn Housing achieved the goal of reaching some of the targeted potential Road Home applicants, but it recommended that the state not rehire Acorn Housing.

That’s mainly because Acorn Housing kept lousy records, said Belinda Kennedy, who monitored the contract for the state’s Office of Community Development.

In the end, she rated Acorn Housing as being in “marginal compliance” with the state contract.

“There were items they were billing that we couldn’t account for,” she said in an interview this week.

Overall, the state said the invoices on file in the Acorn Housing office didn’t always match what was submitted to the state, some travel expenses couldn’t be confirmed or justified, and that the hours worked by employees weren’t always properly billed.

The final review of the contract said that Acorn Housing worked face-to-face with 629 households and another 159 over the phone in the 10 months between December 2006 and September 2007. Its subcontractor, working in rural western Louisiana parishes more affected by Hurricane Rita, reached more people, for a total of 2,099 households served by the contract.

Kennedy worked with Acorn Housing officials to try to clear up the bookkeeping problems, visiting the New Orleans office four months after the contract ended. She said she encouraged agency officials to work to justify some of the questionable billing.

 “We never heard back from them,” Kennedy said.

More background on this story can be found here.

Bertha Lewis, the head of ACORN, is one tough nut.

She came to the National Press Club on Tuesday, ostensibly to report on the community group’s “internal probe” into the ACORN workers who were caught on tape advising people posing as a pimp and a prostitute. But Lewis made it clear that, far from apologizing, she was on a “set-the-record-straight tour” — and a tour de force it was.

The internal review by ACORN’s board, disclosed this week by the Louisiana attorney general, that $5 million had been embezzled from the group rather than the $1 million previously alleged? “This is speculation, completely false and not based on any documentation or any audit or anything other than two disgruntled former board members,” Lewis reported.

Accusations of voter fraud after ACORN workers filled out voter registrations for Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys? “An utter fabrication and a work of fiction that was created by the people who wrote it.”

The report by Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee that ACORN created a “shell game that funneled charitable funds to for-profit organizations”? “Another stretch of allegations of how to pound on ACORN. . . . It’s just false.”

And, of course, the secretly recorded videos of ACORN workers providing help to people claiming they wished to set up an underage-prostitution business? “These highly edited tapes,” Lewis said, “don’t tell the whole story.” ACORN’s accusers “have to stoop to break the law in order to create something sensational,” she added.

In creativity, the ACORN boss’s denials were matched only by her assignments of blame. She blamed her predecessor: “I don’t think it’s fair to judge me, as I’m cleaning up a previous administration.” She blamed the powerful: “We’ve seen this play before, whether it was the civil rights movement or whatever, when you organize poor people to have real power, what you do is often turned against you.” And most of all, she blamed Republicans: “The RNC . . . because we’ve been inflated as the boogeyman, raises almost $2 million a day, every day, and this form of modern-day ACORN McCarthyism has got to stop.”

Assigned only a minor role in this orgy of blame were ACORN and Lewis herself. “My biggest weakness is a certain naivete about folks coming after you,” she said in a moment of self-interested introspection. “I guess maybe others might have known and could have set up some other barriers and could’ve been better with media and PR.”

Read the whole story here. But, first savor this quote. Perhaps one of the best Big Media comments during this breaking saga:

But Lewis, in playing the victim, is her own worst enemy. Forget the film of the pimp and prostitute: Watching a film of Lewis’s performance yesterday would probably be enough to cause lawmakers to cut off ACORN’s federal funding.

The brother of ACORN’s founder embezzled $5 million from the organization, nearly five times more than the figure previously acknowledged by the New Orleans activist group’s officials, according to a subpoena served Monday by the Louisiana Attorney General’s Office.

“The exact amount of the embezzlement was unknown until it was recently acknowledged in a board of directors meeting on October 17, 2008 by (ACORN Chief Executive Officer) Bertha Lewis and (ACORN board member) Liz Wolf that an internal review had determined that the amount embezzled was $5,000,000,” reads the court document. “It is still unclear if some of the monies embezzled are from state, federal of private funds.”

ACORN 2nd Subpoena –

ACORN officials have said that Dale Rathke, brother of founder and former CEO Wade Rathke, in 1999 and 2000 inappropriately charged $948,000 to accounts controlled by Citizens Consulting, the bookkeeping arm of ACORN. Under a quiet arrangement known to only a fraction of the organization’s 50-member board, Dale Rathke was allowed to set up a repayment plan. He eventually repaid about $200,000 before a private donor paid the balance.

Attorney General Buddy Caldwell said the statute of limitations for theft from ACORN could present problems. However, the language about the source of the money in the new subpoena hints that ACORN might not be the only victim of the alleged embezzlement and could open new avenues of investigation or prosecution.

Though the debt is paid, the attorney general’s office can still consider whether ACORN or Citizens Consulting intended to defraud the state when it failed to submit employee payroll withholding taxes for nearly six years.

The document says former members of the ACORN board of directors approached state officials with claims that the group was breaking laws “related to the filing of employee withholding taxes, failing to report an embezzlement of nearly $1 million by the brother of the founder…., obstructing justice and violations of the Employee Retirement Security Act.”

The obstruction allegation comes from the failure to report Dale Rathke’s improper charges, and the retirement-account contention refers to the possible illegal use of money in those accounts for ACORN employees.

It seeks myriad financial records dating from 1998 from Citizens Consulting regarding ACORN and all related entities, such as income paid on behalf of all ACORN affiliates, all financial audits and statements, a list of all employees for each related group, notices of tax liens and all tax returns.

The subpoena also focuses on Dale Rathke’s actions, seeking information “detailing the theft of funds by Dale Rathke…and failure to report the theft to the proper law enforcement agencies.” It also demands records “dealing with the issue of Dale Rathke’s illegal use of employee benefit funds” and “records that detail all of the funds received by Dale and Wade Rathke in either income, benefits, use of properties, credit cards or other accounts, loans or other means of deferred compensation.”

Regarding the tax many tax liens filed against ACORN and related groups, the subpoena said that “a substantial portion” of the $306,000 owed was not paid until “bank accounts were levied.”

Records in the Orleans Parish Clerk of Courts Office shows that ACORN-related entities still owe more than $1.5 million in federal taxes, as well as about $30,000 in state taxes. The most recent filing from the IRS was recorded last month for more than $500,000. It makes a claim on the ACORN building on Canal Street until the debt is paid.

Most liens stem from payroll taxes withheld from employees but not submitted to the state or the IRS. The $306,000 bill from the state says payments were missed in 66 tax periods, from 2002 through mid-2008.

Original story here.

An internal review by the board of directors of the community organization ACORN determined that the amount allegedly embezzled from the community organization was $5 million, well more than the previously reported amount of nearly $1 million, according to a new subpoena in an investigation by Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell.

The subpoena, released this afternoon, says, “It is still unclear if some of the monies embezzled are from state, federal or private funds.”

Caldwell issued subpoenas in August seeking documents related to Acorn International then-President Wade Rathke and his brother Dale Rathke, who kept the group’s books. Those subpoenas were focused on possible Acorn violations of state employee tax law, obstructing justice and violating the Employee Retirement Security Act.

Whole blockbuster story here.

Update: According to the new subpoena issued by the Louisiana Attorney General, it seems ACORN leadership was aware of the full extent of the embezzlement. That they have covered up the true figure cast doubt on their ability to truely reform the organization. In other words, they will only admit to what they get caught at.