ACORN files suit against Breitbart.com
Via The Politico:
ACORN filed suit today in Maryland against conservative filmmakers James O’Keefe, Hannah Giles and conservative Web site Breitbart.com for secretly taping the organization’s employees at its Baltimore office.
In the complaint, ACORN alleges that the filmmakers entered into the organization’s offices in July with a “hidden camera and microphone” and taped employees Tonja Thompson and Shera Williams. Both employees are listed as plaintiffs on the complaint, filed in the Circuit Court for Baltimore City.
ACORN is seeking $500,000 for each employee and $1 million for the organization in damages.
The shakedown campaign has officially begun.
What’s the real issue here for ACORN? Being caught – via an undercover sting – encouraging a “pimp” and a “prostitute” to lie to the IRS. And that’s not all:
Officials with the controversial community organizing group ACORN were secretly videotaped offering to assist two individuals posing as a pimp and a prostitute, encouraging them to lie to the Internal Revenue Service and providing guidance on how to claim underage girls from South America as dependents.
The videotape was made public Thursday on BigGovernment.com, a political blog launched by Andrew Breitbart as a companion site to his BigHollywood.breitbart.com blog.
In the videotape, made on July 24, James O’Keefe, a 25-year-old independent filmmaker, posed as a pimp with a 20-year-old woman named “Kenya” who posed as a prostitute while visiting ACORN’s office in Baltimore. The couple told ACORN staffers they wanted to secure housing where the woman could continue to maintain a prostitution business.
ACORN is clearly in the wrong here, as they are in the cases that have been exposed in other cities around the country. But of course they are taking the typical liberal approach when caught in the act of blatant wrongdoing: They’re blaming someone else.
What’s Congress – which has poured billions of dollars into ACORN over the last several years, and had been prepared to do this year – doing about this? Why, the same thing ACORN is – they want to investigate … the investigators:
Two powerful Democratic committee chairmen on Tuesday came to the defense of the embattled community group ACORN, sending a clear signal that not all Democrats are content to let Republicans destroy the organization.
House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) and House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) have formally requested the Congressional Research Service provide a “clear and objective analysis” of the “charges and countercharges” that have recently been levied against the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.
[…]
The pair also want the report to provide an analysis of “recent ‘sting’ activity concerning ACORN,” a reference to the recent videos taken by a man and a woman posing as a prostitute and a pimp that seemingly caught ACORN employees giving advice on how to evade federal tax and housing laws.
“Conflicting allegations have been made about the propriety of these activities,” Conyers and Frank wrote. “Please research and report on the federal and state laws that could apply to such videotaping and distribution of conversations without the consent of all parties.”
No word yet from the WH on whether or not President Obama believes ACORN, Frank, and/or Conyers have “acted stupidly.”
Stay tuned …
Edited to add: Interesting how Frank, Conyers and other Democrats supposedly want to see “all the facts” before they make a judgement call on ACORN’s actions, but they’d be the first to call for hearings and condemn our military off of nothing more than an unsourced report of “prisoner abuse” reported on the front page of the NYT …