ACORN Official Sentenced

From Judicial Watch:

ACORN Official Sentenced




This week brought a measure of accountability to one former ACORN official convicted of election fraud. According to The Daily Caller:



“A Las Vegas judge has spared senior ACORN executive Amy Adele Busefink jail time for her role in a notorious voter fraud conspiracy.



“Judge Donald Mosley sentenced Busefink to two years imprisonment but suspended the jail time provided that she abides by the terms of her probation. She was also fined a total of $4,000 and ordered to perform 100 hours of community service. Prosecutors had argued for a fine of just $1,000. Voter fraud, sometimes called electoral fraud, is a blanket term encompassing a host of election-related improprieties.”



“[E]lection related improprieties” doesn’t quite capture it. Busefink ran ACORN’s corrupt 2008 voter registration drive that produced 400,000 bogus registrations. How did she do it? By overseeing a bonus program called “Blackjack” or “21” where ACORN paid canvassers extra cash for producing over 20 voter registrations. According to the original official complaint filed in May 2009, as ACORN’s Regional Director for Voter Registration, Busefink “did aid, abet, counsel, encourage, hire, command, induce or procure ACORN to commit the crime of Compensation for Registration of Voters.”



The Daily Caller called the sentence “relatively stiff,” but she should have been jailed.



As you know, if you’ve been reading this space for some time, this is hardly the only incident of voter registration fraud with ACORN’s name all over it.



In fact, back in June 2010, we obtained documents from the FBI related to the 2007 investigation and arrest of eight ACORN workers from St. Louis, Missouri for violation of election laws and voter fraud.



The documents include handwritten notes from FBI investigators interviewing canvassers working with Project Vote, an ACORN affiliate that counts President Obama himself as one of its former workers. (Project Vote, by the way, “still operates out of ACORN’s offices in Washington, DC, according to The Daily Caller.) You can read the highlights here. But this is one of the tidbits we found most interesting: “ACORN HQ is wkg [working] for the Democratic Party.”



And in March 2010, Judicial Watch obtained a separate batch of FBI documents detailing federal investigations into alleged ACORN corruption and voter registration fraud in Connecticut. The FBI and Department of Justice initiated investigations. However, the Obama Justice Department, while noting that ACORN had engaged in “questionable hiring and training practices,” closed down the investigation in March 2009, claiming ACORN broke no laws.



Read the documents here and you’ll see for yourself how far the Obama Justice Department had to stretch to let ACORN off the hook.



ACORN is now rebranded and splintered into hundreds of smaller entities all across the country, but the “new and improved version” is still up to its same old corrupt practices. Project Vote, the ACORN front group, is still going strong. You can pop on over to its web site (http://www.projectvote.org) to monitor its activities directly.



According to a recent report by the Inspector General for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, one ACORN offshoot “housing” group “cannot properly account for how it has spent millions of federal dollars and recommends that the group repay the government and be put on standby mode until it cleans up its act.” The IG recommended that HUD suspend all grants to the organization, but only temporarily.



Meanwhile, Attorney General Eric Holder continues to sit on his hands.



No surprises there. The Obama Justice Department shows no inclination to investigate ACORN. That’s why Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), head of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, stated recently that Holder ought to get serious about investigating ACORN, which he deemed a “criminal enterprise,” or step down.



I would go further and suggest that it is well past time to “Dump Holder.”



It’s time for true accountability for ACORN. Slap on the wrist fines and community service for massive voter registration fraud will not dissuade ACORN workers from continuing their corrupt activities. The integrity of our nation’s elections is at stake.