Free Republic

The governmentÂ’s effort to withdraw the departure motion means Flynn can ask to withdraw his guilty plea. Now the prosecutors are changing their tune. The furor over U.S. Department of Justice leaders openly intervening in the Roger Stone prosecution to overrule line prosecutorsÂ’ sentencing recommendation has led some commentators to report that Attorney General William Barr may have played a role in the governmentÂ’s shifting sentencing recommendations for retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn.In FlynnÂ’s case, prosecutors have twice reversed course on their sentencing recommendation. The latest reversal in the governmentÂ’s position, however, was more likely caused by the line...

#CutTheCheck. That’s the hashtag for Black activists demanding payment from white liberals for taking part in the months-long protests in Ferguson, Missouri over the police shooting death of unarmed Black teenaged criminal Michael Brown in a confrontation with white Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson last August. Black activists held a sit-in at the office of MORE (Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment) on Thursday to press their claim that groups led by whites have collected tens of thousands of dollars in donations off of the Black Lives Matter movement without paying the Black participants their fair share. During the sit-in,...

In an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) founder and Service Employees International Union organizer Wade Rathke acknowledged that the tea party movement has been more effective than Occupy Wall Street in influencing American politics. Rathke was unequivocal about the Occupy movement, telling The DC that “in no way has it had the political impact that the tea party movement has.” Yet because Occupy organizing is “still in its embryonic stages” while tea partiers have been organizing for more than two years, he cautions that “comparing the tea party movement to OWS...

Political operatives connected with renamed ACORN affiliates are in position to help swing close, competitive races for left-leaning candidates in the 2012 elections, according to former insiders and policy analysts who are familiar with the network’s operations. An ambitious rebranding scheme that began earlier this year has now accelerated to include affiliates in at least 12 states. The bankruptcy filing the organization slyly submitted on Election Day is properly viewed as “a head fake” and a “public relations gimmick” arranged to distract attention away from the partisan political activities of renamed affiliates, sources say. It is worth recalling that the...

Today was the day that ACORN was supposed to die. Picking as the official closing date April Fool's Day was not a coincidence, because if you really believed that ACORN was going to cease operations, you were being fooled. Even CEO Bertha Lewis denied ACORN was closing. ACORN’s announcement of “bringing its operations to a close” was just another deceptive tactic designed to take the pressure off so they can continue their scheme of using public dollars and private donations to advance their radical progressive agenda. And now there is proof. Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) released a report examining the...

From a written statement issued by national ACORN spokesman Kevin Whelan: The ACORN Association Board met on Sunday March 21 and approved a set of steps to responsibly manage the process of bringing its operations to a close over the coming months. These include: * Closing ACORN’s remaining state affiliates and field offices by April 1st; and * Developing a plan to resolve all outstanding debts, obligations and other issues. ACORN’s members have a great deal to be proud of—from promoting to homeownership to helping rebuild New Orleans, from raising wages to winning safer streets, from training community leaders to...

Amnesty = 25,000,000 new Democrats. Any questions?

Citing two leaders of the group, the Times reported ACORN is suffering from "mismanagement along with a severe loss of government and membership funds." The organization has been reeling since a secretly recorded YouTube.com video was disseminated last September showing ACORN workers giving advice on how to flout the law to two conservative activists who posed as a pimp and a prostitute. Employees involved in the incidents in New York were fired from the organization but have been cleared of criminal prosecution. Since September, at least half of ACORN's 30 chapters have disbanded, the Times said. The group's large New...

WASHINGTON, March 11 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that it has obtained documents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) detailing federal investigations into the alleged corrupt activities of Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). The documents reference serious allegations of corruption and voter registration fraud by ACORN as well as the Obama administration's decision to shut down a criminal investigation without filing criminal charges. The documents include background information on two specific complaints filed in October 2008 by Lucy Corelli and Joseph Borges, Republican Registrars of...

Matthew Vadum NewsRealIf you thought you sent representatives and senators to Washington, D.C., to exercise the constitutionally mandated power of the purse — you’re wrong. Silly you. You wasted all that time in civics class learning a whole bunch of outdated claptrap about separation of powers and the lawmaking process for nothing. The spending power belongs to federal judges now, regardless of what that quaint little document called the U.S. Constitution says. That’s what ACORN’s favorite federal judge, Nina Gershon of the Eastern District of New York ruled Wednesday. In December Gershon, a Bill Clinton appointee, helped ACORN out by...

Five Wisconsin residents have been charged with criminal counts of voter fraud in the November 2008 general election, state Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen announced today. Two of those charged, Maria Miles and Kevin Clancy, are workers for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), the embattled community group. "The complaint alleges that Miles and Clancy submitted multiple voter registration applications for the same individuals, and also were part of a scheme in which they and other (special registration deputies) registered each other to vote multiple times in order to meet voter registration quotas imposed by ACORN," Van...

The Democrats’ money-and-muscle operation is rebranding, not disbanding ACORN is not dissolving. But some of its local affiliates, in an effort to suggest they’re cutting ties with the organization, are giving themselves new names. The reason is money: ACORN cites a string of “vicious right-wing attacks” that have made it hard for them to shake down their usual banker benefactors and nonprofit patrons. ACORN isn’t the first gang of riff-raff to discover that there’s lots of money to be made at the intersection of politics and poverty — that was part of the original mafia’s business model, too — but...

Democrats just can't stay away from ACORN. Even as scandal piles on top of scandal, they continue to embrace the organization. The latest is that the Senate just confirmed Patrick Corvington as chief executive of the Corporation for National and Community Service. Corvington and ACORN have quite the history as Matthew Vadum notes: Read more at the Washington Examiner:

Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe III, the independent filmmakers behind the series of videos which swept the nation in 2009 and exposed internal corruption and illegality within ACORN Housing Corporation, were sued today in federal court in Philadelphia by an ACORN employee featured in one of the pair’s films. The plaintiff is Katherine Conway-Russell, a Philadelphia resident who has worked for ACORN since March 2008 as an office director. It was Conway-Russell who met with Giles and O’Keefe, posing as a prostitute and pimp as they had in ACORN offices nationwide during other installments of the undercover video series, for...

I want to say thank you to those of you who have contributed already to help State Senator Scott Brown defeat Barack Obama and Harry Reid’s choice to succeed Ted Kennedy in the U.S. Senate. In just one day, we raised half of our goal of $5,000 for Scott Brown. An article published recently higlighted the fact that one of Democrat Martha Coakley’s biggest advocates, ACORN, gave her an A+ grade, which they gave to just 6 other state Attorneys General. "I am honored to have received this recognition from ACORN,” Coakley said in a statement after receiving the “honor.”

Many are puzzled that Democrats persist in ramming unpopular and destructive legislation down our collective throats while seemingly unconcerned by their plummeting poll numbers. A widespread belief is that the Democrats are committing political suicide and will be swept from one or both houses of Congress with unprecedented electoral losses next November. But since Democrat politicians rarely do things that will not ultimately benefit themselves, this column asked two weeks ago: "what do they know that we don't?" We may have found out. It's called universal voter registration. The Wall Street Journal's John Fund described the Democrat plan recently at...

The Weekly Standard’s John McCormack reports tonight that Illinois Democrat Sen. Roland Burris is claiming credit for inserting a provision that may benefit ACORN. But it’s not just the ACORN angle that’s scandalous. It’s the race hustler shakedown. Why, oh, why do we need to be funding massive new federal bureaucracies to create separate “Offices of Minority Health” in six separate health care agencies:

Senator Roland Burris is claiming credit for a provision in Harry Reid's "manager's amendment," unveiled Saturday morning, that could funnel money to ACORN through the health care bill. On December 9, Burris, an Illinois Democrat, pledged that he would filibuster a health care bill without a public option. "If we have to get 60 and it comes back and it does not have a public option in it, I will not vote for it," he said. Then early last week he said he could vote for the bill if there were changes made to achieve the goals of the public...

Congress -- and possibly Citigroup -- may be gearing up to start funding the organized crime syndicate ACORN again. The current federal funding ban expires Dec. 18. On Tuesday evening the House Appropriations Committee rejected on a party line vote of 9 to 5 an amendment offered by Rep. Tom Latham (R-Iowa) that would have blocked federal funding of the radical advocacy group. The amendment was needed because the Obama administration thumbed its nose at a provision in spending legislation that banned ACORN funding until the end of next week. In a ruling revealed late last month by the Justice...

Seventy-one percent (71%) of voters nationwide say they’re at least somewhat angry about the current policies of the federal government. That figure includes 46% who are Very Angry. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that only 27% are not angry about the government's policies, including 10% who are Not at All Angry........ The data suggests that the level of anger is growing. The 71% who are angry at federal government policies today is up five percentage points since September. Even more stunning, the 46% who are Very Angry is up 10 percentage points from September.