Connecting the Insidious Obama and ACORN Nexus
By Larry Johnson on September 17, 2009 at 9:44 PM in Current Affairs
Barack Obama’s ties to ACORN (see Memeorandum) are not incidental nor are they casual. Bill O’Reilly displayed his fundamental ignorance on the matter last night when he pooh-poohed the notion of an Obama tie simply because “ACORN previously worked” for his campaign. O’Reilly acted like this was ancient history. Sorry Bill, but you do not know what the hell you are talking about. The latest saga of ACORN as an enabler of child prostitution, illegal immigration and tax fraud is not new.
The money given to ACORN through one of its front companies–CSI–was not a simple clerical error. The Obama Presidential campaign deliberately tried to hide its relationship to ACORN and funneling almost $1 million dollars to ACORN by using a group with no experience doing the task that it was ostensibly hired to do. The story is pretty simple–it is about Citizen Services Inc., a Nigerian director of CSI living in Minnesota and false campaign financing report.
I first wrote this story last August (see here). We passed this information first to David Brown, a reporter in Pittsburgh, who broke the story publicly in early August. So far the mainstream press has failed to investigate this matter. Here are the key details.
The Obama team gave Citizen Services Inc. more than $800,000 ostensibly for “staging and lighting.” We reported (our own intrepid Eastan MacNeal) the following:
According to Federal Election Commission (FEC) financial disclosure reports filed by the campaign earlier this year, between February 25th and May 17th Obama paid $832,598 to Citizens Services, Inc. (CSI), one of the nearly seventy Not-for-Profit companies registered at the ACORN New Orleans headquarters on 1024 Elysian Fields Avenue [SEE IMAGE OF THE NATIONAL HEADQUARTERS of CSI as well as 20 other businesses.]. CSI now also shares an office with ACORN in Chicago at 209 W. Jackson St., home of the SEIU (Service Employees International Union). . . . According to the director (of CSI), and as found in various disclosure reports from other candidates, CSI specializes in field operations, specifically grass roots organizing for get out the vote efforts. The Obama expense reports list the following payments to CSI: $564,342 for Stage, Sound, Lighting, $138,000 for Advance Work, $18,417 for Polling and $98,451 for Travel/Lodging.
Only one itty, bitty problem. CSI had no track record of performing such services. When the Obama team was confronted with this uncomfortable fact they quickly pivoted and claimed, “Oh, we made a labeling mistake, it was just to get out the vote.” And the media and most of the public swallowed that horseshit without pause.
But that was a lie. How do I know? Because I tracked down one of the Directors of CSI, one Mr. Sunday Oladimeji Alabi. To be precise I called him on July 24, 2008, more than three weeks before Mr. Brown’s story broke. According to one of the documents filed with the State of Louisiana the Directors in 2006 were:
Filing 3
Filed Date: 06/01/2006
Filing Number: 36196988
Comments: ANNUAL REPORT (06)Officers – As Of – 04/20/2007
Name: ALIBI, SUNDAY
DIRECTOR
Contact Type: OFFICER
Address: 1201 E 22ND ST
MINNEAPOLIS, MN 55404-2969Name: DOMINGUEZ, TERESA
DIRECTOR
Contact Type: OFFICER
Address: 621 PROSPECT ST
EL PASO, TX 79902-3745Name: LEON, ROSALIE
DIRECTOR
Contact Type: OFFICER
Address: 3990 DELTA ST
SAN DIEGO, CA 92113-4206
I searched the internet and found Mr. Alabi’s phone number. Mr. Alabi answered the phone and I introduced myself using my real name. But I did tell a white lie–I said I got his name and number from Bob Shrum at the Democratic National Committee. He hesitated. When I repeated that I got his name and number from the DNC he brightened up and became quite chatty. Using the Obama FEC filing as my guide I told Mr. Alabi that I needed to hire Citizen Services to help my campaign with “Staging, Sound, and Lighting.” Without a moments hesitation Mr. Alabi told me, “we don’t do that.” He went on to identify ACORN as the organization that handles those matters and he told me to contact Marc Seiden (he gave me a cell phone number for Mr. Seiden, which is a District of Columbia cell phone). Are there any legit journalists interested in Mr. Seiden’s phone number? It is still working as I write this.
Note that Mr. Alabi did not take time to correct me and tell me that he and his group only did “get out the vote” work. He directed me to a person he says is affiliated with the ACORN office in Washington. So who is Eric Seiden? What was his role with the Obama campaign? Who did he talk to in order to ensure the “get out the vote” effort was effective.
Why did the Obama team select CSI/ACORN for a critical role in getting out the vote? Who on the Obama team recommended that CSI/ACORN had the requisite expertise? Let’s remember that Obama was in a longshot position of winning the election when they turned to CSI and sent them almost $1 million dollars. Given that Barack Obama and David Axelrod are so damn intelligent (Did you know that Barack is the smartest person ever to be President? I heard that on the radio.) are we to believe that they just made a blind choice completely devoid of any research or back up testimonial? I don’t think so.
If you want to understand why ACORN offices across the country are able to give crafty advice on avoiding taxes, fooling the police and setting up child prostitution businesses then you must first understand why the campaign of Barack Obama gave almost $1 million to an organization with no track record in doing the electioneering work they were hired to do.
Anyone out there willing to go get these answers?
UPDATE: As I reread my piece I realized I did not make it clear that I had the conversation with Sunday Alabi in July 2008. The story about CSI had not broken in the press yet. A friend of mine forwarded this to Andrew Breitbart. Unfortunately, Mr. Breitbart does not appear interested in following up. Too bad.
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