The story in a nutshell:
- Bertha Lewis is the CEO of ACORN.
- In a review of Lewis’s contacts list, which was leaked to RedState, Bertha Lewis has the office, cell phone, home number, and private personal email address of Patrick Gaspard.
- Patrick Gaspard holds Karl Rove’s position in the White House and was Obama’s Political Director during the campaign.
- In addition to Patrick, Bertha has Patrick’s brother Michael in her rolodex. She lists Michael as working at the Advance Group.
- The Advance Group is ACORN’s lobbying organization.
- In other words, besides having Obama’s political director’s contact info, the political director’s brother works for ACORN via its lobbying shop.
On Sunday, Barack Obama played ignorant on the situation with ACORN. Obama told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, “Frankly, it’s not really something I’ve followed closely. I didn’t even know that ACORN was getting a whole lot of federal money.” Never mind that Barack Obama used to work for ACORN.
Based on information obtained by RedState, we think Barack Obama may live to regret those words.
With everybody focused on ACORN these days, what if we could dig around and see who in the Obama administration shows up in Bertha Lewis’s rolodex? Bertha Lewis is the CEO of ACORN.
Bertha Lewis is considered one of the 100 most influential women in New York according to Crain’s New York Business. She is an activist, organizer, and radical of the far left. When she calls, union bosses and others pick up the phone.
It’s not that hard to look into her contacts. RedState has seen a list of Bertha Lewis’s contacts. We did not seek it out. It just showed up one day unsolicited. We did not ask for it. We did not expect to get it. But now that we have it, we should see who is in there.
The contacts came from a credible source who is no fan of ACORN. An ACORN employee gave it to him. Having examined the file for a week and after consulting with others, we believe the list is legitimate. It fits a recent pattern of leaks out of ACORN as the rats scramble from the sinking ship.
The list contains the private email addresses and cell phones of scores of powerful and influential people from Al Sharpton to Charlie Rangel. It contains several people inside the Barack Obama administration including one of the closest ties to Barack Obama other than his wife.
One word about the list of contacts — some of the contacts are outdated. Like with most people’s contact lists, some of the people have not had their contact information updated in a while. I know the file has at least been updated because it also contains Michael Steele and lists him as Chairman of the GOP — an act that did not take place until this year. To be fair though, it is just his generic email address. That is not the case with some others. Likewise, other names on the list are very current and some have portions of their information outdated and other data current.
The Advance Group
To get a sense of the ties to the White House, one must first understand what the Advance Group is. The organization appears over and over again in the list of contacts.
Were you to look at its website you’d see nothing of interest. It is a rather innocuous “under construction” page. But behind that page is a host of connections.
A review of the Advance Group’s lobbyist filings with the State of New York shows it represents several organizations that fight for social justice, minority rights, etc. It also represents the New York Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now, or ACORN. And not just any branch of ACORN, but the main branch. Though its name is New York ACORN, it’s registered address is New Orleans, LA. While ACORN keeps its organization somewhat nebulous, and also for profit so it does not have to reveal details about its organization, New York ACORN with a registered address in Louisiana is, for all intents and purposes, ACORN.
It’s registered lobbyist with the Advance Group is Scott Levenson. Mr. Levenson is also named ACORN’s national spokesman. He made headlines recently when Glenn Beck threw Mr. Levenson off his show during a segment on ACORN.
Patrick Gaspard
Patrick Gaspard was the Executive Vice President for the SEIU until Barack Obama asked Gaspard to become his Presidential Campaign’s National Political Director. Once in the White House, Gaspard became Barack Obama’s Director of the Office of Political Affairs. He is Barack Obama’s Karl Rove, but unlike Rove, eschews the spotlight, which is why so many compare David Axelrod to Rove.
Here is a good profile of Patrick Gaspard.
Mr. Gaspard’s official responsibility is to provide the president with an accurate assessment of the political dynamics affecting the work of his administration, and to remain in close contact with power brokers around the country to help push the president’s agenda.
In practice, he’s something of an all-purpose fixer, if not the carte blanche policy architect that Mr. Rove was for George W. Bush, or the number-one politics guru that David Axelrod is for Mr. Obama.
And while he looks after the president’s interests in Washington, he also uses his position as a lever to manage politically messy situations closer to home.
Gaspard is in the news this week as the man who delivered the horse head to New York Governor David Paterson — telling Paterson not to run for re-election.
Patrick Gaspard intentionally keeps a low profile, preferring to work behind the scenes. It makes him effective.
Michael Gaspard
Patrick Gaspard’s brother Michael Gaspard works for The Advance Group. Michael apparently keeps a lower profile than his brother. He does not appear on lobbyist disclosures for The Advance Group in the State of New York. Nonetheless, he works there. Ms. Lewis’s contacts list confirms Michael Gaspard’s employment there.
Tying Bertha Lewis to the Gaspard Brothers
The level of detail Bertha Lewis has for contacting Patrick Gaspard suggests a closeness between the two.
Ms. Lewis has Patrick Gaspard’s office number, home number, and cell phone number. Patrick’s information still contains the 212 area code, which suggests it has not been updated since he moved to Washington, D.C. However, only 131 of the 1,894 contacts, or 7% of the total, list home phone numbers, let alone home, office, and cell phone numbers. For perspective, only 31 of the 1,849 contacts have home, office, cell phone, and business email addresses listed. Patrick Gaspard makes that list.
Gaspard’s contact information also contains his private personal email address making him among the most detailed contacts on the list. Only Wade Rathke, the founder of ACORN, and a handful of others have as much personal information in Lewis’s contacts list as Patrick Gaspard.
Bertha Lewis also has Michael Gaspard’s office number and cell phone. In addition, as noted above, Michael Gaspard works for ACORN’s registered lobbying organization and with ACORN’s national spokesman.
Other Administration Connections
A cursory view of Ms. Lewis’s contacts lists shows a couple of other obvious administration contacts too.
It will come as no surprise that Ms. Lewis keeps up with Shaun Donovan. Mr. Donovan is now the Secretary for Housing and Urban Development. Before that, Mr. Donovan was the Commissioner of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD). In New York City, he worked on affordable housing initiatives right up ACORN’s alley. His contact information has not been updated since he left the HPD.
Then there is Karine Jean-Pierre. She originally worked for John Edwards. In fact, Ms. Lewis’s contacts list still has her listed with John Edwards’ campaign, but also has Ms. Jean-Pierre’s personal and presumably still working personal email address, etc. Ms. Jean-Pierre left there to work for Congressman Anthony Weiner, then became Barack Obama’s regional political director.. She is now the White House liaison for the Department of Labor. That’s a handy contact.
The web of connections from Ms. Lewis’s contacts list goes straight into the White House and out the other door into the Departments of Labor and Housing and Urban Development, circling back to ACORN’s lobbying operation.
With the White House trying to distance itself from ACORN, Ms. Lewis’s contacts there might make it more difficult. She has clear ties to Patrick and Michael Gaspard, the President’s fixer and the man who gets ACORN projects and money.
The President can say “I didn’t even know that ACORN was getting a whole lot of federal money,” but a review of Ms. Lewis’s contacts list suggests that is not the case.
Inside The ACORN Rolodex: ACORN Has Its Own Political Party Other Than the Democrats
Posted by Erick Erickson Wednesday, September 23, 2009 http://www.redstate.com/erick/2009/09/23/inside-the-acorn-rolodex-acorn-has-its-own-political-party-other-than-the-democrats/
Above is a word cloud of the associations in the Bertha Lewis contacts list we received. Some are legitimate business dealings. Forest City Ratner, for example, is both bailing out ACORN and relying on its support for its construction projects. But others are more intriguing.
The larger the name, the greater the frequency of the name appearing in the contacts list. For many years it has been speculated that SEIU and ACORN share a common foundation. This seems to suggest as much. In fact, in at least one appearance on the contacts list, an SEIU official has an ACORN email address.
But were this picture a tree, the trunk would be the Working Families Party. Roger Stone has suggested the Working Families Party is ACORN. Bertha Lewis’s contacts list suggests as much.
Lewis is both the head of ACORN and also the Co-Chair of the Working Families Party. As you can imagine, ACORN would have us believe that those are separate roles. However, information suggests otherwise and we also know that ACORN has a habit of creating political parties for its own ends.
To understand how the Working Families Party is part of ACORN, we need to understand the concept of “fusionism.”
I’ve written about this concept before and it is essential to ACORN’s political strategy.
As I noted back in 2008, ACORN played a vital role in the Chicago area New Party — the far left political party that endorsed Barack Obama.
From my 2008 article on Obama’s New Party ties:
Fusion is a pretty simple concept. A candidate could run as both a Democrat and a [Working Families Party] member to signal the candidate was, in fact, a left-leaning candidate, or at least not a center-left DLC type candidate. If the candidate, let’s call him Barack Obama, received only 500 votes in the Democratic Party against another candidate who received 1000 votes, Obama would clearly not be the nominee. But, if Obama also received 600 votes from the [Working Families Party], Obama’s [Working Families Party] votes and Democratic votes would be fused. He would be the Democratic nominee with 1100 votes.
The fusion idea set off a number of third parties, but the New Party was probably the most successful. A March 22, 1998 In These Times article by John Nichols showed just how successful. “[The Wall Street] Journal’s editorialists fretted last fall about how the New Party was responsible for a labor movement that was drifting leftward …. As [openly declared socialist] Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) puts it, ‘If the Wall Street Journal editorial page goes after you, you can pretty well bet you’re doing the right thing.’”
ACORN knows all about Fusion because it worked with the New Party in Chicago as if the New Party were ACORN’s political party.
In These Times reported on February 17, 1997, that “the [New] [P]arty, with 80 members in the [17th] ward, many of whom are also active in the Service Employees International Union and the advocacy group ACORN, has begun to build a parallel precinct organization.”
With the experiences it garnered in Chicago, ACORN knows how to deploy fusion in elections.
That brings us to the Working Families Party (”WFP”) in New York.
In this “fusion” system, candidates appear on the ballot lines of all the parties that endorse them. The WFP, thus, leverages power by selectively awarding its line to candidates who support its agenda. So, for example, Hillary Clinton in 2000 received 102,000 votes for U.S. Senate on the WFP line, meaning 102,000 people sent her a message that their support was contingent on her supporting the WFP’s agenda. According to WFP Executive Director Dan Cantor, this message gets louder down the ballot. “We brand our endorsed candidates right on the ballot so that voters who might not know the candidate still know how to vote on the important issues,” he says.
According to Elizabeth Benjamin in the New York Daily News,
Even the Democrats - who have become the WFP’s closest allies since the party helped them win a slim majority in the state Senate - are looking to distance themselves. They’ve got plans to build their own field organization.
That would enable Dems to rely less onthe WFP’s controversial for-profit arm, Data & Field Services, which has drawn scrutiny from the city Campaign Finance Board.
This is important because, following ACORN’s pattern of practice, the WFP set up Data & Field Services to skirt around election laws as a for-profit entity. Unfortunately for them, the New York Campaign Finance Board ruled Data & Field Services is part and parcel WFP. That means it has to comply with campaign finance rules.
If it were shown that ACORN is joined at the hip to WFP in the same way Data & Field Services is, then ACORN might also have to comply and disclose — something it does not have to do now.
As it stands now, with the close association between the two, a candidate can get on both the Democratic ballot in New York and the WFP ballot and signal that they are the ACORN approved candidate. With ACORN’s growing negative reputation, it is only a matter of time before it spills over to the Working Families Party.
Posted by Erick Erickson Tuesday, September 22, 2009 http://www.redstate.com/erick/2009/09/22/media-matters-is-on-the-case-of-the-stolen-acorn-rolodex/
If you were doubting the legitimacy of RedState’s access to Bertha Lewis’s contacts list, look no further than Media Matters’ overheated rhetorical condemnation of our writing about it.
Double standard much? If this were a right-wing organization, Media Matters would be plowing through it. As Media Matters does not organizationally poop without prior coordination among left-wing interests, we can presume they are scared by the information we have.
And they should be.
Besides the private contact information for various Senators and Congressmen, we have intel now on top Democratic staffers in Congress, third party groups allegedly unaffiliated with ACORN, and more.
This is going to be fun.
Oh, and several Missouri and Ohio campaigns, in particular, are going to have a few headaches based on some recent staff hires.
Obama continues effort to distance himself from ACORN
He Can Run, But He Can't Hide
With members of President Obama’s brotherhood of community organizers, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, more commonly known “ACORN,” caught on video while they gave advice on how to skirt federal laws to buy a home to use as a brothel and how to cloak the status of underage “sex workers,” Obama renews his effort to distance himself from ACORN.
During Sunday’s talk show Obamarama, the President acted as though he barely knew about ACORN. In an exchange with George Stephanopoulos, Obama said that ACORN “deserves to be investigated,” but did not endorse recent votes in Congress to cut off ACORN’s federal funding but did not endorse recent votes in Congress to cut off ACORN’s federal funding:
STEPHANOPOULOS: How about the funding for ACORN?
OBAMA: You know, if — frankly, it’s not really something I’ve followed closely. I didn’t even know that ACORN was getting a whole lot of federal money.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Both the Senate and the House have voted to cut it off.
OBAMA: You know, what I know is, is that what I saw on that video was certainly inappropriate and deserves to be investigated.
STEPHANOPOULOS: So you’re not committing to — to cut off the federal funding?
OBAMA: George, this is not the biggest issue facing the country. It’s not something I’m paying a lot of attention to.
Does Obama really expect us to believe that because he was one of he Senators that did not bother to vote for The Housing Assistance Tax Act of 2008 that he did not know that it provided a mechanism to provide community organizing groups like ACORN federal funding? Does Obama really expect us to believe that he was not aware of the brouhaha over efforts to include even more federal money to community organizing groups like ACORN in the big $700 billion bailout bill that Obama voted for during the heat of the Presidential campaign?
There are a lot of connections between Obama and ACORN that Obama does not the public to scrutinize:
- Obama’s campaign paid more than $800,000 to ACORN - The 800,000 was allegedly for get-out-the-vote efforts, but the Obama campaign “mistakenly misrepresented” what ACORN was doing to The Federal Election Commission. Some found this “mistake” highly suspicious:
“Barack Obama’s failure to accurately report his campaign’s financial records is an incredibly suspicious situation that appears to be an attempt to hide his campaign’s interaction with a left-wing organization previously convicted of voter fraud.”
- ACORN received thousands of dollars from the Woods
Fund during the time Obama served on the board of directors of the Woods
Fund (1993 to 2002) –$45,000
(2000), $30,000 (2001), $45,000 (2001), $30,000 (2002), and $40,000
(2002) [Donors Forum website - ifs.donorsforum.org, accessed 6/10/08].
- ACORN was caught over and over again engaging in fraudulent voter registration. Something NBC, CNN and John Fund documented.
- Then there are the attempts to wipe the web clean of potentially damaging articles concerning Obama’s involvement with ACORN and the false claim, made on Obama’s so-called fight the smears website, that Obama was never an ACORN trainer.
- Obama told community organizers they will shape his presidency
If I was Obama and my community organizer experiences were so closely tied to ACORN and all it’s fraudulent and otherwise dubious activities as Obama’s are, I’d try to hide the connections too.
Obama’s Sudden ACORN Amnesia
Video: http://newsrealblog.com/2009/09/22/obamas-sudden-acorn-amnesia/ or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xl5wre_9q34
In a weekend interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, President Obama suddenly came down with a case of selective amnesia regarding his former employer, the radical left-wing activist group ACORN — which just happens to be pure public-relations poison right now.
Incredibly, the president, himself a former Alinskyite community organizer who worked for, trained for, and represented ACORN in court as its lawyer, told Stephanopoulos he hadn’t been following the ACORN story recently.
Frankly it’s not really something I’ve followed closely. I didn’t even know that ACORN was getting a whole lot of federal money…What I know is that what I saw on that [undercover sting] video was certainly inappropriate and deserves to be investigated…George, this is not the biggest issue facing the country. It’s not something I’m paying a lot of attention to.
John Fund of the Wall Street Journal politely suggested that’s nonsense on the “Glenn Beck Program” Monday. Fund said Obama’s reaction is
curious because ACORN has gotten federal funding throughout its existence and Barack Obama has a long history of working with ACORN. He was a trainer for them in their Chicago seminars. He was their lawyer. I suspect at some point ACORN paid him. I suspect some of that was probably federal funds.
Meanwhile, useful idiots on the left are tripping over each other in the rush to defend ACORN, their embattled ally.
Journalist Joe Conason, a longtime Bill Clinton apologist, predictably whines that poor, poor ACORN is being picked on and misrepresented. In a column at Salon.com, Conason blames ACORN’s recent troubles on the political right:
Like so many conservative attacks, the crusade against ACORN has been highly exaggerated and even falsified to create a demonic image that bears little resemblance to the real organization.
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