OPINION:
Why is an affiliate of the disgraced group ACORN lobbying the White House?
White House visitor records show that attorney Estelle H. Rogers, director of advocacy at ACORN-affiliated Project Vote, met with a senior aide to Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett and with Van Jones’ former chief of staff.
Is a single visit to the White House normally cause for concern? Not necessarily, but this is a visitor from the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), an organization infamous for massive voter fraud and that at one time employed the president of the United States. What in the world did Ms. Rogers and White House officials talk about?
Watchdog group Judicial Watch has filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Justice Department, demanding copies of all correspondence between department officials and Ms. Rogers, a former attorney for ACORN. Judicial Watch said it is investigating the extent to which the department and Project Vote “are partnering on a national campaign to use the National Voting Rights Act (NVRA) to register more individuals on public assistance, widely considered a key voting demographic for the Obama 2012 campaign.”
According to Project Vote’s website Ms. Rogers represented Project Vote “at meetings and legislative hearings, preparing a voting rights agenda for submission to the Presidential Transition Team in 2008-2009.”
She visited the White House on March 2, meeting with Shasti Conrad and Jon Carson, according to the White House visitors database.
Ms. Conrad is executive assistant to Ms. Jarrett, who is so close to Mr. Obama and so perfectly aligned with his thinking that the media dubbed her “the other side of Barack’s brain” and “a female version of Barack.”
Mr. Carson is director of the White House Office of Public Engagement. Previously he was chief of staff at the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) serving under Van Jones, the self-described communist who was known as Mr. Obama’s green jobs czar. Mr. Jones was forced out in September 2009 after it was revealed he had signed a “truther” petition that accused President George W. Bush of orchestrating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States.
Project Vote is the unit of the ACORN network that Barack Obama worked for in 1992 when he ran a successful get-out-the-vote drive that helped to elect the radical leftist Carol Moseley Braun as Democratic senator from Illinois.
Project Vote’s official position is that voter fraud is a myth invented by Republicans to disenfranchise Democratic voters. The group vilifies as a racist anyone who thinks voter ID requirements are a good idea and constantly presses to make voting requirements in general even more lax than they now are.
Using taxpayer resources to register people on welfare to vote themselves more government benefits by electing redistributionist politicians isn’t exactly a public-spirited enterprise. It is a key plank of the so-called Cloward-Piven Strategy that seeks to force change by provoking crises and it has long been used by the ACORN network.
President Obama himself has endorsed the strategy. The late Vernon Jarrett, father-in-law of Valerie Jarrett, wrote a column for the Chicago Sun-Times, Aug. 11, 1992, that quoted the future president: “All our people must know that politics and voting affects their lives directly. If we’re registering people in public housing, for an example, we talk about aid cuts and who’s responsible.”
News of Ms. Rogers’ White House visit came a few days after Mr. Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign stunned observers. The campaign is naming its new get-out-the-vote effort “Project Vote.” The name choice is puzzling because the Obama campaign spent much of 2008 trying to distance the president from his history with Project Vote and ACORN.
Historically, Project Vote and ACORN have been indistinguishable. They share staff members, office space and money, as former Project Vote employee Anita MonCrief has explained. Project Vote still occupies ACORN’s old Washington headquarters near Capitol Hill.
And they share a common belief that voter fraud is needed to push the nation even farther to the left.
Matthew Vadum is a senior editor at the Capital Research Center and author of “Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers” (WND Books, 2011).
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