Certainly blogs are the way to go if you want the real story behind the sudden discovery by the United States Justice Department and the FBI that the community organizing group, ACORN, may have perpetrated voter registration fraud.
Josh Marshall over at TalkingPointsMemo really covered the hell out of the U.S. attorney firings story last. He can claim at least one scalp, that of Alberto Gonzalez, the supremely unqualified attorney general. TPM simply leads the way on this story and many others.
So, when the site says over and over and over again that there is more than meet the eye to the mushrooming probe of the community organizing group, ACORN, that it is a politically motivated probe, more Republican dirty tricks, I have to sit up and notice. This has been done before. It was the underlining reason those all those United States attorneys were fired.
David Iglesias, former U.S. Attorney for the District of New Mexico, has told TPM he is astounded that DOJ would again bring these charges, especially so close to an election.
“I’m astounded that this issue is being trotted out again,” Iglesias told TPMmuckraker. “Based on what I saw in 2004 and 2006, it’s a scare tactic.” In 2006, Iglesias was fired as U.S. attorney thanks partly to his reluctance to pursue voter-fraud cases as aggressively as DOJ wanted — one of several U.S. attorneys fired for inappropriate political reasons, according to a recently released report by DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General.
Iglesias, who has been the most outspoken of the fired U.S. attorneys, went on to say that the FBI’s investigation seemed designed to inappropriately create a “boogeyman” out of voter fraud.
And he added that it “stands to reason” that the investigation was launched in response to GOP complaints. In recent weeks, national Republican figures — including John McCain at last night’s debate — have sought to make an issue out of ACORN’s voter-registration activities.
ACORN has registered 1.3 million voters, most of them Democrats. Republicans need to figure out a way to keep those voters from voting on Nov. 4. That is the reason they’ve raised the hue and cry over registration anomalies that, if they exist, are negligible, at best.
Rather than perpetrating fraud, ACORN is the victim of politically motivated witch-hunt.
The fact, however, is that even if what is alleged is true, it used to be against DOJ policy to bring such lawsuits so close to an election. Bush’s politicized Justice Dept. changed the rule in May 2007 so they could bring such lawsuits on the eve of elections.
Removed from the rules is this crucial passage:
“The Justice Department generally does not favor prosecution of isolated fraudulent voting transactions. This is based in part on constitutional issues that arise when federal jurisdiction is asserted in matters having only a minimal impact on the integrity of the voting process.”
U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, (D-VT), was livid discussing this with Republican sewer rat Bradley Schlozman.
John McCain, the floundering Republican presidential candidate, brought up ACORN during the last presidential debate on Wednesday, asking Sen. Barack Obama, his Democratic opponent to disclose the full extent of his relationship with ACORN. The group, he said with a straight face, was “on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country.”
I cannot wait for McCain’s political career to be over. He is the greatest fraud in American political history.
Barack Obama decisively won all three presidential debates because of his many thoughtful programs for middle-class Americans, his stance on the ending the Iraq War and bringing U.S. combat troops home… and because of his agreeable, chameleon-like ability to represent many good things for a great many people.
This was by far the worst debate performance for each candidate.