An internal investigation of ACORN, the corrupt community organization previously represented by Barack Obama when he was an attorney, was concluded recently and found that not a single ACORN employee had broken the law. The probe, conducted of the entire ACORN organization, was somehow completed in a little over two months. Its outcome is patently absurd coming from an organization under investigation for voter fraud in 14 states, and whose former president helped his brother embezzle $5 million its coffers. It was a whitewash job carried out by Scott Harshbarger, the former Massachusetts attorney general and avowed leftist who headed up the "investigation."
Appointing Harshbarger to helm the ACORN investigation represents a total conflict of interest. Harshbarger has never been directly involved with ACORN, but as a radical liberal, he has drifted in and out of the organization's orbit. He served as president of Common Cause, a left-wing interest group worried about the influences of corporate money on government. He was instrumental in helping push through the campaign finance reform bill in 2002, which unconstitutionally limited everything from when candidates could air television commercials to how much money voters could donate to candidates. Common Cause is funded by George Soros, the billionaire socialist philanthropist. Unlike Obama, Soros isn't foolish enough to directly associate with ACORN. But his fingerprints are nevertheless all over their operations.
In 2004, Harshbarger spoke at a forum hosted by a liberal group called the Campaign Institute. Also scheduled to speak was Dan Cantor, the Executive Director of the Working Families Party, which is essentially a front group for ACORN. Five years later, as the media began slowly waking up to ACORN's corruption, a dozen or so left-wing groups attended a strategy session in Washington, DC to discuss how to proceed in light of ACORN's woes. Among the organizations there was Common Cause. ACORN president Bertha Lewis was the keynote speaker and the Soros-funded Center for American Progress hosted the event.
Given all these connections, it is improbable that Harshbarger's and ACORN's paths never crossed.
Additionally, Harshbarger is a diehard leftist. As Attorney General of Massachusetts, he banned Christmas decorations from his office. He established the most draconian gun laws in the United States, including mandated trigger locks for every handgun, despite the freedom of arms established in the Second Amendment. The radical ACORN is his natural ideological ally.
He also presided over one of the most outrageous miscarriages of justice in Massachusetts since the Salem Witch Trials. As a District Attorney, he crusaded against the Amirault family, which owned a daycare center in Malden, Mass., and had been accused of child sex abuse. Harshbarger paraded preschool children into the courtroom, accusing the Amiraults of bizarre behavior, including anally raping children with butcher knives, forcing their charges to drink urine, operating a child torture room presided over by an evil clown, and the murder of sixteen youngsters. Despite the absurdity of the charges, Gerald Amirault, his mother Violet, and his sister Cheryl were all convicted and sentenced to prison in 1986. Violet and Cheryl served nine years before their convictions were overturned; Gerald was released after 18 years. The Wall Street Journal wrote of the case subsequently, "Along the way, the law was stood on its head. The rules of evidence were changed to accommodate the prosecution; the burden of proof was put on the accused. Four- and five-year-olds were coached to say what adults wanted to hear. All this was done in the name of virtue, with the result being the kind of catastrophic miscarriage of justice we saw in Mr. Amirault's case."
Harshbarger, the driving force behind that miscarriage of justice, is the man ACORN considered impartial enough to conduct their internal investigation. Is it any wonder they were acquitted of any illegal wrongdoing? And with Barack Obama's attorney general Eric Holder refusing to open an investigation, ACORN may very well get away with it. It helps to have the right friends.
