White House funneling tax money to radicals?

President Obama quietly has been funding the notorious radical group ACORN, his former employer and legal client, possibly in violation of federal law, according to a new report.

Obama's Department of Housing and Urban Development gave a $79,819 grant to a Florida office of the largest branch of the ACORN tree, the massive conglomerate known as ACORN Housing Corp, or AHC. The grant, awarded in March, was recently discovered by the nonpartisan watchdog group Judicial Watch.

"This is the first such grant to surface this year but more are certain to follow," said Matthew Vadum, an award-winning investigative journalist whose stunning new book, "Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers," tells the real story about the criminal activist group with longstanding ties to President Obama and the Democratic National Committee.

Vadum, senior editor at Capital Research Center, a think tank that studies left-wing advocacy groups and their funders, has compiled the information from nearly three years of research and hundreds of interviews.

ACORN Housing filed papers last year legally changing its name to Affordable Housing Centers of America, or AHCOA. HUD considers AHCOA to be completely separate from ACORN.

Get the book that reveals the ongoing criminal enterprise known as ACORN. This book is so explosive, copies have been provided to all 535 members of the House and Senate in hopes of prompting further investigation of the subversive activity it exposes.

However, a September 2010 report from HUD's inspector general found that the group may have concealed fraud by destroying or failing to produce records. The report said the group charged the government salary costs for employees after they were terminated and that ACORN may have corruptly funneled taxpayer dollars to its affiliates and engaged in money laundering. More than $3 million in taxpayer money has never been accounted for.

The new $79,819 HUD grant to ACORN funds what Vadum calls a "political agitation and indoctrination program" known as the Education and Outreach Initiative. HUD describes the grant program as funding "organizations that educate the public and housing providers about their rights and obligations under federal, state, and local fair housing laws."

"The father of modern so-called community organizing Saul Alinsky himself couldn't have devised better euphemisms than the ones HUD uses to describe the program," Vadum told WND.

ACORN and other left-wing groups that take in these grants use the money to radicalize tenants and encourage them to engage in political activism, Vadum said.

"Tax money shouldn't be used to further any group's political agenda, whether on the left or the right," he said.

Even worse, the grant money came out of fiscal 2010 appropriations, HUD admits.

That is a huge problem, according to Vadum.

This is because in 2009 Congress passed four separate appropriations bills that contained language blocking federal funds from flowing to ACORN during federal fiscal year 2010, which ran from Oct. 1, 2009, through Sept. 30, 2010. All four of the laws prevent ACORN and its affiliated groups from receiving federal taxpayer dollars.

The funding prohibition in Public Law 111-117 applies specifically to HUD. It spells out in clear language that ACORN shouldn't be getting any government funding. Three sections in the same statute ban the funding of ACORN:

Division A – Section 418. None of the funds made available under this Act or any prior Act may be provided to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), or any of its affiliates, subsidiaries, or allied organizations.

Division B – Section 534. None of the funds made available under this Act
may be distributed to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) or its subsidiaries.

Advertisement - story continues below

Division E – Section 511. None of the funds made available in this division
or any other division in this Act may be distributed to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) or its subsidiaries.

"There is no doubt in my mind that HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan was personally involved in making sure ACORN landed this new grant," Vadum told WND.

Vadum's book documents the very close ties between Donovan and ACORN.

"Perhaps no administration official has had more interaction with ACORN than" Donovan, the New York Times has reported. Reinforcing the newspaper's point, ACORN's then-national chief organizer Bertha Lewis praised the HUD secretary.

"We grew to respect him, and he grew to respect us," she said.

Roll Call said Lewis admitted "ACORN has friends in high places for the
first time in a long time." She acknowledged "that she has particularly
good relationships with Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan and with Patrick Gaspard, the White House political director."

Donovan's close ties to ACORN might help to explain why the Cabinet member went into overdrive two years ago publicly distancing himself from the group. That's around the time the undercover brothels-for-pedophiles videos surfaced that showed ACORN employees giving two conservative activists helpful advice on how to break the law without getting caught.

WND recently reported that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that actions by Congress to prevent ACORN from getting federal money were allowable.

After winning in court initially, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now had asked the high court to review a decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit which found that the funding cutoff enacted in 2009 was not a "bill of attainder" forbidden by the Constitution.

ACORN had advanced the novel legal argument that Congress had no power to stop funding the group unless lawmakers could prove it had done something wrong.

"Imagine if the court case had gone the other way," Vadum told WND. "Every liberal group from Honolulu to Key West could have brought ACLU lawyers to congressional appropriations hearings to whine about the supposed unfairness of not being able to feed at the public trough. That's nuts."

Because of the potentially criminal activity documented in this explosive book, copies of "Subversion Inc.," by Matthew Vadum have been sent by the publisher, WND Books, to all 535 members of the House and Senate in hopes of prompting further investigation of ACORN and its tentacles.