CRS Report On ACORN An Incompetent Whitewash

Apparently Congressional Research Service employees are as good at research as ACORN employees are at registering voters.

Not surprisingly, the new Congressional Research Service report on ACORN continues the Democrats’ coverup of President Obama’s favorite advocacy group.

The CRS report commissioned by House Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) and House Financial Services Committee chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) –both longtime ACORN allies– is a whitewash.

The first finding Conyers and Frank crow about in a press release is this:

There were no instances of individuals who were allegedly registered to vote improperly by ACORN or its employees and who were reported “attempting to vote at the polls.”

This is demonstrably false. Darnell Nash of Cleveland, Ohio, was registered to vote nine times by ACORN. After fraudulently casting a ballot, he was convicted of both vote fraud and voter registration fraud and sentenced to six months imprisonment. ACORN remains under investigation by the elected Democratic prosecutor Bill Mason in Cuyahoga County (at least according to Mason’s spokesman the last time I spoke to him).

And to think — our tax dollars paid for this worthless report.

One might expect the CRS would actually have its researchers expend a bit of shoe leather and do real research, but that’s not what CRS did. In the cover letter accompanying the report CRS explains that “a NEXIS search of the ALL NEWS file did not identify any reported instances of individuals who were improperly registered by ACORN attempting to vote at the polls.”

That’s all CRS did. A Nexis search.

That’s pretty shoddy methodology. All CRS had to do was make a few phone calls to experts who track ACORN and they could have come up with the correct information.