A July 8 WorldNetDaily article begins:
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.
False. First, as Media Matters points out, ACORN no longer exists, having filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy last November, so it is in no position to receive funding of any kind.
Second, WND deliberately gets the name of the group receiving money wrong. As WND itself notes later in the article, “ACORN Housing filed papers last year legally changing its name to Affordable Housing Centers of America, or AHCOA.” So WND is lying to its readers by introducing AHCOA only as ACORN Housing Corp.
While WND goes on to state that “HUD considers AHCOA to be completely separate from ACORN,” it failed to report that the Government Accountability Office has also determined that AHCOA “is not an affiliate, subsidiary, or allied organization of ACORN.”
WND went on to claim that “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.” But WND curiously didn’t report that the report also said that AHCOA states it has “completed many of the corrective measures suggested by the OIG,” adding, “We commend AHCOA’s efforts to bring its operations into compliance with Federal requirements and its willingness to resolve the issues identified in the report.”
WND also gave ACORN-hater Matthew Vadum plenty of space to rant about how much he hates ACORN while ignoring the fact that ACORN no longer exists — thus undermining the entire premise of his rant.