Obama and Acorn

Is there a case for a special prosecutor?

The Acorn scandal continues to mushroom. Yesterday BigGovernment.com published videos from a fourth Acorn office visit by freelance investigators James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles. As Johnny Carson used to say, it’s weird, wild stuff. The woman manning the Acorn office in San Bernardino, Calif., Tresa Kaelke, responds to the pair’s requests for help setting up a child-prostitution ring by claiming to be an ex-prostitute herself. “Heidi Fleiss is my hero!” she exclaims.

When Giles claims her former pimp abused her, Kaelke tells of having been abused by an ex-husband–then confesses to his premeditated murder. San Bernardino’s finest are looking into the claim: “Investigators have been in contact with the involved party’s known former husbands, who are alive and well.” Thus her claims “do not appear to be factual.” Politico’s Ben Smith interprets this as meaning that the confession was “a joke” and writes that according to Acorn, this “demonstrates that the employee there was playing along with the outlandish visitors, not actually indulging them.”

Government officials continue responding to the Acorn revelations. The New York Post reports that Andrew Cuomo, New York’s state attorney general, “yesterday launched an investigation into pork-barrel grants given to ACORN by state lawmakers, as City Council Speaker Christine Quinn froze all city funding earmarked for the scandal-scared [sic] community-activism organization”–this in response to the third released set of videos, from Acorn’s Brooklyn office.

The Wall Street Journal urges the U.S. Justice Department to undertake a criminal investigation of Acorn. This column echoes that call, although we wonder if the Obama administration is compromised here. The president, who as a candidate touted his background as a “community organizer,” has extensive ties to Acorn. In February 2008, the Acorn Political Action Committee endorsed Obama over Hillary Clinton, and Obama’s campaign Web site, Organizing for America, boasted of the candidate’s support for the group

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