More proof has emerged of White House political director Patrick Gaspard's ties to the radical advocacy group ACORN. Gaspard, a longtime operative for ACORN and one of its partisan arms, New York's Working Families Party, currently holds the title of White House political affairs director, the same title Karl Rove held in President Bush's White House.
Internal ACORN documents show that Gaspard gave ACORN $40,000 over the past two years. Specifically, while Gaspard worked as an executive vice president of Service Employees International Union Local 1199 in New York he gave ACORN $15,000 in 2007 and $25,000 in 2008.
That's an awfully large tithe for someone who made $111,894 in 2007 and who has a wife and two children. The $111,894 figure comes from SEIU 1199's most recent publicly available tax return. (If salary and deferred benefits are combined the total is $151,869.)
Moreover, Gaspard hails from New York which has a crushing tax burden, especially for individuals earning six-figure salaries -- and he lived in the upscale neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn. It was unclear at press time if Gaspard's wife contributes to the family fisc.
It is also entirely possible that the $40,000 Gaspard handed over to ACORN was SEIU money.
And in the scheme of things it really doesn't matter whether the lefty lucre belonged to Gaspard or SEIU. What matters is the fact that Gaspard handed over the money to ACORN. This is yet more proof of his closeness to the radical group.
Gaspard was previously revealed to be political director for ACORN's New York operation. Although the source of this information, ACORN founder Wade Rathke, has since feigned senility and claimed he was mistaken, evidence of Gaspard's ties to ACORN remains plentiful, as demonstrated by Stanley Kurtz, Trevor Loudon, Erick Erickson, and Moe Lane.
When I reported Sept. 28 that Gaspard was ACORN's man in the White House, the Obama administration promptly went into damage control mode and reflexively denied the report. Although the White House lied, various gullible reporters accepted the denial at face value, doing little or no research on their own.
Particularly risible was the research done by PolitiFact. Its attempt at debunking the story included information provided by less than credible Alinskyite sources for whom truth is a relative concept: ACORN spokesmen Brian Kettenring and Scott Levenson and disgraced ACORN founder Wade Rathke who covered up his brother's million-dollar embezzlement from the group for eight years.
Incidentally, one thing that journalists don't get about ACORN, which used to employ President Obama himself, is that it is a strange, complex creature with tentacles that reach into the highest levels of the United States government, the Democratic Party, corporate America, the labor movement, the nonprofit world, the media, foreign governments, and academia.
ACORN has a confusing structure with its network of who-knows-how-many taxpayer-funded tax-exempt nonprofit affiliates. As I've written ad nauseam, this is deliberate. ACORN identifies its affiliates as ACORN affiliates when it is convenient and claims the same entities are not ACORN affiliates when it is not. This game of nonprofit musical chairs is standard operating procedure at ACORN whenever things get hot.
Gaspard previously worked for the Working Families Party, which is an integral part of ACORN's far-flung empire of radical activism -- as is SEIU, although the left-wing union is now trying to distance itself from ACORN. ACORN's chief organizer Bertha Lewis co-founded the Working Families Party. ACORN notes on its website that in 1998 "ACORN members spearhead[ed] formation of the Working Families Party, the first community-labor party with official ballot status in New York state in more than 50 years." ACORN and the party share office space in Brooklyn.
Even though he's working in the White House now, Gaspard can't tear himself away from New York politics. He reportedly helped persuade leftist Republican Dede Scozzafava, who had been endorsed by the Working Families Party in previous elections, to endorse the Democratic candidate in the special election in New York's 23rd congressional district after she dropped out of the race. On Tuesday Democrat Bill Owens beat Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman.
Given Gaspard's longstanding links to ACORN, it's not at all surprising that Scott Levenson, a lobbyist and spokesman for ACORN, dropped by the White House in March to visit with his former co-worker. The purpose of the meeting was not disclosed.