Let the Games Begin: ACORN Sues Breitbart, College Kids.

Bertha Lewis, you magnificent idiot, you’ve gone and done it now (via memeorandum).

ACORN, the community organizing group embarrassed recently in a video sting, said Wednesday that it needs to determine whether it has major internal problems, but it also struck back, filing a lawsuit against the people who conducted the secret investigation.
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Bertha Lewis, head of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, told reporters in a conference call that ACORN does not support criminal activity and that it thinks the filmmakers should have obeyed Maryland laws. In the state, where one video that embarrassed ACORN was made, the act constituted illegal wiretapping, the suit says.

Kim Priestap is right: “chutzpah” is a very good word to use in this case. Another good word is “foolish”. This suit is likely to throw the doors of discovery wide open, which should be a surprise to absolutely no one. If Lewis didn’t know this (and she should be fired if she didn’t), then her attorney certainly should have. I have to imagine that the last thing ACORN wants is Andrew Breitbart’s lawyers pawing through their records.

I could be wrong. Lewis strikes me as more than arrogant enough to believe that there’s no way in the world she and her organization could ever go down. She has a horde of politically-connected friends and it’s possible she hasn’t noticed that most of them have already taken one huge step back already.

ACORN’s case is far from a slam-dunk as well. I am not a great legal mind, but I think most of the wrangling will be over whether the conversation among O’Keefe, Giles, and the two former ACORN employees could be considered “private”. That’s the threshold for what the law defines as “oral communications” in the statute. If the conversation was held in an open area (and it looks like it was, considering that there was no closed door and, as we saw, the tax advice lady came and went pretty freely) where anyone could easily overhear it, I certainly wouldn’t consider it private.

I notice that the lawsuit lists the two employees fired by ACORN for their misconduct along with ACORN itself. That seems odd to me. If ACORN is right, then they fired the employees wrongly, and ACORN’s lawyer is going to have a heck of a time representing all three of them. If the two have separate lawyers, I’d certainly want to know who is paying their bills and how their clients found them.

Oh yeah, that discovery thing is going to be really entertaining.

A couple good blog posts on the subject. First, Allah:

Amazing. In one fell swoop, the lawsuit (a) gives Fox a reason to keep covering the story, (b) presents a thorny legal issue that’ll attract media to the scandal who might not otherwise have touched it, and (c) makes ACORN look like they’re trying to punish people who exposed taxpayer-funded corruption. Which, of course, they are.

This is the other odd thing I noticed right away. ACORN has filed this suit at perhaps the worst possible time. There is no way this lawsuit can end well for Lewis and company. Either they lose, in which case it’s game over for ACORN; or they win, in which case they take an enormous public relations hit, shed droves of supporters, and have all their dirty laundry aired where everyone can see it. It would have been much better had ACORN let the heat die down for a couple few months, so that the public had a little time to forget about the situation. Lewis and company could then have reframed the entire discussion with them as the victims. Right now, they look arrogant and cruel.

Ed Driscoll, whose roundup is the best I’ve seen tonight, says “Paging Admiral Ackbar…Admiral Ackbar to the red comlink please…”

Heh. You bet it’s a trap. The amazing thing is that it’s not a very clever one, yet Bertha Lewis bumbled right into it.

Other Posts of Interest:

• ACORN is Having a Very Bad Week. Hooray!!
• Massive CNN Knowledge FAIL!
• It’s Not Yelling “Fire”, but It’s Darned Close…

Tags: ACORN, Andrew Breitbart, Corruption

Category: Progressives