The Obama Administration has given a former director at the
scandal-plagued Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now
(ACORN) nearly half a billion dollars to offer “struggling” Illinois
homeowners mortgage assistance, a Judicial Watch investigation has
found.
It means the ACORN official (Joe McGavin) will go from operating a
corrupt leftist community group that’s banned by Congress from receiving
federal funding to controlling over $445 million in U.S. taxpayer
funds. The money is part of a $7.6 billion Treasury Department program
to help the “unemployed or substantially underemployed” make their
mortgage payments.
In this case, JW found that a subcomponent of the state-run Illinois Housing Development Authority, known as the Illinois Hardest Hit Program, received a generous $445,603,557 Treasury
infusion. The Obama Administration established Hardest Hit in 2010 to
provide targeted aid to families in states hit hardest by the economic
and housing market downturn, according to its website.
In early 2011 McGavin was appointed as director of Hardest Hit.
Before that he was director of counseling for ACORN Housing in Chicago
and operations manager for a Chicago ACORN offshoot called Affordable
Housing Centers of America (AHCOA). His strong ties to ACORN make him a
suspect candidate to handle such a huge amount of taxpayer dollars.
The Obama-tied community organization supposedly shut down after a
series of exposés about its illegal activities, including fraudulent
voter registration drives and involvement in the housing market
meltdown. Read all about it in Judicial Watch’s special report, “The Rebranding of ACORN.” The legal scandals led Congress to pass a 2009 law
banning federal funding for ACORN, which for years enjoyed a huge flow
of taxpayer dollars to promote its various leftwing causes.
The Obama Administration has violated the congressional ACORN funding ban, however. Last summer Judicial Watch uncovered records that
show ACORN got tens of thousands of dollars in grants to “combat
housing and lending discrimination.” The money came via Housing and
Urban Development (HUD), which awarded a $79,819 grant to AHCOA.
In addition to violating the ACORN funding ban, the grant was
astounding because federal investigators had previously exposed fraud by
the same Florida-based ACORN/AHCOA affiliate. HUD’s inspector general
found that the group “inappropriately” spent more than $3.2 million in
grants that were supposed to be used to eliminate lead poisoning in its
housing program.

http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2012/06/former-acorn-director-gets-445-mil-from-u-s-treasury/