ACORN Issues Empty Threat
A few days back, ACORN issued an empty threat: they said that they would sue James O’Keefe, Hannah Giles, Andrew Breitbart and FNC for their secretly taping ACORN employees offering their help in putting a sex slave/prostitution business together. The first time I heard that story, I knew it was pure bluster. Here’s why:
If ACORN sues, it would have to sue alleging some variation of defamation or fraud. The problem is that for either allegation, truth is an absolute defense. Nothing could be more relevant to Fox establishing its defense of truth in the lawsuit than having access to ACORN’s office memos, emails, phone records, and bank statements. All of these would have a reasonable chance of providing evidence as to whether ACORN workers had knowledge of any of the topics seen on the videotapes.
In short, it would blow the doors off ACORN’s vault of secrets. Fox would learn which organizations collaborate with ACORN, how they spend taxpayer money and what ACORN’s leaders say to each other behind closed doors. It would be a treasure trove for a media organization.
I’m not a lawyer but I think what they’re talking about here is called discovery. That’s why I’m fairly certain that Andrew Breitbart’s first reaction was either one of “Yeah, whatever” or one of licking his proverbial chops.
I suspect that this was part of ACORN’s PR campaign but that they had no intention of filing a lawsuit. ACORN has been extremely secretive throughout the years. The last thing they want is to give their enemies a free opportunity to examine their internal documents.
Technorati Tags: ACORN, Lawsuit, Discovery, Memos, Andrew Breitbart, James O’Keefe, Hannah Giles, Prostitution, RICO, Sex Slave Ring
Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog
September 19th, 2009 at 10:24 am
Seems like Brietbart has acorn by the stacking swivel!!!!!