Baltimore, MD—It’s really all about evil words that rolled off of the tongues of ACORN community consultants, Tonja Thompson and Shera Williams. These two ladies eagerly entered into a criminal conspiracy to facilitate theft, bank fraud, tax fraud, prostitution, money laundering, immigration crimes and of course child prostitution.
The civil complaint was filed today by ACORN’s lawyers in the Circuit Court for Baltimore City. If the case survives the summary judgment phase it conceivably will be sent to a jury where a simple majority vote would prevail.
Thompson and Williams are part of a tax supported criminal organization that has perpetrated a decades old crime wave. ACORN has been protected by government officials in an organized crime operation that would even have made Al Capone envious.
The disgusting display of Thompson and Williams was never intended by them to be heard by anyone not involved in the criminal conspiracy. It’s now clear that ACORN and their agents feel public exposure of their use of taxpayer money is some kind of private affair. They are seeking at least two-million dollars in damages from citizen journalists, James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles along with Breitbart.com that hosted and promoted the shocking videos.
The ACORN claim is that Maryland law requiring all parties to conversations to give consent to voice recording in advance was violated. They further allege that the recordings caused the very two employees ACORN publically fired to suffer "extreme emotional distress."
Okay, I can’t seem to figure out just who caused the distress here. Was it ACORN, the two ACORN agents or the journalists that brought on the emotional distress? The journalists simply recorded the ACORN criminals doing what they do best.
As for the Maryland taping law, Illinois had an identical law that came up for review in the appellate courts there after someone was convicted for violation of that law. The courts there found that the recording of a conversation by a party to the conversation is not a violation of the statute even if another party to the conversation is unaware of the recording. People v. Jansen, 561 N.E.2d 312, 314 (Ill. App. Ct. 1990).
The Illinois court said that real issue involved the memory or note taking ability of a conversation participant. Recording the conversation was nothing more than enhanced note taking. In the ACORN case we don’t have to worry about whether O’Keefe and Giles exaggerated or got the ACORN side of the conspiracy wrong.
Currently the only requirement for secret one party consent recording in Illinois is that the person/s recording must be private citizens and not government or government agents.
One thing for sure this story is far from over and we can only hope that evil is suppressed and good prevails. Frankly the taxpayers deserve a break here.
