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http://www.factcheck.org/2016/10/trumps-bogus-voter-fraud-claims

If he says it, you know it's VBullchit.

https://www.brennancenter.org/issues/voter-fraud

August 21, 2008

Obama's Lost Annenberg Years Coming to Light

By Thomas Lifson

The cloak of media invisibility is slowly beginning to lift from Barack Obama's most important administrative leadership experience, helming an expensive educational reform effort in Chicago that failed to produce any measurable academic gains, according to the project's own final report.

Add in the fact that former Weatherman and admitted terrorist William Ayers (whom Obama described in the Philadelphia debate as merely a "neighbor") was head of the operating arm of the CAC, working with Obama on distributing scores of millions of dollars to grantees in the wards of the city, and you have a topic that the Obama campaign wishes to avoid at all costs.

A compliant media has averted its eyes so far. A timeline of Obama's career from George Washington University omits it. Why the McCain campaign has not raised more questions on the subject is a question beyond my pay grade. But there are signs it is on the case.

The four plus years (1995-1999) Barack Obama spent as founding chairman of the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) represent his track record as reformer, as someone who reached out in a public-private collaboration and had the audacity to believe his effort would make things better. At the time he became leader of this ambitious project to remake the public schools of Chicago, he was 33 years old and a third year associate at a small Chicago law firm, Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland.

This was a big test for him, his chance to cut his teeth on bringing hope and change to the mostly minority inner city school children trapped in Chicago schools. And he flopped big time, squandering lots of money and the time of many public employees in the process.

Given Senator Obama's lack of any other posts as leader of an organization, someone unschooled in the ways of the American media might expect that for months reporters have been poring over the records of the project to get an idea of how it managed to fail so badly. Examining the track record of the guy who wants to lead the federal government would seem to be part of the campaign beat for media organizations.

But as a matter of fact, until recently, only a few bloggers were looking into the most important organized effort ever led by Barack Obama, prior to his successful campaigns for public office.

The Cover-up

Now, it appears a cover-up is underway, in order prevent journalists and researchers from getting access to the records of this charitable project housed in a taxpayer supported library. And there is a mystery:

The UIC Library says it is acting on behalf of the donor, whom it refuses to name.

It took Stanly Kurtz, of National Review Online to ask permission to see the files held by the publicly-funded University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). After initially agreeing, The Richard J. Daley Library withdrew permission. Kurtz writes:

"The Special Collections section of the Richard J. Daley Library agreed to let me read them, but just before I boarded my flight to Chicago, the top library officials mysteriously intervened to bar access. Circumstances strongly suggest the likelihood that Bill Ayers himself may have played a pivotal role in this denial. Ayers has long taught at UIC, where the Chicago Annenberg Challenge offices were housed, rent-free. Ayers likely arranged for the files of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge to be housed in the UIC library, and may well have been consulted during my unsuccessful struggle to gain access to the documents."

It is highly unusual and legally questionable for a publicly-funded archive to deny access to records in its collection, particularly when they have a bearing on matters of intense public interest: the qualifications of a man seeking to be Commander in Chief.

But even if the university manages to stall release of the records until after the election, it is only drawing attention to the project. Already, the nation's mainstream media have taken notice (however imperfectly) of the University's unusual actions, albeit without exploring the subject in any depth yet.

In the midst of a heated presidential campaign, it is going to be hard to keep this interest in Obama's Annenberg years contained, now that it has surfaced.

A blogger, Steve Diamond, has put together enough data from public sources to seriously embarrass Obama over the closeness of his association with Ayers in the project, and to describe the wrong-headed and politicized approach taken by the project. Anyone can go to this page and look at the latter half of the very lengthy post to see the data uncovered by this intrepid researcher. At a minimum, it proves that Obama has seriously misled the public about his association with Ayers. And it documents and analyzes some of the complex left wing politics underlying the effort.

As the public begins to notice this outlines of the history of the CAC presented by Diamond, more questions are bound to be asked.

The First Cover-up

Diamond examined public documents, receiving cooperation from the Brown University Library, where the Annenberg Challenge Program national headuarters had been housed. Until, that is, Diamond's requests for further information fell on deaf ears following publication of a post highlighting a grant to one of Ayers' former revolutionary cohorts in the Weathermen. He writes:

"...while the representative from the university I originally corresponded with had been quite friendly and accommodating prior to my June 23 post, afterwards my additional requests for further information went unanswered. I did not pursue it at the time because I felt I had told a significant part of the story already. Thanks to the diligent work of Dr. Kurtz, however, we now know there is much more to know."

So the appearance of a cover-up actually began in June.

If Ayers were the sole point of interest in seeking the Annenberg Challenge files promised to Kurtz, all "132 boxes, containing 947 file folders, a total of about 70 linear feet of material", then the Obama camp might claim it was merely guilt-by association and persuade at least some of its own partisans. But the fact that Obama was in charge of a massive expensive project makes it indisputably a matter of proper vetting to examine his track record at delivering on promises of hope and change.

The Obama camp has already noted that it does not control the archives at UIC. All well and good, though it would be nice for the candidate to plead with the university and the mystery donor to let the sun shine on his track record. After all, he is a new kind of politician.

But even if he doesn't, the Annenberg Challenge is slowly entering the national consciousness, and that's very bad news for Barack Obama.


Thomas Lifson is editor and publisher of American Thinker.

For Release: July 26, 2012
Contact: David Almasi at (202) 507-6398 x11 or (703) 568-4727 or dalmasinationalcenter.org, or Judy Kent at (703) 759-7476 or jkentnationalcenter.org

New GroupSnoop.org Profile of the Brennan Center for Justice Released

Leading Opponent of Voter Integrity Measures is Financed By George Soros

Report Exposes Brennan Center for Justice's Biased Reporting and Liberal Funding

Washington, D.C. - A new report from the National Center for Public Policy Research finds the Brennan Center for Justice - one of the country's loudest opponents of voter integrity measures - to have a history of bias-driven research.

The report also discloses that the Brennan Center has received millions in funding from George Soros.

The report is the latest entry in the National Center's GroupSnoop.org series.

"The Brennan Center is on a mission to undermine support for voter integrity measures, claiming that state-level voter ID provisions will disfranchise millions of voters and that voter fraud rarely occurs. However, some of its major reports concerning voter ID measures and voter fraud are wrought with bias and have been refuted by election scholars," said National Center General Counsel Justin Danhof.

GroupSnoop.org is an educational website launched by the National Center in 2011 to provide candid, documented analysis of influential public policy-oriented non-profits. In the national debate over voter integrity measures, the Brennan Center is a prominent opponent of efforts to curb voter fraud and protect voters against identity theft. This new GroupSnoop.org profile shines some much-needed light onto the inner workings, funding and motivations of the Brennan Center.

The profile shows that the Brennan Center has a history of cherry-picking data that aligns with pre-determined conclusions that voter integrity measures, such as requiring a photo ID to vote, are actually efforts to disfranchise specific voting blocs. The Brennan Center appears to ignore or severely downplay data that are inconvenient for its theses.

For example, in November 2006, the Brennan Center published a widely cited report, "Citizens Without Proof," in which it claimed that 21 million adult Americans lack a photo ID, including 25 percent of black Americans. Election scholars with the Heritage Foundation evaluated the report and concluded that "[b]y eschewing many of the traditional scientific methods of data collection and analysis, the authors of the Brennan Center study appear to have pursued results that advance a particular political agenda rather than the truth about voter identification."

The Brennan Center profile on GroupSnoop.org also exposes the advocacy group's close ties to George Soros, known for his prolific funding of explicitly left-wing organizations. Soros has a history of making contributions intended to influence American policymaking and elections. Soros reportedly spent an estimated $27.5 million during the 2004 election cycle in a failed effort to oust then-President George W. Bush.

"Further clouding the Brennan Center's reputation is that convicted felon George Soros' Open Society Foundations have funneled over seven million dollars to the Brennan Center since 2000," said Danhof. "It is no wonder the Brennan Center works so hard on a daily basis to provide intellectual ammunition to those fighting voter integrity measures."

Despite the Brennan Center's best effort to paint voter integrity measures as racially-charged barriers to voting, the American public strongly supports democratically-enacted voter ID laws at the state level to protect the value of their vote. In a recent Rasmussen poll, 73 percent of Americans supported voter ID laws.

As the Brennan Center continues its campaign against voter ID, a simple and effective way to protect against stolen votes, it is troubling that the media - which increasingly seeks to "fact-check" political speech - is not reporting that the Brennan Center is an advocacy organization. This need for scrutiny is increasingly important given that the Brennan Center is willing to say that lawmakers supporting ballot protection legislation do so out of racial animosity and political maneuvering.

This new GroupSnoop.org profile should change that narrative.

"Brennan Center work should be presented as opinion - if it is considered at all," said Danhof. "The Brennan Center is a George Soros-funded extreme advocacy group that appears willing to fight all meaningful efforts to combat voter fraud. It should be regarded as such."

The National Center for Public Policy Research is a conservative, free-market, non-profit think-tank established in 1982. It is supported by the voluntary gifts of over 100,000 individual recent supporters. In 2011, it received over 350,000 individual donations. Two percent of its revenue comes from corporate sources. Contributions to it are tax-deductible and greatly appreciated.