Anita MonCrief, the ACORN whistle-blower who announced at the 2010 Right Online convention that she planned on filing FEC charges against Obama for his campaigns illegal work with ACORN during the 2008 election, has released a donor list to Obama's presidential campaign in which she says the New York Times were planning on running months before the election. However, after the reporter received calls from Obama's campaign calling her a "rightwing nut" and "conspiracy theorist", she backed off. "As a confidential source for the New York Times, I turned this document over to reporter Stephanie Strom months before the 2008 presidential elections and though the list includes information more complete than what the Obama campaign turned over to the Federal Election Commission, the NYT decided to bury the story" MonCrief wrote on her website EmergingCorruption.com. The document MonCrief is referring to is the Obama donor list, which can be found here, a screenshot of list can be viewed here. MonCrief exchanged e-mails with Strom using pseudonymous e-mail addresses. Storm planned on running the story until she received the call-- in which then she wrote the following informing Anita of the situation:
“I’m calling a halt to my efforts. I just had two unpleasant calls with the Obama campaign, wherein the spokesman was screaming and yelling and cursing me, calling me a rightwing nut and a conspiracy theorist and everything else…”
“What’s happened is that the campaign has answered some of my questions on the record — but when I sought on-the-record answers to my questions about the meeting and about the list, the campaign insisted on speaking only on background. When I asked why, I got the barrage I described earlier. Clearly, I’ve hit a nerve with what you’ve told me. The campaign knows that having the allegations of meeting attributed to ‘former employees’ — and there are more than one of you talking — and having an anonymous denial of the meeting makes it harder for me to get it into the paper", Strom wrote.
MonCrief also drew a parallel between the newly exposed JournoList-- a ListServe of off-the-record conversations amongst 400 left-of-center journalists, think tankers, and academia showing attempts to control the message within the media-- saying:
Considering that Journolist included journalists from Washington Post, the New York Times, National Public Radio, New Republic, and Time, one has to wonder if the biggest story covered up in 2008 was the illegal coordination between ACORN and the Obama campaign.
Ever since blowing the whistle on ACORN, Moncrief has worked tirelessly in hopes of exposing the corruption that occurred within ACORN as well as affiliated groups. To view Anita's website, click here.