Philadelphia Weekly

PW: I'm curious as to how this domino effect with the de-funding thing happened so quickly without any kind of oversight, investigation or congressional hearing, it was was simply a matter of, "this is what Fox News had, lets pull the funding."

WADE RATHKE: Jonathan, that question is one I ask whenever I run into somebody still working with ACORN or still, like you, thinking about it. It's what I don't get either. It's such a herd mentality, I don't want to keep using this phrase, but it is such a clear example of Neo-McCarthyism, a rush to judgment without pretense of due process. There's this congressman out of New York who's talked about this being a Bill Of Attainder against the Constitution, but none of it's slowed them down. I know the Republican governor's website told all their Republican governors they should discontinue funding ACORN. So a couple of other states got embarrassed when they issued executive order stop all money to ACORN and then a day or two later realized they had never put a dime into ACORN anyway, so what was the point? This is just unprecedented I think, the only thing I compare it to is the Palmer Raids in 1919 against unions and others. It just and aberration of basic rights and justice principles that should protect organizations no matter how controversial they may be, like ACORN.

PW: Lastly, I want to ask you to clarify or comment the incident that led to you leaving ACORN, with the embezzlement of your brother and your actions in the wake of that.

WADE RATHKE: What comment are you asking me to clarify?

PW: Well, is the story as told accurate? That your brother...

WADE RATHKE: Years ago we discovered, our accounting contractor came to me and said there were things that weren't adding up on the credit card. I asked our outside auditors to come in and investigate, they did so. They did a forensic audit to determine what the level of the misappropriation was, we brought in outside lawyers as well as in-house council to determine what the course of action might be. We had two choices, we could either enter a restitution side to try to get repaid or we could go with the retribution side and turn it over to the police. Both of those options, we were told from outside council, were equally legal and permissible. I brought this to the management council, the management council unanimously voted, without my participation, to go with restitution as opposed to retribution. I brought it to the executive committee, the executive committee approved that and over a period of time the money was paid back as per the terms of the agreement. That's what happened. Part of the decision, at that time, 10 years ago this all came out just as the Bush V. Gore thing was happening, so it was not a period where we felt we would be well-served if it was front page news. It came up again in the middle of 2008 and was raised to a thunder and I fully disclosed to everyone, the whole staff, as well as the whole board, but there are a couple of people that weren't happy about that. I was chief organizer, I was founder of the organization, and I tried to take the responsibility by resigning, hoping that would just prove a fundamental principle we have of accountability. There was even a small minority of people that believed we made the wrong decision by not going public at that time or whatever. I took responsibility and resigned. So that's what happened. The committee actually at first tried to not accept by resignation, but I insisted it had to be. Unfortunately it didn't seem to stop the problem. The same reason perhaps that we kept the secret internal all these years, to protect the organization like it did sort of did. Once I was gone, they lost control of the story and it certainly has not been pretty how it was handled.