Last night, ACORN founder Wade Rathke spoke at Busboys and Poets, a Washington coffeehouse and well-known lefty hangout. Rathke was promoting his new book, Citizen Wealth: Winning the Campaign to Save Working Families. Given the controversy over ACORN, you’d think the media would have been interested in Rathke’s making a public appearence and taking questions. But you’d be wrong.

Besides NRO, only three media outlets showed up to cover the event: BigGovernment.com, The Nation, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune (Rathke’s hometown paper). That was it. While Rathke’s primary purpose was to discuss and promote his book, he did take a number of questions about the ongoing ACORN controversy. At times, Rathke acknowledged the organization’s mistakes and sounded a bit humbled by its fall from grace. For the most part, however, he remained defiant, suggesting that ACORN’s critics were engaged in “neo-McCarthyism” and were motivated by a desire to supress the votes of poor people.

But most tellingly, Rathke did a great deal of dissembling rather than admit the organization has a history of pervasive corruption — corruption that he appears to have played a significant role in enabling.

Early on in the question-and-answer period, Rathke took a question from BigGovernment.com’s Maura Flynn. (Rather amusingly, Rathke professed to be totally unfamiliar with BigGovernment.com and seemed genuinely unaware that it is the media outlet most responsible for ACORN’s downfall.):

Maura Flynn: Are there any — leaving the current management out of it — any reforms that perhaps you’d like to see ACORN make or perhaps that you wanted to make prior to leaving?
Wade Rathke: When I was in Arkansas, one of the things I remember from my time there is that a ball coach up there at University of Arkansas — and Arkansas is quite the football state, so it pretty much shut down. This guy Lou Holtz — he’s still a commentator or something. The Razorbacks were in the Orange Bowl at one point, and all of a sudden the night before the Orange Bowl he suspends two or three of the star players, and some reporters were all up in his face about “What did they do?” and “What are you going to do?” and “What’s happening here?” Sweet Lou said, “You know what? They broke the ‘Do Right’ rule.” And so about that I’m clear. Some people obviously have broken the ‘Do Right’ rule. I don’t have a whole lot to say other than, to the degree they didn’t do right, that’s got to be fixed. And it’s got to be fixed in whatever fundamental way it takes to fix it. I hope that’s responsive to your question.

That response seemed a bit odd and self-serving. (Not to mention the fact that frequent Sean Hannity guest Lou Holtz would probably have a few things to say about ACORN and the “Do Right” rule.) The reason why Rathke stepped down from from his position as chief organizer of ACORN last year was that it was publicly revealed that his brother Dale Rathke had embezzled $950,000 from the organization in 1999 and 2000. Yet Dale Rathke remained on the organization’s payroll until June of last year — eight years after the embezzlement had come to light, and only after a whistle-blower made the incident public.

According to the New York Times, Rathke “said the decision to keep the matter secret was not made to protect his brother but because word of the embezzlement would have put a ‘weapon’ into the hands of enemies of Acorn, a liberal group that is a frequent target of conservatives who object to its often strident advocacy on behalf of low- and moderate-income families and workers.” Of course, Rathke worked to keep even ACORN’s own board of directors in the dark about the incident. It sure looks like he was afraid of being held accountable. In the ensuing organizational struggle after the embezzlement was made public, ACORN ousted two board members who (quite understandably) had begun pushing for measures to make ACORN more transparent. (For more background on this matter, see this Wendy Kaminer piece at The Atlantic.)

With all that in mind, Rathke and I had a rather forceful — yet civil — exchange later in the evening. The takeaways are: 1) Rathke thinks that what’s happening to ACORN now is proof that they were right to keep his brother’s embezzlement a secret, and 2) again, to the extent that ACORN has a corruption problem, Rathke thinks it’s a minor issue that is not important relative to the work the organization has done. But in fairness to Rathke, I will post the full transcript of our exchange:

RATHKE: Mr. National Review.
ME: Well, I want to say I do appreciate you having the courage to make a public appearance. I think that says something in and of itself. But going back to your previous answer there . . .
RATHKE: Well, I didn’t know it took courage. Now I’m questioning my good judgment. Is that a phone call for me?
ME: Again, I do appreciate that. I appreciate where you’re coming from with your last answer there, but then again, I don’t think the appearance of corruption at ACORN is necessarily something that can be dismissed. You spoke before about ACORN employees violating the “Do Right” rule. Okay? Well, this isn’t just relating to the current scandal. Your brother embezzled $950K from the organization and stayed on the payroll for the next 8 years. Meanwhile, two board members who were trying to increase transparency in the organization were kicked off. Now it seems to me from the outside looking in that you must have been instrumental in helping your brother stay on the payroll. I’m not going to say you did anything untoward. But certainly the perception would suggest that you’re not really in a position to suggest that there’s some weird automatic bias [against ACORN], and that there is in fact a very real reason to be concerned about corruption in the organization that goes far beyond the current scandal.
RATHKE: Well, there are about three or four questions you’ve packed in there so let’s look at them. One, I’m going to remind the rest of the listeners you said the word “appearance,” so I’m going to take it in good faith
that you’re saying “appearance” and not recklessly making exaggerations here. So there are a couple of things. My brother misappropriated not your figure — but it’s $985,000. [ED NOTE: The New York Times reported $948,607.50, but Rathke would be in a position to know the exact figure.] And when it was brought to my attention that was going on, we brought in an outside auditor to come up with a number. Once we came up with a number, we consulted with lawyers, and management counseled the staff, looked at the legal things. You could have restitution or retribution. The decision was to go with restitution. We came up with a plan that allowed that. He had worked for the organization for 20 years. People thought there were other contributions he could make. People may disagree. But he was taken out of any impact on finance, which is where he’d been. He tried in his own way both to payback what he’d misappropriated as well as live through his shame.
ME: Has that money been paid back?
RATHKE: Absolutely. Every dime has been publicly reported extensively. It was paid back throughout that period.
The second thing you asked was something about two board members and whatever. That actually happened after I left. I’ll get into that. But at the point the executive committee of the organization and the management made the decision to handle it privately and not more publicly deal with the situation, I implemented that program. At the point that eight-and-a-half, nine years later it became public, I immediately disclosed that to the full board and membership. To the degree that there were some people unhappy — you know I didn’t carry the title of chief organizer or train people about final responsibility because I didn’t believe in it. I mean, my hope was if there were any people who disagreed on the board or membership of our organization, I would [offer] my resignation, and I resigned June 2 — frankly, hoping that would solve the problem. Among the many things that I think are tragic and sad about this, it didn’t solve the problem. And I gather after I left, because of some of the internal politics of the board, there were some problems. I can tell you this. In the 38 years I worked for the board, there was only one person who was ever expelled from membership — he was a leader out of Reno, Nevada, who somehow, without going to any membership, endorsed some politician in Reno, and it became a whole mess and so he managed to have his membership not renewed. But pretty much when I was at ACORN, it was a free-floating wild culture. You had a position, you took that position. You won the votes, you prevailed. So I don’t know anything about ticking people off or not ticking people off. You need to talk to the new management about how that all may have worked or not worked. I wasn’t involved in that. Any other questions that I didn’t touch? So you know . . .
ME: Why didn’t you make it public? You said you resigned after the full board became aware of it, but why did it take so long for the full board of the organization to become aware of it?
RATHKE: Because the executive committee and mangement made a decision to keep it privately to deal with the restitution. They were worried — and you know I’ve been quoted everywhere, from New York Times on out — they worried about how this information would be weaponized to deal with the organization. I’m not going to get into whether or not I made the perfect implementation of this program or not, but I can say this: Looking at the current problems ACORN is having kind of makes me wonder if maybe that executive committee and that management council didn’t have a better recommendation of how vulnerable the organization was to attack, and how any misstep in the organization might become a threat to its very survival. That’s what is happening now; from what I gather that was the early question.
MWH: But is the threat from your own corruption, or because people are out to get you?
RATHKE: ‘Threat from your own corruption’? You want to talk to somebody else about that?
ME: It just sounds like you’re dissembling . . .
RATHKE: I mean, there is audits, investigations, lawyers, you know, crawling all up my leg for, you know, all the years I’ve done this work, and there’s never a dime that’s been misplaced. So I don’t know who this ‘our’ is besides you and the rat in your pocket. It’s not anybody that has to do with me. In terms of whether or not, of the thousands of people who worked for us, huge tragic problem that it happened to be somebody from my family. And that’s very regrettable in my opinion. There’s no apologies that are sufficient. But if you want to say that’s a culture . . . 38 years, yeah, there was that one problem. There are many organizations, many newspapers, many magazines, or many businesses that have problems and they go forward. And I think ACORN should have the right to have had a problem, and they did have a problem, we dealt with it accountably, took responsibility, money was paid back, eventually you know. . . . Obama has a great line in his book Tales From Our Father [sic] about one of the things he thought was such a wonderful thing about community-organizing. I can’t exactly share with you the culture that I’ve enjoyed being in for 40 years. What Obama says in that book [is that] what moved him the most about community-organizing was realizing its power of redemption. I understand from the outside people have trouble understanding the sort of subculture of organizing, and I can’t really explain it any better than I’m able to, but we have a culture within the work that doesn’t assume everybody is blameless and sinless, that actually is very redemptive and forgiving and understands that people have got lots of things going on, lots of problems, lots of things, but have come together collectively to try to do something better. And I think probably that’s one of the things that ACORN may have miscalibrated as it looked to deal with its own problem inside this family, or this organization. At the point it was all weaponized and became public, clearly, you know, deal with the major culture, not the minor culture.
ME: Thank you for your answer.