My article in today’s FrontPage Magazine:

ACORN slayer James O’Keefe with Matthew Vadum

The undercover videographer who helped to kill ACORN is now turning
his powerful lens on Obamacare “navigators,” showing how left-wing
groups break the law and defraud taxpayers by pushing Obamacare
exchanges.

The undercover investigators of Project Veritas, the nonprofit
created by ACORN slayer James O’Keefe III, are going after the almost
50,000 Obamacare “navigators,” whom the U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services says are supposed to “serve as an in-person resource for
Americans who want additional assistance in shopping for and enrolling
in plans” on the Obamacare exchanges.

Left-wing activists have scooped
up more than $67 million in grants nationwide to hire the navigators, a
payoff to ACORN and other radical outfits that helped win Barack Obama
the presidency.

Undercover investigators from Project Veritas captured taxpayer-paid Obamacare promoters on video telling health care insurance applicants to lie about preexisting medical conditions.

A new video shows an Obamacare navigator employed by the National
Urban League in Texas counseling an investigator to be untruthful when
completing documentation needed to apply for health care insurance on
the Obamacare exchanges. The league took in $376,000 from the federal
government for its navigator work.

“You lie because your premiums will be higher,” one navigator tells
the undercover journalist, who advised the person that he occasionally
smokes. “Don’t tell them that. Don’t tell ’em.”

When the investigator pretends to be a low-income university employee
with unreported cash income that, if declared, could endanger his
eligibility for federal premium subsidies, the navigators advises,
“Don’t get yourself in trouble by declaring it now.”

“Yeah, it didn’t happen,” says another navigator. Another adds, “Never report it.”

The video also shows Project Veritas visiting Enroll America, a
nationwide nonprofit group that is encouraging millions of Americans to
sign up for health insurance coverage on Obamacare exchanges.

As John Fund notes in a National Review Online article, Daniel
Clayton of Enroll America says the group is “purely nonprofit. It’s not
partisan, non-political.” But when Brian Pendleton, also of Enroll
America, was introduced at a speaking engagement, Enroll America was
called “the official group for the DNC [Democratic National Committee].”

O’Keefe, Fund reports, says Enroll America “appears to be sharing
data and working directly with an explicitly political group called
Battleground Texas, activities that [O’Keefe] notes ‘are prohibited
unless certain conditions are met.’ Adrian Bell, the regional field
director for Battleground Texas, proudly notes the group was ‘started by
President Obama’s national field director’ and is ‘dedicated to turning
Texas blue.’”

The release of the video has already produced promising
results. The Urban League of Greater Dallas fired one person and
suspended three others shown in the video exhorting health care
applicants to lie. The group stated it “does not condone, nor would we
ever sanction, misleading the public or any individual who seeks our
assistance about any issue, and particularly in this case, an issue as
critical as health care.”

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) called for the navigators program to be
halted after he watched the video. “This behavior is unacceptable, and
is yet another broken piece of a deeply flawed system,” Cornyn said.

“We have so much footage, so many offices,” O’Keefe wrote
of his new Obamacare navigator sting operation on his Twitter account.
“So many employees. So much fraud caught on tape. We’re going to release
them all one by one.”

O’Keefe is following the same highly successful rollout strategy the
late Andrew Breitbart used in fall 2009 that disseminated O’Keefe’s
videos showing ACORN wrongdoings and kept ACORN employees’ criminal
behavior in the forefront of each new day’s news cycle. Breitbart would
release a video showing misdeeds in an ACORN office in one city and then
ACORN would lie, denying the behavior or claiming it was carried out by
rogue employees. On another day Breitbart would release a video from an
ACORN office in another city showing similar unethical or unlawful
behavior and ACORN would again offer dishonest spin on the new video.
Several more videos were released this way, and each time ACORN shot
itself in the foot by trying to explain away what viewers’ lying eyes
had observed.

This culminated in a farcical National Press Club media event in
which ACORN’s then-chief organizer Bertha Lewis claimed that shadowy
forces had somehow conspired to harm her poor little innocent group.

Even left-wing Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank openly
mocked Lewis at the time, finding himself in the unaccustomed position
of defending Republicans. “In creativity, the ACORN boss’s denials were
matched only by her assignments of blame … [s]he blamed her predecessor
…  [s]he blamed the powerful … [a]nd most of all, she blamed
Republicans,” accusing them, ridiculously, of what she called
“modern-day ACORN McCarthyism.”

The Breitbart approach paid off, devastating the organized crime
syndicate that used to employ Barack Obama as a trainer and as its
attorney.

The undercover videos shot by O’Keefe and his then-partner Hannah
Giles in mid-2009 showed ACORN employees across the nation giving
helpful advice on how to lie to the government, commit tax fraud, and
trick banks into providing loans for brothels catering to pedophiles.
The videos helped to kill off the group which had been hit the year
before with the revelation of a million-dollar embezzlement scandal and
cover-up involving its founder Wade Rathke.

Later that year Congress, which had given ACORN about $79 million in
grants over the years, approved a law permanently pulling ACORN off the
ever bounteous public teat. The 400,000-member organization filed for
bankruptcy in November 2010. ACORN’s largest division, ACORN Housing,
changed its name to Affordable Housing Centers of America to distance
itself from the tarnished ACORN brand but still ended up collapsing in 2012 despite receiving sizable cash injections from the Obama administration.
Remnants of the ACORN network are involved in providing Obamacare navigators too.

United Labor Unions (ULU) Local 100 in New Orleans, is reportedly
providing navigators in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. In 1979, ACORN
created the United Labor Unions, which it used to organize low-wage,
fast-food, and home healthcare workers in Louisiana, Arkansas, and
Texas.

ULU 100 is headed by ACORN founder Wade Rathke, a corrupt union
ringleader who orchestrated massive campaigns involving identity fraud
in furtherance of voter fraud and who covered up a million-dollar
embezzlement involving pension funds. Now his navigators have unfettered
access to confidential information on thousands of people seeking
health insurance. ACORN, or the Association of Community Organizations
for Reform Now, is the nonprofit group that knowingly hired felons
convicted of identity theft to work on voter registration drives, giving
them custody of sensitive voter information.

As I showed in my ACORN/Obama expose, Subversion Inc.,
ACORN is also infamous for hiring felons without bothering to do
background checks, storming hospital emergency rooms and city council
chambers, using voter fraud to turn graveyards across the nation into
Democratic electoral strongholds, using mob violence against bank
executives and other shakedown targets, and for ruthlessly exploiting
its own employees and going to court to seek an exemption from minimum
wage laws.

Fund reports that ULU Local 100 is

a “sub-grantee” providing navigators for the Southern
United Neighborhoods group, which received a $600,678 grant to promote
Obamacare enrollment. It also received a $270,193 grant for similar work
in Arkansas and a $486,123 grant for Louisiana. Marcel Reid, a former
dissident board member of ACORN who broke with the group in 2008 over
its questionable practices, told me earlier this year, “ACORN is forming
new groups under new mismanagement, and if Wade Rathke is involved in
any of them, it spells trouble.”

Enrollment isn’t going so well at HealthCare.gov.

In the month of October, signups on the Obamacare health insurance
exchanges for Medicaid, the joint federal-state welfare program that
provides health insurance for the poor, vastly outnumbered signups for private insurance.

“When we first saw the numbers, everyone’s eyes kind of bugged out,”
said Matt Salo, executive director of the National Association of
Medicaid Directors. “Of the people walking through the door, 90 percent
are on Medicaid. We’re thinking, what planet is this happening on?”

To make matters worse, flaws in the HealthCare.gov website reportedly allow ineligible individuals anywhere in the world to sign up for Medicaid.

The exchanges themselves are artificial, bureaucrat-created cartels
that merely mimic free, competitive markets, perhaps well enough to dupe
some people into believing they’re engaging in actual eBay- or
Amazon-style commerce. It’s not really shopping, of course, if you have a
gun to your head.

Speaking of guns to the head, felons may tapping into confidential personal data stored at HealthCare.gov.

Responding to questions from Sen. Cornyn during a recent
congressional hearing, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said it is
“possible” that convicted criminals are among Obamacare navigators, who
have access to Americans’ personal information.

“Isn’t it true that there is no federal requirement for navigators to
undergo a criminal background check,” said Cornyn, “even though they
will receive sensitive personal information from the individuals they
help to sign-up up for the Affordable Care Act?”

Sebelius replied, “That is true. States could add an additional
background checks and other features, but it is not part of the federal
requirement.”

Cornyn asked, “So a convicted felon could be a navigator and could
acquire sensitive personal information from an individual unbeknownst to
them?”

Sebelius answered, “That is possible.”

As FrontPage previously predicted, enrollment has turned into a
dangerous free-for-all because Obamacare “navigators” are barely
regulated at all. By the way, the only reason there are any “navigators”
is to help the Left, as HHS Secretary Sebelius has more or less
admitted. Imposing rules would only interfere with community organizers’
ability to wreak havoc and spread the gospel of so-called social
justice.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal previously warned that the Obamacare navigator program, like all of Obamacare, is deeply flawed.

“‘Navigator’ is a crafty name, but in reality, there are very few
restrictions on who they are, and what exactly they are supposed to be
doing,” Jindal says. “‘Navigators’ are supposed to be hired to help
consumers understand the law and the insurance coverage provisions in
the new health exchanges. Sounds like a job for a rocket scientist.” He
continued:

The “navigators” are prohibited from having financial
ties to an insurance company, but other than that there are few
constraints. Union organizers and community activists are among the
types that are allowed to be hired as “navigators,” and having prior
experience working in the health care field doesn’t seem to necessarily
be a pre-requisite for the job. I wonder what percentage of these
“navigators” will be partisan Democrats?

Sebelius has been looking to
radical left-wing community organizers to fill navigator ranks since at
least early last year. In April 2012 she tried to recruit activists at
the national convention of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network (NAN).

“In our country what we know is health care inequality [has been] one
of the most persistent forms of injustice but over the past three
years, as Rev. Sharpton reminded us, we have begun to turn the tide,”
Sebelius said at the time. “Now is not the time to turn back.”

The Left has spent the last few weeks rushing to Obamacare’s defense
as implementation of the law flames out spectacularly in real time.

Pseudojournalist Alex Seitz-Wald, whose calling is to lie about
conservatives and devise new and inventive spin to defend professional
leftists, previously lied again and again about ACORN and the O’Keefe
sting, falsely accusing O’Keefe of performing misleading edits on the
ACORN videos in 2009.

Now, according to Seitz-Wald, it’s Republicans’ fault that Obamacare navigators are corrupt and incompetent.
GOPers are throwing up unnecessary roadblocks meant to stop
navigators from performing their noble, selfless tasks, the former Salon
reporter writes.

But whether by fees, background checks, tests, extra
training, certifications, threats of civil penalties, or delays,
Republican legislatures and officials in at least 17 states across the
country have thrown up all manner of bureaucratic roadblocks in front of
the program. The officials say the regulations are necessary to protect
consumers and their personal information, but health care reform
advocates say the regulations, adopted only in states controlled by
Republicans, are just part of a multipronged campaign to obstruct the
implementation of the Affordable Care Act at every turn.

Nice try.

Thanks to the excellent, public-spirited work of James O’Keefe and
Project Veritas, Seitz-Wald and the other paid professional liars of the
left-wing legacy media are going to have to spin harder than that.