Prosecutors clear ACORN in N.Y. case

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NEW YORK, March 1 (UPI) -- The community organizing group ACORN did nothing wrong in its dealings with conservative activists posing as a prostitute and a pimp, New York prosecutors said.

Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes, whose office investigated the matter for four months, said Monday "no criminality had been found" on the part of three employees of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, the New York Daily News reported.

The conservative activists, James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, posed as a pimp and a prostitute and secretly filmed meetings with employees at several ACORN offices in the United States. Their video of an encounter in the New York office appeared to show ACORN employees giving them guidance on how to hide income from prostitution -- but a law enforcement source told the Daily News the unedited video did not support the narrative of the edited version.

"They edited the tape to meet their agenda," the source said.

"Acorn is gratified that the DA has concluded something we knew all along," ACORN lawyer Arthur Schwartz said.

Schwartz said O'Keefe and Giles used "subterfuge to convince Congress and the media to vilify an organization that didn't deserve it."