Credit where credit is due:  Wired Magazine’s Noah Shachtman and Conde Nast have a scoop on their hands. In the course of researching his new and largely fair piece on Andrew Breitbart and the “Big” websites, during which he was given unprecedented access, Shachtman learned of a new project-in-progress by ACORN stingmeister James O’Keefe involving the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) offices in Detroit and Chicago:

wired_logo

This time, there are no prostitutes involved, just a shady, and serious, tax-fraud scheme. The ploy involves the Obama administration’s 10 percent tax credit to first-time home buyers. The law says that the credit maxes out at $8,000 for an $80,000 home. But at the Detroit office of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the rule seems open to interpretation. O’Keefe asks a staffer, What if I bought a place for $50,000, but the seller and I agreed to write down $80,000 as the purchase price?

“Flip it any way you want,” the staffer replies.

What if the place is worth much less — like only $6,000?

“Yup, you can do that.”

O’Keefe and fellow activist Joe Basel ran the same sting at HUD’s Chicago office and at several federally supported independent housing groups. Breitbart paces the parquet floor. The video is damning but not exactly Acorn-explosive.

Then O’Keefe stops the playback. “Oh yeah, I forgot,” he says. “We went to the Detroit Free Press, to the managing editor. We told her the whole thing. She said she wasn’t interested. Wanna see the tape?” (more…)