Seattle, Washington FBI Bureau File - Paperless Archives

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1 per day. (This was after ACORN threatened to close down the office for poor
performance. Debwa said she communicated this to the workers). Because of the high
2 volume of cards she got behind on the verification process. She said she noticed that
the cards turned in by Tina Johnson, Jayson Woods and Ryan Olson appeared as if they
3 were fraudulent. She also noted that all of these cards were coming from Seattle.
4 Debwa continued to avoid direct questions about when she recognized that there was a
problem, what specifically the problem was and who all were responsible. Also, she
5 avoided again the subject of who was terminated and when.
6 SOFA Hobbs then asked Debwa to identify initials on copies of cards. She said "CM"
were Clifton Mitchell's initials; "TJ" were Tina Johnson's initials; "RG" were Robert
7 Green's initials; "JW" were Jayson Wood's initials; and, "KLT" belonged to Kendra
Thill.
8
Debwa was asked if there were no initials on a card what was done. She said the card
9 was pulled out. She was told that there were a large number of cards submitted to
King County with no initials. She then said she remembered at the end she noticed a
10 large number without initials.
11 Oebwa then volunteered that Mitchell would collect cards from workers and bring them
in at the end of the day. She said she thought people were sharing cards. When asked
12 to explain she said that she thought they were dividing up cards and then putting
their initials on them. Debwa would not elaborate, so she was asked if she meant that
13 she believed that cards were filled out somewhere, using a phone book for example, by
workers and then divided up later so each worker had completed cards to turn in. She
14 said that is what she thought.
15 She then said that one day Mitchell came in with a large stack of un-initialed cards.
Then, suddenly, they would have initials. She thinks this was done to meet the ACORN
16 quota. Again, Debwa avoided saying that they were fraudulent, although it was clear
that is what she was implying.
17
Debwa was asked again to elaborate. She said, "I think towards the end they were
18 getting names out of the phonebook." She said she started recognizing duplicates, bad
driver license numbers and Social Security Numbers (although, it is unknown how she
19 could tell if a Social Security Number was wrong). Debwa was asked if she documented
these problems. She said she documented them by dividing the cards into piles, as
20 described above.
21 Debwa was then asked if at the end she got overwhelmed with the large number of cards,
and that, combined with the pressures put on by ACORN, led her to ignore obvious
22 fraudulent activity. She said yes. She also nodded her head when asked if she did a
termination notice on the workers at the end to cover herself.
23
Oebwa then said that she sent in the large number of un-initialed cards to King County
24 because she didn't know what to do with them.
25
Certification for Determination
of Probable Cause
Norm Maleng
Prosecuting Attorney
W 554 King County Courthouse
Seattle, Washington 98104-2312
(206) 296-9000