Woman Who Ambushed Flake in Elevator Is Director of Soros-Funded Group

At least one of the women who cornered Arizona senator Jeff Flake in an elevator last Friday, screaming in his face for several excruciating minutes, works for the Soros-funded Center for Popular Democracy, the left-wing organization spearheading the effort to stop Kavanaugh.

Ana Maria Archila and 23-year-old Maria Gallagher are the two women who confronted Flake in the elevator.

Flake had just announced that he was going to vote yes on moving Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination out of the Judiciary Committee and onto the Senate floor for a full debate when the activists trapped him in the elevator.

CNN’s Suzanne Malveaux met the pair while waiting outside Flake’s office earlier that morning. According to Malveaux, they ran after Flake when they caught sight of him and some staffers walking down the hall.

“We caught up with him just as he was getting into the elevator. The doors were closing, and Archila literally and figuratively put her foot down — causing the doors to open,” Malveaux wrote.

“You have children in your family. Think about them. I have two children. I cannot imagine that for the next 50 years they will have to have someone in the Supreme Court who has been accused of violating a young girl,” Archila shouted. “What are you doing, sir?”

Gallagher hollered: “I was sexually assaulted and nobody believed me! I didn’t tell anyone, and you’re telling all women that they don’t matter, that they should just stay quiet because if they tell you what happened to them you are going to ignore them. That’s what happened to me, and that’s what you are telling all women in America, that they don’t matter!”

According to National Review’s John Fund, both of the women work for the far-left Soros group.

Archila is an executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy; she had spent the previous week in Washington engaged in protests against Kavanaugh. Gallagher is a 23-year-old activist with the group. The Center is a left-wing group that is heavily funded by George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. Indeed, as of 2014, the Open Society was one of the three largest donors to the group.

A spokeswoman for the Center for Popular Democracy told the New York Times that Gallagher was “not directly affiliated” with the organization but was “just a passionate person.”

According to Malveaux, “the two were strangers” until just a few hours before the confrontation when they “discovered they had a similar pain and decided to go to Flake’s office because they thought he could be their critical ally.”

Capitol Police arrested 70 protesters on September 4, the day of Kavanaugh’s first confirmation hearing, Roll Call reported.

Most of those arrested were activists from the Women’s March and the Center for Popular Democracy who were charged with disorderly conduct.

They probably had no problem making bail.

As the Washington Free Beacon previously reported: “George Soros is one of the largest funders to the CPD. Soros provided the CPD with $130,000 from the Foundation to Promote Open Society in 2014 and $1,164,500 in 2015. Soros provided an additional $705,000 from the Open Society Policy Center in 2016.”

Besides being a co-director of the Center for Popular Democracy, Archila is also a member of the national committee of the Working Families Party (WFP), which was founded in 1998 by the leaders of ACORN, Fund reports. Barack Obama served as a lawyer for the now disgraced and disbanded community organizing group in Chicago in the 1990s.

Many of the same organizers involved with ACORN, such as New York executive director Steven Kest and chief organizer Bertha Lewis, are also leaders in the WFP.

And both the WFP and ACORN are housed at the same address in Brooklyn, New York.

Matthew Vadum of the Capital Research Center bluntly concluded that the WFP was “ACORN’s political party” in 2011, as he reported on how four Democrats associated with the Working Families Party had entered guilty pleas in an elaborate voter-fraud scheme in Troy, N.Y.

ACORN was one of the most disreputable, amoral, and sleazy groups every to darken American democracy. It used street demonstrations and boycotts against banks to force lower credit standards for home loans, which a congressional report found had contributed to the subprime-loan mess.

But ACORN ultimately became best known for its voter-fraud misdeeds. In 2012, in an article published at American Thinker, Vadum summed up the group’s record as follows:

At least 52 individuals who worked for ACORN or its affiliates, or who were connected to ACORN, have been convicted of voter registration fraud. ACORN itself was convicted in Nevada last year of the crime of “compensation.” Under the leadership of ACORN official Amy Adele Busefink, who was also convicted of the same crime, ACORN paid voter-registration canvassers cash bonuses for exceeding their quotas. This is illegal because it gives people an incentive to commit fraud by adding Mickey Mouse and Mary Poppins to the voter rolls.

Under Busefink’s leadership, ACORN and its affiliate Project Vote generated an impressive 1.1 million voter registration packages across America in 2008. The problem was that election officials invalidated 400,000 — that’s 36 percent — of the registrations filed.

In 2009, ACORN finally ran off the rails. Guerrilla videographer James O’Keefe secretly recorded employees in ACORN’s offices in Brooklyn, Baltimore, Washington, and San Bernardino, Calif. O’Keefe and a colleague posed as a prostitute and a pimp and said they were planning to import underage women from El Salvador for the sex trade. They asked for and received advice on getting a housing loan and evading federal taxes.

ACORN claimed that the videos were “doctored” and accused critics of a smear campaign and “racist coverage” of the incidents.

But that didn’t fly with the U.S. Senate, which quickly voted 83 to 7 to strip ACORN of more than $1.6 million in federal housing money meant to help low-income people obtain loans and prepare tax forms. That dramatic step followed the decision by President Obama’s U.S. Census Bureau to sever its ties with the organization. Within weeks, ACORN’s donors fled the group and it was forced to close its doors, with many of its affiliates reforming under new mismanagement and new names — such as the Working Families Party.

A reporter asked Flake, “Did the women who confronted you this morning, did they have any role in changing your mind?”

“No, no,” Flake answered, shaking his head.

Be that as it may, many on the left are crediting the left-wing activists for helping Flake have a change of heart about his vote for Kavanaugh.

ThinkProgress’ Ian Millhiser suggested on Twitter that the incident should embolden progressives to engage in similar direct actions wherever Republicans eat, sleep, and work.

https://twitter.com/imillhiser/status/1045740430229409793

Ana Marie Cox said it’s why “we get in people’s faces.”

Watching Flake decide he wants a FBI investigation, never forget: This is why we do direct action. This is why we “get in people’s faces.” This is why our stories matter. pic.twitter.com/3pbSXcPZG6

— ana marie cox (@anamariecox) September 28, 2018