By Jim Popkin, NBC News Senior Investigative Producer

Move over, Bill Ayers. This week, Republican activists have a new Public Enemy #1. It’s ACORN, the once-obscure community-organizing group that boasts of having registered 1.3 million new voters.

Republican officials and advisers to Sen. John McCain have accused ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) of rampant voter-registration fraud. Indeed, officials in states including Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, Indiana and Connecticut now are looking into accusations that ACORN workers turned in thousands of fraudulent or duplicate voter-registration applications. (The Dallas Cowboys magically filled out voter registration forms in Nevada, for example.)

So what exactly is ACORN’s track record in registering new voters? It hasn’t always been pretty. Here are some highlights (lowlights?) from recent court documents and public testimony in three states that have examined ACORN’s hiring practices over the past two years.

By Jim Popkin, NBC News Senior Investigative Producer

The Obama campaign’s Muslim outreach director participated in a meeting in mid September that was attended by several controversial Muslim activists, NBC News has learned. The Obama campaign now concedes that was a misjudgment, and that its top Muslim staffer would not have attended the meeting if she had known the full participant list beforehand.

“Would a campaign staffer have attended if they were aware of the complete list of attendees? No,” said Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt in an email statement to NBC.

The Muslim outreach meeting
On September 15, newly named Muslim outreach director Minha Husaini spoke to a small group of Muslim leaders and potential Obama supporters at a hotel in Springfield, Virginia, several meeting participants and the campaign said. Two other Obama-affiliated Democratic Party workers joined Husaini and also spoke to the crowd. Some Virginia and Washington, D.C.-based Muslim activists and interested citizens attended, and flyers were passed out from “Arab Americans for Obama” stating Sen. Obama’s goals for achieving peace in the Middle East, protecting the civil liberties of Arab Americans and ending the war in Iraq.

Several participants told NBC News that Husaini and other speakers delivered a standard Obama campaign pitch. “They said, ‘We’re here to get the concerns of Muslim voters and let everyone know that the Obama campaign does want the support of the Muslim community,’ ” recalled one participant, who requested anonymity. The meeting was not advertised and some attendees got text phone messages notifying them that day of the meeting’s location, the participant said.

Nearly a month later, the meeting is drawing controversy--and not because of anything said at the meeting itself.

By Jim Popkin, NBC News

Years before "Troopergate" and accusations that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin tried to kick her former brother-in-law out of the state police force, she was praising him as "a fine example" of "high-caliber personnel." In a letter dated July 8, 1999, Sarah Palin commended her future brother-in-law, Mike Wooten, for his hard work at Wasilla's July 4th parade.

"SRA Wooten worked hard to locate and deliver appropriate supplies to use in our parade," the then-mayor of Wasilla wrote to Wooten's Air Force commander. "I believe Mike is a fine example of the high-caliber personnel we are blessed to have in the United States Air Force. He was extremely helpful to our community and I thank you for allowing his assistance," Palin wrote.

The unsigned letter is one of hundreds of documents released today to NBC News by the Wasilla city government, dating back to Palin's six-year term as mayor.

The documents also substantiate Palin's sustained use of federal earmarks to fund local projects (she now opposes earmarks on the campaign trail), her personnel moves as mayor and her opposition to environmentalists' efforts to protect Alaska's Steller sea lions. The sea-lion protection plan, Palin wrote to then-Secretary of Commerce Norman Mineta, "will result in adverse conditions being placed on the livelihoods of Alaskans who rely on the fishing industry..."

By Jim Popkin, NBC News Senior Investigative Producer

When federal judges in San Francisco ruled in 2002 that reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools was unconstitutional because it included the phrase "under God," Sarah Palin was not amused. Palin, who at the time was Mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, quickly drafted a terse letter to the editor of a San Francisco newspaper.

“Dear Editor,” Palin wrote in 2002. “San Francisco judges forbidding our Pledge of Allegiance? They will take the phrase ‘under God’ away from me when my cold, dead lips can no longer utter those words,” Palin wrote.

 “God Bless America,” she concluded.

Hundreds of notes and letters
Palin’s letter to the editor is one of hundreds of personal notes and letters written by the former Mayor, and obtained this week to NBC News and others. The documents shed light on the management style--and personality--of the small town mayor turned vice presidential candidate.

By Robert Windrem, NBC News Producer

With 8,000 Russian troops still on their territory, Georgian officials are looking for whatever help they can get, including hiring lobbyists from both U.S. political parties to push through needed military and other aid. 
 
A search of records on the Justice Department’s Foreign Agents Registration Act list shows the contracts can be lucrative. The Georgians have paid two U.S. lobbying firms more than a million dollars since 2004.  And the principals of both firms are well-known advisors to presidential campaigns.

One of the lobbying contracts is well known.  Since 2004, Georgia has paid Orion Strategies $800,000 for lobbying. Orion was founded by Sen. John McCain's top foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, a former aide to Sen. Trent Lott. For the duration of the campaign, Scheunemann is taking a leave of absence from Orion and made a big deal about halting his work for Georgia earlier this year.

But on April 17, a month and a half after Scheunemann stopped working for Georgia, his partner signed a $200,000 agreement with the Georgian government. Under terms of the contract, Orion gets about $25,000 a month.

By Jim Popkin, NBC News Senior Investigative Producer

As a vice presidential candidate, Gov. Sarah Palin has railed against federal earmarks, or congressional funding for pork-barrel projects. "In our state, we reformed the abuses of earmarks," Palin recently boasted to a rally in Lancaster, Pa. "We championed earmark reform up there," she said, "to stop Congress from wasting public money on things that didn't serve the public interest."

But musty records culled from the archives of the Wasilla, Alaska, city government reveal that Palin was directly involved in soliciting millions of dollars in earmarks for Wasilla when she was mayor. And she got help from a well-connected Washington lobbyist.

In a monthly status report to the city on March 7, 2000, newly hired "City Lobbyist" Steve Silver describes how the Palin administration had requested $6.6 million in federal earmarks for water and sewer improvements for Wasilla, and another $1 million for police equipment. Mayor Palin reviewed and signed the lobbyist's report, dated April 5, 2000.

By Jim Popkin, NBC News Senior Investigative Producer

Well that didn't take long.

Just hours after releasing Sen. Joseph Biden's federal tax returns for the last 10 years, the Obama campaign began pressing Gov. Sarah Palin to follow suit. In an email to reporters titled "Nonpartisan Alaska Elected Official Calls on Gov. Palin to Release Tax Returns," the Obama campaign tried to put Gov. Palin on the defensive.
 
The email quoted Mat-Su Borough (Alaska) Assembly member Michelle Church as saying: “The important question today I guess would be, because Senator Biden released his tax returns, would be for Governor Palin to release her tax returns -- federal tax returns -- to show whether or not she actually paid federal income tax on those reimbursements for when she was living in her Wasilla home.”

By Jim Popkin, NBC News Senior Investigative Producer

The FBI today arrested Kevin Ring, a former lobbyist, for his alleged role in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. Justice Department officials said that the FBI arrested Ring this morning at his Maryland home. He is charged in a 10-count public-corruption indictment, the officials said. Ring is a former congressional staffer for Rep. John Doolittle (R-Ca.)

The indictment charges Ring with conspiring with Abramoff and others to corrupt congressional and executive-branch officials by providing things of value to several public officials "to induce or reward those who took official actions benefiting Ring and his clients."

As reported by the Associated Press, Ring is a one-time congressional aide who went on to
work with jailed lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Ring, 37, pleaded not guilty to a 10-count federal
indictment that accuses him of conspiring with Abramoff to win assistance from congressional and executive-branch officials by giving them things of value, and helping them skirt requirements to report those gifts.

He appeared in federal court unshaven, his hair rumpled, wearing shorts and a T-shirt and occasionally fighting back tears as he exchanged glances with his wife.

By Aram Roston and Amna Nawaz, NBC News producers

The GOP candidate for vice president, Gov. Sarah Palin, may be facing yet another ethics investigation back in her home state of Alaska. An ethics complaint obtained by NBC News was filed Wednesday by the police officers union in Alaska, requesting a probe into possible wrongdoing by the governor or her office. It was brought on behalf of state trooper Mike Wooten, an ex-brother-in-law of Palin who is at the center of the "Troopergate" scandal.

The complaint alleges that the governor or her staff may have have improperly disclosed information from Wooten's personnel records. The complaint alleges "criminal penalties may apply."

John Cyr, director of the union that filed the complaint, told NBC News, "It seems obvious to us somebody has improperly accessed [Wooten's] personnel file."

By Pete Williams, NBC News Justice Correspondent

Federal prosecutors today revealed the arrest of a Michigan man who made at least five Molotov cocktails that he planned to throw at the Republican National Convention. He also discussed plans to bomb underground power cables to shut off power to the convention center, according to the Justice Department.