A top Republican today tried to link the defunct community organizing group ACORN to the Occupy Wall Street movement, demanding that one of Acorn’s successors be investigated for “fraud” for allegedly raising money for other causes and giving it to the protesters.

But while former leaders of ACORN say they support the Occupy movement and played a role in organizing a rally in support of it last month, they dismiss House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa’s charges that they’re behind it as wishful thinking.

“I’d like to say this was our idea and we had something to do with it, but we didn’t,” New York Communities for Change executive director John Kest told POLITICO. “It’s coming from a totally different place – it’s a different constituency than we tend to organize. It’s just tapping into something we knew was there in the communities we work in, but we didn’t necessarily know it was something that existed all throughout society.”

“We have never given any money to Occupy Wall Street,” he said of Issa’s specific charge, first reported by Fox News, that money donated for other causes had been funneled to the “Occupy” movement. “It’s just absurd.”

And indeed, the most striking fact about the “Occupy” movement isn’t the involvement of post-Acorn groups like New York Communities for Change, but its growth outside the old structures of the left. While some on the right would love to link ACORN to Occupy more directly, given the defunct organization’s perennial power as a favorite conservative target, ACORN’s old supporters, and the organizing groups trying to rebuild from its ashes say it collapsed in part for a lack of allies outside its base in low-income, minority communities – the key constituencies of Occupy.

“Had there been something like this before 2008, a movement redefining what some of the issues are nationally, ACORN would probably not have gone down,” speculated John Atlas, the author of a recent, sympathetic history of the defunct community organizing group, “Seeds of Change.” ACORN collapsed amid a conservative assault, he said, because it had grown so reliant on institutions to which the Occupy movement has few ties.

“They were all getting money from corporations and big foundations,” he said. “If you’re getting money from corporations , big foundations, and even the government, it’s hard to attack them.”

New York Communities for Change, which occupies the city’s old ACORN offices and is run by its former officials, became the target of conservative scrutiny when Fox News reported that the group “is playing a key role in the self-proclaimed ‘leaderless’ Occupy Wall Street movement.”

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