Life During Wartime
Tapping phone lines? I know that that ain’t allowed:
Alleging a plot to wiretap Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office in the Hale Boggs Federal Building in downtown New Orleans, the FBI arrested four people Monday, including James O’Keefe, a conservative filmmaker whose undercover videos at ACORN field offices severely damaged the advocacy group’s credibility.Also arrested were Joseph Basel, Stan Dai and Robert Flanagan, all 24. Flanagan is the son of William Flanagan, who is the acting U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Louisiana, the office confirmed. All four were charged with entering federal property under false pretenses with the intent of committing a felony.
According to the FBI affidavit, Flanagan and Basel entered the federal building at 500 Poydras Street about 11 a.m. Monday, dressed as telephone company employees, wearing jeans, fluorescent green vests, tool belts, and hard hats. When they arrived at Landrieu’s 10th floor office, O’Keefe was already in the office and had told a staffer he was waiting for someone to arrive.
More as it develops. (And watch the legacy media cover this without reporting, or minimizing O’Keefe’s role in the ACORN stings.)
Update: To borrow from the title of another 1970s-era song, Allahpundit is predicting “Ten Years Gone” for O’Keefe as a result of this latest stunt, and adds:
The editors of Big Government claim they knew nothing about it, which is almost certainly true: No way would Breitbart be so stupid as to sign off on tapping a senator’s phone. What makes this doubly bizarre, of course, is that O’Keefe was already threatened with legal action by ACORN for surreptitiously videotaping inside their offices. You’d think if he was planning to try something as insanely underhanded as this, he might have done, say, a Wikipedia search about whether it’s illegal to, um, tamper with government phone lines.
Here are the two statutes cited in the affidavit, incidentally: Sections 1036 and 1362 of Title 18. The former, entering federal property under false pretenses, is clear cut, which is probably why the four allegedly already admitted to it. The more serious charge is section 1362:
Whoever willfully or maliciously injures or destroys any of the works, property, or material of any radio, telegraph, telephone or cable, line, station, or system, or other means of communication, operated or controlled by the United States, or used or intended to be used for military or civil defense functions of the United States, whether constructed or in process of construction, or willfully or maliciously interferes in any way with the working or use of any such line, or system, or willfully or maliciously obstructs, hinders, or delays the transmission of any communication over any such line, or system, or attempts or conspires to do such an act, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.
I assume the defense is going to be something like, “We never intended to tap the phone, we simply wanted to show how easy it would be if someone wanted to do it,” but even so: Ohhhhhhhhhhhh boy. Ten years.
Ohhh boy, indeed.™
Update: Michelle Malkin adds:
They are, of course, presumed innocent until proven guilty.
But for now, let it be a lesson to aspiring young conservatives interested in investigative journalism:
Know your limits. Know the law. Don’t get carried away. And don’t become what you are targeting.
ACORN’s defenders transformed themselves into Nixonian caricatures. Based on the story so far, it appears that O’Keefe may have been channeling RFK or J. Edgar Hoover.
Update: The Political Byline has a round-up of initial conservative reaction.
Update: Statement from Andrew Breitbart:
“We have no knowledge about or connection to any alleged acts and events involving James O’Keefe at Senator Mary Landrieu’s office. We only just learned about the alleged incident this afternoon. We have no information other than what has been reported publicly by the press. Accordingly, we simply are not in a position to make any further comment.”
More as it comes in.
Update: Hugh Hewitt has a lengthy interview with Breibart on O’Keefe’s arrest; transcript here.
Update: More from Breitbart at his Big Government Website.
Update: Patterico writes, “I’m sticking out my neck and declaring that I think this will prove to be a big nothing”:
I just don’t believe this guy was wiretapping phones or trying to do so. I really don’t.
It might not even have been an attempt to show how easy it would be to bug phones. Maybe there is another explanation. But I don’t think he was acting in a criminal fashion. I don’t.
You can quote me.
Fair enough.
Update (1/28/10): The Washington Post walks back their “wiretapping allegation”, and sparks fly between Breitbart and “objective” MSNBC journalist David Shuster, in a new update online here.
I don’t agree. They’ll use this to impeach the Acorn sting and to try to rehabilitate Acorn.
This guy, O’Keefe — he’s a work of art. Maybe he got a little too emboldened by the press he got with the ACORN prank, but this is over the line. I honestly don’t care if ACORN is rehabilitated or not (per Steven’s comment), but this smells of a Watergate-type attempt gone bad by a bunch of true amateurs (Nixon’s people were amateurs, but not fools like this bunch). I hope they get a few years with Bubba in federal prison somewhere to think about their tactics. Zealotry has no place in US society — I don’t care what political party is targeted.
A final thought, boiled down into one word: IDIOTS.
Sometime you can break a story and make a major national impact, and other times, it’s just not as easy.
Dressing up as a pimp with prostitute in tow and walking into ACORN offices with a hidden camera is one thing, and in that case the people O’Keefe and Giles talked to implicated themselves face-to-face with the pair. Going into a government office and attempting to wiretap a phone, if the indictment is true, is both illegal under the law and really more of a fishing expedition than anything else (and would have been doubly stupid if the plan was to bug the office and then call up pretending to be someone else and try to entrap Landieu and/or her staff with some illegal offer).
My guess is this will embolden the prosecutors in Philadelphia, Baltimore and in the L.A. area who were talking about bringing charges against O’Keefe and Giles into going ahead with their plans, though for both they and the media that’s still problematic, because what the ACORN workers said on the tapes still doesn’t come off looking or sounding very good, no matter how bad this indictment reads.
The possible hurtful outcome is the ACORN videos get buried in return for lessor sentence and the pressure on the justice department to investigate ACORN goes away.
O’Keefe was too cute by half with this stunt.
The big question is: Who is he gonna roll over on to get out of this?
Mr O’Keefe doesn’t look like he’s capable of doing time in any joint. I’m betting there are some nervous people watching this story carefully. O’Keefe better be careful when he starts his car. Somebody told him to try this, and I have a feeling we’re going to find out who before long.
“Somebody told him to try this, and I have a feeling we’re going to find out who before long.”
I doubt very much if any adults encouraged James O’Keefe to do something this stupid. At this point in time, it looks like he and his friends will spend some time in jail. Did he watch too many James Bond films? This stuff is just so crazy. I am sorry—but I am not getting the impression that O’Keefe might be innocent. He appears guilty as hell.
Troubling. And, as usual, Ed has it right: This ain’t no Mudd Club or CBGB’s. This is a battle for the future of our nation, and we need to be a movement respectful of the law even in a political culture of growing lawlessness. Keep your heads, patriots. Be persistent but do the right thing.
These men were a lot of things, but patriots? No.
If you cannot win in the court of public opinion by playing by the rules, as Malkin states above, then you’ve just handed the liberals enough catnip for them to go crazy for a year.
Wait a minute. As patriots , as red-blooded Americans, we must have faith in our system and follow the rules, follow the laws. But this is a very young man, and one who accomplished more with a few thousand bucks and a ton of guts and a ton of hutzbah and a ton of imagination than any of you pious moralizers… And look at Ed’s title… “Life during wartime”.
Well…
Are we at war, or is that just overheated rhetoric used for effect? Is America under assault from without and within, or is stating such a cynical act of political hyperbole?
Now amateur hour wiretapping like this of a US senator, even one as incompetent and conniving and corrupt as Landrieu, is wrong and stupid… but ask yourselves this: if a young proven hero took your hollow rhetoric of “war” a bit too seriously and made a big blunder thereby, do you owe him something after the fact, or do you throw him to the wolves? Your answer to that says everything about you that needs knowing.
Morton,
It’s just a blog title, to justify the line about “tapping phone lines — that ain’t allowed” from the Talking Heads song.
Ed
At the outset, I want to point out that I’m not defending O’Keefe’s alleged actions. “Gotcha” videos are one thing — a well-established tool of journalism — but breaking the law is quite another thing.
But I don’t see how tapping a phone, if said tapping doesn’t prevent the phone from working, would constitute a violation of section 1362. Unless I’m much mistaken, tapping a phone means it continues to work as a phone, but you get to listen in on its conversations. The only part of section 1362′s wording that could possibly apply is “willfully or maliciously interferes in any way with the working or use of any such line, or system” — the rest is entirely about cutting lines, or other acts of sabotage that prevent normal operation. Seems to me that tapping phone lines would be a violation of a different statute, one about privacy or classified information or something like that, not a statute about sabotage.
But then, I am not a lawyer, and I may be mistaken about what the phrase “in any way” can cover in 1362′s language. I would welcome comments by someone more familiar than I am with the relevant legal issues.
Not so fast. It appears the men were working the angle that the Senator was purposely not answering her constituents’ telephone complaints and were in the process of proving it by observing the calls coming in and not being answered. I give them a pass for most of it, he obviously works on the “edge” to accomplish his tasks. Remember, he could have been arrested for “pimping” when reality would have been something different. When you break it down to basics he entered a place funded by taxpayers, a place with equipment and employees funded by taxpayers, who are supposedly working for the benefit of the taxpayers to expose some type of abuse of their authority and misuse by those same people of taxpayer money and public trust.
Wow, a right-wing scumbag acting like a scumbag — what a surprise!
David Shuster, is that you?