The charges against James O’Keefe, the ACORN-busting conservative filmmaker who was arrested in January after attempting to gain access to Senator Mary Landrieu’s office, have officially been reduced to one misdemeanor. O’Keefe and three associates posed as telephone repair men and were arrested on January 26 inside Senator Landrieu’s offices after staffers became suspicious.
According to BigGovernment.com:
Joseph Basel, age 24, Stan Dai, age 24, Robert Flanagan, age 24, and James O’Keefe, age 25, were charged in a one-count bill of information with entering real property of the United States under false pretenses, a misdemeanor, announced the U. S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Louisiana.
According to the Bill of Information, between January 20, 2010, and January 25, 2010, Flanagan, Basel, O’Keefe, and Dai met on several occasions. During their meetings, they discussed, among other things, possible scenarios in which they would talk with members of the staff of Senator Mary Landrieu inside of her New Orleans, Louisiana office, in the Hale Boggs Federal Building, and record the interaction using audio and visual equipment. As a result of this planning, on January 25, 2010, Basel and Flanagan entered the Senator’s office dressed as telephone repairmen, said they were following up on reports of problems with the telephone system, engaged in conversation with the staff members, and pretended to test the phone system. O’Keefe, who had also entered the office, recorded the interaction between Basel, Flanagan, and the staff members.
If convicted, Flanagan, Basel, O’Keefe, and Dai each face a maximum term of six (6) months in prison and a fine of $5,000.
You may recall that the New York Times and other news outlets that only reluctantly mentioned O’Keefe’s damning undercover investigations of ACORN rushed to report O’Keefe’s arrest. MSNBC even referred to O’Keefe’s arrest as “Watergate Jr.”
Many people still wonder if O’Keefe and company took this stunt a little too far, but if their actual goal was to simply underscore blatant mainstream media bias with regard to ACORN and other pet leftist organizations, they more than succeeded.
