All four are free on $10,000 bail.
anyone know who posted their bail?
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by dbcooper41 » Thu Jan 28, 2010 12:39 pm
All four are free on $10,000 bail.
by seemslikeadream » Thu Jan 28, 2010 4:01 pm
Filmmaker O’Keefe Tweets on Pending Charges Despite Gag Order
Published 1, January 28, 2010 Bizarre , Courts , Criminal law , Media , Politics , Society 98 Comments
It appears that conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe is continuing to comment on his case despite the gag order of the court. Raw Story and other sites are reporting that O’Keefe tweeted shortly around midnight last night that “Govt official concedes no attempt to wiretap.” It is certainly an important development if true, but O’Keefe may be accused of violating the court order though it could raise constitutional objections from O’Keefe. In the meantime, it appears that the stunt in New Orleans may have been an effort to cut off the telephones as opposed to wiretapping calls.
As noted in the segment below from Countdown, the affidavit accompanying the charges was curious in two respects. First, the government was charging a higher category of trespass by alleging intent to commit a felony. However, the prosecutors failed to state what that felony was. The clear suggestion of the affidavit was that the “malicious” interference with the telephone system was to wiretap Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office. Second, if this was a conspiracy to wiretap, one would have expected a reference to electronic surveillance equipment found at the scene.
Now, O’Keefe is saying that the government is not pursuing a surveillance theory. Such a development is important and worth public attention. However, O’Keefe is under a gag order not to discuss the case. These orders can create difficulties for the defense when someone like O’Keefe is being widely accused of a wiretapping conspiracy. He has an obvious desire to rebut those allegations — as do his lawyers. Moreover, he was merely referencing a news development in a brief tweet. Finally, a court is on precarious ground when it says that a defendant cannot speak for himself in public. O’Keefe could raise first amendment claims if the government decides to raise the matter with the court. Nevertheless, it could be viewed as a technical violation since these orders often refer to the parties in general and not just the lawyers. One recent such controversy occurred in Texas, here, but such disputes are not uncommon in high profile cases. For another such recent case, click here.
Attorneys in some recent hig-profile cases have asked for such gag orders to be lifted to allow their client to defend himself in the public forum, here. On occasion, courts will grant such motions.
Even without a gag order, it is always a mistake for clients to directly manage the media or speak on a case. Most lawyers strictly forbid such communications absent prior legal review and supervision. While this violation is not likely to result in a serious penalty, it can bring a rebuke from the Court and undermine the relationship with the judge.
MSNBC is reporting that officials say that the men did want to interfere with the phones by shutting them off (one of the possibilities that I discussed below). In a remarkably dumb prank, they “wanted to see how her local office staff would respond if the phones were inoperative.” This was connected to their opposition to Sen. Landrieu’s position on health care. I will not try to bridge that logical gap.
O’Keefe seems to relish reckless acts. His stunt with ACORN appears to have violated state laws. Even without a surveillance conspiracy, the Landrieu stunt is still quite serious. What is interesting is that O’Keefe hardly needs to directly communicate such information given the press attention in the case.
by DoYouEverWonder » Thu Jan 28, 2010 4:19 pm
by justdrew » Thu Jan 28, 2010 4:20 pm
by Nordic » Thu Jan 28, 2010 4:24 pm
justdrew wrote:James O’Keefe should be castrated with a rusty knife.
by chiggerbit » Thu Jan 28, 2010 4:32 pm
The clear suggestion of the affidavit was that the “malicious” interference with the telephone system was to wiretap Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office. Second, if this was a conspiracy to wiretap, one would have expected a reference to electronic surveillance equipment found at the scene.
by dbcooper41 » Thu Jan 28, 2010 5:20 pm
How many other 'events' have these folks been involved in? These guys are professional disruptors, like the crowd that shut down the vote in Miami.
"September 11, 2009
James O'Keefe, undercover ACORN "pimp"... and pro-life activist
UPDATE, 9/12, 7:05a: ABC News is reporting the Census Bureau has severed its relationship with ACORN. Go, James, change the world!
_______________
Those who watch Fox are aware of the video released yesterday showing Baltimore ACORN employees caught in an undercover video sting allegedly offering to help a pimp and prostitute evade tax laws and cover up sex trafficking of minor girls from El Salvador.
Today a 2nd video was released, showing similar actions by Washington, D.C., ACORN staff.
See both video stings at BigGovernment.com.
The "pimp" in the videos is James O'Keefe. The name or face may not be familiar, but James has played a huge part in the pro-life activist movement of late. You may not know who James is, but you know his work.
We 1st saw James in February 2008 when LiveAction.org released video of an undercover sting at UCLA's Ashe Center. James portrayed a student preparing for an orgy. Reported LiveAction...
In an awkwardly entertaining Live Action Films... video, a student amasses over a hundred condoms from the... Ashe Center....
He gets them by detailing his plans for an orgy to the front desk attendants. The receptionists tell him to take just 3, but the condom man smirks and explains he'll need a lot more for his weekend plans. "We're going to Catalina on a boat-ride," he says enthusiasticaly. Ashe Center staff giggle off camera.
It's understandable they might laugh. Less understandable is their encouragement. "Can I come?" Ashe staff workers ask. "Are you going to have fun on the boat?" Sex with multiple partners?
As our student leaves, clutching his condoms, Ashe staff tell him to "raise the roof!"
I'll try to post that video later today. YouTube removed it long ago, of course, but I'm going to put it back up, hoping James' new fame will get YT to back off. [JLS note 9/12, 6:35a: Still working on this.]
At any rate, we heard James' voice soon thereafter on the now infamous phone calls to Planned Parenthood wanting to make donations specifically to abort black babies.
James is a real hero, going farther than most would to expose the underbelly of the liberal and abortion industries.
[HT: moderators Carder and Chris]
Posted 09/11/09 at 1:50 PMShareThis
Comments:"
James O'keefe Jr is an animal abuser. His Father is an evil slum lord and works on secret government programs. Their lack of compassion towards others is disturbing and illegal.
I witnessed this first hand as I was a tenant. My mother was poisoned for 2 years by Carbon Monoxide and mold. These are people who pay local cops to continue to run their slum. On the property on which my mother lived there were 2 insane people who stalked my mother. These people lived in little illegal apartments. They had a family of six move into an illegal basement apartment. The house we lived in was a single family.
This O'keefe family payed off the town and the cops.
This video is just another right wing ploy to play on some ones caring nature, a trait that was instilled in James at a young age by his greed driven father and grandfather. These women just wanted to help a young girl and were clearly not as smart as the cunning young director. James Jr. took
advantage as scum bag partisan hacks often do.
If you really care about this story look into James O'keefe Sr.
What we really sould be focusing on is a Nonprofit Single Payer Public Option a cause Paul Wellstone died fighting for.
Take Your Nation Back From These Fascist Scum
Posted by: Animal Abuser at September 17, 2009 7:08 PM
Animal Abuser,
I can hardly wait to see your undercover video footage of all that you have said. Let's see it.
Posted by: carla at September 18, 2009 9:00 AM
Animal Abuser is full of sour grapes. Let's see, helping the poor. Should we subvert the law? It appears that the Left ASSUMES that exploiting the
poor is a means of gaining power. After all, you can't rely on the LEGAL means, encouraging people to give their time and money to houses of faith
or other organizations. You have to create a clandestine organization which ostensibly helps the "poor" using Alinsky's mantra: "By whatever means
necessary". I sooo applaud O'Keefe and Giles for doing what the Statist Media will not and cannot do, because they are "in too deep" with
"progressives". Try to find something Animal Abuser. If all else fails, just read Rules for Radicals and get some ideas. Heck the left has used ad
hominem attacks for years!!
Posted by: fiddler at September 20, 2009 5:26 PM
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/09/23 ... 3509.shtml
Posted by: MidnightWalker at September 24, 2009 2:26 AM
by sunny » Thu Jan 28, 2010 5:29 pm
by dbcooper41 » Thu Jan 28, 2010 5:58 pm
Following graduation, he spent one year training students at the Leadership Institute in Arlington, Virginia on how to start up conservative newspapers on their campuses. According to Morton Blackwell, the president of the Leadership Institute, O'Keefe's longstanding ambition was "to go out and catch leftists breaking the law".[14] After leaving the Leadership Institute, O'Keefe attended UCLA Law School for one year before returning to his investigative journalism career full time.[14]
by chiggerbit » Thu Jan 28, 2010 6:02 pm
After leaving the Leadership Institute, O'Keefe attended UCLA Law School for one year before returning to his investigative journalism career full time
by Nordic » Fri Jan 29, 2010 3:08 am
sunny wrote:O'Keefe looks like a Timothy McVeigh just waiting to happen.
by justdrew » Fri Jan 29, 2010 3:28 am
by dbcooper41 » Fri Jan 29, 2010 2:33 pm
"Lawyer: Phone scheme meant to embarrass senator
By MICHAEL KUNZELMAN and BRETT J. BLACKLEDGE
Associated Press Writers
Posted: Jan. 28 3:13 p.m.
Updated: Today at 3:06 a.m.
NEW ORLEANS — Investigators pressed ahead with their probe of four men accused
of trying to tamper with a senator's phones after a lawyer said the conservative
activists were just trying to capture embarrassing video of her staff ignoring
constituent calls.
For her part, Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu wasn't impressed with the lawyer's
explanation Thursday that the men hoped to document claims that callers couldn't
get through with complaints about her support for health care reform.
"Attorneys are hired to spin for their clients," she said Thursday in an
interview in Washington. "Good luck."
J. Garrison Jordan, an attorney for one of the men, denied they were trying to
disable or wiretap the phones in Landrieu's office. The four, including activist
James O'Keefe, known for posing as a pimp and using a hidden camera to target
the community-organizing group ACORN, were arrested Monday.
"You're dealing with kids," Jordan said. "I don't think they thought it through
that far."
Monday's incident came weeks after callers began claiming that Landrieu's office
was ignoring them. Protesters marched in front of Landrieu's office in Baton
Rouge in December to criticize her support for Senate health care legislation
and complain that they couldn't get through on her office phones. Landrieu said
at the time that her office was flooded with a high volume of calls.
Jordan said his client, Robert Flanagan, the 24-year-old son of a federal
prosecutor in Louisiana, did not intend to break the law when he went into the
office posing as a telephone worker.
No matter their intentions, the four face the serious charge of entering federal
property under false pretenses for the purpose of committing a felony, which
carries up to 10 years in prison. They are free on $10,000 bail.
Investigators are aware of Jordan's explanation, but are pressing ahead to see
if that was indeed the men's motive, a senior federal law enforcement official
said Thursday. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the
investigation is ongoing.
Charged along with O'Keefe and Flanagan were Joseph Basel, 24, of Minnesota and
Stan Dai, 24, of the Washington, D.C., area. The four are due back in court Feb.
12.
O'Keefe, Basel and Dai stayed with Benjamin Wetmore, a friend of O'Keefe's,
while they were in New Orleans. Wetmore, a 28-year-old law school student, was
O'Keefe's boss when he worked at the Leadership Institute, an Arlington,
Va.-based program that trains conservative activists.
Wetmore declined to discuss their stay at his house and what they did while
there. But he praised O'Keefe's work targeting ACORN on his Web site and said he
hired O'Keefe in 2006, helping him hone his undercover camera craft.
In an Oct. 16 blog post, Wetmore criticized the Leadership Institute, where he no longer works, for not supporting O'Keefe's budding activism. Wetmore said he was "nearly fired for buying the initial video equipment that James used."
O'Keefe last year became famous for his videos about ACORN, the Association of
Community Organizers for Reform Now, which has affiliates that register voters
in urban and other poor areas of the country. He used a hidden camera to record
as he brought a young woman posing as a prostitute to the group's offices.
In Monday's incident, authorities said O'Keefe used his cell phone to try to
capture video of two of his fellow defendants in Landrieu's office before their
arrest. The two posed as telephone repairmen - wearing fluorescent vests, tool
belts and hard hats, one equipped with a hidden camera - and asked to see the
phones at Landrieu's office. The fourth is alleged to have waited outside in a
car with a listening device that could pick up transmissions.
Andrew Breitbart, whose biggovernment.com site launched O'Keefe's ACORN videos
and who has since hired O'Keefe as a contributor, also downplayed the federal
case.
"Their uniforms were outlandish," Breitbart said in an interview. "This was like
'Hee Haw,' a blatant clown-nose-on spectacle to make a salient political yet
mildly humorous point."
---
Associated Press Writers Justin Pritchard in New Orleans and Ben Evans and Pete
Yost in Washington contributed to this report."
by JackRiddler » Fri Jan 29, 2010 5:25 pm
Charged along with O’Keefe and Flanagan were Joseph Basel, 24, of Minnesota and Stan Dai, 24, of the Washington, D.C., area. The four are due back in court Feb. 12.
O’Keefe, Basel and Dai stayed with Benjamin Wetmore, a friend of O’Keefe’s, while they were in New Orleans. Wetmore, a 28-year-old law school student, was O’Keefe’s boss when he worked at the Leadership Institute, an Arlington, Va.-based program that trains conservative activists.
Wetmore declined to discuss their stay at his house and what they did while there. But he praised O’Keefe’s work targeting ACORN on his Web site and said he hired O’Keefe in 2006, helping him hone his undercover camera craft.
In an Oct. 16 blog post, Wetmore criticized the Leadership Institute, where he no longer works, for not supporting O’Keefe’s budding activism. Wetmore said he was “nearly fired for buying the initial video equipment that James used.”
www.studentsforlife.org/index.php/about/directors/ - [Cached Version]
Published on: 12/4/2007 Last Visited: 12/4/2007
Ben Wetmore, PresidentBen has been the President since 2006 and has been involved with SFLA since 2002.He has worked for the National Catholic Educational Association and the Leadership Institute.He has worked on a variety of campaigns, and has been involved with campus organizing for over four years, and campus activism in various forms for ten years.Ben was involved with starting campus newspapers and publications at the Leadership Institute, where he helped over 125 publications start in less than three years, and he helped train over a thousand activists in 46 states.Ben works at SFLA in fundraising and planning.Email Ben.
James Bond Wannabe Part of Right-Wing Plot to Tamper with Senator's Phones
By Lindsay Beyerstein, AlterNet
Posted on January 28, 2010, Printed on January 29, 2010
Earlier this week, four young men were arrested for allegedly scamming their way into the New Orleans offices of U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., and trying to tamper with the office telephones. All four were criminally charged with entering a federal building under false pretenses to commit a felony.
Their defenders hypothesize they were just "checking" on the senator's phone lines to make sure that constituent calls weren't being blocked. Some conservative groups have complained bitterly in recent weeks that they couldn't get through to Landrieu. Certain paranoid elements of the right speculated that Landrieu had "done something" to her phones to make it easier to ignore their calls. (A rather pervasive and simpler technology for that does exist; it's called voicemail.)
James O'Keefe, one of those arrested, is a videographer who became famous for dressing like a pimp in a purported sting in which he quizzed low-level ACORN employees about how to exploit underage girls. In his latest caper, perhaps O'Keefe was interested in exposing Landrieu's allegedly scandalous telephone system. But if that's all he and his comrades were after, why did they recruit Stan Dai, a "freelance consultant" with ties to the intelligence community, to aid in their quest?
The circumstances of Dai's arrest are difficult to square any theory that the men were just checking the protocols of Landrieu's phone system. A federal law enforcement official told the Associated Press that one of the four suspects was arrested a few blocks away in a car with "a listening device that could pick up transmissions." Another anonymous official told MSNBC that the man in the car was Stan Dai. It's unclear why the listening device wasn't mentioned in the affidavit. The U.S. Attorney's office for the Eastern District of Louisiana declined my request for further comment.
In 2008, Dai served as associate director of the Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence at Trinity Washington University. The ICCAE is funded by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and charged with recruiting the next generation of spooks. A university official assured Laura Rozen of Politico that Dai was a civilian whose job with the university ended in 2008 when the grant money ran out.
Last June, Dai was a featured speaker on torture and terrorism at a "CIA Day" for students in the Junior Statesmen of America's summer school. The mission of the Junior Statesmen, according to the organization's Web site, "is to strengthen American democracy by educating and preparing high school students for life-long involvement and responsible leadership in a democratic society." The students visited Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Va., and then returned to Georgetown for a series of lectures.
According to program notes for the CIA-a-Palooza, Dai also served as an operations officer for a Department of Defense irregular warfare fellowship program before he joined the ICCAE program at Trinity. I called the Pentagon to confirm that Dai had worked in this capacity, but the spokesman told me there was no way to answer that question without knowing which irregular warfare fellowship program Dai purportedly worked for. (Who knew there were so many?)
Irregular warfare is an umbrella term that encompasses everything from counterinsurgency and counterterrorism to military intelligence. If conventional warfare is violence between uniformed armies on the battlefield, irregular warfare is almost a catchall term for everything else. Potential adversaries include guerrilla fighters, as well as international criminal and terrorist organizations. (A classic example of irregular warfare was when CIA operatives recruited Hmong tribesmen to fight alongside Americans in the Vietnam War.) In recent years, there has been an uptick in interest in irregular warfare in various branches of the U.S. military. The CIA's Special Operations Division (SAD) is often regarded as the preeminent practitioner of irregular warfare.
Still others have speculated that O'Keefe was seeking to uncover some imagined grand conspiracy in light of the special deal Landrieu won for additional Medicaid payments to Louisiana once she agreed to vote to allow the health care bill to come to the Senate floor. (An influx of contractors after Hurricane Katrina had artificially driven up income statistics for that state, forcing federal Medicaid payments down.)
Like the other three suspects, Dai rose through the ranks of conservative campus journalism, writing for the GW Patriot, the alternative right-leaning newspaper published by students at George Washington University in Washington, DC, where Dai went to school. While attending GWU, he co-wrote a piece called The Penis Monologues, a satire of the play, "The Vagina Monologues."
In one passage, Dai recalls how his penis felt after a friend invited him to a performance of "The Vagina Monologues."
"MY PENIS IS ANGRY!!!!!!!" Dai wrote. "You want to know what happened to my penis? [...] Look, I'm no misogynist, I like women, just not crazy, screaming, vagina-obsessed ones! They scare me!"
Lindsay Beyerstein is a New York writer blogging at majikthise.typepad.com She covers health care reform for the Media Consortium.
© 2010 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
dbcooper42 wrote:but still something bothers me. remember the watergate crooks were set up to be caught. could this be the same trick? are they gonna now "bust" a handler?
by Nordic » Fri Jan 29, 2010 6:32 pm
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