Blue Mass Group

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Watergate II: Bugging Senator Landrieu

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So who were these wannabe wiretappers?  The Washington Post has a few juicy details about the bunglers’ bios:

O’Keefe, 25, became a conservative hero last year after he and fellow activist Hannah Giles secretly videotaped several regional offices of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) while posting as a pimp and a prostitute. O’Keefe’s videos showed ACORN staffers appearing to offer them housing help and advice on concealing their purported prostitution business.

In October, 31 members of Congress signed a resolution, authored by Rep. Pete Olson (R-Tex.), to honor O’Keefe and Giles “for their diligent investigative journalism exposing the fraudulent and potentially illegal activities” of ACORN.

“While O’Keefe is well-known,” the Post reported, “Flanagan, Basel and Dai are not. “Flanagan worked last year as a paid intern for Rep. Mary Fallin (R-Okla.).”

Flanagan, 24, is the son of William J. Flanagan, the acting U.S. attorney for the Western District of Louisiana, based in Shreveport. U.S. Attorney Flanagan declined to comment through an office assistant.

Dai, who is from Alexandria, is a Chinese immigrant and was president of the Conservative Student Union at George Washington University while studying there in 2005, student records show.

Basel, a Mankato, Minn., native, and O’Keefe became friends as fellow founders of conservative newspapers at their respective colleges, O’Keefe at Rutgers and Basel at the University of Minnesota-Morris.



James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles

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  1. This O’Keefe kid is scary. The right wing’s darling undercover brother has been unmasked as a common criminal.  This is so sweet. I guess he won’t be riding the Acorn smear into office any time soon.  I would put nothing past this kid. He’s One Crazy Zealot.

  2. These folks deserve condemnation if found guilty and regardless of whether they are found guilty or not the tactics that they allegedly used likewise deserve condemnation.  It is one thing to aggressively pursue a story by reviewing available material on the person, speaking with friends, enemies and neighbors, maybe even digging through their trash, but bugging phones by impersonating telephone company employees smacks of Watergate.  I realize that was before his time, but he and any other “journalist” regardless of party affiliation needs to understand the boundaries of the law and adhere to them.  If he and others did not in this case, they deserve what the judge rules.  Hopefully it will serve as a lesson to other “reporters” that there is a line you should not cross and their are repercussions if you do.

    • I think it should be noted, for the record, that none of the Watergate burglars were or claimed to be journalists, film-makers, or party activists.

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      p>They were, instead, paid agents of the (Republican) Committee to Re-Elect the President (Nixon). Several (in fact, most, as I recall) were also ex-CIA personnel.

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      p>I think these comparisons to Watergate significantly distort the insidious nature of what Watergate truly was.

      • Some of these things are different, some of these things are the same:

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        p>Different (AFAWK): The Nixon scandal was organized top down.  This is organized bottom up.  That is a big difference.

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        p>Same: Breaking and entering with the intent of illegally recording voice conversations for political gain.

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        p>Different: Watergate I used professional spooks.  Watergate II used a couple of dumb kids.

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        p>Same: Both sets of criminals got busted.

  3. However, since he is politically connected, I’m sure some right-wing organization will pump money into his defense fund and make sure that he gets in front of a Bush-appointed federal circuit judge and will walk away with a slap on the wrist. If he was poor, African-American or Latino, the outcome of course would be very, very different.

  5. It’s basically an Ender’s Game set up to select for the dirtiest trickster.

    Everyone who watched this summer’s race for College Republican National Committee (crnc) chair with any detachment has a favorite moment of chutzpah they admire in spite of themselves. Leading the count are the following: speaking sotto voce of your opponent’s “homosexuality”; rigging the delegate count so that states that support your candidate have twice as many votes as those that don’t; and using a sitting congressman to threaten the careers of undecided voters. I can understand the perverse appeal of each of these incidents. But I cast my vote for the forged letter.

    Abramoff, Safavian, Ralph Reed, Karl Rove, they all got their start as College Republicans.  

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    p>O’Keefe is not just some lone wolf.

    • you really really don’t.  Oooooo 3 examples.  Absolute criminals!  If I was to use the joelpatterson method for recognizing criminal behavior, of course I would find ACORN to be criminal.  

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      p>Get over yourself.  There are thousands upon thousands of young men and women who go through college republicans because they refuse to be apathetic and happen to have political ideologies differing from yours who are clearly not criminal.  

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      p>Instead of calling them criminals, you should commend the youth of our country for being active in our political process rather than sitting by and watching it go by, regardless of their positions.  

      • The College Republicans have defrauded retirees:

        The College Republican National Committee is under fire for using front organizations to collect millions of dollars in contributions, including money from elderly people with dementia.

        During the 2004 campaign, the group sent out direct-mail solicitations under such letterheads as “Republican Headquarters 2004” and “Republican Election Committee.”

        One four-page letter asked prospects to send $1,000 together with an American flag pin for President Bush to wear to “Republican Headquarters” to ensure that Bush knows “there are millions who are giving him the shield of God to protect him in the difficult days ahead.”

        …snip…
        Internal disputes over fundraising tactics have been brewing among College Republican groups for at least three years, but they surfaced in late October, after publication of damaging news reports in the Seattle Times and the Durham Herald-Sun.

        The Times reported that a number of elderly donors gave far more money than they could afford.

        “I don’t have any more money,” Cecilia Barbier, 90, a retired church worker in New York who made more than 300 donations totaling nearly $100,000, told the paper. “That was all the savings. . . . Now I’m scrounging.”

        Monda Jo Millsap, 68, of Van Buren, Ark., told the Times that she emptied a savings account, then got a $5,000 bank loan to give a total of $59,000.

        Now I’m sure there are honest College Republicans–but they are not the ones selected to become the leaders.  The leaders are people like Abramoff and Rove, who earn it by demonstrating effectiveness through a certain moral flexibility.

  6. It’s quite clear they weren’t trying to intercept or record telephone conversations.  I can’t find a copy of the complaint but it isn’t about tapping telephones, it’s about obstructing business in a government office.

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    p>The emerging story was they were trying to find evidence of the senator ducking calls opposing HCR.

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