Well I still am curious as to what they were doing there and I certainly think it is foolish to be breaking the law, yet this puts a whole new spin on what happened the other day. I’ll bet if it gets thrown out of court, the MSM will have the story buried on page 27. Good for Andrew Breitbart for following this story.
by Patterico
Looks like law enforcement and James O’Keefe’s supporters agree: he did not intend to wiretap Mary Landrieu:
A law enforcement official says the four men arrested for attempting to tamper with the phones in the New Orleans office of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D) were not trying to intercept or wiretap the calls.
The Washington Post, which this morning claimed otherwise, today had to retract that mistake — a grave error that Andrew Breitbart socked them for last night, and I socked them for this morning. Here is the relevant part of their embarrassing correction:
Earlier versions of this story incorrectly reported that James O’Keefe faced charges in an alleged plot to bug the office of Sen. Mary Landrieu. The charges were related to an alleged plot to tamper with a phone system. The headline incorrectly referred to a plot to bug the phone and a caption incorrectly referred to an alleged wiretap scheme.
That’s the second O’Keefe correction by the same reporter. Time to retire her from this story.
So there was no intent to wiretap. Let’s dispel that idea now. Nobody is claiming he was trying to bug Landrieu. Everyone who compared this to Watergate was wrong, wrong, wrong — and should be embarrassed. Period.
The only question now is what he and 3 other men did intend to do.
The Government position is that O’Keefe & Company wanted to shut down Landrieu’s phone system:
Instead, the official says, the men, led by conservative videomaker James O’Keefe, wanted to see how her local office staff would respond if the phones were inoperative. They were apparently motivated, the official says, by criticism that when Sen. Landrieu became a big player in the health care debate, people in Louisiana were having a hard time getting through on the phones to register their views.
That is, the official says, what led the four men to pull this stunt — to see how the local staffers would react if the phones went out. Would the staff just laugh it off, or would they express great concern that local folks couldn’t get through?
Nice theory. Let’s see if you can prove it.
Note that even the Government now believes that O’Keefe targeted Landrieu for the reason I previously highlighted — first last night (subtly, in UPDATE x4), and somewhat less subtly this morning — namely, her claim that phone lines were “jammed” when constituents tried to reprimand her for the Louisiana Purchase.
Read the rest.
Tags: James O'Keefe, Mary Landrieu
