‘Brilliant’: Once lauded by Bachmann for ACORN sting, O’Keefe arrested by FBI

O'Keefe in his pimp costume, via Nola.com

In September, Rep. Michele Bachmann hailed as “brilliant” James O’Keefe, who with Hannah Giles orchestrated a sting operation at a Philadelphia ACORN office, posing as a pimp and a prostitute. Today, it appears that may have been an overestimation. Days after the duo was named in a federal lawsuit for the ACORN sting, O’Keefe was arrested by the FBI along with three others, allegedly for tampering with phones in the New Orleans office of Sen. Mary Landrieu.

Back in September, Bachmann praised O’Keefe and Giles at the How To Take Back America conference for their undercover expose of a Philadelphia ACORN office, in which they posed as a pimp and prostitute seeking advice from the anti-poverty group: “Hannah and James used Saul Alinsky’s ‘Rules for Radicals’ — that’s the community organizer’s bible — against ACORN! Brilliant!”

(In a House floor speech the same month, Bachmann alluded to O’Keefe and Giles’ sting, although in an odd way. She accused ACORN of “furthering the trafficking of illegal aliens, minor girls into childhood prostitution and child abuse,” when in fact O’Keefe and Giles — not ACORN — were the ones posing as attempted sex traffickers.)

But their brilliance came into question when an independent investigation, commissioned by ACORN and conducted by former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger into the Philadelphia sting found:

The videos that have been released appear to have been edited, in some cases substantially, including the insertion of a substitute voiceover for significant portions of Mr. O’Keefe’s and Ms. Giles’s comments, which makes it difficult to determine the questions to which ACORN employees are responding. A comparison of the publicly available transcripts to the released videos confirms that large portions of the original video have been omitted from the released versions.

Then on Thursday, Katherine Conway-Russell, director of the group’s Philadelphia office, filed a suit against the filmmakers, as well as the conservative website Breitbart.com, in federal court for recording and disseminating her words without permission, a violation of state law.

On Monday, O’Keefe and three others were arrested for posing as employees of a telephone company in order to gain entry to Landrieu’s office in the Hale Boggs Federal Office Building and manipulate telephones. According to a Times-Picayune, O’Keefe, Joseph Basel, Stan Dai and Robert Flanagan (son of the Acting United States Attorney for the Western District of Louisiana) were charged with entering federal property under false pretenses with the intent of committing a felony.

According to an FBI affadavit (pdf), both Flanagan and Basel “admitted to federal agents that they were not telephone repairmen and that they entered the office of Senator Landrieu under false pretenses.” The affadavit, written by FBI Special Agent Steven Rayes, states the belief that the pair had the intention of “willfully and maliciously interfering with a telephone system operated and controlled by the United States of America,” adding that they were “aided and abetted” by O’Keefe and Dai.