—Tom Horner, Independence Party candidate for governor

—Joseph Basel, conservative activist who pleaded guilty Wednesday for his role in using false pretenses to enter Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office in January

—Michael Brodkorb, Deputy Chair, Republican Party of Minnesota

—Peggy Flanagan, director of Wellstone Action’s Native American Leadership Program, former Minneapolis School Board member

—Rep. John Lesch (DFL-St. Paul), District 66A

—Sen. Al Franken, Democrat, U.S. Senate

—Lynne Torgerson, independent candidate for U.S. House, 5th Congressional District

—Rep. Erik Paulsen, Republican, U.S. House of Representatives

Basel

Minnesota native Joe Basel, along with conservative activist James O’Keefe and two others, pleaded guilty this morning in a New Orleans court to charges of entering federal property in January under false pretenses. O’Keefe, who’s best known for posing as a pimp in now infamous gotcha videos targeting ACORN, received the stiffest sentence for his role as leader of the group that used subterfuge to enter Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office. He received three years probation and must do 100 hours of community service and pay $1,500. The others — Basel, Stan Dai and Robert Flanagan — face two years probation, 75 hours of service and a $1,500 fine. 

The four originally faced felony charges for their activity, but prosecutors later reduced the charges. As the AP reports:

The FBI has said O’Keefe used his cell phone to try to capture video of two others who posed as telephone repairmen and asked to see the phones at Landrieu’s office. The fourth allegedly waited outside in a car with a listening device.

O’Keefe has said the group was trying to investigate complaints that constituents calling Landrieu’s office couldn’t get through to criticize the Democrat’s support of a health care reform bill.

Basel is a 2008 graduate of the University of Minnesota – Morris, where he edited the conservative publication, The Counterweight.

Update: Here’s the FBI’s official release on the guilty pleas.

Minnesota's Joe Basel. Photo: David Weigel

NASHVILLE — Justin Elliot picked up on my observation that Joseph Basel was here at the National Tea Party Convention and wondered how Basel was allowed to leave his home state of Minnesota before the Landrieu phone tampering case came to trial. I asked him.

“I’m on bond,” said Basel. “I just signed a piece of paper and I could go. I get pre-approval for travel outside of Minnesota, run by a supervision officer — I just gave him a call and said ‘I’m going to go to Nashville.’”

Basel pointed out that James O’Keefe had left his New Jersey home for New York to tape an interview with Sean Hannity. “We’re all fine,” he said. “It’ll all work out.”

Update: TPM has more.

James O'Keefe and the cover of a recent issue of his old college magazine. Sources: YouTube, The Centurion

WASHINGTON — When James O’Keefe applied for a grant to fund a conservative newspaper at Rutgers University, he appealed to people like Sarah Longwell. As the senior program officer at the Collegiate Network, she toured campuses across America to help conservative and libertarian students start newspapers or keep their publications running. She “read basically every conservative college paper” and got to know the sort of people attracted to the unpaid work of right-leaning campus muckraking.

“You always knew when you met a James O’Keefe,” Longwell says. “When I watch the television, and watch him say things like ‘the truth will set you free,’ I think: there’s a certain type of person who’s so obsessed with being in-your-face contrarian, and being famous for it, that he does it without thinking of the consequences. I certainly met people like him in other places.”

Few conservative activists went on to achieve the fame O’Keefe did for the 2009 sting he pulled with fellow activist Hannah Giles, posing as a pimp and prostitute inside ACORN offices, and secretly taping the advice they received. In the week since O’Keefe and three colleagues were arrested for apparently tampering with phones in the New Orleans office of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), national reporters have trained their eyes on organizations like the Collegiate Network and the Leadership Institute. The CN also gave a grant to the Patriot (George Washington University) and The Counterweight (University of Minnesota-Morris), where O’Keefe’s accomplices Stan Dai and Minnesota native Joseph Basel, respectively, had worked in college. The Leadership Institute employed O’Keefe for a year to train conservative activists; while there, he formed a friendship with Ben Wetmore, another veteran campus conservative who put up the four activists at his home before the Landrieu escapade. But any attempt to make them the faces of conservative college journalism, argued Longwell, would be off-base.

“From what he’s said and what he’s doing, O’Keefe strikes me as an ideologue,” said Longwell. “To use him to define conservative campus journalism is silly.”

Longwell has gained some perspective on this. In 2005, she left the Intercollegiate Studies Institute–the umbrella organization that runs CN–for Berman and Company, a free-market public relations firm in Washington that aggravates liberals with dogged, smart-alecky campaigns against their causes. Also joining Berman was Justin Wilson, once the editor of CN’s paper at the University of Michigan, then another program director at CN. Both later worked with Bret Jacobson, formerly the editor of the CN’s paper at the University of Oregon. (Before she came to CN, Longwell worked at a CN paper at Kenyon College.) In the years since, all three of them helped out with a punchy campaign against the Employee Free Choice Act–legislation that would make it easier for workers to form unions–at Berman’s Center on Union Facts. That campaign included ads that portrayed union organizers as thugs and undercover videos–conducted with more subtlety than O’Keefe, who would pose in costume–that captured union strategists shifting their strategy. One measure of how successful Berman and Company was at frustrating Democrats came when the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) angrily ripped up one of the firm’s anti-EFCA newspaper ads in front of a cheering crowd of union workers.

According to activists who spoke with the Washington Independent, the experience of campus conservatives who went on to Berman is more representative of the movement’s investment in college journalism than the trials of O’Keefe, Dai, Basel and Wetmore. It’s the sort of work that the three latter activists were doing until last week, using their training and connections to become players in the intelligence industry or in conservative activism. For the Leadership Institute, the Collegiate Network, and the National Journalism Center run by Young Americans for Freedom–just three of the conservative training organizations that have operated for more than a generation–the Landrieu debacle was a distraction from a project that had been going quite well. Conservative activists and journalists who’ve come out of those training programs have had a larger, but quieter, impact than O’Keefe. (Disclosure: I edited a CN paper, The Northwestern Chronicle, from 2002 to 2004, and I held a CN fellowship at USA Today from 2004 through 2005.) They’re well-funded–ISI, CN’s parent organization received, $8.3 million in contributions in 2009–and while they don’t release the names of donors, their trustees include American Spectator publisher Al Regnery (ISI), Heritage Foundation president Ed Fuelner (ISI), and GOP strategist Frank Donatelli (LI).

“Every two years or so, somebody writes a story about how conservatives on college campuses have suddenly discovered journalism,” said John J. Miller, an editor at National Review who came there from the same conservative UM paper as Berman’s Justin Wilson, and who hires summer interns from the CN roster. “Still, if you took people under the age of 40 or 45, right-of-center journalists — however you want to categorize them — a lot of them came from these conservative campus newspapers.”

While O’Keefe’s experience with the Leadership Institute has received more attention than his CN grant — and more than the internship Hannah Giles had at the National Journalism Center — the path from campus conservative journalism to D.C. influence is reliable. Before Marc Thiessen wrote speeches for George W. Bush, he was editor-in-chief of the Vassar Spectator. Before the Chamber of Commerce’s James Gelfand was tripped up for an email asking if it was possible to fund a study that would discredit health care reform, he was an editor at the Northwestern Chronicle. They place yearlong fellows at Roll Call, The Hill, The Weekly Standard, The American Spectator, and USA Today. Last year, the CN’s program expanded to the Raleigh News & Observer in North Carolina. John McCormack scored a Collegiate Network internship with Miller on the strength of his work with the GW Patriot–the same paper that produced Stan Dai. From there he got the CN fellowship at The Weekly Standard, and was hired full-time after his fellowship ended. In October 2009 and January 2010, he shifted the momentum of elections in New York’s 23rd congressional district and in Massachusetts by hounding candidates who were blowing off his questions, prompting them to overreact–and suffer from the ugly headlines that resulted.

This doesn’t take much money. The Leadership Institute’s contribution to college papers consists of Balance in Media Grants–once $500, recently raised to $750–to offset the cost of the first issue of a new publication. The Collegiate Network gives out annual grants up to several thousand dollars based on a number of factors, including frequency and quality of publications, and pays stipends for its media fellowships. Media organizations who hire CN fellows are pleased by the results, and not bothered by the O’Keefe story.

“We’ve been quite happy with our CN fellows over the years,” said John Siniff, executive forum editor at USA Today. “Does the O’Keefe story change the way I think about interns from the CN? No.”

In the months after O’Keefe’s ACORN story, he was embraced by the conservative journalism network. He gave a short, well-received speech to the annual Collegiate Network conference, held last year in San Antonio. The Leadership Institute trumpeted O’Keefe’s experience with the group. Since the Landrieu debacle, the praise has mellowed but not disappeared.

“There was a fairly universal celebration that he gave ACORN a black eye,” said Steven Sutton, who manages the college journalism program for LI. “I don’t think it marks a milestone or launch date — we’re not going to be having James O’Keefe Day dinners to mark the day that he busted ACORN.”

“This kind of ’stunt’ journalism requires skill, like an acrobat,” said Dinesh D’Souza, the conservative author whose work at the Dartmouth Review in the early 1980s set the tone for decades of conservative campus journalism. “It’s pretty easy to fall off the ropes if you’re stupid about it. The ACORN story ‘worked,’ because the masquerade proved a point about ACORN, but trying to tap a senator’s phones–well, there’s a point where you are breaking the law, and no one is above the law.”

Among conservatives, there’s a consensus that the work of campus journalists, and the connections that the network can give them, won’t be touched by O’Keefe’s scandal. Berman’s David Martosko–who attended Dartmouth with D’Souza, but did not work for the Review–told the Washignton Independent that campus conservative papers continue to produce smart “contrarians” with exactly the reporting skills and sense of humor that Berman needs.

“For every James O’Keefe,” said Sarah Longwell, “there are 50 serious journalists coming out of these programs.”

Photo: Twitter

Updated: A Joseph Basel — possibly of Minnesota and involved in an alleged phone-tampering against Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana — follows veteran rightwing prankster James O’Keefe on Twitter.

“JEBasel” has only two tweets of his own, the latest from Dec. 18: “Minnesota needs global warming NOW! Workers of Minnesota Unite!”

But among the 35 Twitter feeds he follows are O’Keefe and two accounts associated with conservative anti-ACORN cheerleader Andrew Breitbart.

Update: JEBasel also follows Francisco Gonzalez, whose latest tweet reads: “Please pray for my friends @JamesOKeefeIII and Stan Dai. They and Joe Basel were arrested by the Feds: http://bit.ly/aHcw90.” (Another person JEBasel follows: timpawlenty.)

JEBasel’s Twitter avatar photo also resembles the avatar for a Facebook account belonging to a Joseph Basel who studied at the University of Minnesota-Morris.

Someone with that name is listed on the UM-Morris College Republicans site, and on Facebook a 2008 Morris grad of the same name is shown to be friends with both O’Keefe and Stan Dai, who was also arrested in Lousiana yesterday.

A bit more (circumstantial) evidence: CampusReform.org recently interviewed Basel, founding editor of the conservative paper The Counterweight at Morris, alongside O’Keefe.

In that interview, Basel spoke of The Counterweight: “I think if you just make your agenda the truth or a fair chance at the truth on campus, you’d be surprised what falls in your lap if you work hard and keep doing it.”

This time around, what could fall in Basel’s lap is a felony charge.

Update: News outlets including the Star Tribune and Forum Communications’ papers are reporting that Minnesota’s Basel is the same one arrested with O’Keefe in New Orleans.

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.