Jonathan Turley paints a very bad picture for these right-wing characters caught trying to break into Mary Landrieu's phone system, because they may face way over ten years of jail time along with stack counting for their break-in attempt, especially if it's established they intended bug her lines.
Law enforcement officials need to prosecute O'Keefe and his Watergaters to the fullest extent of the law, because if they don't, we're looking at the potential of dozens of O'Keefes who are looking to make a name for themselves on Fox News by trying to smear Democrats and who will break the law to do it.
Andrew Breitbart must be a little nervous today no matter how insipid his defense was of the New Watergaters, because he's been paying O'Keefe's salary for his Big Hollywood sites.
Yes, we're all trying to tamper with the jury pool for O'Keefe. How much did O'Keefe tamper with the video he used against ACORN, hmmmm? Maybe the word "doctored" is better.
The American Prospect has more:
Following the arrest of conservative activist James O'Keefe and three others allegedly attempting to "interfere with the telephone system" in the New Orleans offices of Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu , Andrew Breitbart , whose website hosted the selectively edited ACORN tapes that propelled O'Keefe to conservative stardom, issued a statement saying he had "no connection" to the incident:
We have no knowledge about or connection to any alleged acts and events involving James O’Keefe at Senator Mary Landrieu’s office. We only just learned about the alleged incident this afternoon. We have no information other than what has been reported publicly by the press. Accordingly, we simply are not in a position to make any further comment.
That doesn't appear to be accurate. In an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt yesterday highlighted by Media Matters, Breitbart acknowledged that O'Keefe was on his payroll:
AB: When the story came to us, what I wanted to do was to make sure that the ACORN story got as much widespread dissemination as humanly possible. The videos that he independently produced went on YouTube. And so Huffington Post, every single site put it out there, including my sites. What he does for the site exclusively is he tells his life rights, basically. So when he puts a story out there, it’s on the Brietbart sites, the Big sites, that he can tell people what transpired. So…
HH: Do you pay him for that?
AB: Yes.
HH: And are you free to tell me how much you pay him?
AB: I’ll…perhaps at another date, but he’s paid a fair salary.
So Breitbart was paying O'Keefe a salary to come up with sensational stories involving liberal targets. That's not "nothing." Moreover, it's worth noting that O'Keefe had already potentially broken laws in Maryland and California with his original ACORN scheme, so it's not as though Breitbart can say he was ignorant of O'Keefe's recklessness or lack of journalistic ethics.
It seems more accurate to say that Breitbart was paying O'Keefe precisely to do this kind of kamikaze activism, without caring too much about the details until O'Keefe got hemmed up by federal agents.
