MSNBC reports that Andrew Breitbart-funded conservative activist James O'Keefe wasn't trying to wiretap Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu's phones, but rather was attempting to record how her office might respond to the phones being disabled. Conservative activists had complained earlier this month about not being able to reach her office to register displeasure for her support for health-care reform.
This strikes me as a more plausible explanation than the wiretapping allegations, partly because even if one were recording the calls going in and out of Landrieu's office, interpreting and contextualizing the information you acquired in a manner that would imply corruption on a scale necessary to justify breaking the law would still require actual -- you know -- work. Meanwhile, videotaping someone in the hopes that they do something stupid or embarrassing, which can then be inflated and amplified by a sympathetic audience into a high crime, takes far less work and is far more easily accessible. It also fits better with O'Keefe's record.
But I will say, MSNBC's frame for the story, "prank or crime," is incorrect. If O'Keefe and his pals committed a crime in pursuit of their prank, they still committed a crime. It doesn't "not count" because they got caught. Still, it's not hard to imagine a judge going easy on O'Keefe and his crew. Children of privilege are often thought of as "good kids who made a mistake" rather than the incorrigible "bad apples" of lesser economic means.
But even in his original ACORN videos, O'Keefe may have broken state laws in Maryland and California. So this kind of recklessness can't really be described as a "mistake." And while I doubt Breitbart had prior knowledge of this scheme, he was already aware that O'Keefe's methods were questionable, and he paid him to come up with "stories" anyway. The issue is that trying to make people look like idiots and catching it on camera is what passes for conservative "journalism." O'Keefe was doing exactly what made him so popular in the first place.
-- A. Serwer
