I think National Review's John Hood has the best theory of the incident involving Andrew Breitbart funded conservative activist James O'Keefe:
First, given the facts of the case as reported so far, I doubt the kids were trying to install some kind of wiretap on the senator's office phone system. I doubt they would even have the expertise to pull that off. What I think they were really doing was recording video (and audio, thus the reported use of listening equipment by one of the kids outside the building) of a fake repair visit in order to create a piece ridiculing Landrieu for voting for Obamacare despite the legions of phone calls from constituents against the bill. “Why didn't she listen to the voters?” the gist of the stunt might be. “Were her phones not working?”
This isn't a defense of them. Far from it. They might well still be guilty of some kind of offense for misrepresenting themselves in an attempt to gain entry and access to phone equipment in a federal office.
Hood also points out the obvious, that as sensational as the original ACORN videos were, they weren't "journalism":
In fact, let me go further. Whatever you think of these kinds of publicity stunts, they do not constitute investigative journalism. The earlier ACORN videos weren't pieces of investigative journalism, either. It does the growing ranks of investigative journalists at conservative organizations a great disservice to invite a comparison of such publicity stunts with the hard, meticulous, and often boring work of exposing government waste and corruption.
This strikes me as a more plausible scenario than a Watergate for the new millennium. The initial conclusion, that the plot was somehow related to wiretapping, has been all over media reports (including my initial post) but doesn't seem to be reflected in the charges themselves.
It's worth noting that whatever the fallout from this incident, Breitbart himself has devoted extraordinary efforts to smearing progressive organizations based on thin reeds of evidence.
-- A. Serwer
