Four Charged in Phone Scheme at Senator Landrieu’s Office
January 27th, 2010Via: USA Today:
The four men accused of trying to tamper with Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office phones share a common experience as young ideologues writing for conservative publications.
Federal authorities said two of the men posed as telephone workers wearing hard hats, tool belts and flourescent vests when they walked into the senator’s office inside a federal building in New Orleans on Monday. The other two were accused of helping to organize the plan.
The most well-known of the suspects is James O’Keefe, a 25-year-old whose hidden-camera expose posing as a pimp with his prostitute infuriated the liberal group ACORN and made him a darling of conservatives.
O’Keefe and suspect Joseph Basel, 24, formed their own conservative publications on their college campuses. A third suspect, Stan Dai, 24, served as editor of his university’s conservative paper and once directed a program aimed at getting college students interested in the intelligence field after 9/11.
And the fourth suspect, Robert Flanagan, 24, wrote for the conservative Pelican Institute and had recently criticized Landrieu for her vote on health care legislation. O’Keefe was a featured speaker at a Pelican Institute luncheon days before his arrest. Flanagan is the son of the acting U.S. Attorney for northern Louisiana.
It’s not yet clear whether the plan was a prank intended to be captured on camera or a more serious attempt at political espionage, as claimed by state Democrats who dubbed it “Louisiana Watergate.”
A witness told authorities that O’Keefe was already sitting in the waiting area of the office and appeared to record Basel and Flanagan on his cellphone when they arrived posing as phone workers.
A federal law enforcement official said one of the suspects was picked up in a car a couple of blocks away with a listening device that could pick up transmissions. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the information was not part of the FBI affidavit. Another official said Dai was the suspect arrested outside.
All four suspects were charged with entering federal property under false pretenses for the purpose of committing a felony, which carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
Given that they were obviously there to perpetrate information terrorism, I feel as though they should be sent to gitmo, such that we may properly apply “aggressive interrogation techniques” to ascertain the terror cell’s source(s) of funding.
Besides, the poor fools, if they wanted to get access to Landrieu’ s phones, why didn’ t they simply go ask the Mossad ? They own the joint, after all.
giggle
Sure looks like they were caught with their hands in the cookie jar. But if anybody can figure out a way to spin this around to portraying them as heroes, the sociopaths in the GOP can. I can see them now, in some little room, “How can we make this Landrieu’s fault?!”
He was involved with this too:
Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/apr/26/nation/na-abortion26