Federal Court

Guilty pleas in Landrieu incident

The conservative provocateur James O'Keefe and three other men pleaded guilty in federal court on Wednesday to a misdemeanor in a scheme in which they posed as telephone repairmen in Senator Mary L. Landrieu’s New Orleans office.

Magistrate Daniel Knowles III, who cited the defendants' potential as investigative journalists though he was critical of this incident, sentenced Mr. O'Keefe, 25, to three years of probation, 100 hours of community service and a $1,500 fine. As Mr. O'Keefe was considered the ringleader, his fellow defendants, Joseph Basel, Stan Dai and Robert Flanagan, were given lesser sentences of two years of probation, 75 hours of community service and $1,500 fines.

On Jan. 25, two of the men entered the office of Ms. Landrieu, a Democrat, pretending to be telephone repairmen, one of them wearing a hidden video camera on his hard hat. Mr. O'Keefe was also in the office pretending to wait for a friend, but secretly recording the interaction, and another man was waiting outside. All four were arrested and eventually charged with entering federal property under false pretenses, a misdemeanor. The charge carries a maximum term of six months in prison and a $5,000 fine.

Mr. O'Keefe has said they were in the office because of reports that Ms. Landrieu's constituents had trouble reaching her office during the health care debate, though a spokesman for the senator said that her voice mail and that of several other senators were jammed at the time by an unusually high volume of calls.

Mr. O'Keefe, whom the judge described as "extremely talented," gained fame for secretly recording conversations with workers for Acorn, the community organizing group. In at least one video, Acorn workers advised a conservative activist who was posing as a prostitute how to conceal her criminal activities in the course of trying to buy a house. The heavily edited videos severely damaged Acorn’s reputation.

(Published by The New York Times – May 26, 2010)