One of the many victims of Andrew Breitbart’s ACORN video hoax is finally striking back in court, against pseudo-pimp James O’Keefe and pseudo-ho Hannah Giles if not Breitbart himself. Former San Diego ACORN office employee Juan Carlos Vera, who was falsely portrayed in a heavily edited videotape as conspiring with O’Keefe and Giles to traffic underage girls across the Mexican border, is suing both of the right-wing filmmakers, seeking $75,000 in damages under California’s privacy statutes.
Filed last week in the U.S. District Court in San Diego, Vera’s brief complaint claims that O’Keefe, Giles and up to 20 unnamed parties violated his "reasonable expectation of privacy" by conspiring to secretly videotape him and then posting the tapes on the Internet without his consent, causing him to lose his job and other damages. Indeed, as the complaint notes, the "pimp and prostitute" explicitly asked Vera whether their conversation would be confidential.
The notorious tape featuring Vera -- with his friendly smile and hesitant English -- was aired repeatedly on Fox News and cited as proof of the most incendiary charge against ACORN by conservative Web impresario Breitbart: namely, that the anti-poverty organization was in fact a criminal conspiracy to promote teenage prostitution.
But as California Attorney General Jerry Brown discovered when he investigated the ACORN matter last spring, the actual meaning of the Vera tape was severely distorted by dishonest editing to suggest that he had agreed to help smuggle young girls for O’Keefe’s mythical brothel. To obtain unedited versions of the tapes from O’Keefe, Brown gave him and Giles immunity from any criminal prosecution under the state privacy statutes.
What really happened in the San Diego ACORN office, as Fox News and many other outlets neglected to report, was that immediately after O’Keefe and Giles departed, Vera called a cousin who is a detective in the National City Police Department to report the planned crime. Police detectives later confirmed Vera’s effort to local news outlets and to the California attorney general’s office. When Vera learned that O'Keefe and Giles were hoaxing him, he again called the police, who terminated their investigation.
"The evidence illustrates," said Brown when he released his report last April, "that things are not always as partisan zealots portray them through highly selective editing of reality. Sometimes a fuller truth is found on the cutting-room floor." And soon that fuller truth may be weighed in the halls of justice.
To a world in crisis, the latest antics of James O'Keefe and Andrew Breitbart are of no great import, but they may provide a few minutes of comic relief. Last seen pleading guilty to a misdemeanor for invading Sen. Mary Landrieu's office under false pretenses (with his cronies in Village People drag), O'Keefe has since moved on to even smaller targets. Still under the patronage of Breitbart's Big Government website, O'Keefe signed up as a U.S. Census employee, presumably playing to conservative paranoia about the constitutionally mandated decennial survey.
He didn't find much to expose, beyond his own pettiness. During two days as a Census trainee, O'Keefe reveals, he was paid for between three and four hours more than he actually worked. Evidently the training each day was completed by 3:30 or 4 p.m., but the crew supervisor allowed the new workers to file forms saying they had worked until 5 p.m. (He also let them take an extra 10 minutes for lunch!) Shocking, right? Especially when the Census trainees are probably unemployed, desperate people whose families might need that extra $30 or $40.
But for O'Keefe, this is serious federal "corruption" that requires naming and taping the crew supervisor and his superior, even though there is no evidence that they derived any personal enrichment or political advancement from the inaccurate time sheets. As always, his video editing style is to slice away any exculpatory material that might complicate his imaginative storyline.
Media Matters provides a heavily annotated package on this intrepid probe into nothingness, including tart observations by Eric Boehlert, plus a few amusing clips from "Good Morning America," in which host George Stephanopoulos deftly demonstrates the absurdity of the entire project, while allowing guests O'Keefe and Breitbart to articulate their arrogant pretensions. As usual, both of them utter a variety of falsehoods and exaggerations, with O'Keefe insinuating that Sen. Landrieu is "corrupt" without a shred of evidence, and Breitbart claiming that ACORN employees "set up a prostitution ring in every single office" -- a lie so fantastic that even he must know it isn't true.
Soon enough, O'Keefe will be on to his next target. Are you an Amtrak conductor who gave incorrect change? A sanitation worker who took a long coffee break? A schoolteacher who used too much chalk? Beware.
O'Keefe now says he was filming a video that would've proved that Landrieu's office phones worked. That video would've put the lie to the claim that they didn't work -- a claim I'm not sure anyone ever made. (The problem was, people who were instructed by websites and talk radio to call her offices occasionally got busy signals, I think?) But when his make-believe phone company workers asked to enter the office's telephone closet, they were all arrested by U.S. marshalls.
O'Keefe's gang that couldn't sting straight was quickly dubbed the "teabuggers," even though web publisher and classic cocktail enthusiast Andrew Breitbart insists no one intended to bug anything. O'Keefe's partners-in-crime included the son of the acting U.S. attorney for the western district of Louisiana and a couple other standard-issue Young Republican rabble-rousers.
We're still, obviously, waiting on O'Keefe's major followup to his original bombshell investigation into ACORN, which proved that sometimes poorly-paid people in offices will humor people who come in and say crazy things. (It also proved that many major media outlets will report on deceptively edited videos produced by political operatives without bothering to check or verify the claims of the producers. Richard Blumenthal just learned a very similar lesson!)
But perhaps an investigation into the Louisiana criminal justice system is in order? He could compare how his case was handled to how the vast majority of criminal defendants in the state -- most of whom are impoverished and not provided with legal aid -- are treated.
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene
On Tuesday night, Rachel Maddow put a definitive end to the story -- pushed by Fox News Channel for six months -- that the "exposé" of ACORN by James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles on Andrew Breitbart's Web site showed the group involved in nefarious deeds. Using the unedited tapes released by California Attorney General Jerry Brown of O'Keefe and Giles's visits to ACORN offices in the state, Maddow showed the vast gulf between the conservative version of the "scandal" and reality.
Salon composite of James O'keefe behind bars, taken from a booking photo provided by the U.S. Dept. of Justice.
James O'Keefe and the three other men arrested with him after they tried one of the video stunts O'Keefe has become famous for at the office of Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., were hit with federal felony charges after their arrest. Now, the charges have been reduced, down to a single misdemeanor each.
The four men initially faced penalties of up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Now, the maximum punishment they can receive is six months in prison and a $5,000 fine.
As the Associated Press notes, the way these charges were reduced seems to indicate that a plea deal is on its way, and a lawyer for one of the men essentially confirmed that to the AP.
WASHINGTON -- A couple of weeks ago, I spent a lovely Saturday afternoon getting shrieked at by Andrew Breitbart when I dared ask him a few skeptical questions about his self-proclaimed exposé of ACORN. It doesn't matter how the "investigation" was conducted, Breitbart insisted -- what matters is that ACORN aided and abetted a child prostitution ring. (Which it didn't.)
These days, Breitbart may not be enjoying himself quite so much.
Yesterday, the Brooklyn district attorney announced the local ACORN office there hadn't engaged in any criminal conduct -- despite the hyperventilating by Breitbart and on Fox News. And in fact, a law enforcement source told the New York Daily News, the hidden-camera tapes James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles made of themselves posing as a prostitute and her boyfriend were "edited to meet their agenda."
Now, it turns out, Breitbart hadn't even seen the full tapes when he put O'Keefe's handiwork up on his site. Or at least, that's what he seems to have told blogger Mike Stark at CPAC, the same conservative conference where he yelled at me (and Max Blumenthal, and the Washington Independent's Dave Weigel, and Tommy Christopher, and just about anyone else who tried to get him to answer questions about O'Keefe's videos). Stark pressed him on why Breitbart, and everyone reporting breathlessly about O'Keefe's "scoop," originally declared O'Keefe had gone into ACORN offices dressed as a pimp, when in fact he'd been dressed more like a junior Capitol Hill staffer. Breitbart said he didn't initially realize the discrepancy:
I said, what I would require, in order to help them launch your independent film production, is on the big government site that we're going to launch, I want full transcripts and the full audio ... Why it matters what a pimp is wearing, whether they're dressed, you know, in a tutu or dressed in a flamboyant outfit, when you go in and you try and act like a pimp, you're a pimp, okay? So it never dawned on me, who saw the edited videos and who read the transcripts, and who heard the audio, and that's which I'd required -- it never dawned on me that it would ma -- not that it would matter, I didn't know, because James has a video that's looking out like that.
Why did the video begin with O'Keefe, dressed like an extra from a bad Bootsy Collins documentary, trailing Giles around and doing the best pimp-walk impression a conservative Rutgers grad could muster? "Because it's the title sequence," Breitbart said, comparing the videos to "Borat" or Ali G. "It's the title sequence with music."
Of course, that didn't stop Fox News from interviewing O'Keefe, dressed as a pimp, on its morning show when the tapes first appeared. Or the New York Times, for that matter, from declaring that O'Keefe was "dressed so outlandishly that he might have been playing in a risqué high school play." None of which turned out to be true.
The ACORN videos, now that people have had a chance to look into their claims, are starting to fall apart. (Which may be why Breitbart still won't release the full, unedited videos.) The notion that they proved ACORN was funding child sex slavery rings was always fiction, since the only sex slavery existed in O'Keefe's and Giles's feverish imagination. But the more scrutiny the videos get, the less they seem to show. Comparing them to Sasha Baron-Cohen's work, of course, doesn't do them any favors, since no one has ever pretended "Borat" was a crusading work of journalism. The damage, though, has been done; ACORN basically shut down as a national organization, and Congress moved to deny it all federal aid within days of Breitbart's big "scoop."
Breitbart, of course, is a bigger star than ever. He got a featured speaking slot at CPAC, and he'll address a big GOP confab in New Orleans next month, where he'll share the stage with Sean Hannity, Sarah Palin and others who make conservative hearts beat faster. He may not have reinvented media, the way his blustery promises say he will, but he's certainly made himself into a big deal. At CPAC, he was surrounded by a ring of adoring fans, who cheered him on as he hollered.
Meanwhile, if he was telling Stark the truth, he didn't even follow his own advice to look into the scandal carefully. Now he's cutting O'Keefe loose, insisting over and over again that he was just an "independent film producer" (though O'Keefe's arrest in New Orleans for trying to pull another hidden-camera stunt involving Sen. Mary Landrieu's phone system may have something to do with that, as well). There's no real reason to think it would matter to Breitbart if the ACORN tapes keep falling apart under scrutiny, though. He's never bothered to keep his boasting about the tapes too closely tied to the truth. And in the end, it probably doesn't matter. After all, Breitbart doesn't really want the media to change its ways; if he did that, he wouldn't have anyone to accuse of being un-American, as he taunted the press at CPAC. As long as they keep paying attention to him, he'll be just fine.
My Breakfast with Breitbart 2: Media Jiu-Jitsu
