Hey, I was born in Idaho, and still live there to this day. Don’t be hatin’ on the Gem State!
You mean, there really is such a place?
Yeah, right. Like that “Delaware” people keep claiming is somewhere on the eastern seaboard.
The lunatic fringe has cranked up the conspiracy engine to eleven:
Don’t neglect the Denial over at Politico:
Man charged in NOLA-gate scheme did not work for intelligence community
However:
There’s room for a little suspicion of his motives here.
Sounds to me like the accomplices were simply spy “wanna-bes” who took courses in spy-ology at a 2nd rate institution. They were amateurs.
There was a little more to it than that.
From the Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence at Trinity Washington:
**
JUNKETS!!!**
Still, the school is in DC, and there does seem to be a legit tie to the intelligence community, insofar as anything set up on the side during the Bush years had any legitimacy:
Amateurs indeed.
Going inside the building and the office to tap the phones. You could do that just as easily from the utility room in the basement of the building, or a phone company pad outside the building in the back alley. And those places would be far less likely to be observed or questioned by anyone. So their own stupidity got them caught.
Well, yeah, one would think so. On the other hand, the Bushiviks did their darndest to staff the Justice Dept. with ideologically correct graduates of Dollar Store University, so who knows?
I’m just tickled that from here on out, James O’Keefe, by his own doing, is now almost universally known as “ACORN Pimp.”
I call it Teabagger Syndrome.
Amateur or not, we should all be glad they didn’t stay at a Holiday Inn Express!
I would have assumed that federal buildings don’t have easily accessible phone company pads in back alleys outside.
I’d like to think CIA operatives would have fake credentials or be able to come up with an excuse better than “dude, we left 'em in the car”, though I wouldn’t swear to it. If I were a rogue CIA operative I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t buy a reflective vest and walk into the building in front of witnesses but just break in at 2 a.m. when you can take all the time you need and the only person you have to worry about is the $10 per hour security guard.
So I’m not even sure these guys watch Burn Notice, let alone took courses.
In my very short time working as a FTTP* designer, t-bonham@scc.net really wasn’t too far from the truth. If the building wasn’t built as a federal building in the first place, they usually didn’t bother to move everything inside/underground but there would be cameras aimed at the important stuff like junction boxes and penetration points. I never tested to see if someone was watching the cameras but I had no problem wandering around the parking lot and grass areas with a vest and badge flapping around.
*Fiber (optic cable) To The Premises
My hunch is they wanted videotape of the phones ringing off the hooks while the secretaries smacked bubble gum, buffed their nails, and ignored the phones. You can’t get that at 2 am.
I wanted to let the punnage and general merriment peter out before thanking you for the correction.
Thank you.
Article and clips of his Hannity appearance. He’s lying his ass off, and that’s just when he calls himself an investigative journalist, and his comment about how “we were trying to figure out what had happened with her phone system” IS THE SAME AS SAYING “we were there to tamper with her phone system”; any information on repair to her office phone system would probably be available under FOIA anyway.
(Godamighty, can you imagine Hannity if the guest had been a Youth For Obama Democrat who had been arrested for breaking into Orrin Hatch’s office?)
Did they have any equipment with them that could actually be used to monitor a phone line and either record it or transmit it to a remote location?
I’d never seen a pic of him before the link in Sampiro’s post? Someone actually believed that piece of pale white bread was a pimp? The pimps I’ve known would have him turning tricks in about two minutes.
Not that I’ve known a lot of pimps. Just sayin.
I’m guessing here, but I think the point of the exercise was to confront the staff with someone who might repair malfunctioning phones so that the staff would say “No, our phones are working fine, no need for you here.” A pre-emptive strike, so to speak.
So that when Jimmy offers his positive proof that Sen Landrieu’s staff were deliberately ignoring the huge wave of anti-HRC phone calls, they couldn’t fall back on “the phones weren’t working” for an excuse. Or, even better, if they did he could bring out his video of them refusing any assistance.
He did not dress up like that for the actual visits to the ACORN offices. That outfit was edited into the videos later. Some other things were edited in also, like voiced, but we don’t know exactly what was changed or why, because they will not release the original tapes.
Also, he did not present himself as a pimp apparently. He was there as the boyfriend of the the hooker, at least that is how the stories I have read have reported it.