Monday, April 22, 2013

Monday, April 15, 2013

James O’Keefe in Defense of Taping Mitch McConnell, and Everyone Else


April 15th 2013, 4:45 am

Anti-taping laws hurt democracy by shielding the powers that be from accountability, writes provocateur James O’Keefe.

“Break in, bribe, seduce and lie; anything to break through that palace guard and get the story,” said investigative reporter Robert Scheer, according to a article by Abbie Hoffman in a decades-old edition of Mother Jones magazine. Sometimes I’ve broken through the palace guards, and other times the palace guards have nearly broken me. What didn’t jail me made me stronger and smarter. I’ve become all too familiar with civil and criminal statutes that are bad for democracy because they insolate those vested in a public trust from democratic accountability.

Those embroiled in fraud rarely make unprovoked admissions of licentious behavior, which is precisely why covert tactics are effective in exposing the truth. Yet the problem lies in the consequences of applying Scheer’s rule. If I were on the left, pushing the legal limits of recordings by secretly taping meetings of the National Rifle Association, I’d be a cause célèbre and win awards for journalistic excellence. Because my passion so far has been exposing government-funded sacred cows and disrupting statist narratives, I am an apostate. Therein the tragedy lies; a free press is supposed to defend the rights of journalists with whom they disagree. It’s not just ignoble for the mainstream to ignore my First Amendment crises when they’ve arisen; journalists who reflexively call for my prosecution put themselves outside their own values, assuming that support for the First Amendment is one of them. They must now confront these values head-on as surreptitious recordings spark a mainstream renaissance, opening the floodgates to a veritable constitutional crisis over privacy, consent, and the ability to protect anonymous whistleblowers.

Mother Jones magazine’s Washington bureau chief, David Corn, recently won a Polk journalism award after publishing a series of clandestine recordings. Writing later about how he came into possession of the tape, Corn noted that the recording raised a “question of possible criminal prosecution” in Florida, a two-party-consent state. His lawyers advised Scott Prouty (the bartender who captured then candidate Romney’s now famous “47 percent” comments), his anonymous source at the time, to “shut up and keep your head low.” This week, Corn stands to win another journalism award from Ithaca College for “outstanding achievement in independent media,” a week after a recording was released that captured a private conversation in Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s Kentucky campaign office. Corn’s latest story could trigger felony eavesdropping charges. The FBI is investigating, and an official in the group Progress Kentucky has subsequently resigned, saying he “does not condone any allegations of illegal activity that might have taken place.” The murky nature of the Kentucky law makes it unclear whether it’s legal to record a barely audible conversation, according to NBC News. Sadly, rather than being viewed from the onset as a freedom-of-press issue, these debates split neatly down party lines, contingent upon who’s being investigated.

I received a unique education in this murkiness. My punishment—and I’m hardly the first journalist to be put through the legal wringer for aggressively pursuing the truth—changed my behavior. I’m hesitant to go into federal buildings, for example. I haven’t been arrested again for a reason.
But it also forced me to take my work to a new level. I may or may not have tapes of a federal employee committing fraud. I’ve spent the last few days with lawyers dissecting 18 U.S.C. § 1001, prohibiting anyone from making “materially false,” fictitious, or fraudulent statements to the federal government. Whether an undercover reporter fibbing about a scenario is making a “materially false” statement is any lawyer’s guess. There is virtually no case law on this point, and no analysis of the two cases where the statue is discussed. Anybody who tells a harmless fib to a federal-government employee potentially risks everything; we are not talking about a slap on the wrist, we are talking about a quarter-million dollar fine, a felony conviction, and the destruction of one’s reputation in the media. Therefore, the federal government is shielded from the type of reporting Mother Jones, NBC’s To Catch a Predator, and ABC’s Primetime have all won awards for.

Wednesday, April 03, 2013

James O'Keefe-Citizen Watchdog Promo




Published on Apr 3, 2013
Project Veritas' James O'Keefe promo of Americans for Prosperity Foundation-New Jersey/Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity Citizen Watchdog Summit! Saturday, April 6 in Hasbrouck Heights, NJ

REGISTER HERE: http://njcitizenwatchdog.eventbrite.c...

NJO: Video and blurb from YouTube channel AFPFoundationNJ.

Tuesday, April 02, 2013

Act Against Arms: Piers Morgan, Oprah, TriBeCa Films asked to ban guns from movies #ForTheChildren



Published on Apr 2, 2013
http://projectveritas.com. @Project_Veritas investigators urge Piers Morgan, Oprah Winfrey's production company (Harpo), and Robert DeNiro's production company (Tribeca) to help ban all guns from past and future movies. With some disturbed murderers citing violent movies as the impetus for their crimes, would Hollywood elites agree to remove guns from their flicks #ForTheChildren? Or would money and fame supersede their malleable ideology?

NJO: Title, video and blurb from James O'Keefe's YouTube channel VeritasVisuals.

Minions / fellow culture warriors involved:

John M. Howting

John Howting