Conservative filmmaker James O'Keefe is among four men charged after infiltrating Sen. Mary Landrieu’s New Orleans office. | AP photo composite by POLITICO Anti-ACORN filmmaker arrested

Federal authorities have arrested four men on felony charges for attempting to infiltrate Sen. Mary Landrieu’s New Orleans office, including one filmmaker who targeted the community group ACORN last year in damaging undercover videos.

Among those arrested was 25-year-old James O’Keefe, the conservative filmmaker, along with Joseph Basel, Robert Flanagan and Stan Dai, all 24. They were charged with entering federal property under false pretenses and attempting to gain access to the Democrat’s office by posing as telephone repairmen, according to a copy of an FBI affidavit unsealed Tuesday.


The complaint said that O’Keefe was waiting in the office when Flanagan and Basel each entered the premises, wearing light green fluorescent vests, denim paints and blue work shirts, tool belts and hard-hats. They informed a member of Landrieu’s staff that they were telephone repairmen and requested access to the main telephone at the reception desk.

At that point, the two men allegedly attempted to manipulate telephones and accessed the telephone closet, saying they needed to work on the entire system. The men, who said they left their credentials in their vehicles, were arrested by the U.S. Marshals Service soon afterward. O’Keefe, who had been filming the two men on his cell phone camera, was allegedly involved with planning, coordination, and preparation of the operation, according to an affidavit signed by Steven Rayes, special agent at the FBI.

According to the FBI, the four men could each face up to 10 years and a fine of $250,000 if they are convicted. The case, which is being investigated by special agents of the FBI and deputy marshals with the United States Marshal’s Service, is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Jordan Ginsberg.

Michael Madigan, O’Keefe’s lawyer, told POLITICO Tuesday afternoon that he was still unclear exactly what happened at the senator’s office.

"I don't know the facts yet of what exactly happened, but at heart James O'Keefe is a good kid,” said Madigan, a white-collar criminal defense lawyer who served as counsel to Sen. Howard Baker during the Watergate investigation and helped run former Tennessee Republican Sen. Fred Thompson’s investigation of the Clinton administration.

In a statement issued Tuesday night, Landrieu said: “This is a very unusual situation and somewhat unsettling for me and my staff. The individuals responsible have been charged with entering federal property under false pretenses for the purposes of committing a felony. I am as interested as everyone else about their motives and purpose, which I hope will become clear as the investigation moves forward.”

In a statement, ACORN said O’Keefe’s arrest is “further evidence of his disregard for the law in pursuit of his extremist agenda.”

This was not the first of O’Keefe’s legal troubles: ACORN is pressing charges him with a six-figure lawsuit in Baltimore for videotaping its employees with a hidden video camera over the summer. The lawsuit is still ongoing, and the Philadelphia branch of the group alleged in federal court this month that O’Keefe and co-filmmaker Hannah Giles caused emotional distress, harm and injury in their publicizing of the videos.

O’Keefe made waves last year when he unveiled undercover videos of ACORN employees seeming to encourage two people – who were pretending to be sex workers – to circumvent the law, embarrassing the group and forcing many of its supporters to spurn its ties with it. ACORN has long been a punching bag for conservatives who say that the community-organizing group engages in underhanded activities as it tries to beef up voter registration among the poor, charges that the group roundly dismisses.

O’Keefe’s original ACORN videos – filmed last year -- appeared on the conservative news website biggovernment.com, which is run by Andrew Breitbart, a prominent conservative.

In a statement, Breitbart denied that he knew anything of the latest incident involving Landrieu.

"We have no knowledge about or connection to any alleged acts and events involving James O'Keefe at Senator Mary Landrieu's office,” Breitbart said in a statement. “We only just learned about the alleged incident this afternoon. We have no information other than what has been reported publicly by the press. Accordingly, we simply are not in a position to make any further comment."

In one of O’Keefe’s videos, a woman pretending to be a prostitute informs an ACORN employee that she wants to traffic in a dozen underage women from El Salvador and wants assistance obtaining a loan for a brothel, in an attempt to avoid tax laws and launder money into a congressional campaign. The video shows an employee from a Baltimore field office giving the advice to the two people, seeming to ignore the fact that they were characterizing themselves as sex workers.

Similar videos also emerged, including another by O’Keefe where he filmed ACORN workers in San Bernardino, Calif. talking to a woman pretending to be a prostitute how she could avoid police detection.

Conservatives pounced on the videos as evidence that the organization was corrupt, and it prompted an array of efforts in Congress to shut down all federal funding to the community group. In November, the group sued the federal government, alleging it is unconstitutional for Congress retaliate against a specific group.

Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.), a leader of the effort, couldn’t be reached for comment on the incident in Landrieu’s office, and a lead House critic of ACORN, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), declined to comment as well.

Rep. Pete Olson, the Texas GOP congressman who sponsored a resolution last fall to honor O’Keefe and the other filmmaker, said Tuesday night that “individuals who lawfully expose wrongful activities by an entity like ACORN receiving federal tax dollars should be praised.

“However, if recent events conclude that any laws were broken in the incident in Senator Landrieu’s office – that is not something I condone,” Olson said. “Citizens have an important role in helping to expose waste and/or fraud when their tax dollars are being spent, but it must be done in a lawful manner.”

Democrats who support ACORN say that the group has been the subject of unsubstantiated criticism, and they point to a December study by the Congressional Research Office that suggested that the group has not improperly used its federal funds or engaged in illegal activities at the polls, and it raises the possibility that the filmmakers broke the law by its undercover sting.

The videos prompted an embarrassed ACORN to launch an internal review conducted by former Democratic Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger, who recommended a series of improvements but said that there was no pattern of intentionally inappropriate or illegal conduct by the group’s staff.

Immediately after Tuesday’s news broke, some conservatives seemed sympathetic to O’Keefe’s latest troubles.

“Hang in there buddy, we’re on your side,” a fan wrote on O’Keefe’s Facebook page.

Michael Calderone contributed to this story.