It’s a scenario that smacks of a movie set in a foreign country. A journalist is arrested and put into shackles. Not just handcuffs, mind you; shackles. He’s taunted by the police and thrown in jail on trumped-up charges. The politically connected prosecutors don’t just work to put him away, they assume secret identities to trump up public opinion against him.

Now ask yourself: does anything about this story make you want to go into journalism?

This is what happened to conservative journalist James O’Keefe in Louisiana a few years ago when he tried to investigate Democrat Senator Mary Landrieu during the run up to the passage of Obamacare. Landrieu was getting a lot of heat from her constituents and O’Keefe wanted to investigate whether she was ignoring phone calls, using one of his typically creative approaches. O’Keefe and three colleagues were arrested and O’Keefe was contrite at the time, saying to The Hill:

“On reflection, I could have used a different approach to this investigation, particularly given the sensitivities that people understandably have about security in a federal building,” he wrote.

No matter. Louisiana threw the book at him. As The Huffington Post reported at the time:

All four suspects were charged with entering federal property under false pretenses for the purpose of committing a felony, which carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

O’Keefe ended up taking a plea deal that gave him three years probation but that’s not the end of the story.

A few days before last week’s run-off election that dethroned Sen. Landrieu after her eighteen year run, James O’Keefe returned to Louisiana to expose what he says is clear corruption by officials.

The story goes beyond James O’Keefe: the Draconian tactics used against him (yes, he really was put in shackles) were designed to send a message. Remember, this incident happened soon after O’Keefe’s exposé of leftist community activist group ACORN had dismantled the group and resulted in its loss of federal funding.

Here in this exclusive interview for Rebel Pundit, O’Keefe explains the message the Democrats were trying to send citizen journalists.