Im not so sure this wasn't a frameup and even if it wasn't - trying to discover corruption in the office of the senator who got the Louisiana Purchase now somehow = bad?. Obama has wanted to get these people as soon as the ACORN news broke. They were marked men.
You suggest entrapment, the only imaginable defense for the alleged burglars. I say, follow the money and we will find out where the crime leads.
Those fellows were not police officers, and the law is unambiguous about wiretaps: except as permitted by a court of law to law enforcement officials who have sworn the necessity and efficacy of wiretaps, wiretaps are illegal. Period. The burglars posed as telephone-company employees, and did something that the phone companies do not tolerate. "Good intentions" do not excuse a crime.
By committing what looks like a set of serious crimes, James O'Keefe has just discredited his exposure of ACORN. Because his filming is not of the sort that one associates with such types as Hitchcock, Kubrick, or Spielberg, his career as an "independent filmmaker" looks to have been ruined. This looks like a
Gigli of a crime.
