I’ve been trying to get my mind wrapped around the arrest of journalist James O’Keefe – best known for his exposé this past July of several ACORN offices offering advice on prostitution-related crimes – for allegedly attempting to interfere with the phone system of Louisiana Senator Mary Mary Landrieu’s office.  Note that earlier reports that said they were trying to bug the system should not be followed, as this has not been said to be the case.  Yet, I’ve been racking my brains, trying to figure how else these guys could have tampered with the system.  After seeing this MSNBC article, I’m coming up with only one other explanation.  Otherwise, I don’t know anything else they could do to “tamper” with it, short of ripping it apart.

Meanwhile, Democrats and other liberals are besides themselves with glee, with Media Matters taking it upon themselves to start a smear attack on Andrew Breitbart of Big Government and Big Hollywood fame.  Of course, this was not the reaction of most liberals when the ACORN videos were released.  Mostly, they tried to sweep it under the rug, assuring us that it only happened in a few isolated circumstances, rather than admit that ACORN had a real problem on its hands.  Now they are happy the O’Keefe has been arrested, because he is a conservative, and for them, he was already a bad, bad guy.

On the other side of the issue, Republicans and conservatives have generally been more realistic in their response, or at least they were until today.  Yesterday, when the news was that O’Keefe, Joseph Basel, Stan Dai and Robert Flanagan had attempted to bug the Senator’s office, they rightly admonished the four.  Today, however, with the release of the affidavit, their response has suddenly become a lot different.

Allahpundit is probably the most realistic in his posting:

I assume the defense is going to be something like, “We never intended to tap the phone, we simply wanted to show how easy it would be if someone wanted to do it,” but even so: Ohhhhhhhhhhhh boy. Ten years.

Patterico, on the other hand, is banking on this being “a big nothing.”  He, no doubt, will point to this MSNBC report as proof that it is nothing (update: he did):

Instead, the official says, the men, led by conservative videomaker James O’Keefe, wanted to see how her local office staff would respond if the phones were inoperative.

Why, then, go up to the tenth floor and proceed to further their plan?  Why not, having recorded the conversation with the staffer, not just left the building?  Well, MSN doesn’t spell it out, but I expect the expanded explanation will include a plan to disable Landrieu’s phones, while O’Keefe records the re-actions of the staffers, who are presumably supposed to freak out in this situation.  Perhaps O’Keefe would ask a few questions to the staffers to find out if they were concerned by the outage, and then post their response, hoping that they would not register any concern that callers could not come through.

Even then, the four would still have committed the crime of tampering with the phone system.  This would, perhaps, turn it more into the category of a “prank” rather than an attempt to listen in on a Senator’s private conversations, though I suppose in these more secure times they could have winded up with a tele-terrorism charge on their record.

So I do believe that O’Keefe and his co-conspirators were planning to do something to Landrieu’s phones, even if it wasn’t to tap it to gain incriminating information, and I think conservatives are in a lot of denial about that right now.  While I’m with them in that the four men should be treated as innocent until proven guilty, I just don’t think the situation looks much better for them than it did yesterday.

In the end, we will need to wait to hear O’Keefe and company’s version of events before we pass judgment on his actions.  Anything else is just wild theorizing, including my wild theorizing.

P.S. Patterico is supporting a theory by Jawa Report’s Good Lt. that they were looking for evidence of a previous disconnection or re-routing.