O'Keefe, Giles, and Breitbart 'Buried the Truth' About Their ACORN 'Pimp' Hoax Video Tapes And the New York Times is STILL helping them do so...

By Brad Friedman It's not particularly worth my time, or anybody's time (unless they are involved in suing or pressing charges against the GOP hoaxsters), to get into the detailed weeds on how the ACORN "pimp" hoax videos were doctored to show something other than what they really were, in comparison to what the text transcripts (which may or may not be accurate) actually show, since:

• the entire scam was a political hit job and a scam from the jump, and;
• since accused felon James O'Keefe and his employer and publisher Andrew Breitbart have refused to release the unedited video tapes, and;
• since three investigations (one from the Congressional Research Service, one from MA's former Attorney General, and the latest, just this week from the Brooklyn, NY District Attorney) have all found no criminal wrongdoing by the low-level ACORN employees caught on secret video, and;
• since nobody but low-level workers and volunteers are even seen on the tapes, and;
• since ACORN immediately fired those who violated the organization's own written protocols.

As The BRAD BLOG has been detailing over the last several weeks, the highly-edited, heavily-overdubbed, secretly (and likely illegally) taped videos, and those who published them, have already proven to have discredited themselves.

Now that O'Keefe's ACORN "pimp" hoax has been acknowledged, even by Andrew Breitbart, as a deceptive fraud --- where he once called it Pulitzer Prize-worthy "journalism" he now compares it to Borat --- it doesn't seem to matter to the same rightwing bloggers who trumpeted it in the first place that O'Keefe lied about playing his now-infamous 70's-era blaxploitation "pimp" character in ACORN offices. What's important, those foolish enough to keep backing O'Keefe and Breitbart now claim, is not that the purveyor of the information has been shown to be a fraud himself, but what he purports to have caught ACORN workers saying and doing on his highly-edited video productions.

But even those charges don't hold up to even the quickest scrutiny...

One of the few foolish enough to stay on the Breitbart/O'Keefe fraud train, rightwing blogger "Patterico" (who, as Los Angeles Deputy D.A. Patrick Frey, should know better) was initially shown to have been massively and embarrassingly wrong. But after having been played for a chump by Breitbart, he has been busy doubling down ever since, in one silly article after another, in hopes of saving face, apparently.

All of that, even after the Brooklyn D.A. on Monday found "no criminality" in the Brooklyn videos, and a law enforcement source was quoted as confirming what any intellectually honest person already understands by the now: "They edited the tape to meet their agenda."

[Update: Even Rupert Murdoch's NYPost confirms DA source that the video was a "'Highly edited' splice job ... with seemingly crime-encouraging answers...taken out of context so as to appear more sinister"]

Nonetheless, it seems Patterico has determined to make his own private industry out of continuing to misrepresent the now-discredited ACORN tapes and the independently verified and verifiable information that myself and others, like Media Matters' Eric Boehlert, emptywheel's Marcy Wheeler, Digby at Hullabaloo and Dave Johnson at Campaign for America's Future have been presenting over the last several weeks. His strategy, like O'Keefe's, seems simply to be to mislead his gullible wingnut readers with tons of smoke, mirrors, out-of-context quotes, and demonstrably inaccurate claims, on the fairly safe bet that they won't be bothered to look too closely at the actual facts.

You'd only know much of Patty's nonsense was demonstrably inaccurate if you had the time, inclination, or interest to lower yourself far enough down into the dirty weeds to notice.

This won't take long, and I don't plan on spending much time doing it, given the discredited nature of the entire affiar, as I've mentioned above, but allow me to give just one very quick example of just how deceptively and dishonestly the Breitbart/O'Keefe ACORN "pimp" hoax tapes have been presented to the public, and as they are still supported, incredibly enough, by wingnut bloggers like Patrick "Patterico" Frey, Deputy D.A..

'Bury the Money?' --- Bury the Truth...

Hannah Giles, who played the "prostitute" in the tapes to O'Keefe's law school student boyfriend trying to save her from an abusive pimp (as we now know, he never actually posed as his infamous 70's-era "pimp" character in those offices, though the NYTimes has yet to correct its repeated misreporting on that), had this to say on Sean Hannity's show on September 14th last year, the same day Breitbart and O'Keefe published their Brooklyn ACORN tape, deceptively titled as "ACORN NYC Child Prostitution Investigation":

GILES: Yes. Imagine that. Everyone is suffering and looking for a loan and they tell us and you know, we're going through all this financial problems, and they're telling me to bury funds in the back yard so that the government or my pimp can't come steal the money.

The Brooklyn videos --- both parts 1 and 2 --- open with the seemingly startling, but out of context, comments , and a graphic suggesting the ACORN Housing workers (ACORN Housing is a separate organization from ACORN itself) were instructing Giles on ACORN's non-existent "Rule #8": bury the prostitution money in a tin in the backyard to "hide the money from government," as Giles lied on Fox "News".

That moment is often alluded to when the Rightwing propagandists and fellow defenders of the videos try to claim (inaccurately) that the workers advised them to evade taxes.

Here's the very damning, if entirely misleading (and misspelled) graphic O'Keefe uses at the beginning of Part II of the "ACORN NYC Child Prostitution Investigation" video:

Trouble is, the entire thing --- including Giles' comments to Hannity --- is a deceptive hoax.

A very quick review of just a few lines of O'Keefe/Breitbart's own unauthenticated text transcript [PDF] on that point, reveal immediately how the tapes "were edited to meet their agenda", as noted after the Brooklyn D.A. concluded his investigation on Monday.

As you'll see in the quick transcript snippet below --- the one from which, presumably, the "BURRY [sic] THE CASH-MONEY IN THE BACKYARD" comments were taken out of context for use in the doctored video --- the low-level ACORN Housing tax/mortgage adviser did not advise hiding money "from the federal government" as both Giles and O'Keefe claimed publicly, and as the gullible wingnuts and their enablers in the irresponsibly uncritical media have portrayed.

Instead, the worker was advising Giles on how she could keep the money from her fictional psychotic pimp --- who O'Keefe represented himself as trying to help rescue her from --- after that pimp had beaten her up, threated to kill her, stalked her, etc.

Here's the actual comments (at least as seen in O'Keefe and Breitbart's own unauthenticated transcripts):

Volda (loan counselor): Not only that but if you gonna do that type of work you got to start thinking quickly or else you are going to be abused

Hannah (Eden): which I have been

Volda (loan counselor): you have to start thinking faster than even the person who put you over there. Quick, quick, quick, you know that

Hannah (Eden): I mean I do think fast but this whole thing

Volda (loan counselor): when you buy, let me tell you something when you buy the house with a back yard. You get a tin if Jo [* see ed note below -BF] is going to come beat you and want money you get a tin and bury it down in there and you put the money right in and you put grass over it and you don't tell a single soul but yourself where it is

Hannah (Eden): so a tin I put the money in a tin

Volda (loan counselor): in a tin and put it in there

Milagros (counselor) and put the grass

Volda (loan counselor): and put the grass over it

Hannah (Eden): I saw a movie one time where he put all the money underneath the dog house

Volda (loan counselor): you don't put it under no dog house

Hannah (Eden): but I don't have a dog

Volda (loan counselor): good so you put it where you can get it and he cant get it from you if he wants to come and rip up the place and all the like

Hannah (Eden): okay

* The reference to "Jo" in the transcript section above is actually heard as "Tom Jones" in the edited video. According to the Urban Dictionary, "Tom Jones" is defined as the "First man to bring prostitution to the US". Elsewhere in the transcripts, Hannah (Eden)'s abusive pimp is referred to as "Sonny". But it's clear that the ACORN worker was not referring to "the government" as Giles had asserted to Sean Hannity.

So after reading the above, read again how Giles lied about it on Fox "News" on the same day the tape was released, and on the same day O'Keefe also appeared on Fox in his "pimp" get up, representing that it was the same one he "wore in these ACORN offices up and down the Eastern Seaboard":

GILES: Yes. Imagine that. Everyone is suffering and looking for a loan and they tell us and you know, we're going through all this financial problems, and they're telling me to bury funds in the back yard so that the government or my pimp can't come steal the money.

Other than that, O'Keefe, Giles and Breitbart --- who all knowingly lied about the ACORN videos --- are completely legitimate, the tapes and transcripts are to be trusted, but Dan Rather had to go.

'He who knowingly enables and facilitates the fraud is as guilty as he who originated it'

Remember when the modern day wingnut blogosphere scored their first great political take-down with Rather? Never mind that there is no evidence that he ever believed he was using fraudulent documents questioning George W. Bush's National Guard service, or that conclusive evidence exists to prove that the documents were actually fraudulent, or that, to this day, nobody from the Dubya White House ever directly challenged the substance of Rather's report itself. Because the wingnuts believed the documents were fraudulent, Rather's entire report was labeled as "a fraud" to be discredited, and Rather and everyone involved in the report needed to be fired immediately.

For example, Texas attorney and rightwing blogger William J. Dyer, who blogs as "Beldar" screamed (in all bold) about Rather and his CBS employers back in 2004: "He who knowingly enables and facilitates the fraud is as guilty as he who originated it."

That same blogger has yet to call for the firing of James O'Keefe by his employer Andrew Breitbart, despite Breitbart's own latest claims that even he was duped by O'Keefe's pimp hoax. In fact, none of the rightwing bloggers have called for O'Keefe to be fired by Breitbart as far as I know, even after all that we now know, and even as he's facing federal felony charges for his alleged scheme to tamper with the phone system of a Democratic U.S. Senator.

We'll have more on the deceptive nature of the entire ACORN "pimp" hoax in the coming days. But it's necessary to remind that the real point of all of this is not how the partisan liars and operatives lied --- we expect them to do that --- but, rather, how the non-wingnut, purportedly-legitimate mainstream media fell for the entire scam, hook, line and uncorrected sinker, and how they still refuse to cop to their serious and damaging failure, even now that the hoax has been demonstrated to them in no uncertain terms.

"He who knowingly enables and facilitates the fraud is as guilty as he who originated it."

If the mainstream corporate media won't acknowledge they were hoodwinked now --- and it wasn't just the NYTimes, it was also Baltimore Sun, CNN, New York Post, Washington City Paper, Philadelphia Daily News, NPR, Dallas Morning News and many more --- then they are enabling the fraud, and will fall for the same scams again in the future. In fact, they already have.

Despite the NYTimes' Public Editor Clark Hoyt telling me, via email just two weeks ago, that he was "recommending to Times editors that they avoid language that says or suggests that O'Keefe was dressed as a pimp when he captured the ACORN employees on camera," the paper has already done so again.

Reporting Monday night, on the wrap-up of the Brooklyn D.A.'s five-month probe finding "no criminality" in the O'Keefe/Giles/Breitbart Brooklyn ACORN tapes, the Times' Andy Newman wrote:

The Acorn employees in Brooklyn who were captured on a hidden camera seeming to offer conservative activists posing as a pimp and a prostitute creative advice on how to get a mortgage have been cleared of wrongdoing by the Brooklyn district attorney’s office.

District Attorney Charles J. Hynes said in a statement on Monday that “no criminality has been found” in his investigation of the three employees, who had appeared to advise the woman, who was scantily dressed and identified herself as an “outcall” specialist, not to tell prospective lenders that she was a prostitute and to funnel her earnings to her “pimp” through a third party so that he would not be tied to her.

Newman also used the exact same misleading rhetoric earlier in the day, in a shorter article for the Times' "City Room Blog".

No context or clarity was given for accuracy to the reader, or to adhere to Hoyt's recommendation. Never mind that the only references to a "pimp" in O'Keefe's own Brooklyn transcript is to the one that O'Keefe represented to workers that he was trying to save Giles from:

James: well the reason why we are rushing is because she was working for this pimp and he was very abusive ... James: and that is why we were in a rush you know why I am excited and I know nothing about her business I am just trying to be here to be professional because ya know she walks in and but now we have this pimp discriminating against us ... James: I know I have to worry about the pimp but he is illegal anyway he is not going to do anything to me who what do I have to be careful of? ... James: Sonny is the pimp

The BRAD BLOG is doing its best to hold the media accountable for their seeming inability to report credibly and critically on the Rightwing propaganda that they so eagerly pass on to the public. Unless they can be held accountable, as the 2010 general election nears, you can look forward to more spoon-fed phony wingnut stories about non-existent "ACORN voter fraud", and much much more such horseshit, from all of these previously-legitimate media outlets.

Breitbart confirms he was duped by O'Keefe and the ACORN pimp hoax

By Eric Boehlert

It turns out that Andrew Breitbart didn't actually know what was on the ACORN tapes when he helped launch them on his website last year, and used the videos to fuel his oddly personal crusade against the low-income advocacy organization.

That's right -- Breitbart didn't know what was on the tapes. Take a few seconds to let the implications of that confession sink in, and what it means to Breitbart's already dented credibility.

Recall that for months Breitbart personally vouched for the ACORN videos, braying loudly that they could not be ignored and that they represented the unvarnished truth. Breitbart claimed he had told "the truth" every step of the way about the controversial ACORN clips and bragged that "[t]hroughout the ACORN story I applied my conscience to the material."

But now it turns out that Breitbart was fooled by the ACORN pimp hoax and mistakenly assumed, after watching deceptively edited clips from his protégé James O'Keefe, that O'Keefe strolled into ACORN offices wearing the outlandish pimp outfit.

Now Breitbart, the chief promoter of the ACORN sting, claims he "didn't know" the truth about the tapes. Although he's quick to insist it doesn't really matter anyway.

And yes, that sound you hear is Breitbart throwing O'Keefe under the bus. Because it's O'Keefe who Breitbart now blames for the "discrepancy" regarding the pimp hoax. It's O'Keefe, who Breitbart once touted as a should-be Pulitzer Prize winner, who created the false impression that he walked into ACORN offices last summer dressed as a garish pimp.

In a video interview posted Monday at Crooks and Liars, Stark Reports, as well as The Brad Blog, Breitbart, filmed by blogger Mike Stark at the recent CPAC convention, claims he did not know the facts about O'Keefe's pimp outfit. (See video below.)

Essentially, Breitbart claims he was duped like everyone else who saw the ACORN clips created by O'Keefe. He was duped because at the outset, the misleading clips contain cut-away shots filmed outdoors, which feature O'Keefe decked out in the cane-fur-sunglasses pimp costume. (Breitbart deceptively refers to the dressed-as-pimp section as the "title sequence" of the videos, but it's really much more than that.)

It appears that many viewers just assumed O'Keefe wore the get-up while he surreptitiously filmed the ACORN workers who ignited a scandal when they gave O'Keefe and his pretend prostitute girlfriend, Hannah Giles, tax advice on how to run a brothel.

The dressed-as-a-pimp storyline was one Breitbart, O'Keefe, and others eagerly pushed last fall. And it was one the press quickly embraced. (In truth, O'Keefe was often dressed rather conservatively -- slacks and dress shirt -- when he talked to ACORN staffers, and he often presented himself as a law school student and an aspiring politician trying to rescue his prostitute girlfriend from her abusive pimp.) The outlandish costume was used as a prop to both mislead viewers, and to make ACORN staffers look like idiots for not being able to spot the obvious ruse.

But it was all a hoax. And for weeks now, ever since the trick was highlighted by blogger Brad Friedman, Breitbart has been wrestling with the glaring contradiction and struggling to explain his own role in the hoax. He's been straining to explain why, for instance, in a September 21 column in The Washington Times, Breitbart specifically claimed O'Keefe had been "dressed as a pimp" while receiving tax advice from ACORN workers.

That claim was categorically false.

He's been laboring to explain why he never sought a single correction last year when an avalanche of news outlets erroneously reported O'Keefe was dressed as a pimp inside ACORN offices.

And he's been struggling to explain why, in light of the pimp hoax, he refuses to release all of the unedited ACORN tapes so we can see what other discrepancies might pop up.

At least now, thanks to Stark, we finally have Breitbart's unequivocal admission: It was all O'Keefe's fault.

From the Stark interview [emphasis added; full transcript here]:

Hello to anyone that thinks that I was misleading. I did not know that there was a discrepancy between the title sequence -- I didn't think it was significant. I saw the videos. I read the transcripts to make sure that there was continuity, and my only mistake -- and I've admitted it to Brad, I've admitted it, now that I now know about it -- is that there is a title sequence and it doesn't reflect what he was wearing when he was in there. But he still represented himself as a pimp.

In the interview, Breitbart also stressed that because O'Keefe is an "independent film producer," Breitbart couldn't "tell him what to put on these things." And to make his point clear, when Stark pressed further about the hoax, Breitbart responded, "Your problem is with James."

Breitbart may have tried to shift the blame, but the admission was a devastating one. After all, he's the guy who won't stop bragging about how he's going to reinvent online journalism, and how he and his conservative activists are going to shame the liberal media with relentless fact-checking. Yet it turns out that for the biggest story of his career, Breitbart didn't even know what was on the ACORN tapes.

Not only did Breitbart clearly fail Journalism 101 in this case, but the way he's refused to publicly accept responsibility for the blunder represents another body blow to his credibility. To date, Breitbart has made no effort to correct the record on his site, which helped launch the ACORN sting. Which means that, to date, Breitbart's sycophantic readers have not been told that, oh, by the way, that whole dressed-as-a-pimp thing was bogus.

With that in mind, what journalist would take seriously the next undercover video sting Breitbart might sponsor, when we find out that for the all-important ACORN caper he didn't even know what was on the tapes until observers pointed out a glaring discrepancy?

Meanwhile, should we believe Breitbart's pimp spin? Tough to say. It probably represents his only way out of this mess. If Breitbart actually confessed that he knew the pimp costume story was a fake, and that not only did he do nothing to try to stop the misinformation last year but actively helped to spread the hoax, then I think his credibility would be permanently demolished. At that point even mainstream journalists, who tend to turn a blind eye to Breitbart's mendacity, would have to acknowledge he is nothing more than a partisan propagandist.

So, searching for a face-saving move, it appears Breitbart has opted for Plan B: Blame the young "independent film producer" O'Keefe, who brought the videos to Breitbart, complete with the misleading pimp costumes shots already embedded. (Does Breitbart really expect people to believe that he never had a single conversation with O'Keefe about the pimp outfit prior to the release of the videos?)

The problem with Breitbart's alibi (i.e. it's O'Keefe's fault!) is that it means Breitbart has copped to the fact that he didn't know what was on the tapes that he relentlessly hyped and used as a weapon in his oddly unhinged attack on ACORN, an underfunded and somewhat adrift nonprofit that advocates for poor people. (In one disturbed dispatch from a pro-ACORN rally last year, Breitbart attacked the attendees as "common street thugs, the dregs of society.")

His new song and dance (literally -- see the 6:40 mark in the video below) is that none of this matters because it's irrelevant whether O'Keefe was dressed flamboyantly inside the ACORN offices. It's true, as I've stated many times, that the costume question does not negate what was captured on the ACORN videos. But the hoax certainly does matter in terms of the larger ACORN attack and how the press embraced it. Breitbart knows it, and that's why he's been so slow to clear up the confusion. (And it's why he seemed so eager last year to spread the confusion.)

As the blogger Digby recently explained:

But the less than obvious reason this is a big deal is that the pimp and ho costumes were a send-up of over-the-top racial stereotypes that both reinforced some very ugly notions about the African American community, but more importantly, made these ACORN workers look as though they were so dumb they shouldn't be allowed to cross the street, much less handle tax dollars. And this was done for a reason.

The pimp hoax is not some footnote that can just be dismissed. The glaring blunder goes to the heart of Breitbart's credibility as a wannabe journalist. The lie was absolutely central to the rollout of last year's ACORN attack campaign. And now, six months later, Breitbart claims he didn't know the first thing about the hoax because, truth be told, he didn't even know what was on the ACORN tapes. Quick comment: One trend I noticed among right wing males is that they act like Billy Badass when they're in a room filled with other sackless right wonders yet when it's one on one they want no part of a debate of ideas.