By Brad Friedman on 3/31/2015, 7:49pm PT  

Rightwing grifter and convicted federal criminal James O'Keefe --- the guy who we exposed as having faked the infamous ACORN "pimp" hoax --- lost again in court this week.

O'Keefe, of course, is no stranger to being a loser. You'll recall the Republican scam-artist was also forced to pay $100,000 to a San Diego ACORN worker after illegally videotaping him as part of the phony "sting" scheme back in 2009.

This week's latest loss for the pretend "journalist" was in regard to his attempted 2010 wiretap conspiracy in the New Orleans office of then Democratic U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu...

As reported by Mother Jones tonight:

Conservative filmmaker and provocateur James O'Keefe has lost another legal battle: on Monday, a federal court in New Jersey dismissed a libel suit O'Keefe filed against legal news website MainJustice. In August 2013, MainJustice published an article referring to a 2010 incident in which O'Keefe and his associates posed as telephone technicians to gain access to the offices of then–Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.). O'Keefe and three others ultimately pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor charge of entering federal property under false pretenses.

In its original article, MainJustice said that O'Keefe was "apparently trying to bug" Landrieu's offices. After O'Keefe complained, the website changed the sentence to read that O'Keefe and his associates "were trying to tamper with Landrieu's phones." Still, O'Keefe sued, alleging that both characterizations were defamatory because they implied he had committed a felony. MainJustice countered that the language wasn't defamatory because the substance of the article was true, and the site accurately described the legal proceedings triggered by the episode.

The court didn't find O'Keefe's case convincing.
...
Mary Jacoby, editor-in-chief of MainJustice, writes in a statement:

This is an important First Amendment victory. It's a total, resounding defeat of O'Keefe's attempts to intimidate journalists into accepting his spin on the circumstances of his 2010 entry into Sen. Landrieu's offices under false pretenses.

Huh. So, O'Keefe tried to intimidate the journalists at MainJustice because they reported that he was "apparently trying to bug" Landrieu's office, even though they even quickly changed it to read "trying to tamper" with her phone lines after he complained.

Yet, he didn't bother to sue us --- or even complain --- when we wrote a 2010 article headlined "FBI: O'Keefe DID Plan a 'Wiretap Plot' to Secretly Record Employees of U.S. Senator".

Wonder why that would be.

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Article Categories: Journalist Intimidation, Accountability, Louisiana, U.S. Senate, ACORN, Mary Landrieu, James O'Keefe