Struggling to explain him, Lieberman– who received access through O’Keefe after convincing him to trust the columnist because they “inhabit the same circles”– alludes to everyone from Johnny Knoxville to Woodward and Bernstein to G. Gordon Liddy himself: an “ace performance artist–political shit stirrer–jackass.”
This convoluted description, while accurate, doesn’t explain too much, though the background that Lieberman gives on his life certainly adds some clarity. O’Keefe has been at this since performing in high school musicals. That preposterous “pimp” coat he wore in the famous ACORN video? On loan from grandma. Yes, he lives in his parents’ house, but he’d rather not talk about it. He is very poor and appears to trust people he barely knows on a whim. He has a cache of juicy “investigative” pieces he can’t release because of the legally questionable way the information was obtained, one– Lieberman’s favorite– in which O’Keefe plays a “high-roller” who visits a resort owned by a prominent politician in search of prostitutes. Always the prostitutes with this one.
That latter point made and broke his career– the acclaimed ACORN sting was not his idea, but that of 20-year-old Hannah Giles, the “prostitute” in the video turned fellow conservative wunderkind. Giles found O’Keefe on Facebook, pitched the idea, and it was a go. “We met in person the day before we went undercover,” Giles confesses in the piece. Conversely, the CNN dildo boat was the idea of one Ben Wetmore, a law school friend who first helped fund his Rutgers conservative pamphlet, The Centurion.
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