James O’Keefe, who was arrested at Mary Landrieu’s New Orleans office earlier this week, released a statement on the allegations about tampering with the Louisiana Senator’s phone lines. He merely wanted to see if the phones were disabled, he claimed:

The government has now confirmed what has always been clear: No one tried to wiretap or bug Senator Landrieu’s office. Nor did we try to cut or shut down her phone lines. Reports to this effect over the past 48 hours are inaccurate and false [...]

I learned from a number of sources that many of Senator Landrieu’s constituents were having trouble getting through to her office to tell her that they didn’t want her taking millions of federal dollars in exchange for her vote on the healthcare bill. When asked about this, Senator Landrieu’s explanation was that, “Our lines have been jammed for weeks.” I decided to investigate why a representative of the people would be out of touch with her constituents for “weeks” because her phones were broken. In investigating this matter, we decided to visit Senator Landrieu’s district office – the people’s office – to ask the staff if their phones were working.

Simple as that. Asking if the phones were working. Accompanied by two people dressed as telephone repairmen. But he didn’t want to touch the phone lines at all. He just, as a citizen, wanted to join two fake telephone repairmen who asked for access to the telephone closet for the purposes of performing repairs. That’s from the arrest report.

O’Keefe, while agreeing that he “could have used a different approach to this investigation,” immediately launched into an attack on the media for distorting the nature of his arrest. That’s certainly a good way to manage public relations, through an attack-dog strategy. But it kind of falls down under scrutiny. When your own lawyer’s cover story is “You’re dealing with kids … I don’t think they thought it through that far,” you don’t have much of a case.