Appearing on MSNBC’s The Ed Show on Friday night, Eugene Iredale, the attorney for former San Diego ACORN worker Juan Carlos Vera, made short work of the chiseling claim made by federal criminal and professional liar James O’Keefe, that he had agreed to pay Vera $100,000 simply to bring to a close a “ridiculous lawsuit.”
“If he wants to get out of the settlement and wants to fight us in court,” Iredale told host Ed Schultz in response to O’Keefe’s fundraising bluster, “we’re ready any time. We can go right now!”
O’Keefe agreed last week to settle the lawsuit filed by Vera in July of 2010 against him and his partner Hannah Giles. Vera had been fired by ACORN after deceptively edited video tapes of him, secretly recorded by O’Keefe and his partner Hannah Giles, were published by Andrew Breitbart in 2009. While the edited tapes made it appear as though Vera, whose English is poor, was interested in cooperating in a scheme to smuggle underage prostitutes across the Mexican border, in reality, Vera had played along with the pair in order to gain information, including taking their photos, and then immediately notified law enforcement about the ridiculous scheme O’Keefe and Giles were proposing.
After word of the settlement with Vera leaked to Wonkette’s Matthew Phelan and Liz Farkas last week, O’Keefe took to Twitter to play the victim, describing his payout to Vera as the necessary result of a “nuisance lawsuit”.
“Sadly, this is the cost of exposing the truth,” he explained to his gullible fundraising base in a statement posted to his ironically named Project Veritas website late last week. “That’s why so few people do it. There are liability issues inherent in undercover journalism.”
Many of those paying attention to this long shameful saga would be right in responding in turn: “Um, what ‘journalism'”?!
O’Keefe continued his post-settlement Twitter tantrum to describe media coverage of his settlement agreement as “lies and lies and more lies from journafascists,” taunting them to “have the guts” to allow him to respond on TV.
The BRAD BLOG’s Brad Friedman responded to O’Keefe in turn with an invitation to appear live with him on his KPFK/Pacfica Radio show this coming Wednesday, at which time he could, among other things, explain how deceptively edited videotapes deserve to be labeled “journalism” or why he describes Vera’s complaint as “meritless accusations”. O’Keefe has yet to respond to the invitation…
The Ed Show, Iredale pointed out that O’Keefe’s secret recordings, not only of Vera, but at various ACORN locations in California, violated a criminal statute (CA Penal Code Section 632).
He also alleged that O’Keefe and anti-abortion activist Lila Rose violated the same statute in relation to another phony video sting that was part of a long-standing effort by the right wing Christian fundamentalist Rose to “take out” an Planned Parenthood, which, as the group noted after informing federal authorities about the bizarre visits to offices in six states in early 2011, “delivers preventive health care and abortion services to three million women each year.”
As reported by Right Wing Watch, the O’Keefe/Rose Planned Parenthood child sex trafficking hoax, like O’Keefe’s fraudulent ACORN pimp hoax before it, failed to produce any evidence of any illegalities on the part of Planned Parenthood. The organization reported the possibility of a child sex trafficking ring via a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. The O’Keefe/Rose nationwide “sting” netted a single employee, who failed to follow that organization’s procedures. That employee was fired.
A critical point made during The Ed Show was that O’Keefe was not the only one who smeared Vera’s and ACORN’s reputations. All three, Vera, Iredale and Schultz, pointed to the active role played by O’Keefe’s partner, Hannah Giles, the late Andrew Breitbart (his employer at the time) and to the forum repeatedly provided for these deceitful smear merchants by Fox “News”.
UPDATE 3/12/13: The BRAD BLOG confirms Giles paid Vera $50,000 in her own settlement with him last summer.
Our detailed coverage of the O’Keefe/Vera settlement last week is here. Video interview of Juan Carlos Vera and his attorney Eugene Iredale on MSNBC’s The Ed Show on 3/8/2013, after Vera’s $100,000 settlement agreement with James O’Keefe, follows below. [NOTE TO SCHULTZ: No, O’Keefe never “posed as a pimp” during the ACORN encounters. That claim was also just a part of the overall hoax]…
I’m surprised O’Keefe’s attorneys didn’t include some kind of confidentiality clause. Maybe they knew they couldn’t control a mouth the size of the Grand Canyon.
Brad,
You’re probably already aware of another current O’Keefe story:
“Conservative activist James O’Keefe earned praise for secretly taping Virginia Rep. Jim Moran’s son Patrick seemingly giving advice on how to commit voter fraud in October, but three months later law enforcement has closed their investigation because, they say, O’Keefe wouldn’t cooperate.”
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/01/cops-blame-james-okeefe-sinking-their-investigation-his-voter-fraud-sting/61660/
Typically, when AtlanticWire sought his reaction O’Keefe emailed them this:
“The video and the subsequent actions of both Patrick Moran and Congressman Moran speak for themselves. What we saw on the video was so obviously damning and inappropriate that Pat Moran immediately resigned, and his father’s office released a statement saying that what he had done was wrong. I don’t need to make any comment beyond that.”
There just aren’t any words vile enough to describe him.
Ska-T: I can’t remember when I read it (or, perhaps it’s in the video above), but Iredale said that O’Keefe wanted it to be confidential, but they refused.
Grrrr! –
Yes, we covered that, and why it’s actually important a few weeks back right here.
Brad: I note that, at his Project Veritas site, O’Keefe says he is currently undertaking five investigations. Should he ever have to courage to appear on KPFK, perhaps he can tell us what those are.
I wish the settlement could have required O’Keefe to remove any videos he controlled and use best efforts to induce others to remove videos he didn’t control and to replace the videos with a statement that they showed Mr. Vera in a false light. It seems to me that anything short of that doesn’t rehabilitate his reputation.
I understand that it’s much easier to make a case on the recording statute, but I would really love to see O’Keefe et al. required to defend a defamation suit. Just consider the multiplication of damages with all of the repostings of these videos, not to mention the fun one could have with discovery. Sigh.
I learned long ago to ask the court for immediate judgement. If there was one person who thought that the complainant would see a dime, he or she must have arrived from another planet quite recently.