In defense of taping Mitch McConnell, and everyone else

But it also forced me to take my work to a new level. I may or may not have tapes of a federal employee committing fraud. I’ve spent the last few days with lawyers dissecting 18 U.S.C. § 1001, prohibiting anyone from making “materially false,” fictitious, or fraudulent statements to the federal government. Whether an undercover reporter fibbing about a scenario is making a “materially false” statement is any lawyer’s guess. There is virtually no case law on this point, and no analysis of the two cases where the statue is discussed. Anybody who tells a harmless fib to a federal government employee potentially risks everything; we are not talking about a slap on the wrist, we are talking about a quarter-million dollar fine, a felony conviction and the destruction of one’s reputation in the media. Therefore, the federal government is shielded from the type of reporting Mother Jones, NBC’s to Catch a Predator, and ABC’s Primetime Live, have all won awards for.

Similarly opaque is misdemeanor crime 18 U.S.C. 1036 – “entry by false pretense.” This morning I spent hours filing travel requests to leave the state of New Jersey three years after pleading guilty to a class-B misdemeanor, using “false pretenses” while sitting on a couch in Senator Mary Landrieu’s office. My crime? I said that I was “waiting for somebody to arrive” when in fact I was not. I was in plain clothes and I showed my driver’s license at the entrance to Landrieu’s office. All of this was filmed, but because my tape was confiscated and destroyed it was my word against overzealous US Attorneys who charged me with a felony, which led to a media firestorm and inaccurate allegations of tampering with phones and worse. (The US Attorneys, Jim Letten and Janice Mann, recently resigned in disgrace for the way their overzealous behavior adversely affected defendants that received their prosecutorial wrath in subsequent cases, unrelated to mine). l The Washington Post printed a front-page retraction after letting their glee about my potential imprisonment get in the way of reporting facts. Only one blogger reported the fact that my videotape was destroyed and to this day I continue to rack up defamation lawsuit settlements when reporters say I “tampered with phones.”