Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! (23 page)

While in retrospect the ACORN rollout appears—even to me—seamlessly choreographed and executed, in actuality it was two of the craziest weeks of my life. If any of us got more than three hours of sleep any night, I’d be surprised. It was all a roller-coaster blur of travel, phone calls, e-mails, offers, pitches, and threats. The phone would ring, you’d answer it, and suddenly the story—and our lives—would keep accelerating. We held it together because we believed in what we were doing, believed that the people we were exposing were the tip of the corrupt, venal, leftist spear for whom America was nothing more than a deserving victim. We also held it together because we had a special team.

While I had already met James, I actually met Hannah Giles for the first time in New York. All three of us—James, Hannah, and I—were staying at the same hotel in different rooms. I could tell right away that we were going to get along. She was ebullient, a trouper to beat all troupers. She was immediately my friend and my fellow warrior, and even though twenty years separated us, I said to myself,
I think this person understands what is going on here and can handle it.

James was in a different boat. While we were blood brothers because of the story, James was a creative genius—but also a mess. He had to edit all the videos for release, often to different specifications for different news outlets, so if I was sleep-deprived during all this, James was a full-on zombie. As we pressed on all fronts, I was actually worried about his health.

Hannah started going on TV and started to win over the audience. That was an X-factor we hadn’t planned on; that the beautiful young woman playing a prostitute in the videos would come across as so poised, grounded, and mature on television. The first time Larry and I saw Hannah appearing on the
Glenn Beck
show,
we turned to each other and said, “This is masterful.” Hannah played it all so well, letting the videos tell the story, driving home the key points with pithy phrases. This wasn’t a snotty kid playing “Gotcha!” Here was a serious young woman who understood what she was doing, and what was more:
she wasn’t afraid.

As for James: Apparently he had been burned before by partners who got lots of media attention. He had collaborated with other conservatives, and they had often gotten the credit, and I knew that he wanted this story to be the beginning of his career and his notoriety in the same way I wanted to be recognized for my understanding of how the media work. And I wanted it for him. He deserved it.

That was why I knew I had to manage the story down to its most minute detail. It really was an extraordinary accomplishment to get James to understand that he had to give me full transcripts and audio so that we could do due diligence, to ensure that everything was aligned and in sequence. I had to win his trust, and despite his youth James was quite cynical on that score. Ultimately, James agreed to it, but it ran contrary to what he had done in the past. I told James I’d ensure he got the full credit he was due, but I also told him they were going to hold us to standards to which they don’t hold
60 Minutes
or
Dateline NBC
. He had to give up some control—so that I could trust him as well.

So when the story broke, while I was on television translating for the public Mike Flynn’s expertise in the Democratic machine’s relationship with corrupt “community organizers,” James was hunched over a computer in a cluttered hotel room preparing the video that would support that analysis. Neither piece worked nearly as well without the other, and none of it worked unless we totally trusted each other. It was a bond formed in the media war trenches. This side of Afghanistan, you can’t get tighter than that.

On Monday morning, we released the New York ACORN video.

Our world detonated.

As I previously mentioned, we had worked over the weekend with the
New York Post
to give them the print exclusive on the New York video. We felt that the third video was going to be the charm, because once people realized there was a third video, they’d think there was a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, a hundredth. The fact that the third video was New York—and the fact that the
Post
put a lurid shot of James and Hannah on the cover in their pimp and prostitute outfits—just opened the floodgates. That day, the Brooklyn DA’s office said they would investigate ACORN for possible criminality. It was everywhere, and as the talk of criminal charges surfaced, the mainstreamers could no longer afford to ignore it. This story just wouldn’t be confined to regional newspapers and talk radio. It was national. The only question was who in the Old Media would be the first to crack.

The next day, we did it again. We released the Riverside, California, video, in which Tresa Kaelke tried to help James and Hannah, and told a story about how she had murdered an ex-husband. Kaelke encouraged them to set up the brothel, offering to help. And again, it made the cover of the
New York Post
. Two days, two walk-off homers.

That day, Congress voted to defund ACORN. It wasn’t even close—the House voted 345–75, and the Senate voted 85–11 to end ACORN’s cash flow. The Democrats largely did it to cover their asses, but at least one Democrat seemed truly upset. “I am outraged at the actions of ACORN’s employees and believe they should be penalized to the full extent of the law,” said Rep. Zack Space (D-OH). “Our government must be vigilant in ensuring that organizations that are found to act fraudulently do not receive taxpayer dollars.”
⁴

That same day, the media reported that Bill Clinton had gotten together over lunch with Barack Obama. These two are not friends. It was Clinton who suggested to Ted Kennedy that Kennedy had endorsed Obama “because he’s black.” It was Clinton who told Kennedy that “a few years ago this guy would have been getting us coffee.” Now he was sitting across the table from Obama—supposedly discussing health care.

Now, why would Obama discuss health care with the guy who had failed to get health care passed in the early days of his presidency?

I firmly believe that Obama wasn’t there to discuss health care. Here we were, six days after Obama’s “reset” on health care before the joint session of Congress, and the ACORN scandal was on the cover of the
Post
. It was on TV. It was everywhere. We had released four videos. By Tuesday, Obama clearly was paying attention to the fact that his organization was under siege. He was aware of the fact that his Complex was lying every step of the way and getting nailed in the lies; he was aware of the fact that the media—
his
media—were getting nailed when they accepted Bertha Lewis and ACORN’s ludicrous excuses. How many more days could new video come out, and the press provide cover for them? Obama knew it had to end.

That was why Clinton was there. It was a sign that Obama was facing a potential Lewinsky scandal. He understood that things were spiraling out of control. He needed a strategy—and that was where Clinton came in. Perhaps I’m being a bit hubristic, but I’m convinced that this was the meeting in which Obama and Clinton decided to put John Podesta in charge of the ACORN response team. The truth is that Obama didn’t have much choice. The Tea Parties were gaining credence and weight, the main topic of the Tea Parties was ACORN, and the dam was about to burst.

That night, it finally did. Both Katie Couric and Jon Stewart
broke the mainstream media embargo on the story. Stewart’s story was particularly huge, because if you’re ACORN and you’ve lost Jon Stewart, you’ve lost everything. When I saw that Stewart had bashed ACORN, I said to Hannah and James, “You know how I’ve been fretting and worrying at every stage? I think you guys are out of harm’s way now.”

The Obama team began to respond in earnest the next day with tried-and-true Clintonian tactics. ACORN announced its “independent” investigation panel. The members? Podesta himself, SEIU president Andy Stern, and former Housing and Urban Development secretary Henry Cisneros (investigated plenty of times in his own right). Heading up the team: former Massachusetts attorney general Scott Harshbarger, who had pushed the false prosecution of Gerald Amirault back during his district attorney days.
^*
It was a team designed to obfuscate, not investigate. There was no way I was going to cooperate with these hacks.

As the whitewash began, we showed we weren’t done, either. On Wednesday, we released the San Diego videos, which again showed an ACORN employee helping James and Hannah set up an underage brothel at taxpayer expense.

But we had a problem on Thursday. We didn’t know what to do next. The Plan had gone so well, it had run its course faster than expected.
Now what?
I thought.
Should we keep releasing videos?
We still had several more—in fact, as of this writing, we still do—but we didn’t want to run out.

That was when Baltimore’s ACORN told us they were going to sue us.

I still can’t believe they filed a complaint just then. It served our ends perfectly, because I wanted to create the perception that there were unlimited videos, but we were running out. Now, I’ve been in a lawsuit before. It’s not a pleasant experience. But this one put a smile on my face, because the idea that I would get into discovery with ACORN—and the knowledge that I was in the legally and morally righteous position—was awesome. I would hire the best Federalist Society lawyers in the world to dig through ACORN’s muck. When they sued me, I actually responded out loud: “It’s Christmas.” All their lawsuit did was intertwine me in the mythology of ACORN. All my dreams and aspirations for getting into high-level intrigue were starting to materialize. I was enjoying it so much that it felt like I was simultaneously on every single class-A narcotic that has ever been banned. I felt that I shouldn’t be allowed to drive, I was so giddy with what was happening.

Meanwhile, I merrily tweaked with the media’s heads. They had been coming to me throughout the entire rollout. I knew that the media were a natural conduit to the other side, sort of like discovery for ACORN in a high-stakes lawsuit. ACORN and the Obama administration and their media allies weren’t going to be giving us information about their strategy, I knew, so why should I give them the information they could use to attempt to outplay us? We knew that the press was there to play defense for Obama, and we knew that in many cases, reporters and publishers were attempting
to grill me for information so that they could craft their revised playbook.

So we screwed around with them. And I told them we were playing with them. When Carol Leonnig of the
Washington Post
asked me how many videos there were, I told her I wouldn’t tell her. She asked why, and I told her: “I’m screwing with you.”

It was an entertaining and illuminating interview, to say the least. She asked me what I felt when I saw the videos. “When I saw the first one,” I replied, “I thought it was an anomaly. When I saw the second one, I thought it was a coincidence. When I saw the third one, I knew it was a trend. When I saw these videos, I couldn’t help thinking, ‘This is the Abu Ghraib of the Great Society.’ ”

That got her goat. She got viscerally upset. She told me she was part of the
Washington Post
team that had won awards for its coverage of Abu Ghraib.

“Do you really want to have an argument over this?” I asked her. “That was one National Guard unit that the press used to hang as an albatross around the Bush administration, to make it a symbol of its wartime policy, to extrapolate that its waterboarding policy and interrogation policy were tied to a widespread anti-Muslim humiliation campaign. The National Guard unit was sufficiently punished and there was a straightforward investigation. There was no attempt to cover it up. It was a clean bust and it was a clean cleanup, but it was hardly representative of a massive trend.”

She told me why she thought I was wrong, and why this wasn’t anything like Abu Ghraib. “You just caught a bunch of dummies on video!” she said.

The irony was both painful and delicious. “That’s what Bush called the ‘soft bigotry of lowered expectations,’ ” I noted. “Those people were smart enough to rig the system to defraud taxpayers.” That much was obvious, after all. So while Leonnig saw a bunch of
low-income, mostly minority community organizers as dummies, duped by predatory Repugnicans, to everyone who actually watched the videos it was clear these were well-trained and well-informed operators, committed to navigating an intricate web of government and private services in order to suckle at the government teat.

The conversation summed up everything that was wrong with the mainstream media. They think it’s their obligation to take down right-of-center organizations; they feel it’s their raison d’être to attack conservative institutions mercilessly. But if I did the same with a liberal institution, I was victimizing an isolated “bunch of dummies.”

ACORN proved that we didn’t have to live with their old standards anymore. We could take down the Complex on our own, and we could use the media—could shame the media—into helping. As Jon Stewart, as dependable a media foot soldier as the Dems have, put it after airing the videos on his show: “Are you fucking kidding me?! Investigative media… you’re telling me that two kids from the cast of
High School Musical 3
can break this story with a video camera and their grandmother’s chinchilla coat, and you got nothing?”

The next six months played out absurdly by plan. It’s one thing to have theories about the Complex, but it’s quite another to put those theories into practice, to see the components falling into place based upon your understanding of the other side. We knew they’d ignore and deny, so we planted the videos one at a time. We knew that as time went on, the media would have to pick it up, expediting ACORN’s downfall. And we knew that they could malign James, Hannah, and me as much as they wanted—and that it wouldn’t work, because seeing was believing.

Only five months later could the Podesta team try their typical tactic of going after irrelevant details of the story—“Was O’Keefe wearing the outlandish pimp costume?” But by then, it was far too late to try shifting the focus to such ancillary details. ACORN was done. The game was over.