That was the weak, right-wing defense from Andrew Breitbart's team yesterday, following Jame's O'Keefe's embarrassing guilty plea in New Orleans. (i.e. $1,500 fine, placed on three years' probation, and 100 hours of community service.) And indeed, the talking point ever since has been that O'Keefe's crime was petty and insignificant and that maybe he shouldn't have been arrested at all.

Well, a new press release from United States Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Louisiana obliterates any suggestion that O'Keefe and pals were involved in some kind of “rinky-dink” prank, as one blogger put it. According to law enforcement, O'Keefe and friends hatched an elaborate plan of deception in which they clearly entered the federal building under false pretenses, tried to obtain undercover video from inside the office of a U.S. senator, and then requested access to the office's main phone system or “central box.”

Here is a key portion from the U.S. Attorney's office press release [emphasis added]:

At approximately 11:00 a.m., Basel, Flanagan, and O'Keefe entered the federal building and passed through the security screening. Their purpose was to orchestrate a conversation about phone calls to the Senator's staff and capture the resulting conversation on video. Dai remained outside to provide support. Basel and Flanagan were each dressed like telephone repairmen, wearing blue denim pants, a blue work shirt, a fluorescent green vest, a tool belt, and a white hard hat. One of the hats contained a video recording device installed on the brim.

O'Keefe entered Senator Landrieu's office first and positioned a digital video recorder made to look like a cellular telephone in his hand to record the interaction. He told the staff that he was waiting for a friend. He recorded the subsequent interaction.

Basel and Flanagan entered the office soon thereafter and told the Senator's staff that they were telephone repairmen who were following up on reports of problems with the telephone system. A staff member said that there were no problems with the phone system, and Basel then asked the staff member for permission to test the phone. Basel then walked behind a staff member's desk, lifted the handset from the cradle, questioned whether there was a dial tone and handled the receiver. Basel and Flanagan each pretended to call the office phone with their own cellular phones, and they said the calls would not go through. O'Keefe also interjected and said he had previously placed a call to the office that would not go through.

Basel then told a staff member that he and Flanagan needed to perform repair work on the main phone system, and he asked that they be taken to the “central box.” The staff member directed them to the office of the General Services Administration (GSA), and Basel and Flanagan followed the staff member to GSA's office inside the Hale Boggs Federal Building. Upon meeting a GSA employee, Basel and Flanagan again said they were telephone repairmen, and Basel again asked to be taken to the phone system's “central box.”

The GSA employee asked Basel and Flanagan if they had a work order or credentials, and they responded that they had left both their work order and credentials in their vehicle, parked just outside of the building. The GSA employee then informed Basel and Flanagan that he would escort them to their truck so that they could provide him with the work order and their credentials.

O'Keefe left Senator Landrieu's office several minutes after Basel and Flanagan went to the GSA office, after pretending to take a call from “Sam.”

All four men were apprehended shortly thereafter