The U.S. Justice Department charged four men on Tuesday with tampering with phones in the New Orleans office of Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu, one of them a conservative filmmaker who last year provoked a scandal involving a liberal grass-roots group.
The FBI said among those arrested on Monday was James O'Keefe, who, posing as a pimp and accompanied by a woman pretending to be a prostitute, filmed workers with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, giving advice on how to flout housing laws.
The film attracted a big audience after being posted on YouTube.
"This is a very unusual situation and somewhat unsettling for me and my staff," Landrieu said in a statement. "I am as interested as everyone else about their motives and purpose, which I hope will become clear as the investigation moves forward."
According to the criminal complaint, two of O'Keefe's associates dressed as telephone repairmen entered the office of the Louisiana senator in the Hale Boggs Federal Building under the pretense of performing repairs.
While O'Keefe used a mobile phone to film them, Robert Flanagan and Joseph Basel "manipulated the telephone system" in the reception area of Landrieu's office, the FBI said.
The men were apprehended by U.S. marshals after Flanagan and Basel tried later to gain access to telephone equipment in the U.S. General Services Administration office in the same building, the agency said.
Flanagan and Basel were dressed in denim work suits, florescent vests, tool belts and hard hats, the FBI said. The two admitted later they were not telephone repairmen, according to the affidavit.
A fourth man, Stan Dai, was arrested for having helped O'Keefe, Flanagan and Basel in "planning, coordination and preparation of the operation," the FBI said in a statement.
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