Who Is Nadia Naffe? Not a Conservative, That's For Sure

Nadia Naffe

Nadia Naffe was allegedly a "conservative activist" who partnered with James O'Keefe to engage in staged encounters with liberal public officials to demonstrate incidents of liberal hypocrisy and/or illicit behavior.

O'Keefe, as you may recall, was a Breitbart associate who secretly taped an encounter with the leftist organization Acorn.  He posed as a pimp, along with a young woman activist, to record Acorn officials giving advice on how to beat the system via possibly illegal acts.  The video of the encounter went viral, leading to much bad publicity for Acorn, which in turn resulted in Acorn losing public contracts with the government.

O'Keefe was much praised and heralded for this act.  However, he lost a lot of credibility when he and several others subsequently showed up at the offices of Senator Mary Landrieu, disguised as phone repairmen, and attempted to gain access to her telephone system.  They were all arrested and O'Keefe was convicted of a misdemeanor.  It was a singularly stupid stunt, and I lambasted O'Keefe in this blog for his really terrible judgment (see here and here).  Since then, I have considered O'Keefe to be something of a loose cannon.

Nadia Naffe was apparently recruited by O'Keefe to take part in further staged incidents.  She claims she was harassed by O'Keefe and filed suit against him.  The suit was dismissed for lack of evidence, and now O'Keefe has filed a suit against Naffe.  Naffe took umbrage at Patrick Frey of Patterico's Pontifications, a Los Angeles D.A., who provided O'Keefe with legal advice on how to handle the lawsuits.  Further nefarious deeds by Frey include practicing law online and blogging at work.  Another big So What?  In any case, Naffe has filed suit against Frey.  Never hesitate, litigate!  All while singing that wonderful old standard, "Ill Be Suing You."

At her blog, Naffe describes her encounters with O'Keefe, which on the face appear pretty tame.  She alleges that he came on to her (quite possibly true, young men often have problems controlling their hormones), but that in itself wouldn't seem particularly egregious to me.  He also used her laptop to send emails when she stayed overnight in his office headquarters in a converted barn.  Again, so what?

Now on her blog she discloses that she filed suit against Patrick Frey for somehow downloading her medical records (from where?) and publishing them and her social security number on the internet (for what purpose?). That, if true, would be a serious event. I do not have any specific information on this, and it would be good to get the facts from Frey's point of view. However, I very much doubt that it is true. From what I can surmise from Rauhauser comments on the web, Naffe and her new leftist friends only suspect that Frey did the deed. Oh yes, an experienced trial attorney is going to do something illegal in order to protect O'Keefe from a nuisance and frivolous lawsuit, one that was quickly and easily dismissed for lack of substance. Do you believe that? I don't. UPDATE: I learned from a commenter at Patterico's blog the following info:

Stogie – IIRC [if I remember correctly], at best, it is an exaggeration. He posted a publicly available transcript of one of her many depositions, in which her SSN resided. He quickly redacted when he became aware. Also, IIRC, the whole medical records nonsense comes from the deposition, where she discusses her medical history.

After reading through Naffe's blog, most of her complaints seem like the petty gripes of an adolescent school girl.  She hired the lawyer who represents leftists, the Occupy movement and the Anonymous movement.  She claims that her lawyer will grill Frey in court about how he and his wife can afford to live in a 1.3 million dollar home, and also grill him as to the specifics of how he was targeted in a SWAT-ing episode.  I'm no lawyer, but I think it's a safe bet that no judge would permit such a fishing expedition into areas not relevant to her case.

Finally, Naffe apologizes on her blog for her previous association with O'Keefe, in what seems to be another "Blinded by the Right" epiphany, a la David Brock and Charles Johnson, i.e. as someone who didn't realize how evil the Right was, but now wishes to return to the right side of the Lord, which is the left.

These facts lead me to believe that Nadia Naffe was probably never a conservative activist, but an infiltrator who may have been playing O'Keefe for the purpose of damaging his operations and his reputation (though he seems quite capable of doing that all by himself).  This is my theory, anyway.

Read Nadia's blog here and decide for yourself.  Comments and suggestions welcome.
UPDATE:  I guess Nadia doesn't like visitors poring over her brilliance.  She has now made her blog private.

James O'Keefe Admits Error in Judgment on Hannity Show

James O'Keefe is a victim of his own success.  He and Hannah Giles infiltrated an ACORN office in the guise of pimp and prostitute to ask for tax and other advice.  The ACORN officials gave them advice on how to get housing and tax breaks without revealing their true "employment."  Unbeknown to the ACORN officials, they were secretly being filmed.  When O'Keefe released the tapes for public viewing, ACORN suffered a firestorm of public humiliation and scorn for their unethical and possibly illegal advice.  ACORN, famous for its support of voter fraud through fictitious registrations, deserved the embarrassment.  They lost a lot of federal funding in the process.  O'Keefe, at age 24, became a conservative hero, feted and featured on shows like Sean Hannity's.  He was the knight who had slain the ACORN beast.

Alas, the ACORN caper was a hard act to follow.  What could O'Keefe do next to keep his fame rolling?  Aha!  He would investigate Senator Mary Landrieu's office telephones to see why they were never answered.  So he and three other men showed up one day at the Senator's federal offices dressed as telephone repairmen and attempted to get access to Landrieu's phones and wiring.  Well, as it turns out, they only wanted to photograph or film the phone setup to determine if it had been wired to shut off calls from Landrieu's constituents, who were phoning in droves to protest Landrieu's support of Obamacare.

Meanwhile, building security figured that four guys impersonating phone repairmen, who were attempting to gain access to a U.S. Senator's phone system, were probably trying to bug the telephones.  It was a reasonable assumption, and one that O'Keefe should have figured out for himself before embarking on such a foolish mission.  (Maybe next time he can test airport security by showing up at the airport dressed as Osama Bin Laden, or test bank security by arriving dressed as a bandit.)

O'Keefe screwed up big time and his prior success does not erase that unfortunate fact.  He as much as admitted that on Hannity yesterday.  There are some lessons to be learned from this unfortunate incident:

1.  If you are not a professional, investigative journalist (but merely an amateur wanna-be), take great care in planning undercover surveillance projects:  consult with an attorney first before embarking on such a mission; 

2.  Brainstorm the possible consequences or downside on how the project could fail, take a wrong turn, be misinterpreted (especially by law enforcement) or spun by the left.

3.  Admit it when you screw up, or if you are merely a conservative not involved, admit it when O'Keefe or others like him screw up.  There is little to be gained by advancing moral equivalences with past leftwing misdeeds.

4. Remember, stupid mistakes like O'Keefe's phone repairmen episode hurt the conservative movement by providing ammunition to our political opponents.   

Four Arrested in Attempt to Bug a Senator's Phones

A breaking news story is that four young men attempted to infiltrate Senator Mary Landrieu's federal office under false pretenses and bug her telephones.

One of the four was conservative filmmaker James O'Keefe (left), well known for his secret filming and take-down of ACORN.

All four of the men arrived at Senator Landrieu's office dressed as phone repairmen and asked for access to her office phone system. They were subsequently arrested by the FBI.

Anyone who attempts to bug a U.S. Senator's office is a Horse's Ass, indeed. Did it ever dawn on the conspirators that this might be a little bit ILLEGAL?

If proven guilty, the four should be punished to the full extent of the law. We don't need jackasses like this in the conservative movement.

Read about it here.

Update:  It has now been determined that the four "repairmen" were not there to bug the senator's phones, but to create some sort of political theater.  Mary Landrieu was not answering her phones to talk with incensed taxpayers over Obamacare, so the "phone repairmen" arrived to illustrate the point:  something must be wrong with Senator Landrieu's phones!  Oh ha ha ha!

Not criminal, just really dumb.