The rightwing blogger Patterico is linking to the following article:
http://www.2theadvocate.com/news/79959137.html“We were stunned to learn that so many phone calls to Sen. Landrieu have been unanswered and met with continuous busy signals,” Perkins said. “We asked them to call their senators. They could get through to Sen. Vitter, but not Sen. Landrieu.”
“Our lines have been jammed for weeks, and I apologize,” Landrieu said in interview after giving a speech on the Senate floor Tuesday. “But no amount of jamming is going to keep me from supporting a good work for Louisiana and the nation.”
Now imagine this teabuggery as an incredibly ill-advised stunt to go and "check Landrieu's phones" to see what the jamming problem is. The key here would be if these daft gits had any actual equipment to install on the phone system. If they did not, it stands to reason that they had no real way of actually wiretapping the phones and O'Keefe's taping of the "phone check" would bear this out.
However, if they were trying to tap the phones - if they did have wiretapping equipment they were going to try to install - all mitigating circumstances or explanations are off. Not even Michael Moore has tried to pull crap like that. They're all adults. They should suffer the full penalty of the law.
ETA: And the listening device a couple of block away also argues against this. O'Keefe's cellphone would have recorded enough audio to suffice for any "expose" purposes.