By Brad Friedman on 2/25/2011, 1:27pm PT  

[Note: SD City Beat has now corrected their story as per our criticism in this article. See the UPDATE at bottom of this article for more details.]

The story quoted below, detailing Hannah Giles' attorneys tossing Rightwing hoaxster James O'Keefe "under the bus," comes from San Diego City Beat this week.

Please note, however, that SD City Beat's Dave Maass is still, unfortunately, misleading readers by incorrectly reporting that O'Keefe played Giles' "fake pimp partner" or that he ever "pos[ed] as a pimp" in the scam video tapes featuring deceptively and "severely edited" secretly-recorded interviews with ACORN employees.

O'Keefe never played or posed as a "pimp" in those interviews, as we spent a good portion of 2010 illustrating to the world, such that both the New York Times and its then-Public Editor Clark Hoyt both, eventually, were forced to admit in partial corrections to their repeatedly inaccurate reports making the same misleading claims.

It's a shame that Maass is still inaccurately reporting that part of the story here, as his report is otherwise good in bringing us up to date on the latest in the law suit filed against O'Keefe and Giles by former ACORN worker Juan Carlos Vera, one of those targeted by the hoax video tapes made by O'Keefe and Giles and published by their employer, Rightwing con-man Andrew Breitbart...

Hannah Giles had no problem bragging to FOX News how she posed as a hooker to catch ACORN workers in incriminating conversations on hidden video. Over and over and over and over....

But now that she's facing a $75,000 lawsuit, she says she's not culpable  because it was her fake pimp partner, James O'Keefe, who held the video camera.

Former National City ACORN worker Juan Carlos Vera is suing O'Keefe and Giles in US District Court in San Diego, alleging that the pair violated the California Privacy Act, which require all parties to consent before a confidential conversation may be recorded. Vera lost his job after O'Keefe and Giles went public with secret footage that ostensibly showed the two, posing as pimp and ho, asking for and receiving advice from Vera on how to smuggle underage prostitutes into the US.

A California Department of Justice investigation later determined the video had been intentionally edited to be misleading and found that Vera had called law enforcement after the meeting.

In a motion for judgment, Giles' attorneys argue:

"Section 632 has limited scope: it unambiguously imposes liability only on persons who carry out the recording of a confidential communication with the consent of all parties to the communication, and precludes liability for persons who merely assist the recording or participate in the communication. Here, the Complaint itself makes clear that only O'Keefe, not Giles, actually carried out the recording of the communication. Allegations that Giles was present during, or agreed to, the recording are legally insufficient to bring her within the scope 632."

So, even though Giles says, on her legal appeal website, DefendHannah.com, "In an undercover expose, Hannah Giles captured ACORN employees offering advice on prostitution and money-laundering," she's still innocent because she wasn't holding the camera. In other words, she deserves the glory, but not the liability; that's all O'Keefe.

See SD City Beat for more...

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UPDATE 2/28/11: Our thanks to SD City Beat's Dave Maass for transparently correcting his report as to the inaccuracies we noted above, and for adding additional information in his correction from the CA Attorney General's report on the O'Keefe/Giles/Breitbart scam which, once again, confirmed what we had reported for so many months prior about O'Keefe never having appeared as a pimp in the offices of ACORN. (See NYTimes? Was that really so hard?)

In return, we've corrected the spelling of Maass' name in the article above where we had twice misspelled it originally. Despite our inclination to stand by our original misspelling, given the outrageous number of double-letters in Dave's last name, we've begrudgingly corrected it anyway, and regret the error in the original. ;-)

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