{"id":417070,"date":"2010-03-11T14:57:31","date_gmt":"2010-03-11T19:57:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/washingtonindependent.com\/?p=79037"},"modified":"2010-03-11T14:57:31","modified_gmt":"2010-03-11T19:57:31","slug":"the-next-james-o%e2%80%99keefe-sting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/417070","title":{"rendered":"The Next James O\u2019Keefe Sting"},"content":{"rendered":"

Noah Shachtman gets a look at it in his sprawling profile of Andrew Breitbart. The scene<\/a>, from a meet-up between O’Keefe and Breitbart that Shachtman witnessed:<\/p>\n

\n

This time, there are no prostitutes involved, just a shady, and serious, tax-fraud scheme. The ploy involves the Obama administration\u2019s 10 percent tax credit<\/a> to first-time home buyers. The law says that the credit maxes out at $8,000 for an $80,000 home. But at the Detroit office of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the rule seems open to interpretation. O\u2019Keefe asks a staffer, What if I bought a place for $50,000, but the seller and I agreed to write down $80,000 as the purchase price?<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cFlip it any way you want,\u201d the staffer replies.<\/p>\n

What if the place is worth much less \u2014 like only $6,000?<\/p>\n

\u201cYup, you can do that.\u201d<\/p>\n

O\u2019Keefe and fellow activist Joe Basel ran the same sting at HUD\u2019s Chicago office and at several federally supported independent housing groups. Breitbart paces the parquet floor. The video is damning but not exactly Acorn-explosive.<\/p>\n

Then O\u2019Keefe stops the playback. \u201cOh yeah, I forgot,\u201d he says. \u201cWe went to the Detroit Free Press<\/em>, to the managing editor. We told her the whole thing. She said she wasn\u2019t interested. Wanna see the tape?\u201d<\/p>\n

Breitbart starts to cackle. Of course he wants to see the tape. Sleazy HUD administrators are important, sure. But media covering up sleaze? That\u2019s entertainment. \u201cDude, that\u2019s the<\/em> most important part!\u201d he says. \u201cI have seepage coming out of five parts of my body right now.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Sopranos fans will remember a minor plotline like this, when Tony sought to make some money by flipping condemned housing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Noah Shachtman gets a look at it in his sprawling profile of Andrew Breitbart. The scene, from a meet-up between O’Keefe and Breitbart that Shachtman witnessed: This time, there are no prostitutes involved, just a shady, and serious, tax-fraud scheme. The ploy involves the Obama administration\u2019s 10 percent tax credit to first-time home buyers. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4313,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-417070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4313"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=417070"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417070\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=417070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=417070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=417070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}