KosmoReporter

When news broke in late January that James O’Keefe and three other men, two of whom were costumed as telephone repairmen, had been arrested by federal authorities and charged with “interfering” with the phone system at the New Orleans office of Sen. Mary Landrieu, observers of all sorts shared a similar response: What were they thinking?

Thanks to a statement O’Keefe has posted at Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.come and an interview he gave Monday night to Fox News’s Sean Hannity, we now have a pretty good answer to that question. Landrieu had drawn the ire of some conservatives for her participation in a deal that helped advance health care reform, and the anger had grown amid claims that her office was avoiding calls from constituents. O’Keefe told Hannity:

We wanted to get to the bottom of the claim that [Landrieu] was not answering her phones, her phones were jammed. We wanted to find out why her constituents couldn’t get through to her. We wanted to verify the reports.

And while O’Keefe has acknowledged that, “on reflection, I could have used a different approach to this investigation,” he also told Hannity he was operating in an established tradition: “We used the same tactics that investigative journalists have been using. In all the videos I do, I pose as something I’m not to try to get to the bottom of the truth.” During the interview, he and Hannity name-checked a few specific predecessors, among them PrimeTime Live’s Food Lion investigation, 60 Minutes, 20/20, and Dateline NBC, including its “To Catch a Predator” series.