In January, 2010, the F.B.I. arrested O’Keefe and three accomplices, two of whom had disguised themselves as telephone repairmen in order to enter the New Orleans office of Mary Landrieu, then a Democratic senator for Louisiana. (O’Keefe says he had hoped to disprove Landrieu’s claim that her phone lines were too clogged to answer the many angry calls coming from Tea Party activists.) O’Keefe was sentenced to three years of probation and a hundred hours of community service; he also paid a fifteen-hundred-dollar fine.
In 2011, O’Keefe embarrassed National Public Radio when two accomplices, pretending to represent a radical Muslim group, proposed to donate five million dollars to the network in exchange for favorable programming about Islam. After O’Keefe released videos depicting two NPR employees chatting with the undercover operatives about the need to put Muslim voices on the air, and criticizing the Republican Party as “not just Islamophobic but really xenophobic,” two top NPR officials, including its chief executive, Vivian Schiller, resigned.
James O’Keefe Accidentally Stings Himself - The New Yorker