Criminal Enterprise

ACORN has now decided to sue the two filmmakers who ran undercover sting operations at their satellite offices, for violating Maryland law by obtaining documentary footage without consent.

The group contends that the audio portion of the video was obtained illegally because Maryland requires two-party consent to create sound recordings.

The two employees seen in the video were fired after it was posted online. The lawsuit says the employees, Tonja Thompson and Shera Williams, suffered "extreme emotional distress."

The multimillion-dollar lawsuit seeks damages from James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, who played the pimp and prostitute in the videos, and from conservative columnist Andrew Breitbart, who posted the videos on his Web site.

When ABC News took hidden-camera video of Food Lion workers bleaching rotten meat for resale, they sued - and won in court, to boot. The law is pretty clear on all this.

Mind you, this is the second Breitbart operation in as many weeks where he has posted illegally obtained material on his website. This nascent NEA mini-scandal uses audio from a conference call whose taping seems to violate state law.

There's also the matter of the worker in one surreptitiously taped ACORN video calling the police and reporting the couple for human trafficking. For his effort, he got fired by ACORN based on what he said in the video, regardless of the fact that he did the right thing and reported the fake pimp and prostitute to the police.

James O'Keefe, the supposedly "independent" filmmaker responsible for the ACORN sting, may be getting all kinds of cash from the conservative movement, but he'll need a lot of it, with all the state laws he appears to be breaking.