Last weekend Hannah Giles, who played the prostitute in the "Pimp and Pro" ACORN videos, and Andrew Breitbart, who strategized the release of the videos, lectured on "guerrilla warfare" at a Young America's Foundation conference in San Barbara, California.

The Los Angeles Times article on the lecture concluded:

"'There is a new spirit alive,' said Andrew Breitbart, whose website first broadcast the ACORN videos....

"When one young man asked: 'Who else should we be looking out for now that ACORN has gone down? What organizations would you like us to target?' Breitbart and Giles listed a number of organizations that they said had demonstrated a 'dangerous' liberal bias. Among them: the Apollo Alliance, a coalition that aims for energy independence; and the Service Employees International Union.

"Breitbart said the ACORN videos, along with the recent tea party protests, represented a shift in right-wing activism. Conservatives, he said, were co-opting the tactics used by civil rights leaders and antiwar activists of the 1960s in order to criticize the left. 'We have to employ unorthodox tactics,' Breitbart said. 'We can beat them using their own tricks.'

"As if to prove Breitbart's point, Giles asked everyone in the room to copy down the words of Saul Alinsky, who is considered the father of community organizing -- and is a great hero of the left.

"'All life is warfare,' she quoted him as saying, 'and it's the constant fight against the status quo that revitalizes society.'"

Exposing the corruption and criminality of the Left is essential, but "using their own tricks" may be a slippery slope or criminal.

To date, the "Pimp and Pro" ACORN story is based on surreptitious recording at ACORN offices in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., New York, San Bernardino and San Diego.

Problem: one-party consent makes recording legal in Washington, D.C. and New York, but not in California, Maryland or Pennsylvania

The article also reported: "In her lecture Friday about how to take down liberal organizations and expose what she called media corruption, Giles sought to stir others to action. 'Above all, attack, attack, attack,' she said, quoting Republican consultant Roger Stone. 'Never defend.'"

But surreptitious recording is illegal in Pennsylvania, Maryland and California (and Ms. Giles' homestate, Florida).

That sting exposed ACORN's own willingness to facilitate criminal conduct and did not appear to constitute entrapment, but it may result in felony prosecutions that Ms. Giles, James O'Keefe (the "Pimp") and even others will have to defend.

On November 12, 2009, Breitbart's BigGovernment.com recently posted an article by titled "The Hypocrisy of Jerry Brown, California's Top Cop," reporting that (1) California Attorney General Jerry Brown's communications director had resigned after admitting that he had regularly taped telephone conversations with reporters without their permission, even though California criminalizes the recording of private telephone conversations without consent, and (2) "[a]pparently California’s Attorney General thinks that he and his cohorts can sidestep the very laws that they are using as justification for their investigations of ACORN filmmakers James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles."

Time will tell whether General Brown prosecutes anyone for surreptitious videotaping at perhaps three California ACORN offices, but a November 10, 2009 BigGovernment post--"Exclusive: Audio from ACORN Claims Jerry Brown Will Whitewash Investigation"--reported that an ACORN spokesperson had "been in communication with Brown’s office and assure[d] the crowd that 'the fault WILL be found with the people that did the video — not ACORN.'"

IF Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe are prosecuted in California, perhaps they and their families will not defer to others in conducting their defenses.

"The Other McCain" reported that O'Keefe had told the liberal mainstream media that he and Ms. Giles "receiv[ed] help and advice from a conservative columnist and Web entrepreneur. When O'Keefe had filmed the first two videos -- in the District and Baltimore -- a friend urged him to share his project with Andrew Breitbart, a conservative Internet entrepreneur who had plans to launch an anti-liberal site called BigGovernment.com. Breitbart said he was skeptical after a June phone call with O'Keefe about what he had, but when the video was rolling in his basement office in Los Angeles in late July, Breitbart said, he gasped."

IF there was a June 2009 phone call, it apparently preceded ALL of the surreptitious videotaping. Doug Giles (Ms. Giles' father): "The truth of the matter, from a timeline standpoint, is that they hatched their plan in May of ’09, fine-tuned it from May 20th – July 23rd, and then launched July 24th, fully accomplishing their mission by the end of August."

IF Breitbart watched ACORN sting videos in "late July" of 2009, then he seems to have watched them before surreptitious recording in California.

IF, as "The Other McCain" reported, Breitbart scheduled "media interviews for his BigGovernment.com operation" and exercised such control that he did not permit "Hannah Giles to appear on her father's 'Clash Radio' program," perhaps General Brown will offer the 20-year old Ms. Giles and also 25-year old O'Keefe a pass in return for their cooperation in a prosecution of Breitbart.

Time will tell.

Michael J. Gaynor

Biography - Michael J. Gaynor

Michael J. Gaynor has been practicing law in New York since 1973. A former partner at Fulton, Duncombe & Rowe and Gaynor & Bass, he is a solo practitioner admitted to practice in New York state and federal courts and an Association of the Bar of the City of New York member.

Gaynor graduated magna cum laude, with Honors in Social Science, from Hofstra University's New College, and received his J.D. degree from St. John's Law School, where he won the American Jurisprudence Award in Evidence and served as an editor of the Law Review and the St. Thomas More Institute for Legal Research. He wrote on the Pentagon Papers case for the Review and obscenity law for The Catholic Lawyer and edited the Law Review's commentary on significant developments in New York law.

The day after graduating, Gaynor joined the Fulton firm, where he focused on litigation and corporate law. In 1997 Gaynor and Emily Bass formed Gaynor & Bass and then conducted a general legal practice, emphasizing litigation, and represented corporations, individuals and a New York City labor union. Notably, Gaynor & Bass prevailed in the Second Circuit in a seminal copyright infringement case, Tasini v. New York Times, against newspaper and magazine publishers and Lexis-Nexis. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed, 7 to 2, holding that the copyrights of freelance writers had been infringed when their work was put online without permission or compensation.

Gaynor currently contributes regularly to www.MichNews.com, www.RenewAmerica.com, www.WebCommentary.com, www.PostChronicle.com and www.therealitycheck.org and has contributed to many other websites. He has written extensively on political and religious issues, notably the Terry Schiavo case, the Duke "no rape" case, ACORN and canon law, and appeared as a guest on television and radio. He was acknowledged in Until Proven Innocent, by Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson, and Culture of Corruption, by Michelle Malkin. He appeared on "Your World With Cavuto" to promote an eBay boycott that he initiated and "The World Over With Raymond Arroyo" (EWTN) to discuss the legal implications of the Schiavo case. On October 22, 2008, Gaynor was the first to report that The New York Times had killed an Obama/ACORN expose on which a Times reporter had been working with ACORN whistleblower Anita MonCrief.

Gaynor's email address is gaynormike@aol.com.