"Avoid Marvin Gaye As Too Cliche"

"Avoid Marvin Gaye As Too Cliche"

"Avoid Marvin Gaye As Too Cliche"

Weigel
Reporting on Politics and Policy.
Sept. 29 2010 11:03 AM

"Avoid Marvin Gaye As Too Cliche"

A conservative activist known for making undercover videos plottedto embarrass a CNN correspondent by recording a meeting on hiddencameras aboard a floating "palace of pleasure" and making sexuallysuggestive comments, e-mails and a planning document show.

JamesO'Keefe, best known for hitting the community organizing group ACORNwith an undercover video sting, hoped to get CNN InvestigativeCorrespondent Abbie Boudreau onto a boat filled with sexually explicitprops and then record the session, those documents show.

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CNN has the aborted plan for the sting at the website. It's credited to Ben Wetmore, the O'Keefe mentor who helped with the activist's fumbled New Orleans sting, and with whom I've left a message. And it's really something. The Boudreau plan is the really awful part ("Using hot blondes to seduce interviewees to get screwed on television, you are faux seducing her in order to screw her on television"), but another proposal was to falsify a recording of Tea Partiers yelling obscenities at Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), get CNN to air it, and then nail them for getting suckered.

Oh, and here is the suggested list of props for Boudreau stunt.

A condom jar?

David Weigel is a reporter for the Washington Post.