O'Keefe's Next Victim: HUD

At Wired:

Late last year, O’Keefe and fellow activist Joe Basel went into the Detroit and Chicago offices of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) with a hidden camera. They pretended to be scam artists, asking employees there to participate in a complex kickback scheme involving federal incentives for first-time home buyers. In the excerpted footage shown to me by O’Keefe, the staffers seemed only to happy to comply.

The law says that the tax credit maxes out at $8,000 for an $80,000 home. On the tape, O’Keefe asked a staffer, “What if I bought a place for $50,000, but the seller and I agreed to write down $80,000 as the purchase price?”

“Flip it any way you want,” the staffer replied.

What if the place is worth much less — like only $6,000?

“Yup, you can do that.”

Thanks to WQ.

Leftists are having conniptions in the comments, there, insisting the tapes were edited, O'Keefe broke federal laws, should be in prison, etc.

As Mark Twain said, “It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.”

BLAST! I thought that was a Will Rogers quote -- but when I looked it up to get the quote right, everyone on the internet attributed it to Mark Twain.

For what that's worth.

There's some disagreement on that -- Wiki notes that there's no good source to base attributing it to Twain, and some attribute it to Will Rogers.

I don't know who actually said it. I know I thought it was Will Rogers.

posted by Ace at 02:41 PM