House Majority Leader Eric Cantor claims to be afraid of the crowds at Occupy Wall Street, and maybe he has a point. After all, several witnesses at the event spotted a convicted criminal moving freely through the crowd. That's the guy, the one in the picture above--ugh! What an ugly mugshot, sort of a cross between a rat and a ferret. Everyone needs to keeps their eyes open, because with criminals like this guy floating around there's no telling what might happen at OWS. How was it that a convicted criminal was able to walk around the OWS event without police interfering with him? Apparently he got permission from his probation officer.
A thought occurred to us when we saw reports this afternoon that conservative filmmaker James O'Keefe visited the Occupy Wall Street protest in New York City on Monday: isn't that dude still on probation?
So we looked into it, and according to court records, a judge never approved his trip across the Hudson River and out of the state of New Jersey, where he lives with his parents. A judge has regularly approved all of his trips since he pleaded guilty to entering U.S. property under false pretenses back in May 2010 and received three years probation.
Ryan Girdusky, a spokesman for O'Keefe told TPM that O'Keefe got permission to make the trip from his probation officer. O'Keefe's lawyer did not immediately respond to a call and an email, and O'Keefe didn't immediately reply to a tweet asking for clarification. We'll update if we hear back.
Then again maybe this creep didn't have permission and he'll have to serve some jail time after all. That would probably be for the best: we don't want mobs of
criminals like this guy taking over our streets. Better to leave our streets to peaceful demonstrators.
So watch out folks and be careful. The crowd at OWS is mostly peaceful good people exercising their freedom of speech, but there was at least one convicted criminal in the crowd. No telling how many more like him may be trying to sneak in and discredit the OWS movement.