JAMES O'KEEFE 2

merri ok

odd, no content here

i added old txt

also this will be new content

see infiltration seddon

see pjt veritas /bak bak (404 field eror)

see ed fucking martin 2

see dirty tricks

see dr video edit

seems young for pension plan, but so many fails, eg WAPO

do i need a Where Are They Now node? WATN // poster boy? fury?

fired from own org

how big role in j6 big lie hannity fox islamaphobe ballot harvest

---

Right-wing media’s response to results of LA mayoral primary race is a preview of their midterm playbook

Right-wing media have been using footage from an emerging group of right-wing influencers to allege fraud during CA primary elections

Written by Kayla Gogarty

Research contributions from Hanne MacDonald, Isabella Sherk, Gideon Taaffe & Jack Winstanley

Published 06/18/26

Following Nithya Raman's late surge over Spencer Pratt in the primary results for Los Angeles mayor, right-wing media and the Trump administration leveraged often misleading videos from an emerging group of right-wing influencers to undermine the results.

This tactic fuels election misinformation narratives among the right-wing media and serves to provide so-called “proof” of their conspiracy theories to dispute election results, even though their “proof” is often exaggerated or misleading and voter fraud is extremely rare.

An emerging group of right-wing influencers are mirroring James O'Keefe's tactics

As MAGA-aligned influencers try to make a name for themselves in a crowded field, there is an emerging group of right-wing influencers who describe themselves as “independent journalists” and post on-the-ground, documentary-style videos that spread right-wing narratives on social media. These influencers are using James O’Keefe’s template for undercover sting-style and often misleading videos meant to expose and embarrass liberal organizations and causes.

Among these influencers are Nick Shirley, who gained prominence in recent months following his so-called investigation into fraud in Minneapolis day care centers; Muckraker's Anthony Rubin (who describes himself as a “guerrilla journalist”); and several influencers affiliated with Turning Point USA's Frontlines, including Cam Higby, Savanah Hernandez, and Jonathan Choe. O'Keefe also entered the fold in March, launching Citizen Justice League — a self-described “network of citizen journalists” — and descending into California along with Choe and other Frontlines influencers.

### In March, right-wing influencers descended on Skid Row, claiming to uncover voter registration fraud

In March, several right-wing influencers including, Rubin, Cam Higby,, Savanah Hernandez descended on Skid Row — a 50-block neighborhood in Los Angeles that is officially called Central City East. These self-described “independent journalists” published content alleging a voter registration fraud scheme on Skid Row that involves canvassers registering people to vote and sign ballot initiatives in exchange for cash, cigarettes, and marijuana. Most of the videos appear to be in collaboration with O'Keefe's Citizen Justice League.

Citation

Screenshots via YouTube and Instagram / Media Matters

O'Keefe and others from O'Keefe Media Group “went undercover on Skid Row, posing as homeless individuals,” and they claimed that they captured “28 Instances Of Cash Changing Hands For Ballot Signatures & Voter Registration Forms” on hidden cameras, including footage of a petitioner, Brenda Brown. In the video, O'Keefe alleged that Brown “hands cash money to the homeless person, not only for signing the California ballot initiative, but also as payment for them to register to vote.”

Video

Citation

From a March 17, 2026, YouTube video from O’Keefe Media Group and Citizen Justice League

On March 24, O'Keefe published a second video, alleging that homeless individuals were being paid “to forge the signatures and addresses of current registered voters on ballot measure petitions.”

Following the publication of the Skid Row videos, right-wing media outlets and personalities — including Sinclair’s The National News Desk and , the New York Post,, and — spread the videos and their claims of bribes. O’Keefe, in particular, was interviewed on several programs — including, The Charlie Kirk Show, The Alex Jones Show, and Steve Bannon's *War Room* — where he made unfounded claims that this alleged fraud has occurred potentially of times.

### After the California primaries, right-wing media leveraged content from right-wing influencers and suggested fraud in Nithya Raman late surge in votes

When the votes started to be counted in the jungle primary race, current mayor Karen Bass quickly qualified for the runoff; for the second spot, Spencer Pratt had an early lead, but as Nithya Raman surged ahead of him in the following days, right-wing media's election denial machine went into action, asserting that the election was rigged without pointing to any specific instances of voting fraud.

As Cam Higby noted during a discussion of the California primaries, “To be clear, we don't know for sure that the crimes that we caught people committing in our investigation are directly linked to the mayoral primary or the gubernatorial primary. We're just pointing out, ‘Hey, seems a little bit weird that they're doing a ballot scam just a couple months before the election.’”

Regardless, right-wing media are still using O'Keefe's and other right-wing influencers’ claims about unhoused people registering to vote at homeless shelters on Skid Row to make vague assertions about the Los Angeles primary. On The Benny Show, California Post's Joel Pollak said, “I think the evidence is starting to point us toward a vote harvesting operation that probably targeted Skid Row and other areas where there were many homeless people who could be registered to vote and could be encouraged either to sign their ballots in favor of Nithya Raman or to give them to people who would collect the ballots for them.”

On his show, The Daily Wire's Michael Knowles questioned Raman's second-place win, claiming, “What that implies is that Democrat activists went around and harvested ballots and perhaps forged ballots or bought ballots to beef up Nithya Raman, who nobody likes, to make sure that Spencer Pratt was not in the runoff.” Minutes later, Knowles praised O'Keefe: “Thankfully, we have James O'Keefe who has come out, done an undercover investigation to actually film these ballot harvesters paying people to register.”

On War Room, Election Integrity Network’s Cleta Mitchell — whom The Guardian called “a rising star of Republican election denialism” in 2024 — similarly invoked O'Keefe during a discussion of the California primaries with Bannon. Mitchell alleged that O'Keefe has recently published videos “showing the political hacks going to the homeless, who are the predominant constituency I suppose in LA now, and offering them drugs and money for ballots. … They knew as of election night how many votes the third-place finisher needed and they just gone out and gotten those votes.”

### The Trump administration picked up right-wing influencers’ videos to cast doubt on the California primaries

The Skid Row videos came amid Trump and his right-wing media allies’ push for the passage of the SAVE America Act, which aims to rewrite election laws nationwide and would, if passed, create new barriers for people attempting to register to vote. On March 24, the same day O'Keefe released his second Skid Row video, Trump posted to Truth Social a screenshot of and link to O’Keefe’s social media post promoting the video, adding, “Terrible!”

In his March 17 video, O’Keefe specifically claimed, “The Department of Justice has been sent these tapes of election fraud cash exchange for voter registration happening in broad daylight, and we have informed the Department of Justice there are more tapes coming.”

Two months later, the DOJ announced that petitioner Brenda Brown, who had been featured in O'Keefe's video, was “charged with one felony count of paying another person to register to vote, a federal charge that carries a maximum penalty of five years in federal prison.” Following the charges, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli credited O'Keefe's undercover video for leading to the charges: “I think that was widely reported and it was all over the press and as a result of that, initiated and opened up a criminal investigation with the FBI.” Essayli also said that Brown is “simply the first person that we are announcing charges for in this investigation resulting from some undercover videos that took place at Skid Row.”

O'Keefe and other right-wing influencers have boasted about their role in these investigations, and after the California primaries, Essayli went on a right-wing media tour, claiming to have evidence of election fraud in California that will lead to prosecutions and encouraging people to send in tips to help the DOJ investigate the supposed election rigging.

### This California playbook is a preview of what the right-wing media and the Trump administration will do to undermine the midterm elections results

As the 2026 midterms approach, right-wing media and the Trump administration appear to have ramped up their efforts to undermine the midterm elections – often invoking existing and repeatedly debunked conspiracy theoriesabout widespread election fraud in the U.S. and typically relying on one-off incidents and hypotheticals that are often exaggerated or misleading.

Content from right-wing influencers serves to provide the so-called “proof” of election conspiracy theories and fuels election misinformation narratives throughout right-wing media. It also gives the administration an excuse to argue for policies or actions that would restrict voter access.

While the March content focuses on Skid Row, it dovetails with other videos from these creators that misleadingly claim to show widespread voter fraud in other places, as well as previous content with now-debunked accusations about homelessness services in California.

In January, Benny Johnson was on the ground in California, including on Skid Row, claiming that he would help American taxpayers “see first-hand how criminal California fraud is robbing our nation blind.” In February, Nick Shirley published alleging voter fraud in California. According to Shirley, he went “to locations from California’s public voter rolls from the Secretary of State, and not a single location could verify the voter rolls.”

All of this content claiming fraud in California has been fodder for vague claims of widespread election fraud for those unhappy with the results of the California primaries — and it is all a preview of how this playbook can be used to undermine the upcoming midterm elections.

### Nick Shirley rebooted James O’Keefe’s debunked voter fraud myths for a new audience

02/18/26 4:25 PM EST

### The Flaws In The O'Keefe “Voter Fraud” Scheme

01/11/12 4:54 PM EST

### The right enters a post-proof era of election denial

06/10/26

===

tpm

Trump’s nominee for D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin, and Donald Trump’s Department of Justice more broadly, are taking cues from right-wing influencers — allowing some of the loudest media figures on the right to influence significant decisions, including who gets fired from the DOJ and who and what gets investigated.

It’s the latest way in which Trump’s DOJ has shirked its duty to uphold even the appearance of independence from the White House, and from Trump’s allies and friends in the right-wing social media sphere who have their own political agendas.

“It’s unprecedented for government officials to take direction or suggestions from highly polarized people and act on it within our government, especially when we’re talking about the DOJ,” Wendy Via, president and co-founder of The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said in an interview with TPM. “It eradicates all the DOJ is supposed to be — independent, for justice.”

Most recently, Martin — who has been serving in the role to which he was nominated in an acting capacity since January — targeted a former DOJ prosecutor who was a part of Special Counsel Robert Muller’s team, Aaron Zelinsky, with a letter alleging Zelinsky had somehow intentionally “sent an innocent man to jail.” The most striking part of the letter, though, was that a section of it was pulled directly, without attribution, from an old article on a website run by investigative journalist-turned-MAGA-aligned conspiracy theorist John Solomon.

As Mother Jones points out in a recent report on the letter of inquiry to Zelinsky, Martin’s letter includes a portion that appears to be fully lifted from a 2020 article from “Just the News,” a right-wing outlet started by Solomon.

Solomon started Just the News in 2020 after publishing a series of articles for The Hill highlighting claims by Trump allies who, at the time, were attempting to conjure up allegations of a corruption scheme involving Joe Biden and Ukraine — an effort that eventually led to Trump’s first impeachment in the House during his previous administration.

The April 14 letter accuses Zelinksky of making “false statements” that aided in sending “an innocent man to jail in an attempt to advance the false narrative that the campaign of a serving President had colluded with Russia to win the presidency,” according to Mother Jones‘ reporting. This is a reference to right-wing conspiracy theories that emerged around Trump ally George Papadopoulos’s prosecution.

Just The News did not respond to TPM’s request for comment.

Then in March, the White House appears to have taken a cue from right-wing political activist and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, firing a career federal prosecutor in Los Angeles without reason.

The prosecutor, Adam Schleifer, had been working on a case against the founder of Fatburger, Andrew Wiederhorn, who, according to the New York Times, was a donor to political action committees that have supported Trump.

Right before Schleifer’s dismissal, though, Loomer posted on X, sharing screenshots of old posts where Schleifer had been critical of Trump. “Why is Biden holdover @AdamSchleiferNY Adam Schleifer still working for the US Attorney’s office under the new Trump administration? He is a Trump hater who has been working at the US Attorney’s office since 2021,” she wrote. “Fire him. He supported the impeachment of President Trump and said he wanted to repeal Trump’s tax plan.”

And in February of this year, Denise Cheung, who was in charge of the criminal division of the Washington, D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office, resigned from her post after refusing to comply with an order from Martin to open a grand jury investigation into Biden-era Environmental Protection Agency grants. The only known evidence that Martin had to support this order for both an investigation and a potential asset freeze was a 5-minute video clip from a right-wing conspiracy theory website, Project Veritas.

The Project Veritas video clip purported to show a former Biden-era EPA employee talking about distributing climate specific funding to non-profit organizations ahead of the start of the Trump administration.

“When I explained that the quantum of evidence did not support that action, you stated that you believed that there was sufficient evidence,” wrote Cheung in her resignation letter to Martin. “As I shared with you, at this juncture, based upon the evidence I have reviewed, I still do not believe that there is sufficient evidence to issue the letter you described, including sufficient evidence to tell the bank that there is probable cause to seize the particular accounts identified.”

Via, from the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, called the DOJ’s reliance on right-wing influencers and conspiracy theorists “incredibly bizarre.”

“Of all of our agencies, the DOJ, and then of course under that the FBI, are supposed to be the most independent, the least affected by politics,” she added. “When I say it’s unprecedented, I don’t even know what other words to use, because it is so antithetical to who America is.”

===

---

YT 10 25

TUCKER CARLSON HAS NEVER BEEN AVERSE to appearing alongside idiosyncratic oddball figures. But Carlson’s recent decision to hang out with a wannabe pundit named Elizabeth Lane struck even fellow travelers in MAGA media as confusing.

Lane, a native of the former Soviet republic of Georgia, has made no secret of her fondness for Vladimir Putin. Until recently, she had a small presence online, with fewer than 1,000 followers each on YouTube and X. Yet in early October she secured a sitdown interview with Carlson in his Maine cabin. As soon as a preview of it went up on X, others on the right began asking: Why?

“How did she secure an interview with someone as big as Tucker Carlson?” RedState blogger “Bonchie” asked.

...

The—which saw Lane asking the former Fox News host such newsworthy questions as “What is love for Tucker Carlson?”—did its job: Lane’s following on X is now up to roughly 20,000 people. And while her previous YouTube videos struggled to crack 1,000 views, the Carlson interview has passed a quarter million.

It was, undoubtedly, a boon for Unifyd TV, a burgeoning new right-wing streaming platform where Lane is the most prominent host and chief operating officer.1

Unifyd pitches itself as a place for “groundbreaking” shows and “powerful investigative content” that, at first blush, appears to be supported by subscription fees ($11.99 per month or $95.88 per year). But that may not actually be its primary funding source.

According to court records, millions of dollars have come in to Unifyd from sales and promotion of a device called the “Light System”—or, if you take prefer the nomenclature of the other side of a bitter lawsuit over its origins, the “EESystem”—whose supporters claim it can cure nearly every ailment, from tumors to autism.

The devices have been compared to a real-life version of medbeds, the mythical medical tanning beds some conspiracy theorists believe will fix anything that’s wrong with you (which from President Trump). The system includes a screen, identical to a computer monitor, running on what looks like a form of the BASIC programming language and flashing symbols of different colors. Those symbols, proponents say, are sending out waves of healing power to anyone who sits in front of one of the screens.

Join

Because the promise of these devices is so massive (a person’s health and well-being is basically the whole ball game this side of eternity), the money around them is vast. A twelve-unit system goes for $54,200, according to court filings, on top of a one-time $125,000 licensing fee. More than 800 centers across the world have the machines installed, according to an internal report filed in court and reviewed by The Bulwark for one company that makes the devices. Total revenue for that company is approaching $100 million after just a few years of selling the machines.

[](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ltvP!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6a5bcc4e-264b-4f2e-b15c-755bb9f1bcec_2048x983.png)Robert F. Kennedy Jr., then a presidential candidate, with Jason Shurka in front of EESystem devices in 2024. (Screenshot via Unifyd TV)

But the “Light System” is more than just a machine. It is a key component to a conspiracy theory that a shadowy, benevolent cabal—made up of thousands of people, some essentially immortal and others non-human—is on a mission to elevate human consciousness through things like mass adoption of meditation and veganism, and further, that they’re doing so to accelerate our species’s progress on the way to contact with alien races.

Buckle up: Here’s how this aliens-walk-among-us conspiracy theory and these mystical medical devices are supporting this new right-wing media venture.

...

newsweek sep 24

Police Issue Update After Project Veritas Founder Said He Was Detained - Newsweek

the founder and former CEO of Project Veritas has said that he was detained on the US-Canada border and footage later released by the O'Keefe Media Group (OMG) appears to show an officer using the word "detained." Vermont State Police told NewsweekJames O'Keefe was issued with a trespassing notice on September 21.

O'Keefe's first statement about the incident came on September 23, when he posted to his X, formerly Twitter, account that he and his team had been "detained near the Canadian border by the Vermont State police."

O'Keefe is best known for founding Project Veritas, a site dedicated to filming unflattering portrayals of the subjects that it infiltrates via undercover operators, such as Planned Parenthood, the DNC, and several teachers' unions.

O'Keefe now runs OMG, which calls itself "the last bastion of citizen journalism." The OMG site sells masterclasses on journalism, hosts videos of O'Keefe interviewing other figures on the right such as Vivek Ramaswamy, and also sells merchandise and covert cameras.

James O’Keefe speaking during the Conservative Political Action Conference on February 24, 2022 in Orlando, Florida. His claim to have been detained was contradicted by the police, but footage of the incident appears to show... More Joe Raedle/Getty images

Major David Petersen from the Vermont State Police told Newsweek via email that the police were notified on September 21 of three individuals outside a residence in the town of Derby, which escalated into a trespassing notice.

"It was reported that three individuals arrived in a white van type vehicle with an out-of-state registration plate and attempted to aggressively question the homeowner. The white van left the area prior to [the] arrival of a Vermont State Police member," he said.

"Further investigation suggested one member of the group approached the homeowner feigning car trouble. When the homeowner offered assistance, the group began to question the homeowner on a completely different issue relating to his occupation.

"One of the individuals was reported to be holding a microphone. The homeowner requested the group be issued a notice of trespass for his property."

Major Petersen said that O'Keefe approached a member of the Vermont State Police later that evening, at 7:15pm, in Jericho VT, a town that is in the north of the state.

"Mr. O'Keefe was in possession of a microphone and the other individuals appeared to be recording the encounter," he said.

"During the interaction, Mr. O'Keefe asked the Vermont State Police Trooper why he was parked in that location and offered that he was seeking to ask questions of select individuals about a topic he was to be covering in an upcoming production.

republican state officials are investigating ActBlue after right-wing media used inaccurate information to claim the fundraising platform was laundering money

Right-wing media homed in on a Virginia donor, but FEC data shows the vast majority of donations were to WinRed and Republican PACs rather than ActBlue

Written by Kayla Gogarty

Research contributions from Alex Kaplan

:{Published 08/07/24

Amid Kamala Harris’ surging fundraising, right-wing media are alleging that Democratic PAC ActBlue is laundering money through a Virginia donor, claiming there were more than 22,000 donations listed for that individual, totaling over $800,000. But according to data from the Federal Election Commission, the alleged donor actually gave hundreds of thousands to WinRed and other Republican PACs.

Regardless, the claim spread — including to former President Donald Trump — and right-wing media figures called on attorneys general to investigate. At least two Republican attorneys general have announced they are looking into it.

After President Joe Biden announced that he was dropping out of the 2024 presidential race and endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, fundraising for her campaign surged. Amid that surge, right-wing personalities accused ActBlue of engaging in a money laundering scheme.

As part of these accusations, some right-wing media figures and social media accounts amplified data from a website for a tax-exempt organization, Election Watch, reportedly founded by serial election denier Peter Bernegger, which provides “smurfing data by state.” (“Smurf” apparently refers to “an individual whose ID may have been used to launder money into political campaigns.”) Users can click on a state to see the so-called “smurf” donors, which are apparently identified by “numbers and patterns of transactions” in FEC data “that indeed appear to be highly questionable.”

Right-wing media have seemingly latched onto the first Virginia entry, which the website claims made 22,619 transactions, totaling $839,466. According to FEC data for an individual of the same name living in the same zip code (or at the affiliated address), that individual has made nearly 25,000 transactions since 2019, totaling more than $765,000. Nearly half of the transactions were with WinRed — totaling nearly $380,000. Additional hundreds of thousands went to other Republican PACs. Only four transactions were apparently made with ActBlue — totaling just $66. (Previously, Republican donors have reportedly been “steered … into unwitting donations,” unknowingly signing up for weekly recurring contributions when contributing through WinRed.)

Despite the FEC data, right-wing media figures and social media accounts alleged that the Virginia donor data showed “money laundering” through ActBlue, urged others to use Election Watch's data to find more “smurfs,” and called for attorneys general to investigate.

03/07/24

Republic PAC the Virginia Project claimed there was a “ghost donor problem” and made an allegation about one Virginia donor.

The Virginia Project, which has an “election integrity program,” posted about a “Ghost donor problem,” specifically citing alleged data from Bernegger’s Election Watch site. The PAC claimed, “One Virginia donor. 22,619 transactions totaling $839,466.00. $37.11 average donation.” Virginia Project, accessed [7/30/24; Twitter/X, 3/7/24]

07/23/24

Social media account NoVA_Campaigns amplified the Virginia Project’s claims about the Virginia donor multiple times.

NoVA_Campaigns, a social media account which seemingly pushes right-wing narratives and election conspiracy theories, amplified Virginia Project’s March post multiple times, saying, “Massive @actblue fraud. How @TheDemocrats launder💰in billions,” and specifically claiming that the Virginia donor “made 22,619 Fed donations since ‘19, totaling $839,466 in 592 days.” In a second post, the account repeated the claim about the donations, calling on “AGs like @JasonMiyaresVA 🦗.” Twitter/X, [7/23/24, 7/23/24, 7/23/24, accessed 8/5/24]

07/23/24

Bernegger amplified the claims about the Virginia donor and called on his followers to use his organization’s website to find “smurfs.”

Bernegger responded to the Virginia Project’s social media post about the Virginia donor and called on people to “Check your state out” on his organization’s website, telling them to “scroll down to the USA map, click on any state, let it load, listing of Smurfs.” Twitter/X, [7/23/24]

07/24/24

Newsmax host Carl Higbie amplified Election Watch’s site on his show and claimed “smurfs” or “money mules” are used to funnel money “through the Democrats’ fundraising platform, called ActBlue.”

During the July 24 edition of his Newsmax show, Higbie claimed that “a bunch of people” found “a bunch of stuff that appears to not add up,” crediting Bernegger’s organization, which he said “compiled millions … of data points from the Federal Election Commission.” According to Higbie, “We were able to find out that in the past few years, over $200 million of political donations have been funneled through the Democrats’ fundraising platform, called ActBlue. … And from our research, it appears that these people, most of them, don't even know these donations are being made in their name. It's not their money. They call these people ‘smurfs’ or ‘money mules.’” Twitter/X, [7/24/24]

07/26/24

Right-wing personality Charlie Kirk called on state attorneys general to get involved: “When will one of them take action?”

Kirk alleged that there are “massive, repeated donations to ActBlue that use stolen identities and, quite possibly, stolen credit card,” specifically noting that “one person in Virginia has been named in 22,619 separate donations since 2019, totaling more than $800,000.” Kirk went on to claim that “obviously, she's being exploited for some kind of money-laundering operation,” and he called on state AGs to get involved: “ActBlue raises from all fifty states. We have fifty state AGs. When will one of them take action?” Twitter/X, [7/26/24]

07/26/24

Right-wing social media personality DC Draino specifically called out Virginia’s Republican AG Jason Miyares, asking if he will “prosecute this ActBlue money laundering and protect VA’s exploited citizens.”

DC Draino amplified Kirk’s social media post, adding, “Didn’t Virginia elect a Republican AG? Will @JasonMiyaresVA prosecute this ActBlue money laundering and protect VA’s exploited citizens? Or will he be a 1 term politician?” Twitter/X, [7/26/24]

07/29/24

On Truth Social, Trump amplified Kirk’s and DC Draino’s allegations about ActBlue and their calls for AGs to investigate.

07/29/24

Just over an hour after Trump made his post, Virginia’s Jason Miyares said his office was “looking into” the claims about ActBlue and money laundering.

On social media, Miyares responded to Kirk and said, “My office is aware of these allegations and rest assured, we are looking into it.” The same day, Dan Bishops — the Republican candidate for North Carolina AG — suggested he would take action against ActBlue on “January 1” after being elected. Twitter/X, [7/29/24, 7/29/24]

07/30/24

Wyoming Republican Secretary of State Chuck Gray announced an “investigation into ActBlue,” citing “nationwide money laundering and identity theft allegations.”

In a press release, which he posted on social media, Gray encouraged “any Wyoming citizen who has reason to believe a political action committee stole their identity or falsely reported a donation using their name” to report it to his office. Wyoming Secretary of State media release, [7/30/24]

08/01/24

Right-wing activist James O’Keefe said he would “personally pay” $3,000 to people who confront potential “smurfs” in their neighborhoods.

O’Keefe, the ousted founder of Project Veritas who is now trying to build up O’Keefe Media Group, posted on social media: “Uncover ActBlue Smurfs and get paid like our Citizen Journalists,” urging people to go to Election Watch’s site, “ choose your state, enter your zip code, and start investigating. Not comfortable going door-to-door? … Submit potential Smurfs and links to your FEC findings through our X DMs or Signal.” The post included a video showing how to use Bernegger’s Election Watch site and instructing people to “knock on these people’s doors,” tell them they “seem to be a victim of a money laundering scheme,” and get bank statements from them. Rolling Stone, [6/20/24; Twitter/X, 8/1/24]

Video

CitationFrom an August 1, 2024, video from James O'Keefe

08/02/24

Virginia’s Republican AG, Jason Miyares, posted that he sent a letter to ActBlue “demanding answers.”

Miyares posted the letter on social media and said, “The integrity of our election is at stake.” The letter claims that his office “has become aware of multiple serious allegations that ActBlue, ActBlue Civics, Inc., and ActBlue Charities, Inc. (together ‘ActBlue’) have engaged in fraudulent, deceptive, and/or otherwise illegal activities in the Commonwealth of Virginia and/or aided and abetted others in doing so.” Twitter/X, [8/2/24]

aha pension plan for the cancelled?!

trump hires from TV fox audition, loyal // fascist mafia grifters

mma 5 24

eric and Donald Trump Jr. are assuming the position of “loyalty czars” within the Trump campaign, Axios reported on April 24, with the two eldest Trump sons aiming to “focus on vetting potential officials and staffers for ideology and loyalty” and to “take a lead in making sure government jobs are filled by Republicans aligned with Trump's vision for the party.”

Reporter Alex Thompson writes:

Don Jr.’s goal “is to keep the John Boltons of the world outside a second Trump administration,” a person close to him told Axios, referring to Donald Trump's hawkish former national security adviser who wrote a bestselling book lambasting the former president.

The New York Post similarly reported in March: “Should his father retake the Oval Office, Trump Jr. said he plans to take a ‘very active’ role in the the 2024 presidential transition team.”

“Mostly just to make sure we stop some of the D.C. swamp rats and the swamp creatures from getting in there and doing their thing,” he told the paper. “There are so many great people to choose from now with the first four years of the administration you have a good understanding of who would be great and loyal and implement the America First policies.”

On his Rumble podcast, Triggered, Trump Jr. has frequently taken recommendations from his audience and made his own suggestions of far-right extremists, conspiracy theorists, and MAGA loyalists who would fit into his vision for a second Trump administration:

## Laura Loomer
Laura Loomer is a self-described “proud Islamophobe” who has said she is “pro-white nationalism,” celebrated the death of thousands of migrants, and dismissed the massacre of Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand. Angry White Men, [3/7/21; Right Wing Watch, 11/1/17; Twitter/X, 7/24/17; Huffington Post, 8/20/22]

- Trump Jr. said that he wanted Loomer as his father’s next White House press secretary.On his podcast, Trump Jr. said he’d “love to see her as press secretary just to watch D.C. just explode.” Loomer responded on her own show, saying she would “gladly” serve as press secretary. Media Matters, [11/10/23; Rumble,Loomer Unleashed, 11/10/23]
## Mike Davis
Mike Davis is a pro-Trump sycophant who has promised to wage a “reign of terror” against political enemies he would fire, indict, deport, or imprison under a second Trump administration.He has garnered attention in right-wing media for his excuse of Trump’s crimes, authoritarian leanings, and role in founding the Article III Project, which he described to The New York Times in 2019 as an effort for the right to “take off the gloves, put on the brass knuckles and fight back” on judicial issues. Media Matters, [11/10/23]

- Trump Jr. said that “you almost have to” nominate Davis as attorney general. “Just put them in as interim even just to send that shot across the bow of the swamp, you know? Like — you want to play?” Rumble, *Triggered*, [11/9/23]
## Tucker Carlson
Tucker Carlson is the disgraced former Fox News prime-time host whose nativist commentary normalized white supremacist talking points in conservative rhetoric.Carlson also has a history of claiming January 6 was a “false flag,” praising authoritarian leaders such as Russian President Vladimir Putin, and elevating bizarre pseudoscientific ideas to address an alleged crisis of masculinity. Media Matters [10/28/18, 12/19/22]

- Trump Jr. said that Carlson would be his “first, second, third, fourth, and fifth choice for VP if I could decide right now.”He added, “He’d be great on a lot of issues and it would also drive the other side insane.” Rumble, *Triggered*, [11/9/23]
- Trump Jr. reiterated that Carlson is his pick for vice president but indicated he would also “be great” for press secretary. The former Fox host “actually understands the issues, unlike most of these clowns in the media,” who are “not smart enough, most of them, to actually understand the details … so he would run circles around them,” he said. Trump Jr. added: “I had higher hopes for Tucker than press secretary, obviously, but, man, he’d be great in the role.” Rumble, *Triggered*, [12/28/23]

## Dan Bongino
Dan Bongino is a Trump loyalist who amassed a right-wing following by attacking the Mueller probe, appearing on Alex Jones’ Infowars conspiracy theory outlet, and promising that “my entire life right now is about owning the libs.”Bongino is currently a Rumble-exclusive contributor and was previously a Secret Service agent, NYPD officer, thrice-failed congressional candidate, NRATV host, and Fox News personality. Media Matters, [5/21/21, 4/11/23]

- Answering audience questions live on-air, Trump Jr. said Bongino “would be great” for vice president or another position “to just end nonsense … put him in charge of the FBI and getting rid of the crap down below there.”While reading other audience suggestions for his father’s potential future Cabinet, Trump Jr. previously said Bongino “would be a good one, that’d be fire on day one.” Rumble, *Triggered*, [1/18/24, 12/28/23]

## Vivek Ramaswamy
Vivek Ramaswamy is an “anti-woke” entrepreneur and author who frequently appeared on Fox News and gained attention from his failed GOP primary campaign as part of the 2024 presidential race, though he remained a Trump loyalist.During his campaign, Ramaswamy attempted to appeal to the far right by endorsing the “great replacement” conspiracy theory and suggesting that January 6 was an “inside job.” The New York Times, [2/21/23; The Associated Press, 1/16/24; New York Magazine, 1/3/24]

- Trump Jr. said that he liked the idea of Ramaswamy for vice president but that he also saw support for making him the “blow-shit-up czar, basically, like just get in there and, you know, take down these institutions.”“By the way, both of which [are] important and interesting,” he added. Rumble, *Triggered*, [1/18/24]

## Alex Jones
Infowars host Alex Jones is a 9/11 truther and conspiracy theorist who has been found liable for his false claim that the 2012 Sandy Hook mass shooting was a hoax; he has also platformed Holocaust deniers. Media Matters, [12/1/16, 11/3/23; NPR, 12/2/22; The Associated Press, 10/12/22, 11/27/23]

- Trump Jr. floated Jones as part of a “day-one troll team” for high-level positions in the Trump White House. He went on to threaten that as “punishment” for “every time they just totally disregard the Constitution” or “start another sham impeachment,” Jones would be given an official position “for a month.” Rumble, *Triggered*, [12/28/23]
- While reading audience suggestions, Trump Jr. said Jones would be a “fair” choice for press secretary in a second Trump administration. Rumble, *Triggered*, [12/28/23]

## Owen Shroyer
Owen Shroyer is a convicted Capitol rioter and Infowars host who federal prosecutors said “helped create January 6.” The Washington Post noted that Shroyer had spread “2020 election conspiracy theories with calls for violence to a large internet following,” and during the January 6 insurrection, the Infowars host “trespassed on restricted Capitol grounds in violation of a prior court stayaway order for disruptive conduct.” The Washington Post, [9/12/23]

- Listing Shroyer among audience suggestions for future Cabinet picks, Trump Jr. complained that the Infowars host “just did some jail time for nonsense” and said he would like to see Shroyer on an “FU tour in Washington, D.C.” Rumble, *Triggered*, [12/28/23]

## Jack Posobiec
Jack Posobiec is a right-wing troll and pro-Trump conspiracy theorist with white supremacist ties.Posobiec promoted the debunked “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory accusing members of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign of being part of a pedophilia ring that operated out of a D.C. pizza parlor. Media Matters, [8/15/17; Southern Poverty Law Center, accessed 4/26/24]

- Trump Jr. said that Posobiec “would be a good one” to include in his father’s Cabinet. Posobiec has also appeared on Trump Jr.’s livestream to praise “the great men of means” such as those who founded conservative-leaning platforms like Truth Social and Rumble, encouraging “everyone at lower levels” to “be supporting those guys at all times, period, full stop." Rumble, *Triggered*, [12/28/23, 4/1/24]

## James O’Keefe
James O’Keefe is the disgraced founder and former leader of the right-wing media organization Project Veritas, a group that targeted progressive figures and organizations by covertly filming them and publishing deceptively edited videos to spread misinformation.O’Keefe’s previous plots included trying to push false stories of sexual abuse to The Washington Post, trying to undermine the 2020 election, and targeting Planned Parenthood. NPR, [2/21/23; Media Matters, 11/28/17, 1/4/21; The New York Times, 7/27/11]

- Trump Jr. said O’Keefe would be “a good one” for a Cabinet position, adding, “That would drive some people crazy.” Rumble, Triggered, [12/28/23]

## Victor Davis Hanson
Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and frequent Fox News guest who has written the book The Case for Trump and has invoked “great replacement” theory rhetoric. The New York Times, [3/5/19; Media Matters, 6/30/22, 5/9/23, 9/22/23]

- Trump Jr. responded “that would be an awesome one” after one of his audience members suggested Hanson could be in charge of the Department of Education, saying, “That would drive them crazy but I’d love to see them argue with his academic credentials.”Rumble, *Triggered*, [12/28/23]

## Kari Lake
Kari Lake is a failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate and current senate candidate who has a history of election denial and courting extremist endorsements. Lake has embraced extremists such as Loomer and Posobiec and antisemites such as Jarrin Jackson and Stew Peters. AZ Central, [1/25/23; Media Matters, 10/24/23, 10/12/22]

- Trump Jr. agreed that Lake would “drive a lot of people crazy” as a vice presidential nominee. Rumble, *Triggered*, [12/28/23]

===

---

no lnx an 8 23 $

Embattled far-right 'gotcha' group Project Veritas fights for survival post-O'Keefe

James O'Keefe, formerly of Project Veritas, in Palm Beach, Florida in July 2023 (Gage Skidmore)

Alex Henderson

August 23, 2023

2023 has been a rough year for Project Veritas, a far-right group known for its "gotcha" tactics and campaigns against mainstream media outlets and liberal and progressive organizations.

Plagued by financial problems, Veritas recently laid off 25 of its employees, according to the Daily Beast. And Veritas CEO Hannah Giles isn't shy about claiming that founder James O'Keefe left the company in bad shape when he departed earlier this year.

In an article published on August 23, the Daily Beast's Kelly Weill details Veritas' problems and the steps it has been taking to keep from going out of business. The "cost-cutting measures" that Veritas is considering, according to Weill, include "going fully remote and bringing in an outside firm to produce its content."

POLL: Should Trump be allowed to hold office again?

"By the time of his departure," Weill explains, "O'Keefe had become controversial within Project Veritas, with some employees accusing him of being 'a power-drunk tyrant' who allegedly squandered company funds on lavish personal expenses. After the layoffs — which employees previously characterized asslashing Project Veritas from 43 to 18 staffers — the company is seeking a profitable path forward, according to sources. And it won't be easy, management has suggested in a recent conversation."

Giles spoke candidly about Veritas' financial problems during a Tuesday, August 22 interview, although she was unclear about whether Veritas will outsource production of its content.

Giles told the Beast, "Project Veritas is in a tough situation. It was made tough by O'Keefe leaving, and made doubly challenging by mismanagement before I was hired. I wish we could have kept everyone on and grown the organization, but I've been put in the situation where I have to cut and refocus so we can get to growth. I'm not going to fight in the press over complaints from laid off staffers, I'm going to keep doing the work to rebuild this organization from the mess it was left in."

Weill notes that Veritas is suing O'Keefe for alleged financial mismanagement and for allegedly using Veritas' "donor list to solicit funds for a rival media group after his departure this year." According to Weill, Veritas has accused O'Keefe "of spending company funds on dubious personal expenses like chartered cars, helicopter flights, and musical theater productions."

READ MORE:Conflicting reports about James O'Keefe's termination at Project Veritas

Read the Daily Beast's full report at this link (subscription required).

From Your Site Articles

Inside the Collapsing Media Empire of Deceased GOP Sleaze-Peddler Andrew Breitbart ›

Gasland's Josh Fox Busts James O'Keefe's Latest Bogus Claim ›

The Really Creepy People Behind the Libertarian-Inspired Billionaire Sea Castles ›

Steve Bannon

On the November 16 edition of OAN’s The Real Story, host Natalie Harp accused the federal “Injustice Department” of prosecuting Bannon as part of “yet another witch hunt.” Harp’s guest, Bannon’s War Room co-host Raheem Kassam, warned Republican officials that “if you don’t think that after they’re done with somebody like Bannon that they’re coming after you, you’ve got another thing coming.”
Bannon attorney David Schoen told Real America that “every American citizen ought to be scared to death by” his client’s prosecution, and OAN host Dan Ball claimed the former Trump strategist was the victim of “a politically motivated witch hunt.” According to Schoen, Bannon did not comply with the subpoena because he thought he had to follow Trump’s invocation of executive privilege. Schoen claimed that the Department of Justice chose to criminally prosecute Bannon “vindictively, out of revenge, to punish” him. Ball concurred that the Biden “regime” is using the Justice Department “to go after political enemies to get payback.”
Tipping Point host Kara McKinney linked the murder conviction of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the killing of George Floyd to other “prosecutorial attacks” on conservatives like Bannon. McKinney’s disorganized rant, which also touched on O’Keefe, Rittenhouse, and anti-critical race theory parents as victims, posited that these cases are “all related” as examples of “political persecution.” The relation appeared to be that two members of the House January 6 commission, Reps. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and Bobby Rush (D-IL), were formerly involved in Black radical politics. “So bring this up anytime someone tries to tell you that what's happening to Bannon, and to really the rest of us, is anything less than political persecution,” McKinney concluded.
On Tipping Point, far-right podcaster Millie Weaver said the Bannon indictment “is the left-wing regime going after their political opponents and weaponizing the American justice system to do so.” Weaver also added O’Keefe to her list of victims, claiming both cases are actually about unnamed enemies seeking “the media hit pieces and the psyops that can result” from their arrests. After extensively lying that left-wing agitators were responsible for January 6, Weaver complained “only the political opponents of the Biden administration” are being subpoenaed for the attack on the Capitol. McKinney complained that the “January 6 political prisoners,” including “military veterans” and “MAGA grandmas,” are being held on “heinous charges” and “force-fed critical race theory,” asking if their plight was “just part of the re-education really that the left is using against you and I, the patriots of America?”

James O’Keefe

In Focus host Stephanie Hamill: “It might be James O’Keefe today, but it could easily be me or somebody else tomorrow.” Hamill was speaking to far-right commentator Dinesh D’Souza, a staunch Trump ally who pleaded guilty to campaign finance fraud in 2014 but was pardoned by Trump in 2020. D’Souza dishonestly added that “Republicans would never dream of doing [this] to their critics. It would be unthinkable for example of Trump, or earlier Reagan or Bush, to go after left-wing journalists in this manner,” an obvious omission of Trump’s extensive war on the press.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) told OAN the O’Keefe raid “shows the FBI has been weaponized by the Biden administration, and this gives every American reason to fear the government” and signals the rise of communism in the U.S. Greene said the investigation was evidence that “the Democrat Party is the Communist Party of America” because “this is what communists do in many other countries. They want to silence their enemies, anyone that’s going to reveal the truth,” such as O’Keefe. The GOP representative warned viewers that they will “see these tactics over and over and this is why Americans, you need to get ready. You need to be able to stand up firm against these fear tactics from the Democrat Communist Party, and not allow them to rear this head of communism.”
Real America’s Dan Ball on O’Keefe investigation: “If we don’t stand up to the tyrants currently running this administration, it could be you or me they target next.” Ball concluded the segment by telling viewers to “remember what 45 always said. ‘They’re not coming for me, they’re coming for you.’ [O’Keefe] was just in the way.”
Ball: “This is an example of what’s to come. … Like Trump used to say, they’re not coming after him, they’re coming after you.” Ball continued, “Don’t think they won’t come for other journalists, and you, next. They’re willing to literally tear down everything our institutions stand for and use the DOJ and the FBI as a political weapon.” Guest Harmeet Dhillon, who is an attorney for Project Veritas, claimed that “this is an existential threat to the First Amendment and to our liberties and to our future, and every American … should recognize that. It’s loud and clear.”

Kyle Rittenhouse

OAN guest: “Today it's Kyle Rittenhouse. Tomorrow it’s you." Defense witness and Real America’s Voice employee Drew Hernandez warned OAN viewers that “what they're clearly doing, especially in the mainstream media, is not only are they trying to paint responsible gun owners as the villains, but they're probably even trying to discourage future gun owners from even attempting to buy a firearm to defend themselves, because, hey, we did this to Kyle. We can do this to you.” OAN’s Stephanie Hamill agreed, adding that Americans were watching the trial’s outcome to see if they “have the right to defend themselves” from “Black Lives Matter rioters and looters.”
Larry Klayman: The “reverse racism” against Rittenhouse was “maybe a lesson for the American people at large too.” Klayman, a right-wing conspiracy theorist, explained that the apparent lesson was “if somebody shoves a gun in your face, don’t take it lightly. Kyle [Rittenhouse] did not.” Klayman suggested that the Biden administration and the mainstream media would only make society more hostile to gun owners, advising people “to exercise their Second Amendment rights, their right to bear arms, because it’s only going to get worse” under the Biden administration.
Tipping Point’s Kara McKinney: The Rittenhouse trial shows that “the left can set your city on fire” and “have convicted pedos chase you down,” but “if you try to defend yourself against it, you’re still somehow the bad guy.” McKinney continued, complaining to Dinesh D’Souza that “the idea that they can destroy your life and everything with it and you have to sit there and take it and you’re not allowed to have self-defense” is “almost setting the stage” for Black Lives Matter to “destroy our cities and you and I, we’re not allowed to fight back.”
Revolver News’ Darren Beattie asked OAN viewers to “consider the larger context” of a “vindictive and politically motivated” prosecution and “how fragile this justice system is in the United States and how weaponized it is politically,” despite Rittenhouse’s acquittal. Beattie, a former Trump White House aide fired (and later rehired) for his ties to white supremacist groups, claimed that a conviction would have “destroyed” Rittenhouse’s “entire life over nothing for doing something that, frankly, any upstanding citizen would do, and that is protect his community from rioters and looters,” suggesting that any viewer who would do the same could also face a murder trial.
OAN host Stephanie Hamill: According to the media, “if you’re happy about Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal, you’re apparently a white supremacist too.”

---

salon an 621 bo lnx

former British spy and Republican mega-donor Erik Prince, a founder of the private military contractor Blackwater (now rebranded as "Academi) and brother to former U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, recruited a motley crew of home-grown American operatives from the conservative group Project Veritas and elsewhere to lead an initiative to infiltrate state-level Democratic party organizations and campaigns, according to a new report.

Prince, alongside the ex-MI6 officer he recruited to head the project, Richard Seddon, also targeted moderate Republican officials and those deemed as insufficiently dedicated to the hardline right-wing agenda favored by former President Donald Trump, The New York Times reported Friday.

The duo were bankrolled by the longtime conservative donor and heiress to the Gore-Tex fortune, Susan Gore, and trained their operatives on a remote Wyoming ranch in areas like the "basics of espionage" and "political sabotage," according to the newspaper.

It remains unclear what level of success they were able to accomplish, though the Times notes Seddon and Prince placed two spies — Beau Maier, the nephew of conservative commentator Glenn Beck, and Sofia LaRocca, deep into Democratic political organizations in Wyoming, Arizona, and Colorado.

But then, at some point, Democratic operatives became suspicious of the story LaRocca was claiming, according to The Times:

Her behavior raised some suspicion. Ms. LaRocca and Mr. Maier lived in Fort Collins, Colo., only about 45 miles from Cheyenne, Wyoming's capital, but their residence prompted some Democrats to ask how they planned to organize a grass-roots campaign to flip the state while living in Colorado. Ms. LaRocca told others she could not rent a home in Cheyenne because she had a dog, an implausible explanation.

Ms. LaRocca had also introduced herself to party officials as Cat Debreau. She eventually told a story about why she later went by the name Sofia LaRocca: She had been the victim of an online stalker, she said, but decided to once again use her original name because the police had told her that her stalker had reformed.

"Her story from the start rang very untrue," said Nina Hebert, who at the time was the digital director for the Wyoming Democratic Party. "The police don't call you and say, 'Hey, your stalker is better.'"

Neither Project Veritas nor its longtime head and frequent Fox News guest James O'Keefe returned a request for comment Friday.

One of the most prominent targets of the operation was Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon, a Republican who many in Trump's corner viewed as overly moderate and whose candidacy Gore had vigorously opposed.

Maier and LaRocca were also able to install themselves within the Wyoming-based progressive organization, Better Wyoming, which only discovered the plot months later, after they had been well integrated into Better Wyoming operations. Nate Martin, the group's head, told the Times he suspected the idea was to "dig up this information and you sit on it until you really can destroy somebody."

Maier and LaRocca were married last week in Wyoming, according to the report. Glenn Beck delivered a toast at the reception.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Why Is a Small Montana Town a Hotbed of Far-Right Activity ... ›

Bill Barr sued by watchdog for records in potential DOJ corruption ... ›

Bombshell NYT report uncovers a right-wing activist plot to go after ... ›

Donor-Advised Fund Sponsors Bankroll Project Veritas

The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has tracked over $11.9 million in contributions to Project Veritas from 2014-18, or roughly 43 percent of its contribution revenue over that time period. The biggest funders, by far, are donor-advised fund (DAF) sponsors–501(c)(3) nonprofits that provide individual charitable accounts for donors, passing along their clients’ contributions to other nonprofits for a fee while offering the donors special tax deductions. Clients have the option of remaining anonymous.

Project Veritas has a 501(c)(4) political arm, Project Veritas Action Fund, to which the billionaire, Trump-supporting Mercer family has steered funds. In 2018, a nonprofit called Making America Great, chaired by Rebekah Mercer, the daughter of former Renaissance Technologies co-CEO and Breitbart News funder Robert Mercer, donated $750,000 to the action fund. The Mercer Family Foundation has not donated directly to Project Veritas in recent years, but it’s possible it has used DonorsTrust to do so. From 2014-18, the foundation gave $10.9 million to DonorsTrust, including nearly $8.2 million in 2018, a big increase from previous years. By shifting more of its charitable dollars through DonorsTrust, the family is effectively hiding its donations from the public. In 2012, Robert Mercer donated $25,000 to Project Veritas through his LLC Gravitas Maximus.

Other top foundations that have used DonorsTrust to donate anonymously to conservative nonprofits from 2014-18 include the Knowledge and Progress Fund, a Koch family foundation ($5.3 million), the Adolph Coors Foundation ($4.2 million), the Searle Freedom Trust ($2.6 million), and the Charles Koch Foundation ($980,000). From 2009-12, the foundation of DeVos’s in-laws, the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, contributed $6.5 million to DonorsTrust, but has not donated since.

The National Philanthropic Trust, another donor-advised fund sponsor, gave close to $1.3 million to Project Veritas from 2014-18. Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, a DAF sponsor associated with Fidelity Investments and the biggest nonprofit by annual revenue in the country, gave over $1.2 million from 2015-18. The Greater Houston Community Foundation gave close to $116,000 from 2014-18. Donor-advised fund sponsors associated with additional major finance companies, Schwab Charitable and Vanguard Charitable, have each contributed over $100,000 to Project Veritas. Additional DAF sponsors the National Christian Foundation (nearly $15,000 from 2014-18), the Community Foundation of North Florida ($10,000 from 2017-18), and the Jewish Communal Fund ($6,000 in 2015) gave smaller amounts.

The Greater Houston Community Foundation’s 2016 tax records show that the DAF sponsor received a large amount of money in the form of transferred oil and gas stock. Clients can transfer appreciable assets like stock into their charitable accounts without paying taxes on the sale of those assets, and get the charitable tax deduction at the same time, one reason why DAF sponsors are rapidly becoming more popular among wealthy donors. Clients delivered nearly $14 million worth of Anadarko Petroleum, ExxonMobil, and Marathon Oil stock into their charitable accounts with the Greater Houston Community Foundation in 2016.

Wealthy individual donors in the right-wing philanthropic world have also donated directly to Project Veritas through their family foundations. Dunn Foundation–which has Thomas Beach, a DonorsTrust board member and chairman of the Koch-backed Reason Foundation, on its board–gave $274,000 from 2015-18; the Helen Diller Foundation gave $125,000 in 2017; and the Bradley Impact Fund gave $31,000 from 2015-18.

The Donald J. Trump Foundation gave $20,000 to Project Veritas in 2015, and Trump met with and promoted the group and its founder, James O’Keefe. Trump allegedly encouraged O’Keefe to infiltrate Columbia University and obtain Barack Obama’s college records.Donald Trump, Jr. is set to attend O’Keefe’s upcoming wedding. Prince began working with Project Veritas during the 2016 elections and would go on to work on Trump’s transition into the White House. He later pitched the White House and the Pentagon on a plan to privatize the Afghan war, but the secretary of defense did not pursue a deal.

Law and lobbying firm Alston and Bird, which employs former Kansas Republican Sen. Bob Dole, directed a $1 million donation from an unknown source to Project Veritas in 2019, according to The New York Times. The firm lobbied the federal government on behalf of corporate fossil fuel and health care clients including ConocoPhillips, Cheniere Energy, trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans, and CVS Health in the second half of 2019.

[chart:

donorsTrust $8,436,945

National Philanthropic Trust $1,271,032

Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund $1,212,329

Dunn Foundation $274,000

Helen Diller Family Foundation $125,000

Greater Houston Community Foundation $116,350

Vanguard Charitable $102,000

Schwab Charitable $100,925

Chase Foundation of Virginia $40,000

American Endowment Foundation $35,000

Bradley Impact Fund $31,000

Debora J. and Peter A. Magowan Foundation $30,000

Donors Capital Fund $20,000

Donald J. Trump Foundation $20,000

Daniel and Susan Gottleib Family Foundation $17,500

National Christian Foundation $14,927

Community Foundation of North Florida $10,035

William H. Donner Foundation $10,000

Brad Brock Family Foundation $10,000

...]

Koch foundations haven’t given money to Project Veritas directly, but the group has personal ties to the Koch political network. A 2018 annual review acquired by CMD shows that Project Veritas’s vice president of development is Adam Guillette, who launched the Florida branch of Koch’s premier political nonprofit, Americans for Prosperity, and worked there for several years. Guillette is also president of Accuracy in Media, a nonprofit that has received funding from DonorsTrust.

Project Veritas had $8.8 million in annual revenue in 2018, and O’Keefe took home roughly $387,000, according to its latest tax filing obtained by CMD.

---

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/07/us/politics/erik-prince-project-veritas.html

no lnx

Erik Prince Recruits Ex-Spies to Help Infiltrate Liberal Groups

Mr. Prince, a contractor close to the Trump administration, contacted veteran spies for operations by Project Veritas, the conservative group known for conducting stings on news organizations and other groups.

Erik Prince, the former head of Blackwater Worldwide and the brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, has at times served as an informal adviser to Trump administration officials.

Erik Prince, the former head of Blackwater Worldwide and the brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, has at times served as an informal adviser to Trump administration officials.Credit...Jeenah Moon/Reuters

Mark MazzettiAdam Goldman

By Mark Mazzetti and Adam Goldman

March 7, 2020

WASHINGTON — Erik Prince, the security contractor with close ties to the Trump administration, has in recent years helped recruit former American and British spies for secretive intelligence-gathering operations that included infiltrating Democratic congressional campaigns, labor organizations and other groups considered hostile to the Trump agenda, according to interviews and documents.

One of the former spies, an ex-MI6 officer named Richard Seddon, helped run a 2017 operation to copy files and record conversations in a Michigan office of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest teachers’ unions in the nation. Mr. Seddon directed an undercover operative to secretly tape the union’s local leaders and try to gather information that could be made public to damage the organization, documents show.

Using a different alias the next year, the same undercover operative infiltrated the congressional campaign of Abigail Spanberger, then a former C.I.A. officer who went on to win an important House seat in Virginia as a Democrat. The campaign discovered the operative and fired her.

Both operations were run by Project Veritas, a conservative group that has gained attention using hidden cameras and microphones for sting operations on news organizations, Democratic politicians and liberal advocacy groups. Mr. Seddon’s role in the teachers’ union operation — detailed in internal Project Veritas emails that have emerged from the discovery process of a court battle between the group and the union — has not previously been reported, nor has Mr. Prince’s role in recruiting Mr. Seddon for the group’s activities.

Both Project Veritas and Mr. Prince have ties to President Trump’s aides and family. Whether any Trump administration officials or advisers to the president were involved in the operations, even tacitly, is unclear. But the effort is a glimpse of a vigorous private campaign to try to undermine political groups or individuals perceived to be in opposition to Mr. Trump’s agenda.

Mr. Prince, the former head of Blackwater Worldwide and the brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, has at times served as an informal adviser to Trump administration officials. He worked with the former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn during the presidential transition. In 2017, he met with White House and Pentagon officials to pitch a plan to privatize the Afghan war using contractors in lieu of American troops.Jim Mattis, then the defense secretary, rejected the idea.

Mr. Prince appears to have become interested in using former spies to train Project Veritas operatives in espionage tacticssometime during the 2016 presidential campaign. Reaching out to several intelligence veterans — and occasionally using Mr. Seddon to make the pitch — Mr. Prince said he wanted the Project Veritas employees to learn skills like how to recruit sources and how to conduct clandestine recordings, among other surveillance techniques.

James O’Keefe, the head of Project Veritas, declined to answer detailed questions about Mr. Prince, Mr. Seddon and other topics, but he called his group a “proud independent news organization” that is involved in dozens of investigations. He said that numerous sources were coming to the group “providing confidential documents, insights into internal processes and wearing hidden cameras to expose corruption and misconduct.”

“No one tells Project Veritas who or what to investigate,” he said.

A spokesman for Mr. Prince declined to comment. Emails sent to Mr. Seddon went unanswered.

:{:{}:

Mr. Prince is under investigation by the Justice Department over whether he lied to a congressional committee examining Russian interference in the 2016 election, and for possible violations of American export laws. Last year, the House Intelligence Committee made a criminal referral to the Justice Department about Mr. Prince, saying he lied about the circumstances of his meeting with a Russian banker in the Seychelles in January 2017.

Once a small operation running on a shoestring budget, Project Veritas in recent years has had a surge in donations from both private donors and conservative foundations. According to its latest publicly available tax filing, Project Veritas received $8.6 million in contributions and grants in 2018. Mr. O’Keefe earned about $387,000.

Last year, the group received a $1 million contribution made through the law firm Alston & Bird, a financial document obtained by The New York Times showed. A spokesman for the firm said that Alston & Bird “has never contributed to Project Veritas on its own behalf, nor is it a client of ours.” The spokesman declined to say on whose behalf the contribution was made.

The financial document also listed the names of others who gave much smaller amounts to Project Veritas last year. Several of them confirmed their donations.

The group has also become intertwined with the political activities of Mr. Trump and his family.The Trump Foundation gave $20,000 to Project Veritas in 2015, the year that Mr. Trump began his bid for the presidency. The next year, during a presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump claimed without substantiation that videos released by Mr. O’Keefe showed that Mrs. Clinton and President Barack Obama had paid people to incite violence at rallies for Mr. Trump.

In a book published in 2018, Mr. O’Keefe wrote that Mr. Trump years earlier had encouraged him to infiltrate Columbia University and obtain Mr. Obama’s records.

Last month, Project Veritas made public secretly recorded video of a longtime ABC News correspondent who was critical of the network’s political coverage and its emphasis on business considerations over journalism. Many conservatives have gleefully pounced on Project Veritas’s disclosures, including one particularly influential voice: Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son.

The website for Mr. O’Keefe’s coming wedding listed Donald Trump Jr. as an invited guest.

Mr. Prince invited Project Veritas operatives — including Mr. O’Keefe — to his family’s Wyoming ranch for training in 2017, The Intercept reported last year. Mr. O’Keefe and others shared social media photos of taking target practice with guns at the ranch, including one post from Mr. O’Keefe saying that with the training, Project Veritas will be “the next great intelligence agency.” Mr. Prince had hired a former MI6 officer to help train the Project Veritas operatives, The Intercept wrote, but it did not identify the officer.

Mr. Seddon regularly updated Mr. O’Keefe about the operation against the Michigan teachers’ union, according to internal Project Veritas emails, where the language of the group’s leaders is marbled with spy jargon.

They used a code name — LibertyU — for their operative inside the organization, Marisa Jorge, who graduated from Liberty University in Virginia, one of the nation’s largest Christian colleges. Mr. Seddon wrote that Ms. Jorge “copied a great many documents from the file room,” and Mr. O’Keefe bragged that the group would be able to get “a ton more access agents inside the educational establishment.”

The emails refer to other operations, including weekly case updates, along with training activities that involved “operational targeting.” Project Veritas redacted specifics about those operations from the messages.

In August 2017, Ms. Jorge wrote to Mr. Seddon that she had managed to record a local union leader talking about Ms. DeVos and other topics.

:{:{}:

“Good stuff,” Mr. Seddon wrote back. “Did you receive the spare camera yet?”

As education secretary, Ms. DeVos has been a vocal critic of teachers’ unions, saying in 2018 that they have a “stranglehold” over politicians at the federal and state levels. She and Mr. Prince grew up in Michigan, where their father made a fortune in the auto parts business.

AFT Michigan sued Project Veritas in federal court, alleging trespassing, eavesdropping and other offenses. The teachers’ union is asking for more than $3 million in damages, accusing the group of being a “vigilante organization which claims to be dedicated to exposing corruption. It is, instead, an entity dedicated to a specific political agenda.”

Project Veritas has said its activities are legal and protected by the First Amendment, and the case is scheduled to go to trial in the fall.

Other Project Veritas employees on the emails include Joe Halderman, an award-winning former television producer who in 2010 pleaded guilty to trying to extort $2 million from the comedian David Letterman. Mr. Halderman was copied on several messages providing updates about the Michigan operation, and in one message, he gave instructions to Ms. Jorge. Project Veritas tax filings list Mr. Halderman as a “project manager.”

Two other employees, Gaz Thomas and Samuel Chamberlain, were also identified in emails and appeared to play important roles in the Michigan operation. Efforts to locate Mr. Thomas were unsuccessful. A man named Samuel Chamberlain who matched the description of the one employed by Mr. O’Keefe denied he worked for Project Veritas. He did not respond to follow-up phone messages or an email.

Last year, Project Veritas submitted a proposed list of witnesses for the trial over the lawsuit. Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Thomas were on the list. Mr. Seddon was not.

Ms. Jorge, 23, did not respond to email addresses associated with her Liberty University account. In an archived version of her LinkedIn page, Ms. Jorge wrote she had a deep interest in the conservative movement and hoped one day to serve on the Supreme Court after attending law school.

In a YouTube video, Mr. O’Keefe described the lawsuit as “frivolous” and pointed to a portion of the deposition in which David Hecker, the president of AFT Michigan, said that one of the goals of the lawsuit was to “stop Project Veritas from doing the kind of work that it does.”

Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a statement: “Let’s be clear who the wrongdoer is here: Project Veritas used a fake intern to lie her way into our Michigan office, to steal documents and to spy — and they got caught. We’re just trying to hold them accountable for this industrial espionage.”

In 2018, Ms. Jorge infiltrated the congressional campaign of Ms. Spanberger, posing as a campaign volunteer. At the time, Ms. Spanberger was running to unseat a sitting Republican congressman in a race both parties considered important for control of the House. Ms. Jorge was eventually exposed and kicked out of the campaign office.

It was unclear whether Mr. Seddon was involved in planning that operation.

Mr. Seddon was a longtime British intelligence officer who served around the world, including in Washington in the years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He is married to an American diplomat, Alice Seddon, who is serving in the American consulate in Lagos, Nigeria.

Mr. O’Keefe and his group have taken aim at targets over the years including Planned Parenthood, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Democracy Partners, a group that consults with liberal and progressive electoral causes. In 2016, a Project Veritas operative infiltrated Democracy Partners using a fake name and fabricated résumé and made secret recordings of the staff.The year after the sting, Democracy Partners sued Project Veritas, and its lawyers have since deposed Mr. O’Keefe.

:{:{}:

In that deposition, Mr. O’Keefe defended the group’s undercover tactics, saying they were part of a long tradition of investigative journalism going back to muckraking reporters like Upton Sinclair. “I’m not ashamed of the methods that we use or the recordings that we use,” he said.

He was asked whether he had provided any of the group’s secret recordings of Democracy Partners to the Republican National Committee or any member of the Trump family. He said that he did not think so.

In 2010, Mr. O’ Keefe and three others pleaded guilty to a federal misdemeanor after admitting they entered a government building in New Orleans under false pretenses as part of a sting.

Kitty Bennett contributed research.

---

not exactly punked?

https://www.mediamatters.org/abc/abc-takes-bait-and-suspends-veteran-correspondent-over-bad-faith-right-wing-hit-job

2/26/20

ABC News suspended veteran correspondent David Wright on February 25 after he gave reasonable criticism of the network while being secretly recorded in a video later released by Project Veritas. The organization has a well-known reputation for videotaping media figures and progressive activists and releasing bad-faith, edited videos to push a right-wing agenda.

The video, which Project Veritas on February 26 after teasing it the night before, features Wright offering criticisms of ABC’s coverage of the Trump administration and other political issues. It has clearly been edited to portray Wright’s comments in a negative light.

In the heavily edited video, Wright was critical of the broadcast news business model and suggested that the network still hasn’t figured out how to properly cover Trump. He claimed that ABC fails to give Trump credit for things he does right while also failing to “hold him to account”; chooses more exciting, “TV-friendly” stories over practical issues that matter to voters; takes Trump’s coverage bait in a way that enables him; and overcompensates for the false accusation from groups like Project Veritas that mainstream media pull for the Democratic Party.

Wright also complained that drama surrounding Trump dominates the news cycle and the “voters are poorly informed.” He criticized ABC’s “self-promotional” relationship with Disney, saying that the network often blends news with commercial interests: “You can’t watch Good Morning Americawithout there being a Disney princess or a Marvel Avenger appearing.”

Many of these comments are consistent with criticisms other journalists have made of political media in the age of Trump, and thus there was swift condemnation of ABC for its decision to suspend Wright.

Others were furious that Wright was suspended after he expressed support for progressive policies and said he considers himself a socialist, calling his suspension “absolutely outrageous” given a lack of progressive voices in mainstream media.

Project Veritas, founded by James O’Keefe, has a long history of secretly recording videos and then deceptively editing and releasing them in order to paint its subjects as negatively as possible and catch them in a “gotcha” moment. Veritas targets organizations that it claims have a “liberal” association, and its operatives often approach targets using a false name to coax information from them through casual conversations.

O'Keefe's goal is typically to obtain footage that can be edited in a way that embarrasses or delegitimizes targeted organizations, often seeking to expose “liberal bias” in the media. Past targets have included NPR, The New York Times, and CNN, and as a result, many news organizations are aware of Project Veritas’ motives when these videos are released.

Wright has been a journalist with ABC for nearly 20 years, covering the White House and reporting from the Middle East and Europe. His reporting has earned him an Emmy and a Peabody Awardfor work related to Iraq and the 9/11 terrorist attacks, respectively.

The reasonable nature of Wright’s criticisms of a business model that prioritizes generating ratings over informing viewers, combined with Project Veritas’ well-known reputation and bad-faith tactics, make ABC’s decision to suspend Wright and reassign him from political reporting to “avoid any possible appearance of bias” concerning.

Conservative media outlets like Fox News and The Federalist and figures such as Turning Point USA’s Benny Johnson have already pounced on the footage to advance the right-wing narrative that ABC is a biased source that does a poor job of informing viewers -- and by suspending Wright, the network has fallen for it too.

Update (5:45 p.m.):O'Keefe and Sean Hannity agreed that ABC News should not have suspended Wright[aUDIO]

O'KEEFE: This guy Wright is just being honest. He's just talking about how ABC's pushing Disney products on Good Morning America. He called himself a socialist. He calls Trump a bad name, the d-word, in this tape. He also seems to say that they don't give Trump credit -- they don't give him enough credit. He actually says this about Trump, that they don't give him enough credit for the things that he does right. So he's simultaneously kind of trashing Trump, calling himself a socialist, but also saying Trump does some good things and we don't talk about it, we don't care about voters, we don't cross the Hudson River, this guy says, to look at what voters care about. So he's just being honest, he's been suspended for being honest, and for that I think it was wrong to suspend him. I think he was just telling the truth, Sean.

SEAN HANNITY (HOST): Well, I think so too.

---

Surprise! O'Keefe edits out inconvenient footage from new ...

https://www.mediamatters.org › breitbart-news › surprise-okeefe-edits-out-...

Jun 1, 2010 - Following his pattern of selectively editing videos, O'Keefe excluded ... In the ten-minute video posted on Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com, O'Keefe ... Breitbart's BigGovernment website -- are falsely titled, “ACORN NYC ...

Memo to media: Do not trust Andrew Breitbart and James O ...

https://www.mediamatters.org › breitbart-news › memo-media-do-not-trust...

Jump to Breitbart** and **O'Keefe** criticized for selective **editing** and ... - Those videos created a ... Internet videos, O'Keefe was ... Giles' editing ACORN tape ... Government website -- are ... posted on Big Government ...

new

https://blog.chron.com/txpotomac/2010/01/texas-republicans-back-away-from-arrested-activist-who-had-targeted-acorn/

ACORN KILLED 2009?

Texas Republicans back away from arrested activist who had targeted ACORN

By Stewart Powell on January 28, 2010 at 4:45 PM

Rep. Pete Olson

That was then.

And this is now.

A proposed resolution introduced in October by a Houston-area congressman and supported by seven fellow Texas Republicans called for the House to honor investigative videographer and conservative activist James O’Keefe III and girlfriend Hannah Giles for “fact-finding reporting” that brought to light allegedly “fraudulent and illegal practices” by ACORN, a community action organization that had received federal funding.

The young couple, posing as a pimp and a prostitute, made a hidden-camera video of ACORN employees allegedly counseling them on how to win tax breaks for a hypothetical brothel.

The secret video provoked a political firestorm last summer among critics of ACORN, whose full name is the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

ACORN often recruits new inner-city and minority voters many of whom sign up as Democrats.

The resolution submitted to the House on Oct. 7 by Rep. Pete Olson, R-Sugar Land, had support from 31 Republican co-sponsors. Those included Texans Joe Barton, Louie Gohmert, Ralph Hall, John Carter, John Culberson, Kay Granger and Kenny Marchant.

The O’Keefe-Giles video “resulted in the potential annual savings of millions of taxpayer dollars” by prompting the House to vote to defund the organization, the resolution said.

The couple “displayed exemplary actions as government watchdogs and young journalists uncovering wasteful government spending,” the resolution continued.

On Monday, O’Keefe and three colleagues were arrested in New Orleans, accused of taking part in a conspiracy to wiretap the New Orleans office phone of Sen. Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat.

The four young men were charged by the FBI with a plot to allegedly “interfere with a telephone system” in Landrieu’s office.

If convicted, the four could face up to 10 years in prison and up to a $250,000 fine.

O’Keefe’s attorney, Michael Madigan, said his client did not engage in any illegal activity.

Olson, who sponsored the House resolution praising O’Keefe for his ACORN disclosure, said “individuals who lawfully expose wrongful activities by an entity like ACORN receiving federal tax dollars should be praised.”

But Olson said “if recent events conclude that any laws were broken in the incident in Senator Landrieu’s office, that is not something I condone. ”

“Citizens have an important role in helping to expose waste and/or fraud when their tax dollars are being spent, but it must be done in a lawful manner,” Olson added.

Megan Mitchell, spokeswoman for Culberson, responded to the charges against O’Keefe on behalf of her boss, a Houston Republican who co-sponsored Olson’s resolution.

Culberson “does not condone this behavior nor does he condone ACORN’s abuse of millions of taxpayer dollars,” Mitchell said.

In response to critics’ suggestions that sponsors withdraw the proposed House resolution, the sponsors checked with the House Parliamentarian.

According to the House Parliamentarian, once a resolution has been offered to the House, it can only be amended if it reaches committee action.

It cannot be withdrawn.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/trumps-social-media-summit-was-a-complete-embarrassment-that-did-just-what-trump-wanted/

kos

On Thursday, Donald Trump unexpectedly folded on the question of adding a citizenship question to the census. After warning that he could absolutely put the issue in place with an executive order, Trump hauled out his attorney general and secretary of commerce, set up a podium in the Rose Garden, and did what he always does when not throwing insults—he whined. But Trump had the perfect audience for his “We tried to slip this in at the last minute, then ran out of time, so it’s all everyone else’s fault” complaint. Because on Thursday afternoon, Trump filled the Rose Garden with a collection of villainy and scum that would embarrass any Mos Eisley cantina.

The event was labeled as a “press conference,” but it was a very Trumpian press conference: one at which Trump took no questions, and one where the actual press was made to stand at a distance on the other side of ropes. That’s because all the chairs at this press conference were reserved for the internet’s most hateful: the alt-right pundits that were scraped up to attend Trump’s “social media summit.” That group didn’t try to ask Trump any questions. That’s not their role. Instead, they used this moment of access and historic location to join Trump in attacking the free press.

There was badge-wearing Nazi, and former Trump adviser, Sebastian Gorka threatening reporters. And there was professional 9/11 truther Mark Dice yelling at CNN. There was pundit, songwriter, and congressional candidate Joy Villa—a candidate in California, or New York, or possibly Florida, she hasn’t made up her mind yet—smirking at the media and informing them that their day, the day where people asked questions, expected answers, and checked those responses for truthfulness, is over.

These are the voices that Trump is trying to elevate. Voices that scream racism. Voices that scream hate. And,in the case of Dice, voices that scream that both Hollywood and the music industry are run by a combination of Illuminati and Satanists who hide spells in Super Bowl halftime rituals designed to blind the public to the existence of a worldwide gay conspiracy. And the Starbucks logo features a mermaid prostitute. And Katy Perry is a witch.

But the real purpose of Trump’s “social media summit” wasn’t to promote conspiracy theorists. It was to promote two of his own conspiracy theories.

The primary focus of Trump’s summit on social media was … how awful all the social media platforms are.Despite not just a lack of real evidence, but mountains of genuine counterevidence , Trump continues to push the conspiracy theory that “conservative voices” are being banned from Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms for nothing more than supporting Trump. As The Washington Postreported, Trump spent much of his time focused on telling the alt-right that they were the real victims of one of those conspiracies they love to write about.

“We have terrible bias. We have censorship like nobody has any understanding,” said Trump. This is the reason Trump believes his tweets get much less support than those of Barack Obama, who, three years out of office, continues to have far more followers than Trump. And, in fact, Trump did go on at length about ways in which he believes Twitter has suppressed his followers. But the actual fact is more likely that Trump doesn’t believe it anymore than Mark Dice believes that “monkey bars are racist.” It’s just a handy claim.

It’s handy to Trump in reinforcing his even bigger conspiracy theory. His “They’re all out to get me” theory. That’s the theory in which every honest investigator looking into his actions is part of the “deep state”; any honest reporter showing that Trump’s words aren’t true is spreading “fake news”; any judge following the law is part of the “swamp”; and every torch-carrying white supremacist is “good people.” Anyone, even someone who organized a boycott of a Star Wars movie because it was “feminist propaganda” (and yes, that’s Mark Dice again), is good people, so long as they support Trump.

This is the America that Donald Trump champions, and for a very good reason. Because when there is no authority for truth, the loudest voice wins. It really doesn’t matter if those voices are screaming hate. It doesn’t matter if they’re networks of screaming bots run by the Russian military. All that matters is that they’re screaming loud enough to drown out the press … which has to stand way back there, behind the ropes.

---

// old blogger summit?

Trump administration is welcoming right-wing media stars to the White House today for a forum billed as a “social media summit.” Among those invited to attend are Bill Mitchell, a self-described member of the “Trump Train” who’s embraced the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory, and Ali Alexander, a far-right activist whose recent tweet smearing Senator Kamala Harris as “not an American Black” was retweeted—then deleted—by Donald Trump Jr. Also joining will be James O’Keefe, a discredited right-wing activist known for targeting Planned Parenthood and ACORN. O’Keefe was infamously arrested for trying to wiretap the office of the former U.S. senator from Louisiana, Mary Landrieu.

https://thinkprogress.org/trump-believes-google-is-trying-to-rig-the-election-project-veritas-video-cb82f03caee3/

During a 45-minute monologue on Fox Business Wednesday, President Donald Trump vented his concerns about tech companies like Twitter and Google, going so far as suggesting that he believes they are “trying to rig the election.”

Trump complained that Twitter was somehow preventing him from gaining more followers on the platform, including claiming that random people have told him they’re somehow unable to “join” him on Twitter. He made the same claim back in October (even though his follower growth was actually increasing at the time), and this spring, he reportedly voiced his frustration when Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey visited the Oval Office. Dorsey tried to reassure the president that the followers he had lost were bots and spam accounts.

Trump is reportedly preoccupied by the fact former President Barack Obama has more followers on Twitter.

“It’s amazing I won the election, because you saw what happened yesterday with Google,” Trump said on Fox. “Google is totally biased to the [Democrats]."

Host Maria Bartiromo tried to clarify that they were talking about a Project Veritas video, released Monday, in which a “Google insider” allegedly made comments about avoiding a similar situation as what happened in 2016.

“They’re trying to rig the election! That’s what we should be looking at,” Trump insisted.

He went on to suggest “they should be sued” because of their alleged bias, suggesting that a Google executive expressed “hatred for the Republicans” this week.

Like all Project Veritas videos, the latest undercover video is heavily edited, exaggerates the seniority of the target, and distorts her words to try to fit a conservative conspiracy theory. Specifically, the video claims that Google is trying to affect the 2020 elections to “prevent” thenext “Trump situation.” Even with the context left in the edit, it’s clear she is discussing foreign interference in the election.

The target of the video, Jen Gennai, responded to the video in a Medium post. “Project Veritas has edited the video to make it seem that I am a powerful executive who was confirming that Google is working to alter the 2020 election,” she wrote. “On both counts, this is absolute, unadulterated nonsense, of course.” She confirmed that she was discussing Google’s very public work to protect from future election interference.

As U.S. intelligence and special counsel Robert Mueller’s report have made clear, the Russian government interfered in the election to help Trump. The president has welcomed foreign interference in the 2020 election.

Trump says he’d collude to win in 2020, after years of claiming ‘no collusion’

As Google’s “Head of Responsible Innovation,” Gennai explained that she doesn’t even work on any of the products or topics the undercover spy baited her into discussing in a casual conversation held under false pretenses. “I was having a casual chat with someone at a restaurant and used some imprecise language. Project Veritas got me. Well done.”

The Project Veritas video dropped a day before Maggie Stanphill, Google’s director of user experience, testified Tuesday to the Senate Commerce subcommittee on technology. Republicans on the committee grilled her about whether Google uses “persuasive technology” to try to influence users’ political views.Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), in particular, accused Google of censoring conservatives, citing the Project Veritas report. “Do you think it’s Google’s job to ‘prevent the next Trump situation’?” he asked.

Stanphill rejected the various claims from the report. “We build for everyone, including every single religious belief, every single demographic, every single region, and certainly every political affiliation,” she responded. Cruz refused to believe the company was unbiased.

Simultaneous with Trump’s rant on Fox Business Wednesday morning, Fox News was interviewingDennis Prager, founder of the site PragerU. Prager has sued Google,claiming that it has censored its conservative videos on YouTube. Last year, a federal judge tossed out a nearly identical PragerU suit, noting that as a private company, YouTube can make its own decisions about how to regulate content on its site. Prager insisted that all the major tech platforms simply hate conservative content, taking no responsibility for the hateful people and views that have been featured in PragerU videos, including various racist and anti-LGBTQ messages.

What appears to be happening is that some conservatives are massively distorting tech companies’ attempts to protect against foreign election interference or restrict the distribution of hateful views, stirring up conspiracy theories that the companies are demonstrating blanket bias against conservatives. The president then repeats these totally unfounded accusations on national television as if they are fact. They are not.

#BIG TECH, #DONALD TRUMP, #FOX BUSINESS, #FOX NEWS, #GOOGLE, #POLITICS,#PROJECT VERITAS, #TED CRUZ, #TWITTER

https://www.theverge.com/interface/2019/6/27/18760463/project-veritas-youtube-sting-james-okeefe

newton

my esteemed colleague Russell Brandom leads our policy team. He was struck by the disingenuous response from conservative lawmakers to the most recent video sting from Project Veritas, which presented YouTube employees in an unfair light. Russell asked if he could take over the column today, and I was happy to oblige. I’ll be back tomorrow with thoughts on Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance at the Aspen Ideas festival.

:{:{}:

James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas has been on a tear against Google lately, with the most recent salvo coming this Monday. Like most of O’Keefe’s work, it’s deceptively edited and doesn’t add up to much, but he managed to catch one executive in a pretty poor choice of words. In a hidden camera conversation with Jen Gennai, Google’s Head of Responsible Innovation, the executive is caught saying the following:

Elizabeth Warren is saying we should break up Google. And like, I love her but she’s very misguided, like that will not make it better it will make it worse, because all these smaller companies who don’t have the same resources that we do will be charged with preventing the next Trump situation, it’s like a small company cannot do that.

If you substitute “Cambridge Analytica” for “Trump Situation,” it’s more or less the argument Facebook and Google have been using to fend off antitrust proposals all year. But if you’re inclined to think the whole media is biased against the president, it was exactly what you’d been waiting to hear. When the video was pulled off YouTube for “privacy violations” the next day, it only fueled the paranoia.

The whole situation would probably have stayed quiet if it weren’t for Ted Cruz, who called out the video in an uncomfortable moment at the Senate Commerce hearing the following day. Cruz was questioning Google UX Director Maggie Stanphill, who was nominally there to speak about dark patterns in interface design. Cruz took her to task for the quote in the video, and then again when he realized she hadn’t actually read the report.

“I would recommend people interested in political bias at Google watch the entire report and judge for yourself,” Cruz said. The clip was then circulated on the usual right wing outlets (Town Hall, Breitbart, PJ Media), and got a minor replay from the the next day. After that last hearing, the scandal grew big enough that YouTube decided to issue an official denial, saying simply “we apply our policies fairly and without political bias.”

It’s embarrassing that Congress took this so seriously, and no one wants to give it any more attention than it deserves. But O’Keefe has played this trick over and over, so it’s worth breaking down exactly what’s happening here.

To start with, there’s a fairly straightforward reason why the Veritas video was banned. YouTube’s privacy guidelines ban videos that identify people who don’t want to be identified. There are exceptions for newsworthiness and public figures, but the Veritas video is clearly on the wrong side of the rule. The offending footage is the hidden-camera video of Gennai, who is no one’s idea of a public figure, and obviously didn’t consent to be in the video.

Even if you see Veritas as making a newsworthy point about platform bias, it’s hard to argue that including Gennai’s name and face was necessary to make that point. (Hidden camera footage used on broadcast news typically blurs out faces for exactly this reason.) Given the general temperament of Veritas subscribers, one can only imagine the kind of abuse that’s been pointed at Gennai in the days since the video went live.

This sort of takedown happens often enough that we can assume most YouTubers are aware of them, to say nothing of reporters covering YouTube moderation issues. It’s hard to believe O’Keefe was walking into this blind — just like it’s hard to believe he wasn’t aware that YouTube was scheduled for a run of congressional hearings in the days after the video posted. He was daring YouTube to ban him, knowing that it would elevate a mediocre scoop into two days of congressional berating.

The point wasn’t to force YouTube into better policies or more consistent enforcement. It was simply brute force, letting executives know that every time someone in the conservative clique has trouble with YouTube, there will be a lawmaker ready to sweat them over it. Each time it happens, Google gets a little more gun-shy dealing with high-profile policy violations, whether it’s Alex Jones or Steven Crowder. And as long as the trick keeps working, O’Keefe and Cruz will keep doing it.

PUSHBACK

Some readers thought my column about the development of a Chinese-style social credit system in the United States was a tad too alarmist. After all, there’s no evidence the government is collaborating with any of the companies I mentioned, or even a suggestion it wants to. My goal was to float the possibility to encourage discussion before such a thing comes to pass — but I apologize to anyone who found my subject line too sensational.

In the meantime, ProPublica published an article Tuesday about another technology that moves us in the direction of social credit inside schools. Jack Gillum and Jeff Kao report:

The students were helping ProPublica test an aggression detector that’s used in hundreds of schools, health care facilities, banks, stores and prisons worldwide, including more than 100 in the U.S. Sound Intelligence, the Dutch company that makes the software for the device, plans to open an office this year in Chicago, where its chief executive will be based.

California-based Louroe Electronics, which has loaded the software on its microphones since 2015, advertises the devices in school safety magazines and at law enforcement conventions, and it said it has between 100 and 1,000 customers for them. Louroe’s marketing materials say the detection software enables security officers to “engage antagonistic individuals immediately, resolving the conflict before it turns into physical violence.”

I suppose this is more of a surveillance system than a “social credit” system, per se. But the lines are blurry, the technology is rapidly developing, and it seems like a good time to keep connecting the dots.

DEMOCRACY

Trump signals U.S. government ‘should be suing Google and Facebook’

On one hand, who cares? The president runs his mouth about this sort of thing all the time. On the other:

The president’s comments during an interview on Fox Business came just weeks after federal competition regulators at the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission divvied up scrutiny of Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google, a move that could suggest the government is in the early stages of an investigation into those tech giants.

Reddit Quarantines Pro-Trump Subreddit r/The_Donald Over Anti-Police Threats

Will Sommer broke the news that a notorious subreddit devoted to the president has been “quarantined,” meaning that visitors will see a content advisory when they visit. It’s also considered a first step toward being banned. “Users allegedly threatened law enforcement ordered to find Republican senators in Oregon who went on the lam to duck voting for climate-change bill,” Sommer writes.

The_Donald was controversial on Reddit long before Wednesday’s quarantine. Prior to the 2017 Unite the Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, The_Donald moderators pinned a post encouraging members to attend the rally to the top of the page. The subreddit’s users regularly vote content from white supremacists and other extremists to the forum’s frontpage. The subreddit was also an early hotbed for conspiracy theories about murdered Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich, with The_Donald posters regularly claiming without evidence that Rich was murdered by Hillary Clinton.

Trump is making sure more YouTubers see him than see the Democratic debate

Emily Stewart reports that the president is counter-programming tonight’s debate among Democratic presidential candidates with a giant ad on YouTube:

President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign has bought YouTube’s “masthead” — basically, the advertisement at the top of YouTube’s homepage — for Wednesday, the first night of the Democratic debates. That means anyone who goes to YouTube’s website is going to be hit with pro-Trump messaging. It’s an expensive move, and an effective one.

“It’s one of the highest impact digital ad placements possible,” Daniel Scarvalone, senior director of research and data at Democratic communications and strategy firm Bully Pulpit Interactive, said in an email.

trump fdn

https://thinkprogress.org/donald-trumps-foundation-gave-20000-james-okeefes-project-veritas-e8fbdb48e16c/

no lnx doc

Trump Foundation funding of James O’Keefe was twice as much as previously reported, per new filings

Donald Trump's "charitable organization" gave even more cash to Project Veritas.

JOSH ISRAEL

NOV 28, 2017, 11:43 AM

Donald Trump defending Roy Moore

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP, WHOSE EPONYMOUS FOUNDATION DONATED $20,000 TO JAMES O'KEEFE'S PROJECT VERITAS, DEFENDED ROY MOORE LAST WEEK. CREDIT: AP PHOTO/MANUEL BALCE CENETA

Conservative activist (and convicted criminal) James O’Keefe and his tax-exempt Project Veritas group are under fire again, following a botched “sting” operation in which an employee falsely told the Washington Post that she was raped by Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore (R) as a teenager. The Post did not fall for her trick and instead exposed her for the blatant attempt to discredit the many women who have come forward with their stories of sexual assault.

Last October, ThinkProgress reported that Project Veritas had received a $10,000 donation in 2015 from Donald Trump’s controversial Donald J. Trump Foundation, a theoretically charitable 501(c)(3) organization. This reporting was based on a list of charitable payments provided by the foundation to the Washington Post.

But a ThinkProgress review of the Trump Foundation’s 2015 tax filing finds that it reported making not one but two $10,000 donations to Project Veritas in tax-year 2015.

CREDIT: Donald J. Trump Foundation 2015 IRS Form 990

CREDIT: DONALD J. TRUMP FOUNDATION 2015 IRS FORM 990

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump claimed in a presidential debate that new videos proved that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had “hired people” and “paid them $1,500” to “be violent, cause fights, [and] do bad things” at Trump rallies — a claim based on videos released by O’Keefe that purported to show pro-Clinton activists boasting of their efforts to bait Trump supporters into violent acts. The videos offered absolutely no evidence that Clinton or Obama were aware of or behind the alleged dirty tricks.

“Legend Building” by Project Veritas

Project Veritas has systematically deceived not just targets on the left and viewers on the right but Facebook users as well (their official page has over 200,000 followers) at a time when the company is publicly dedicated to fighting this sort of systemic duplicity. That’s a wrinkle that raises questions about Facebook’s commitment to rooting out coordinated inauthentic behavior closer to home —Thiel sits on the company’s board — not to mention Project Veritas’s presence on social media.

During his deposition, Halderman, Project Veritas’s self-described “executive producer,”stated under oath that the organization falsifies Facebook accounts [YES MEN?] as part of its overall strategy of deceiving the targets of its investigations. Halderman, characterizing himself as “integrally involved in [Project Veritas’s] investigations and have been since I started four years ago,” describes the work that went into setting up Robert Creamer, a Democratic operative recorded by Veritas in a 2016. That video attempted to portray Creamer as complicit in a Hillary Clinton-led campaign to violently disrupt Donald Trump’s campaign events with counterprotests and engaging in counter-Trump voter fraud — both regular, unfounded talking points repeated by Trump on the campaign trail. Last year, the Wisconsin Department of Justice concluded an investigation into the videos, determining that they “reveal no evidence of election fraud,” the Associated Press reported.

In 2017, O’Keefe sued the Suffolk County district attorney over a Massachusetts law barring the covert recording of government officials. This past December, a federal judge overturned the rule. But in the course of the lawsuit, Joe Halderman, a member of the Project Veritas inner circle who was previously convicted of trying to extort late night television host David Letterman in 2010, sat for a deposition. In it, Halderman was compelled to submit to a sworn interrogation of Veritas methods. Just how does one go about duping savvy politicos and the politico-adjacent in the 21st century?

But before Veritas could get Creamer on camera, they needed to make contact via a fake persona, Halderman explained. Per the transcript (emphasis added):

Q. And you spoke earlier about PVA [Veritas] creating this donor, Charles. When you say create the donor, what did PVA do to create the donor?

A. So, I thought of a name. I talked to the undercover journalist who was the person who met with Foval. We between us sort of created this story of this person. I got some business cards made. I got an e-mail. I set up an e-mail account. What else did I do? I think that’s about all I did.

Again, in this particular case, we didn’t feel like they were going to get seriously vetted. In some investigations we do legend building because we believe or our concern is that we’re going to be vetted reasonably, you know, by open source information.

So, we’ll create a Facebook page, a LinkedIn page. We’ve even gone so far in the past of creating LLCs, offshore bank accounts. We do a lot of things because undercover journalism is a tricky, complicated business.

According to Lauren Windsor, a political organizer who began documenting Veritas’s team of “undercover” operatives and their various aliases after her own organization was infiltrated,this sort of use of phony social accounts is the group’s standard operating procedure. “In conducting extensive outreach to victims and extensive research of social media networks to build the vetting resource website Project Veritas Exposed,” explained Windsor, “I documented several instances of PV violating Facebook’s terms by creating fake profiles. We thus have the admission of intent by the organization and evidence of action by multiple of its agents.”

Windsor’s work includes cataloging Project Veritas’s network of fake Facebook accounts; Windsor provided screenshots to The Intercept. In one example, Veritas operative Marisa Jorge’s likeness is used for the Facebook profile of “Ava-Marie Joyce.” The bio of the Ava-Marie persona bizarrely describes herself as “Carrie Tallinn, a self-employed professional women’s right activist.”

According to a 2018 lawsuit reported by The Intercept last year, Jorge previously misrepresented herself as a University of Michigan student in order to gain improper access to teachers union documents. The friends list for “Ava-Marie Joyce” lists another profile fabricated by Project Veritas, “Ava Marie Allen.”

Another screenshot shows a Facebook profile for “Tyler Marshall,” which O’Keefe himself disclosed as a fabricated identity in his 2018 book “American Pravda.” In a section of that book (subtitle: “My Fight For Truth in the Era of Fake News”) detailing Veritas’s attempts to infiltrate protestors planning action around Trump’s presidential inauguration, O’Keefe wrote that his operatives all “of course, establish a social media presence under their assumed names—‘Tyler Marshall,’ say, or ‘Adam Stevens.’ The presence includes Twitter, Facebook, and email at the least.”

Exploitation of Facebook by a Group Linked To Military Intelligence

Emerson Brooking, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, said Veritas’s homegrown social media deception is a clear violation of Facebook’s policy. After reading the deposition, Brooking told The Intercept, “Mr. Halderman describes the creation of fake Facebook personas for the purpose of deception” and “implies that this is a regular and systematic practice. Under any reasonable definition, Project Veritas is engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior and abuse of the Facebook platform.”

Brooking’s group, a frequently cited authority on online electoral interference and other digital propaganda campaigns, entered into an official partnership with Facebook last year. A Facebook director wrote at the time that experts at the lab “will work closely with our security, policy and product teams to get Facebook real-time insights and updates on emerging threats and disinformation campaigns from around the world.”

If it sounds like a stretch to compare Project Veritas to a Russian troll farm, consider the group’s links to the U.S. defense establishment.As The Intercept reported in May, Veritas members underwent “intelligence and elicitation techniques from a retired military intelligence operative named Euripides Rubio Jr.,” personally arranged by the infamous American mercenary and Trump adviser Erik Prince. What we have here, then, is a 2016 military intelligence-linked, organized effort to undermine the Democratic Party and boost the Trump presidential campaign using falsified social media profiles. If that doesn’t sound familiar, it certainly should.

The problem with Facebook and its peers has never been identifying abuses and misuses, whether truly dangerous or merely toxic; Facebook, Twitter, and Google alone represent perhaps history’s greatest living catalog of antisocial behavior, a frenzy of rule violation on a mass scale. Whether these companies deem comprehensive content moderation simply too expensive or not worth the public relations mess, the fact is that the public rarely sees movement on these issues in the absence of congressional scolding or media uproar.

The real issue is uneven, arbitrary enforcement of “the rules.” Max Read, writing in New York magazine on another social network’s enforcement blunders, argued that “the problem for YouTube is that for rules to be taken seriously by the people they govern, they need to be applied consistently and clearly.” YouTube is about as terrible at this exercise as Facebook is, and there’s a good chance that if Facebook treated malicious right-wing American exploitation of its network the same way it treats malicious foreign exploitation of its network, it would probably botch the whole thing and end up burning people who actually do use phony Facebook profilesfor work toward the public good.

That a company like Facebook is even in a position to create “rules” like the coordinated inauthentic behavior policy that apply to a large chunk of the Earth’s population is itself a serious problem, one made considerably worse by completely erratic enforcement. It’s bad enough having a couple guys in California take up the banner of defending “Democracy” around the world through the exclusive control of one of the most powerful information organs in human history; if nothing else, we should hope their decisions are predictable and consistent.

===

ref guk

https://YYY.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/29/project-veritas-how-fake-news-prize-went-to-rightwing-group-beloved-by-trump

2x? no pix lnx

Project Veritas: how fake news prize went to rightwing group beloved by Trump

James O’Keefe’s organisation specialising in media stings received donations from Trump’s foundation but was caught red-handed peddling a false story

Ed Pilkington

Ed Pilkington in New York

@edpilkington

Wed 29 Nov 2017 09.37 EST

James O’Keefe, president of Project Veritas, refused to comment about his organisation’s apparent attempt to plant a fake story in the Washington Post.]

At the unusually late hour of 9.04am on Monday morning, Donald Trump marked his return to Washington after Thanksgiving by announcing a big new idea. There should be acontest, he tweeted, to determine which media outlet should be awarded the “fake news trophy” for being “most dishonest, corrupt and/or distorted in its political coverage”.

US government uses Project Veritas video in trial of anti-Trump protesters

Just hours later, the first winner of the president’s new medal emerged, though the trophy holder was not quite as he had expected. Instead of CNN or one of the TV networks that Trump frequently assails, the award for scurrilous and deceitful practice went to someone much closer to home.

On Monday afternoon, Project Veritas, the discredited rightwing attack organization run by James O’Keefe that specializes in sting operations against liberal groups and the established media, was itself thoroughly exposed. The Washington Post turned the spotlight that O’Keefe had tried to put on the newspaper back on him by disclosing a plot to dupe its reporters into publishing an entirely false story.

The fake account was peddled by a woman named Jaime Phillips who claimed to have had an abortion when she was 15 after sexual encounters with the Republican senatorial candidate in Alabama, Roy Moore. Post reporters did their due diligence, grew suspicious of her narrative, and later watched her walking into the Project Veritas offices in New York.

They also discovered a GoFundMe page under the name of Jaime Phillips in which she said she had accepted a job in New York “to work in the conservative media movement to combat the lies and deceit of the liberal MSM”. When these matters were put to O’Keefe in a filmed encounter, he refused to answer questions about the apparent attempt to plant a fake story on the Post presumably intended to undermine the paper’s earlier exposé of Moore’s alleged molestation of underage girls as young as 14.

O’Keefe’s outing as a duplicitous purveyor of fake news – and an incompetent one at that – on the same day that Trump proposed his “fake news trophy” was profoundly ironic. All the more so, given the ties between the two men.

On 13 May 2015, a month before Trump launched his presidential campaign, his charitable foundation donated $10,000 to Project Veritas. This week ThinkProgress spotted that the foundation’s tax disclosure form for 2015 records a second payment of the same amount to the conservative group.

By then O’Keefe had already acquired a criminal record – he was convicted in 2010 of entering federal property under false pretences. He had been attempting to sting the then Democratic senator from Louisiana, Mary Landrieu, but for his pains was rewarded with three years’ probation and a $1,500 fine.

The underhand tactics that Project Veritas adopted in its notorious takedown of the progressive network Acorn and that it later applied to media organisations has attracted growing condemnation from unexpected quarters. In 2011 Blaze, the rightwing outlet founded by Glenn Beck, investigated O’Keefe’s treatment of National Public Radio and concluded that the editing of a secretly filmed video seemed “designed to intentionally lie or mislead about the material being presented”.

But that didn’t stop Trump donating $20,000 to the group four years later. Nor did it prevent the then Republican presidential nominee from citing a Project Veritas video at his final debate with Hillary Clinton in October 2016, claiming it proved that Clinton and Barack Obama had hired thugs to cause violence at his campaign rallies.

Donald Trump cited a Project Veritas video in his final presidential debate with Hillary Clinton in Las Vegas in October 2016.

Donald Trump cited a Project Veritas video in his final presidential debate with Hillary Clinton in Las Vegas in October 2016. Photograph: Jim Urquhart/Reuters

As if to underline the strength of the links, Trump invited O’Keefe to be one of his surprise guests at the televising of the debate.

It may merely be a coincidence, but following Trump’s victory at the polls and his arrival in the White House, his arch supporter, the conservative radio host Bill Mitchell, came up with his own wheeze to trip up serious newspapers. “You know what we should do?” he said in a tweet in May this year. “Start flooding the NYTimes and WAPO tip lines with all kinds of crazy ‘leaks’. Then laugh when they print them!”

That is not so far removed from what O’Keefe has been trying to do ever since. His first post-inauguration target was CNN in June. In another dubiously edited video, Project Veritas captured a CNN producer who worked in the medical unit talking about the network’s coverage of Trump’s ties to Russia – a subject the producer had no direct knowledge of or involvement in.

Trump posted the video regardless on his Instagram account. The White House press secretary, Sarah Sanders, went further, exhorting all Americans to watch it. “Frankly everybody across the country take a look at it,” she said at a press briefing in response to a question from Breitbart News – an outlet which incidentally frequently reports in glowing terms the output of Project Veritas.

After CNN came a similar story about the New York Times, and this week it was the turn of the Washington Post. The common thread between all these forays into the world of the “mainstream media” is their notable failure to land any killer punches.

In response to the Post’s exposé of Project Veritas’ dishonesty, the group released on Tuesday what it claimed was a major investigation into the newspaper’s lies and biases. The worst it could point to was candid camera footage of a Post reporter wondering whether the paper had devoted too much effort to reporting Hurricane Irma, commenting on how opinionated its opinion pages were, and making the uncontroversial claim that the Wall Street Journal was “very conservative”.

The self-inflicted bloody nose suffered by O’Keefe this week may not amount to a turning point in the war over fake news, but it was at least a moment. As Tom Fiedler, dean of Boston University’s college of communication and a former Miami Herald journalist, put it: “This was an opportunity for people who believe in the role of the media, who think there’s a difference between truth and ‘truthiness’, as Stephen Colbert calls it, to pump a fist in the air and say ‘Take that!’”

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/ginni-thomas-teams-up-with-james-okeefe-in-dark-money-operation-to-protect-trump/

Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and a right-wing political activist, has launched a new set of organizations meant to “protect President Trump” and attack Democrats and left-leaning organizations, according to an article published by The Intercept this week.

The well-connected Thomas, a former Heritage Foundation staffer, presented her plans to build a “robust infrastructure” to a meeting of the secretive Council for National Policy last month. TheCNP is a strategy-development-and-sharing network that includes leaders across the U.S. religious and political Right, including people like neo-Confederate Christian Reconstrucionist Michael Peroutka. CNP members pushed Trump to sign an executive order on religious liberty.

Thomas is planning to build a “robust infrastructure” of affiliated organizations.Among her partners in the new project are longtime right-wing operative Richard Viguerie; undercover videographer and political tricksterJames O’Keefe;Republican campaign lawyer Cleta Mitchell;and Bill Meierling, chief marketing officer for the American Legislative Exchange Council, a matchmaker for corporate lobbyists and conservative legislators willing to do their bidding.

A slide from Thomas’s presentation at Council for National Policy notes, “Long Term teams taking shape will focus on Education, Media, Entertainment/Arts, Faith, Corporate/Economic, Government, Science, and more”—nearly identical to the list of spheres of cultural influence targeted by Religious Right proponents of Seven Mountain:{s Dominionism.}:

The Intercept also reported that Thomas had spoken at another CNP event last October, at which she declared, “The hard left is in control of the Democrat Party … And they’re controlling the media and corporations and Hollywood and education.”

This January, Thomas organized a White House meeting where she was joined by anti-Muslim activist Frank Gaffney and others where, among other things, they complained that White House aides were blocking right-wing Trump supporters from getting administration jobs.

Thomas and many of her partners were among conservative activists who mobilized a year ago to try to replace then-House Speaker Paul Ryan with right-wing favorite Rep. Jim Jordan.

Thomas presented United in Purpose “Impact” awards to O’Keefe, Gaffney, and Sean Hannity in 2017. In 2016, TPM reported that Thomas “wanted to ‘target’ the ‘most questionable’ precincts in Virginia with an anti-voter fraud campaign.”

Thomas also interviewed right-wing radio host Jesse Lee Peterson for the Daily Caller in 2016. The two talked about what Thomas called “race hustlers” who she said are “in the business of keeping blacks angry” and about Black Lives Matter, which Peterson called “evil,” “wicked,” and “worse than the KKK.” Last year, Thomas reportedly hired a former Turning Point USA staffer who had resigned after The New Yorker published screenshots of text messages that included a text that said “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE.

---

erik jok weapons training wyo officially calling it 5/6/19

---

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2018/11/01/midterms-project-veritas-infiltrated-several-democratic-campaigns/1838657002/

[vid] hmmn usatoday

WASHINGTON – Activists with the right-wing group Project Veritas embedded with campaigns of unknowing Democrats across the country ahead of the midterms. And in most cases, candidates didn't know they were a target until they saw the finished videos.

So far, the controversial group led by founder James O'Keefe, has posted undercover videos with liberal campaign workers or candidates in six tight races. And O'Keefe says more are to come in the days leading up to the midterms.

"It's trying to get as much done in the short amount of time we have," O'Keefe told USA TODAY in a phone interview. His goal, he says, is to "expose what these people really believe and think."

O'Keefe's tactics of secretly recording targets to expose them have attracted a barrage of criticism over the years and many of the group's previous videos have been discredited partly because of the edits and cuts, allegations O'Keefe denied while talking to USA TODAY.

Despite the controversy, the group's videos this cycle could hurt Democrats running in some of the nation's closest watched races, those that could decide which party controls Congress.

Those known to have been targeted by the group in this election cycle include: Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, Tennessee Senate candidate Phil Bredesen, Arizona Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown and House candidate Abigail Spanberger.

The aim, O'Keefe says, is to expose the beliefs of progressives who are running in mostly red states, those won by President Donald Trump in 2016. He says his stings have uncovered Democratic candidates being untruthful to woo moderates in their state.

He says hedoesn't need to be liked by the elite and calls his videos the "purest form of journalism" because there is no spin or opinion, rather just the words of their targets.

[vid of?]

Democrats are hoping for a 'blue wave' in the midterm elections, but they are defending more seats than they are challenging. Will they lose seats? USA TODAY]

More: Right-wing activist group films undercover video of Kyrsten Sinema, staffers

More: Oregon Republicans ask for ethics investigation into Brown campaign

But O'Keefe has been accused of editing videos to misrepresent the context of conversations as well as other dubious acts that include a failed sting of the Washington Post. He was also convicted in 2010 of using a fake identity to get on to federal property during one of his projects.

In November 2017, the Post said it was approached by a woman who worked for Project Veritas. She tried to make false accusations against then-Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore, who was already mired in a sexual misconduct scandal and would eventually lose the Alabama special election to Democrat Doug Jones.

That attempted sting was one example of what critics say are ongoing efforts by O'Keefe's group to discredit mainstream media and liberal groups.

O'Keefe wouldn't say how the footage was captured in the six Democratic races but in at least three of the instances, a Project Veritas employee offered a fake name and posed as a campaign employee to gain access. O'Keefe said they use a "variety of different methods and sources" to get the footage.

He acknowledged the group's tactics are controversial but argued the secret recordings make people "more honest" and said to blame those who are making the comments because they're "spilling the beans" to a stranger.

"The truth is paramount, not our tactics," O'Keefe said in one recent video.

McCaskill called for a special prosecutor to investigate after one of the operatives posed as an intern and recorded the senator talking about wanting tighter gun laws and a campaign employee saying she supports abortion in an attempt to demonstrate she was hiding her views because of the tight race against the state's Attorney General Josh Hawley.

McCaskill called the secretive recordings "illegal" and a "fraud."

Sinema, who is running in a tight race against Republican Rep. Martha McSally, called the undercover videos of her and staffers a "stunt." While the goal may have been to uncover her secret views on topics, many of her comments caught by the group on gun laws and did not appear to strongly contrast with her public opinions on issues.

In the video, Sinema is captured talking about immigration, specifically that she believes reform is needed but a path to citizenship should be offered to those who haven't committed a crime.

One of her campaign officials was also captured discussing gun laws, saying the campaign "can't be talking about an assault weapons ban" if she wants to win.

Instead, the campaign official said Sinema can lead on issues like background checks, the gun-show loophole and making it harder for people convicted of domestic violence to get guns.

[

Democratic Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, here thanking volunteers at her field office in Phoenix, is favored to win the Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Arizona.]

Sinema campaign spokeswoman Helen Hare said "these partisan, discredited stunts are the latest attempt to distract from her harmful record."

Brown, who is running against Republican Knute Buehler, dismissed the videos as "alt-right propaganda."

But O'Keefe's videos could ultimately have some effect on these close races.

The undercover stings don't always garner national attention but some have caught fire in the local media, where constituents and voters live.

"That by any means is an achievement," O'Keefe said. He added that whereas candidates spend thousands on advertisements, his videos made the rounds on TV and online for free in many of these races.

A video on Brown reportedly led to the Oregon Republican Party filing an ethics complaint on allegations she may have used taxpayer money for her campaign. Local media in Missouri covered the McCaskill sting as she continued to ask for an investigation. Local coverage in Tennessee of the video targeting Bredesen left his campaign on the defense.

That could possibly hurt Democrats in Tuesday's election, according to Jacob Neiheisel, an assistant professor of political science at the University at Buffalo.

"It might help move the needle for certain people, possibly older folks, who are the people who vote most consistently," Neiheisel said. He noted some of the comments made by Democrats might not be flattering to voters, especially moderates.

But, Neiheisel added, these tapes for the most part "could just be reverberating in the echo chamber" since right-wing media is one of the largest forums for Project Veritas.

The group's latest videos targeted House candidate Spanberger, who is in a tight race against Rep. Dave Brat for Virginia’s 7th District. The undercover Project Veritas operative worked with the campaign but was discovered using a false name and exposed after her constant questioning raised red flags, according to the Washington Post.

Employees with Spanberger's campaign confronted the woman and told her to leave the building as workers throughout the campaign office recorded the interaction.

"Dirty tricks like these are the worst part of politics, and this is exactly what Abigail is running to change," Spanberger’s campaign manager, Dana Bye, told the Post

4/19

related to james o'keefe veritas

project** veritas **action

project** veritas **beto

project** veritas **youtube

project** veritas **facebook

project** veritas **reddit

project** veritas **florida

project** veritas **gillum

project** veritas **sinema

---

kinda copycat?

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/duncan-hunter-fake-border-crossing-825094/

no lnx mojo

Duncan Hunter (R-CA) posted a video on Facebook and Twitter Thursday that he claimed showed him crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. But there’s one catch: the border was actually almost 100 feet away from where Hunter was, Customs and Border Patrol said.

“So here is the grand border wall in Yuma, Arizona,” Hunter said in the video, pointing to a waist-high barrier he could easily step over. “This is what we expect to stop people, transnational terrorists, families, all illegal aliens from coming across the border. This is it.”

He then did step over the fence and said to the camera, “There you go. That’s how easy it is to cross the border in Yuma, Arizona.”

Except no, that wasn’t the border, nor did he climb an actual border wall or set foot in Mexico. A Customs and Border Patrol spokesman told the Times of San Diego that the barrier Hunter climbed was a vehicle barrier located in the United States, 75-100 feet from the actual U.S.-Mexico border, which is located along the Colorado River.

Had Hunter actually crossed the border, he would have created even more trouble for himself. The congressman is currently out on bail because he has been indicted for allegedly misusing campaign funds for personal family expenses to pay for luxury family vacations, dentistry and other bills, and even his children’s school lunches. According to the terms of his bail, Hunter is not allowed to leave the country, so if he had actually crossed over to Mexico, it would have been a violation of his bail.

[vid]

According to the indictment, Hunter and his wife not only spent $250,000 of campaign funds on themselves, they did so while claiming to make donations to charities. For example, they claimed a $200 shoe purchase at Dick’s Sporting Goods was actually hunting equipment to benefit “wounded warriors.” And Hunter’s wife Margaret purchased $152 of make-up at Nordstrom then falsely claimed it was for “gift basket items for the Boys and Girls Clubs of San Diego.”

i keep finding links ro wisc jon doe rivkin and eric the red, mistake? (tho we know eric finded james, and james went after ellis in WI)

J20 OMFG

---

wiki

DisruptJ20 (also Disrupt J20) was an organization that protested and attempted to disrupt events of the presidential inauguration of the 45th U.S. President, Donald Trump, which occurred on January 20, 2017. The group was founded in July 2016 and publicly launched on November 11 of the same year. DisruptJ20's inauguration protests were a part of a wider array of protests organized both locally and nationally from a more extensive initial plan. The protests included efforts to blockade one bridge and to shut down security checkpoints. James O'Keefe and Project Veritas had some success infiltrating DisruptJ20's planned inauguration efforts.^[1]^

Description[edit]

A Washington, D.C.-based political organization, DisruptJ20 (also appearing with an inserted space before "J20") had the initial stated aim of protesting and disrupting events of the inauguration of Donald Trump as 45th President of The United States.^[2] One organizer of the DisruptJ20 protests, Alli McCracken, stated that the group is protesting Trump's views on women, undocumented immigrants and Muslims. Al Jazeera described the members of the organization as "liberal activists".^[3] Steven Nelson of the U.S. News & World Report, after interviews with organizers and representatives, described it in December 2016 as the "more radical protest-organizing network DisruptJ20, which has more than 1,700 Facebook group members."^[4] A representative of the organization^[who?] has stated that it would also have demonstrated had Hillary Clinton won the 2016 presidential election.^[5]^

History and protest planning

DisruptJ20 was founded around July 2016, about six months before Trump's inauguration.^[6] "J20" was chosen to stand for January 20, the scheduled day of the 2017 inauguration.^[7] DisruptJ20 was publicly launched on November 11, 2016 with a YouTube video and social media accounts.^[2] It and its aims were described in an interview with Legba Carrefour, "an organizer with DisruptJ20,"^[8][9][10] as

an umbrella coalition of groups with a core of local organizers who have a lot of activist experience. Washington, D.C. organizers ... most of whom are anarchists. ... The idea ... is we want to undermine Trump's presidency from the get-go. There has been a lot of talk of peaceful transition of power as being a core element in a democracy and we want to reject that entirely and really undermine the peaceful transition.^[8]^

According to Nelson of the U.S. News, the DisruptJ20s website in December 2016 associated the organisation with the "DC Welcoming Committee [DCWC] collective" (describing it as "being assisted by" the DCWC) and Nelson reports that DisruptJ20, at this time, involved individuals from an array of progressive groups (as individuals, rather than representing their groups).^[4] Nelson quotes Carrefour, who he describes as "a local anarchist handling press" for DisruptJ20, as indicating that "more than 200 people attended an organizing meeting at a local church ... on short notice" and that photographs "show[ed] supporters representing a range of ages and interests."^[4] Regarding intent, Carrefour stated to Nelson,

We are planning to shut down the inauguration, that's the short of it ... We're pretty literal about that, we are trying to create citywide paralysis on a level that I don't think has been seen in D.C. before. We're trying to shut down pretty much every ingress into the city as well as every checkpoint around the actual inauguration parade route.^[11][4][6]^

On January 14, 2017, about a hundred demonstrators met at the American University to plan and prepare their protests.^[7][12] Carrefour described their plans for inauguration week, beginning the weekend of January 14–15, 2017 ("MLK weekend"), indicating that DisruptJ20 was:

holding "an Action Camp ... doing a lot of non-violent direct action trainings" on that weekend;
sponsoring a "queer dance party" at the residence of Vice President Mike Pence, on Wednesday, January 18;
arranging an "action" for the DeploraBall—described as an "Alt-Right Trump inaugural ball"—on Thursday, January 19, with the aim of "trying to shut that down";
having, on the 20th, inauguration day, "blockades ... at all the checkpoints around the inauguration parade route and to get into the viewing area ... transit blockades all day ... several unpermitted marches, an especially big one at Logan Circle" at 10 A.M., and a permitted march at 12 P.M., as well as events going on throughout inauguration evening."^[8][6]^

After the January 14 meetings, James O'Keefe of Project Veritas posted a video shot at pizzeria Comet Ping Pong in the capital showing members of the DC Antifascist Coalition, a part of DisruptJ20, planning to disrupt the DeploraBall at the National Press Building on January 19—through use of stink bombs (of butyric acid) and activation of the building's sprinkler system.^[12][13][14] DisruptJ20 countered that it had caught on to the Veritas operation and had thus fed its operative a false plot;^[12][13] however, based on the video, the DC police arrested a man associated with the group[clarification ^needed] on January 19, 2017 for his alleged planning to disrupt the DeploraBall.^[15][16][17] Veritas released a second part to the video showing DisruptJ20 participants discussing their plans to create blockades for bridges and trains; as a result of the latter video, a DisruptJ20 organizer^[who?] announced that the group would scale back on their blockade efforts, and only shut down one bridge.^[18][19]^

Inauguration actions, eve and day

...

---

https://YYY.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/28/project-veritas-protesters-trial-trump-inauguration-protest

no lnx

US government uses Project Veritas video in trial of anti-Trump protesters

Footage from the far-right group is being relied on as evidence against protesters arrested at Trump’s inauguration, raising criticism from activists

Project Veritas: how fake news prize went to rightwing group beloved by Trump

Sam Levin in San Francisco

@SamTLevin Email

Tue 28 Nov 201719.52 EST Last modified on Fri 9 Feb 2018

Police and demonstrators clash in downtown Washington after a limo was set on fire following Trump’s inauguration in January. ]

:{:{}:

Federal prosecutors targeting anti-Trump protesters are relying on video evidence from Project Veritas, a far-right group under fire this week for allegedly trying to dupe the Washington Post with a false story of sexual misconduct.

:{:{}:

The US attorney’s office submitted the footage in court on Tuesday as part of an ongoing trial against activists who protested Donald Trump’s inauguration and now face conspiracy and rioting charges that could lead to decades in prison.

:{:{}:

Prosecutors played the video – which reportedly showed undercover footage from a meeting of activists –one day after the Washington Post reported that Project Veritas had sent a woman undercover pretending to be a victim of Roy Moore, the US Senate candidate accused of sexual misconduct.

Washington Post catches woman in apparent rightwing sting, paper reports

Hothead Ryan Sorba Stalks CMD

O'Keefe's long-time ally Ryan Sorba is another case in point. He has frequently made enemies of more moderate Republicans. At a 2010 CPAC conference, his rabid anti-gay rant ("I'd like to condemn CPAC for bringing GOPride to this event … you just made an enemy out of me") proved too much even for the most conservative "pro-family" delegates. He was the stage, and called "intrinsically evil." Yet, he has suggested his stand led to the resignation of CPAC's David Keene, who now takes a more active role defending the NRA's position on guns.

In 2009, Sorba worked in cahoots with O'Keefe on the attack on ACORN. The organization, with a 30-year track record of helping the poor, registering people to vote, and bettering public schools, was later cleared of any wrongdoing. But the media frenzy (O'Keefe III showed up in a pimp outfit on Fox News) caused it to lose federal funding, and it was later disbanded.

While majoring in psychology at California State, Sorba was head of Young Conservatives for California. He was also Congressional Action Team Leader for FreedomWorks, a $15 million organization underwriting assorted Tea Party events and spawned by the Kochs' Citizens for a Sound Economy before it split into FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity. Between his studies and GOP commitments, he found time to travel around California, and gate crash university panel discussions. In the epilogue to Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party, journalist Max Blumenthal describes a harrowing encounter with Sorba:

"Beside me sat Jonathan Walton, an African-American professor of religious studies … and Mark Takano, an erudite, openly gay former Democratic congressional candidate and local community college trustee. In the middle of our discussion, a dozen College Republicans stormed in front of the stage with signs denouncing me as a ‘left-wing hack' while a hysterical young man [i.e. Ryan Sorba] leapt from the crowd, blowing kisses mockingly at Takano … Afterward, university police officers insisted on escorting me to my ride after the right-wing heckler attempted to follow me as he shouted threats."

It is no surprise that Sorba's rap sheet includes a three-year restraining order for domestic violence. According to court documents, he was barred from having any contact with his brother, and forced to move out of the family dwelling in 2001.

For all his bigotry, Sorba believes that people can change. Especially gay people.

In 2007, he self-published The "Born Gay" Hoax. In this hodgepodge of vitriol and pseudo-scientific theories debunked half a century ago, Sorba argues that being gay is a disease (and, oddly enough, also a fad manufactured by liberal academics.) Fortunately, Sorba has hit upon the cure. By replacing the word "gay" with "sodomy," "unnatural vice" or "anti-Christian," in the public discourse, he hopes to shame everyone into voluntarily stepping forward for some conversion therapy....

---

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/counter-sting-catches-james-okeefe-network-attempting-to-sow-chaos-at-trumps-inauguration_us_5873e26fe4b043ad97e516f7

uPDATE:A of theinteraction between Project Veritas operative Allison Maass and Ryan Clayton of Americans Take Action was posted online Tuesday. In it, Clayton confirms with Maass that her goal is indeed to incite a riot at the inauguration.

“What you’re asking for, let’s bullet point it,” Clayton says, referring to the donor Maass claims to be representing. “He says, I’ll give you $100,000 to shut down a bridge, incite a riot and make sure we hack the media narrative on the inauguration.”

Maass says he has it right. “You said you could do stuff like that. He says he likes it. Would you actually do it?”

Earlier:

WASHINGTON ― A left-wing political group released a new video Monday of a counter-sting that has uncovered evidence of right-wing activists trying to sow chaos at Donald Trump’s inaugural ceremony, an effort to portray critics of Trump who march against him as violent fringe figures.

The counter-sting, carried out by The Undercurrent and Americans Take Action, a project of a previous target of provocateur James O’Keefe, managed to surreptitiously record elements of O’Keefe’s network offering huge sums of money to progressive activists if they would disrupt the ceremony and “put a stop to the inauguration” and the related proceedings to such a degree that donors to the clandestine effort would “turn on a TV and maybe not even see Trump.” To have riots blot out coverage of Trump, the donor offered “unlimited resources,” including to shut down bridges into D.C.

The Undercurrent, led by executive producer Lauren Windsor, is sponsored by American Family Voices, which was among a constellation of groups infiltrated by O’Keefe’s Project Veritas during the presidential campaign, an effort to link Democrats with voter fraud.

Windsor told HuffPost that for now, the group is only releasing an edited version of the video. One of the conservative operatives recorded on it by The Undercurrent was Allison Maass, who previously was caught attempting to infiltrate the Senate campaign of Russ Feingold in Wisconsin, as well as the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton. Maass was also a lead infiltrator during the voter fraud campaign.

Windsor, in investigating Project Veritas, discovered the name of a front group, Breakthrough Dev Group, that O’Keefe was using to set up stings. Somebody from BDG contacted an allied group, which reached out to activist Ryan Clayton. Windsor arranged to have the meeting secretly recorded. (It’s likely Maass was recording as well. It is plausible that O’Keefe’s plan was not to disrupt to the inaugural, but instead to catch lefties offering to do so.)

“It was my pleasure to work with the highly skilled operatives who pulled off this reverse sting of political conman James O’Keefe and his Project Veritas cohorts,” Clayton told HuffPost.

When attempting to infiltrate the Feingold campaign, Maass gave her name as Allison Moss, but listed a phone number that was publicly traceable to her Yonkers home and her real name of Allison Maass. Maass did not return a voicemail left Monday by HuffPost. Maass also left an email with the Feingold campaign, which HuffPost reached out to for comment. O’Keefe, rather than Maass, responded with a phone call, but said he wasn’t able to immediately comment without more information.

Trump’s charitable foundation has contributed to O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, and Trump invited O’Keefe to a presidential debate.

Below, The YoungTurks discuss the sting:

---

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jaime-phillips-washington-post-project-veritas_us_5a1f9a0fe4b0392a4ebb240c?section=us_media

woman whose effort to trick the Washington Post into believing she had been sexually abused by Republican Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore schemed for months in an elaborate effort to discredit the newspaper and other mainstream media outlets, according to a Post report published Wednesday.

The new report details how Jaime Phillips attempted to befriend journalists from the Post, The New York Times, Bloomberg and McClatchy News, among other news outlets, by attending media parties and networking events. The infiltration effort dates back to at least July, the Post reported.

Washington Post

@washingtonpost

Failed effort by conservative activists to plant a false story in The Washington Post was part of a months-long campaign to infiltrate The Post and other media outlets in Washington and New York http://wapo.st/2Ag6Ue8

6:44 PM - Nov 29, 2017

Woman’s effort to infiltrate The Washington Post dates back months

Jaime Phillips’s sustained attempt to insinuate herself into reporters’ social circles makes clear that the efforts to discredit The Post went much further than trying to plant one fabricated article.

washingtonpost.com

56 56 Replies 475 475 Retweets 610 610 likes

Twitter Ads info and privacy

Phillips, 41, is believed to be coordinating with Project Veritas, an organization known for using illegal tactics to target the media and left-leaning groups. She was outed on Monday for trying to push a fake story about Moore, the Alabama Republican Senate candidate accused of sexual misconduct.

Phillips told the Post that she’d had an abortion after conceiving a child with Moore when she was 15. Inconsistencies in her tale, however, prompted skepticism among reporters, who had unearthed a GoFundMe page under her name announcing a new job working “in the conservative media movement to combat the lies and deceipt [sic] of the liberal MSM,” or mainstream media.

On Monday morning, Phillips was spotted walking into the New York offices of Project Veritas.

The controversial organization and its founder, James O’Keefe, have been caught out in the past for other sting efforts, such as an attempt to incite a left-wing riot at Trump’s inauguration. The group’s efforts to discredit CNN have also fallen flat.

In 2010, O’Keefe was arrested and later charged with a misdemeanor for using a fake identity to enter a federal building. He had been trying to break into the office of then-Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) office when he was caught by federal authorities.

Several journalists in Washington and New York told the Post that Phillips attended “at least seven social gatherings in recent months,” including a going-away party for two Post staffers. Phillips secretly recorded some of her interactions at these events — several of which have since been shared online by Project Veritas.

Journalists reacted to the Post’s latest report by calling the tactics “disgusting” and “vile.” The news has also raised concerns within other media outlets about how covert operatives from organizations like Project Veritas could be infiltrating their own networks.

McClatchy data reporter Ben Wieder, who met Phillips at a media happy hour meetup in Washington in September, told the Post he attended such events often and was ”[worried] that this sort of thing will create a little bit of a chilling effect, that people might be worried and more cautious if they are at a happy hour.”

On Wednesday night, Wieder retweeted this warning from Post reporter Beth Reinhard, who co-authored the exposé on Phillips:

Beth Reinhard

@bethreinhard

Fellow ink-stained wretches beware: that young journalist or student chatting you up at the bar could be a undercover anti-media guerilla. http://wapo.st/2AgI4uM?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.e4854b271100 …

7:17 PM - Nov 29, 2017

Woman’s effort to infiltrate The Washington Post dates back months

washingtonpost.com

40 40 Replies 49 49 Retweets 52 52 likes

Twitter Ads info and privacy

Emily Goodell, a staff writer for the Student Press Law Center, was at the same happy hour meetup as Wieder and Phillips.

In a blog post published Wednesday, she described meeting Phillips who’d introduced herself under the false name Jaime Taylor and had quizzed Goodell, then an intern at the SPLC, “about being a reporter, about politics, about what I thought about the news.”

“I didn’t think about our interaction again until I read The Post article Tuesday morning,” Goodell wrote. “I’ve been racking my brain since. Nothing came out of my interaction with her, but now my mind is inundated with all the things that could have happened.”

Goodell went on to warn “all reporters, not just those who are in the early years of their career like me ... [to] learn from my experience.”

“I got lucky this time, but it was a wake–up call for me. Sometimes I forget the lengths to which people will go to discredit news organizations,” she wrote.

WAPO FAIL

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/james-okeefe/546869/

[vid:) geo stephanopolis busts: except you say yo're a conserv activistis disrumpting x for glory

...Then, on Monday morning, Washington Post journalists saw their source “walking into the New York offices of Project Veritas, an organization that targets the mainstream news media and left-leaning groups,” the paper reported.

It’s possible to reverse-engineer a plausible account of what happened.

Project Veritas was operating on the premise that The Washington Post wouldn’t exercise due diligence in vetting a young womanaccusing a Republican Senate candidate of sexual misconduct—that the paper would report the bogus story in the newspaper, enabling Project Veritas to expose them for spreading a false allegation.

The premise that the newspaper spreads “fake news” is widely held on the populist right. But the premise proved incorrect. Washington Post reporters did not reflexively or opportunistically believe a woman falsely accusing a prominent Republican. They assigned multiple staffers to help vet the story’s credibility. And they were skillful enough at doing so that they discovered their source’s lies.

If Project Veritas was operating in good faith—if it was really trying “to achieve a more moral and ethical society,” as it claims on its website—it would have acknowledged that its initial beliefs about The Washington Post were incorrect, and that the newspaper diligently pursued the truth when put to an undercover test.

Instead, even though the newspaper did the right thing, Project Veritas still cast it as an enemy. Even as thePost was exposing what happened in its pages, James O’Keefe was sending out an email trying to fundraise off of the operation:

Project Veritas Supporter,

This morning as I walked to Project Veritas’ office, I was ambushed by reporters and a camera crew from The Washington Post.

What were they after?

Following months of undercover work within The Washington Post, our investigative journalist embedded within the publication had their cover blown.

This is how undercover work goes. This isn’t the first time that has happened, and it won’t be the last time.

The good news is … we already got our story.

Now our team in a dash to beat The Washington Post to the presses.

Can you help us finish this investigation?

A bit later on the email concluded:

… please donate so our team can FULLY follow through on our promise to expose the Establishment Media in 2017 and 2018.

Thank so much for all that you do, and as always … stay tuned.

In Truth,

James O’Keefe

Project Veritas

O’Keefe’s team seems less interested in what’s true than in making the media look bad. If it gathers footage that makes the media look good, apparently, it simply doesn’t release it. In effect, Veritas offers the sort of biased, partial, and politically motivated work they accuse mainstream journalists of producing.

There is perhaps no better illustration of the bad faith that prevails today on the populist right than the actions of O’Keefe as he solicits donations for Project Veritas. And this is not the first time O’Keefe has failed to disclose to his audience that the uncharitable premise of one of his stings was disproved by a target who behaved well, only to be portrayed by O’Keefe as a villain anyway.

O’Keefe still parts credulous supporters from their money in part because the rest of the right-wing media is reluctant to expose his particular con.

It is too close to the con they run.

That’s how hucksters like O’Keefe can fail repeatedly for years and still get rich. According to Lachlan Markay of The Daily Beast, O’Keefe took an eye-popping salary of $317,691 in 2016 for his nonprofit work.Meanwhile, the sorts of mainstream media organizations that O’Keefe tries to undermine are consistently breaking stories about actual abuses of power, including abuses on the left. As O’Keefe was stinging The New York Times, for example, its journalists were taking down Harvey Weinstein, using skills O’Keefe appears not to possess. The best way for Project Veritas to fulfill its stated mission of achieving “a more moral and ethical society” is to shut down and donate its assets to a nonprofit like ProPublica that exposes bad behavior without perpetrating any of its own.

---

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/washington-post-project-veritas-sting_us_5a1c8bb8e4b04e8b2a83d55b?section=us_media

For weeks, Republican Senate nominee Roy Moore and supporters of his Alabama campaign have attacked the journalistic integrity of The Washington Post for publishing what they say are false allegations that Moore sexually harassed teenage girls when he was in his 30s.

But in a display of poetic justice Monday, a sting operation attempting to discredit the Post’s reporting backfired and instead demonstrated that its staff takes extensive measures to verify sources’ claims.

The Post detailed the ordeal in a story on its site Monday.

Earlier this month, a woman named Jaime T. Phillips approached the paper with allegations that Moore, in his 40s at the time, had impregnated her when she was 15. After about two weeks of interviews with her, the Post confronted her about inconsistencies in her story and about aGoFundMe page under her name announcing a new job working “in the conservative media movement to combat the lies and deceipt [sic] of the liberal MSM,” or mainstream media.

Phillips ceased contact with the Post after being confronted with its findings, and on Monday, Post staffers spotted Phillips walking into the New York offices of Project Veritas, a group infamous for its attempts to target the media and left-leaning groups through undercover operations. Its hope is that news outlets will fall for its false information and prove Project Veritas’ claim that the mainstream media can’t be trusted.

Because of our customary journalistic rigor, we weren’t fooled.Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron

In 2015, President Donald Trump’s charity donated $10,000 to the organization.

After spotting Phillips go into the Project Veritas office on Monday, the Post confronted its founder, James O’Keefe, who was convicted in 2010 for using a fake identity to enter a federal building during another sting attempt. He refused to answer repeated questions as to whether Phillips was employed by Project Veritas and whether he was working with Moore’s campaign.

Previous stings O’Keefe has been involved in include anattempt to incite a left-wing riot at Trump’s inauguration and several attempts to discredit CNN.

The Post’s discoveries about Phillips and her possible relationship with Project Veritas were enough for the paper to publish her off-the-record comments.

“[T]his so-called off-the-record conversation was the essence of a scheme to deceive and embarrass us,” Post Executive Editor Martin Baron said Monday. “The intent by Project Veritas clearly was to publicize the conversation if we fell for the trap. Because of our customary journalistic rigor, we weren’t fooled, and we can’t honor an ‘off-the-record’ agreement that was solicited in maliciously bad faith.”

This is only the latest in apparent sting attempts against the Post in light of its bombshell Moore report. Earlier this month, at least one person received a robocall from someone impersonating a Post reporter and offering thousands of dollars for “damaging remarks” about Moore.

cnn

to hurt The Washington Post and help Roy Moore.

But the Post turned the tables and exposed the plot. Now O'Keefe is the one on the defensive.

It's an extraordinary and sordid story that begins with a fake sexual assault allegation. The apparent goal was to discredit the real women who previously spoke with the Post about alleged sexual misconduct by Moore, the Republican nominee for Senate in Alabama.

O'Keefe, a highly controversial activist, had one of his colleagues reach out to the Post with a new, made-up account of Moore's behavior. The woman claimed that Moore had slept with her and even urged her to get an abortion.

The hope within Project Veritas appears to have been that the Post would reveal anti-Moore bias in the initial conversations and perhaps eventually publish the lie.

But the paper didn't bite. Instead, as it would with anyone who came forward with an explosive allegation, it looked into the new accuser's credibility and background -- and found a trail of breadcrumbs that led back to Project Veritas.

The Post described what happened, in exquisite detail, on Monday night. The account has been the most-read story on WashingtonPost.com for the past eighteen hours.

O'Keefe essentially copped to it in an email to his supporters.

"Following months of undercover work within The Washington Post, our investigative journalist embedded within the publication had their cover blown," O'Keefe wrote. "This is how undercover work goes. This isn't the first time that has happened, and it won't be the last time."

On Twitter, O'Keefe is now spinning, saying he has other Post-related videos in the works.

But the videos he shared on Monday night were underwhelming. A reporter for the newspaper was shown on a hidden camera saying that the paper's editorial board has an anti-Trump bent -- a fact that every reader already knows.

Armed with donations, hidden cameras and his YouTube account, O'Keefe has targeted CNNand several other major news organizations. He says he is exposing bias and "corruption" in the media. He uses the "investigations" to raise more money for Project Veritas.

One of O'Keefe's supporters, back in 2015, was Donald Trump's charity, the Trump Foundation. According to Post reporter David Fahrenthold, Project Veritas received a $10,000 donation "after pitching Trump on their work."

Trump also promoted some of O'Keefe's past projects on Twitter before he was elected president.

O'Keefe has many detractors, some of whom say his salesman techniques are an attempt to mask unethical practices.

He has a tendency to exaggerate his findings. Some of his so-called exposés have relied on misleading editing techniques. And an incident in 2010 landed him in legal trouble. After he was arrested at Senator Mary Landrieu's office, O'Keefe pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for entering federal property under false pretenses. He was sentenced to three years of probation, plus community service and a fine.

Some of O'Keefe's longtime critics reacted gleefully. "Conservative tries to prove the Washington Post is fake news, proves the opposite by mistake," Jonathan Chait of New York magazine wrote.

A number of conservative writers and observers also sided with the Post. National Review's headline was "James O'Keefe Shoots at The Washington Post and Misses."

Byron York of the Washington Examiner tweeted that what he called O'Keefe's "idiocy" was "beyond boneheaded." He said "O'Keefe really ought to hang it up."

And Ben Shapiro, editor in chief of the Daily Wire, said the botched sting was "horrible."

"O'Keefe did great work on ACORN. This WaPo attempt is horrible, both morally and effectively," Shapiro tweeted.

---

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/a-woman-approached-the-post-with-dramatic--and-false--tale-about-roy-moore-sje-appears-to-be-part-of-undercover-sting-operation/2017/11/27/0c2e335a-cfb6-11e7-9d3a-bcbe2af58c3a_story.html

ideo entre: ...“I’m moving to New York!” the May 29 appeal said. “I’ve accepted a job to work in the conservative media movement to combat the lies and deceipt of the liberal MSM. I’ll be using my skills as a researcher and fact-checker to help our movement. I was laid off from my mortgage job a few months ago and came across the opportunity to change my career path.”

In a March posting on its Facebook page, Project Veritas said it was seeking 12 new “undercover reporters,” though the organization’s operatives use methods that are eschewed by mainstream journalists, such as misrepresenting themselves.

A posting for the “journalist” job on the Project Veritas website that month warned that the job “is not a role for the faint of heart.”

The job’s listed goal: “To adopt an alias persona, gain access to an identified person of interest and persuade that person to reveal information.”

It also listed tasks that the job applicant should be able to master, including: “Learning a script,” “Preparing a background story to support your role,” “Gaining an appointment or access to the target of the investigation,” and “Operating concealed recording equipment.”

Project Veritas, founded in 2010, is a tax-exempt charity that says its mission is to “investigate and expose corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud and other misconduct.” It raised $4.8 million and employed 38 people in 2016, according to its public tax filing. It also had 92 volunteers.

O’Keefe’s criminal record has caused the charity problems in some states. Mississippi and Utah stripped the group of a license to raise money in those states because it failed to disclose O’Keefe’s conviction on state applications, records show.

Also working at Veritas is former television producer Robert J. Halderman, who was sentenced to six months in jail in 2010 after he was accused of trying to blackmail late-night host David Letterman. Halderman was with O’Keefe outside the Project Veritas offices Monday as a reporter tried to ask about Phillips’s role with the organization.

...

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/you-wont-believe-evidence-theyre-using-prosecute-trumps-election-day-protesters

levin sf guad

The US attorney’s office submitted the footage in court on Tuesday as part of an ongoing trial against activists who protested Donald Trump’s inauguration and now face conspiracy and rioting charges that could lead to decades in prison.

Prosecutors played the video – which reportedly showed undercover footage from a meeting of activists – one day after the Washington Post reported that Project Veritas had sent a woman undercover pretending to be a victim of Roy Moore, the US Senate candidate accused of sexual misconduct.

“It’s a dubious piece of evidence at best, and it’s appalling that it’s coming from the far right,” said Ortiz, who attended the hearing.

Hundreds were arrested during inauguration day demonstrations – including journalists, legal observers and medics – drawing criticisms that law enforcement was issuing overly broad charges against people caught up in the chaos, without specific evidence tying them to alleged crimes. Though some charges were later dropped, many are still on trial for conspiracy, rioting and property destruction allegations, and some could face 60-year prison sentences.

The video comes from Project Veritas’ infiltration of a meeting where activists discussed plans to disrupt inauguration activities.

Menefee-Libey, who was in court on Tuesday, said he believed the judge should not have allowed the video to be presented in the first place, given Project Veritas’ history.

“Fundamentally, this shows that the state doesn’t have very much to go on,” said James Anderson, a member of It’s Going Down, an anti-fascist collective that has promoted protests against Trump and the “alt-right”. Prosecutors have also used comments an activist made on an It’s Going Down podcast as evidence in the ongoing trial.

Erin Lemkey, a Washington DC protester who is facing charges for J20 activities, said the Project Veritas video revealed weaknesses in the prosecution’s case.“The fact that they have to fall back on using these far-right trolls, which are widely discredited, not only speaks to the illegitimacy of their case, but also a fundamental relationship between the Trump administration and the alt-right,” Anderson said.

“They’re using whatever stuff they can drag up,” said Lemkey, who has not yet gone to trial. “It’s doubly strange that they would be taking such a discredited source.”

A spokesman for Project Veritas defended the use of the video as “entirely appropriate”. A spokesman for the US attorney’s office for DC declined to comment.

The J20 demonstrators are not the only progressive activists who have faced harsh prosecutions for protest activities this year. In May, a leftwing activist was convicted after she was arrested for laughing during a confirmation hearing for attorney general Jeff Sessions. Anti-fascist demonstrators in California have also faced serious felony charges.

“Why are there no conspiracy charges for the far right?” said Anderson. “That’s a huge question.”

coates says sherrod was 1st symptom on current breitbart reign

https://www.c-span.org/video/?434795-1/tanehisi-coates-discusses-eight-years-power

---

https://thinkprogress.org/sarah-huckabee-sanders-james-okeefe-c9829702d79f/

At Tuesday’s White House press briefing, Deputy White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders used a question from Breitbart News to attack the entire press corps. Breitbart reporter Charlie Spiering asked about a specific story CNN retracted, but in her response, Sanders accused CNN of being “repeatedly wrong” on other stories, and encouraged people to watch an from James O’Keefe’s disreputable Project Veritas instead.

“Frankly everybody across the country to take a look at it,” Sanders said of the video that was just released Tuesday morning. “I think it’s a disgrace to all of media, to all of journalism. I think that we have gone to a place where, if the media can’t be trusted to report the news, then that’s a dangerous place for America.” She went on to refer to the “Russia/Trump hoax,” suggesting that all of the reporting about President Trump’s connections to Russia was more “fake news.” Her tirade prompted Brian Karem, a local reporter and editor for a Washington, D.C.-area paper, to openly criticize her for demonizing the media in this way.

[vid] In the Project Veritas video Sanders referred to, someone is secretly recording a series of casual conversations with John Bonifield, a CNN supervising producer who works in the network’s medical unit. Like just about every other “gotcha” video O’Keefe has released over the years, this one appears to be highly edited. Nevertheless, he claims that Bonifield’s comments prove that CNN knows its stories about collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia are “mostly bullshit,” but is running them heavily just for the ratings.The New York Times’ Sopan Deb was quick to point out the obvious flaws in the video. Besides the fact the video is clearly edited and O’Keefe is notoriously untrustworthy, a single producer for CNN’s medical coverage has absolutely no authority to speak about the network’s Russia coverage.

...

---

https://www.theXXXguardian.com/media/2016/jun/05/peter-thiel-gawker-lawsuits-james-okeefe-acorn

many links

---

guard no link

Watching Peter Thiel, the libertarian billionaire, waging war on Gawker Media has reminded me that there was a time when Thiel himself backed another controversial media figure famed for causing outrage in his pursuit of the “truth” –conservative “film-maker” James O’Keefe.

Thiel, who has been in the news in the past week for underwriting the legal fees of Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker, has sparked a heated debate about the free speech implications of a billionaire using his cash to muzzle media organizations.

But he has also used his money to fund people who set out to greatly harm progressive causes including public media, housing for poor people, and rational perceptions about immigrants and voting.

In 2009 Thiel invested in O’Keefe, a conservative agitator whose undercover videos (some dishonestly edited to present things that never happened or just plain wrong) were used to undermine liberal causes.

Before admitting to backing Gawker’s biggest lawsuit, Thiel was best known – as much as the billionaire was known at all outside Silicon Valley – as an early investor in companies such as PayPal and Facebook.

He also has been a longtime champion of conservative causes, backing GoProud, a now defunct lobbying body for gay Republicans sick of the “centrist” Log Cabin Republicans.

But his early investment in O’Keefe (who has since pleaded guilty to breaking into a US senator’s office and paid $100,000 to a victim of his smears) may have had the most long-term – and negative – impact.

Jeff Bezos on Peter Thiel: 'Seek revenge and you should dig two graves'

Shortly after I began working as a writer at the Village Voice in 2009, O’Keefe was in the news for making his first breakout “sting” video, which seemed to show him dressed as a pimp and conservative blogger Hannah Giles dressed as a prostitute. They appeared to approach various offices of Acorn (the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now, one of the most powerful grassroots organizations for poor brown and black people which did important work with voter registration and housing access) to ask for their assistance in avoiding taxes, which they seem to get.

Eventually, the videos were debunked – but not until they had done tremendous damage. As I wrote in 2010:

O’Keefe had carefully edited his tapes and left out, for example, that he was decked out in college preppie clothes, not pimp-wear. At least one Acorn office threw him out, and at least two knowingly played along with his ruse. (The San Diego office called the cops after he left, and the Philadelphia office filed a police report.) The upshot was that after his edited tapes became public, Congress quickly voted to strip ACORN of all federal funds. The organization effectively went out of business before the bill could take effect or be thrown out in court.”

O’Keefe later made outrageous, selectively edited videos that would lead to significant outcomes, like the ousting of NPR’s CEO, even though that video was thoroughly debunked when the raw video was seen. But going back to 2009, I got a tip that O’Keefe was not “absolutely independent”, as he claimed, but that he had received funding from one Peter Thiel for a video he’d made earlier in the year called “Taxpayers Clearing House”.

O’Keefe’s Thiel-backed Taxpayer’s Clearing House video

The opening of Taxpayers Clearing House is pretty racially offensive. As Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyrie plays, O’Keefe rides around in a van that looks like the Publisher’s Clearing House Prize Patrol, a well-known American sweepstakes that surprises entrants with a $1m prize. He approaches unsuspecting black and brown people in their homes, duped into thinking they are going to win money when he rings their bell. Instead, he presents them with a bill for $28,000 – the portion of their bill, he says, for the 2008 bailout of Wall Street banks. The whole thing is framed to make minorities look stupid, dumb and greedy.

Asked about Thiel’s involvement, his spokesman James O’Neill, told me that the billionaire had provided O’Keefe with “about $10,000” to make the video through a “small-government group”. He also denied Thiel had involvement with the Acorn videos, adding that he’d only “watched them on YouTube” and “he shares the view that taxpayer money should not promote human trafficking”. (No taxpayer money was ever used to promote human trafficking.)

This incident reveals a few things about Thiel’s reach, the scale of his attacks on liberal politics, and the effectiveness of both outside the domains of traditional press and presidential politics.

While Thiel did not directly fund the Acorn videos, he funded the film-maker who did shortly before they were made; those videos not only managed to destroy Acorn, but they helped Republicans keep voting to defund it for years after it was dead and to convince half of Republican voters in 2012 that Acorn had stolen the election for Obama in 2008.

Would O’Keefe have been able to get that video made, as widely seen, and effectively considered but for Thiel’s startup funding? It’s a counterfactual. But if we are to take seriously the idea that Thiel’s initial half-million-dollar investment in Facebook entitles him to a portion of the value of the company that dominates so much everyday life today, we must also seriously consider that his startup investment in O’Keefe has had a handsome return on investment, too.

Fast forwarding to the Gawker case, Thiel ominously told the New York Times that he “refused to divulge exactly what other [media lawsuit] cases he has funded but said, ‘It’s safe to say this is not the only one.’” So there are an unknown number of media lawsuits he has going on. In 2009, the already billionaire mogul was willing to give a paltry $10,000 to an unknown video troublemaker, who has done a great deal of damage to progressive politics. How many things is he involved with? Only Thiel knows, and we can only wait to find out.

It’s fitting that Thiel funded the crude Taxpayers Clearing House video in 2009. Shortly after O’ Keefe’s video came out, Thiel wrote an essay for the libertarian Cato institute complaining that: “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” With that in mind it makes ideological sense that he should align himself with O’Keefe, both early warriors in the backlash against the Voting Rights Act that grew during the Obama years.

Thiel is a Trump delegate. Trump too has warned he’ll crack down on the press if elected. But the power of a billionaire like Thiel doesn’t just expose problems with the freedom of the press in general or Gawker specifically. It is easy to argue that Gawker’s woes are of its own making – outing Thiel and others, (said by some to have triggered his initial rage), and publishing sex tapes without permission isn’t exactly going to win a lot of public sympathy (disclosure – I’ve written for them a couple of times years ago and have friends who work there).

What Thiel has exposed is that the problem with American politics (and America in general) is capitalism. Unfettered capitalism lets the Thiels of the world do what they want, largely when they want, and largely legally. If a plutocrat wants to build a private island free from government influence, they probably can. If they want to circumvent even America’s toothless gun restrictions by supporting a 3D printer for guns, they can do that, too. We are almost powerless to stop anything we have learned about Peter Thiel; he has the money and power to legally stave off financial competitors, fund foot soldiers to strike down community organizers, and (almost as an afterthought) deeply influence the media and presidential politics.

This is what American capitalism creates.

---

http://www.snopes.com/2017/06/03/james-okeefe-federal-lawsuit/

On 1 June 2017, James O’Keefe and (a well-known maker of “sting” videos) was named as a defendant in a federal lawsuit seeking $1 million in damages. The lawsuit accuses his Project Veritas activist organization of “trespass; fraudulent misrepresentation; and civil conspiracy” in the production of a series of videos he made leading up to the 2016 presidential election, for which one of his employees infiltrated a Democratic consulting firm posing as an intern.

The lawsuit, filed in Washington, D.C. on behalf of Democracy Partners, Strategic Consulting Group and Robert Creamer, accuses O’Keefe and his two nonprofit organizations Project Veritas and Project Veritas Action Fund — along with his operatives Allison Maass and Daniel Sandini — of using false pretenses to gain access to Democracy Partners, a Washington, D.C.-based political consulting firm that was a subcontractor for the Democratic National Committee. As a result of their activities, the firm lost multiple contracts.

According to Stephen Gordon, a spokesman for Project Veritas, there was no wrongdoing. In an e-mailed statement, Gordon told us:

Our undercover journalists operated within the spirit, intent and letter of the law. In this case, our undercover journalist was welcomed, as avolunteer, into the Democracy Partners’ offices, was handed a card access key for the entire office area and was voluntarily provided with a computer login, all without ever being asked by Democracy Partners to sign any form of a non-disclosure agreement.

The lawsuit alleges that Creamer was introduced in late June 2016 to a man using a pseudonym (later identified as Sandini) who presented himself as a potential donor to a non-profit Creamer had done work for. In mid-July 2016, Sandini told Creamer he had a niece named “Angela Brandt” who wanted to do volunteer work for Democratic candidates.

On 21 September 2016, Project Veritas employee Allison Maass (posing as “Angela Brandt”) began working for Democracy Partners as an intern after providing falsified biographical and work history information.Per the lawsuit, she carried:

…at most or all times a camera and audio recording devices which were concealed and not visible to anyone talking or meeting with her in the Democracy Partners’ offices.

According to court documents, Maass, posing as the intern Brandt, was given full access to Democracy Partners’ building, a computer sign-on and wireless password, and was privy to conversations and information deemed confidential and proprietary by the firm. Some of the documents she took from Democracy Partners were published by Project Veritas and audio she recorded wound up as part of a four-part video series called “Rigging the Election.”

The lawsuit says the videos were released just before the 2016 presidential election:

On her first day of work, Maass was also asked to provide a resume. She provided a fabricated resume on September 22, 2016 that used the fake name, “Angela Brandt” and omitted her employment with Project Veritas, her real work history, her work for other conservative news outlets that oppose the candidates and projects SCG and Democracy Partners work with, and her real educational background degree. Instead, it provided an entirely false and fabricated work history and education.

Democracy Partners relied on this fabricated resume, and the trust Maass steadily gained through her volunteer work related to the Republican National Conventionand the ongoing interest she expressed in gaining further advocacy and campaign-related experience, to continue Maass’s internship and give her assignments. Had Maass provided her real employment history and educational background, she would never have been hired and her internship would have been immediately terminated. …

During the course of her internship, Maass was included among the recipients of highly confidential emails, and in confidential discussions in in-person meetings and on conference calls; and she was sent confidential documents. She was given the phone number and private access code for client conference calls. She was also brought to confidential client meetings. These calls, emails and documents all contained confidential business information which Creamer told her was confidential and not to be shared with anyone with whom she had not been instructed to share it.

Maass provided a number of these confidential documents and emails to PV and PVAF. PVAF then published them on its website under the heading “VeritasLeaks” on or around October 26, 2016. The website states “Here are some supporting documents for the Democracy Partners videos we have been releasing.”

The lawsuit also accuses O’Keefe of “selectively editing” the videos, and then drawing misleading conclusions from the footage included in his series:

The video was heavily edited and contained commentary by O’Keefe that drew false conclusions from the selectively edited videos, to charge that Plaintiffs were involved in a conspiracy to incite violence at rallies for then-candidate Donald Trump, and falsely implied that the ongoing work in planning and implementing the bracketing events was part of that conspiracy. The purpose of this video, and all of the videos, was falsely to portray the Democratic Party and progressive organizations as being engaged in unethical and illegal activity.

Democracy Partners’ attorney Joseph Sandler accused O’Keefe and company of being “modern day Watergate burglars.” Sandler told us:

To misrepresent yourself, and lie and submit fake resumes to get access on false premise to confidential information and tape surreptitiously on top of it — real journalists don’t do that. This illegal conduct has done real damage and we’re trying to hold them accountable for the damages they caused.

In a statement sent to reporters, O’Keefe said:

We are on the right side of the law and will not stop exposing the truth. Right now, the Attorney General of Wisconsin is still investigating possible criminal charges against [operative] Scott Foval. This lawsuit further justifies the need to drain the swamp. Our army of guerrilla journalists, which grows daily, will continue to expose the malfeasance and corruption committed by these organizations. …

We will not be intimidated. We will not be silenced. We will find out who is funding this lawsuit. We will never stop exposing the truth. We will not back down.

The videos purport to show Democracy Partner employees, including Foval, a Madison activist, talking about potentially illegal activities, such as voter fraud and causing chaos at campaign rallies for then-candidate Donald Trump. When they were initially released, Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel said they showed “apparent violations of the law”.

As of late April 2017, local news media in Wisconsin reported that Schimel’s office had released contradictory statements about whether or not the investigation was ongoing. We were unable to reach the office on the afternoon of 2 June 2017 to inquire about the current status of the probe. Foval gave an interview to a local publication on 18 May 2017, in which he said the things he discussed in the video were “hypothetical” and not real scenarios — an explanation panned by Project Veritas’ executive director in the same article.

Project Veritas maintains that these videos were not misleading. Gordon pointed to a passage in the first video in which an Scott Foval tells O’Keefe’s employee that he had planted people in the crowd at a rally for Republican Wisconsin Governor (and former presidential candidate) Scott Walker to cause a commotion. At the 12-minute mark of the, Foval says:

Remember the Iowa state fair thing where Scott Walker grabbed the sign out of the dude’s hand and then the dude gets kind of roughed up right in front of the stage right there on camera? That was all us.

Foval was fired shortly after the videos were released; Creamer had released the following statement at the time:

We regret the unprofessional and careless hypothetical conversations that were captured on hidden cameras of a temporary regional contractor for our firm, and he is no longer working with us. While, none of the schemes described in the conversations ever took place, these conversations do not at all reflect the values of Democracy Partners.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C., three men, Paul Kuhn, Colin Dunn, and Scott Charney, each pleaded guilty to one count of misdemeanor conspiracy to commit assaultafter they were caught in a separate sting video produced by Project Veritas in which they discussed plans to disrupt an event leading up to President Trump’s 20 January 2017 inauguration. All three signed what is referred to as a deferred sentencing agreement — if they perform 48 hours of community serviceand abide by the law the guilty plea will be withdrawn and the case will be dismissed at the time of sentencing.

http://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2017/04/25/wisconsin-doj-james-okeefes-project-veritas-tape-did-not-show-election-law-violations/100885192/

MADISON – Covert videos of Democratic activists released in the run-up to last year’s presidential election showed no violations of Wisconsin laws, a review by the attorney general’s office found.

:{:{}:

The blunt conclusion is at odds with how Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel initially reacted to the videos by conservative provocateur James O’Keefe, who has a track record of mischaracterizing his recordings and was found guilty of a misdemeanor in 2010 over one of his operations.

Schimel’s office released a statement in October calling the actions by Democrats on the undercover videos “apparent violations of the law” and saying Schimel was “very concerned” about them.

But one of Schimel’s assistants came to the opposite conclusion when he reviewed the recordings.

“Based on all the available facts I do not believe there is any basis to conclude that the videos demonstrate or suggest violations of Wisconsin criminal laws,” Assistant Attorney General Roy Korte wrote in a Jan. 31 memo ending the investigation The memo was released to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel this week under the state’s open records law.

The findings resulted in Schimel taking flak Tuesday from Democrats, who said he had used his office inappropriately, as well as the conservatives behind the video, who said Schimel hadn't done enough to investigate Democrats.

Schimel spokesman Johnny Koremenos said the attorney general had handled the investigation appropriately.

"It is not unusual for a prosecutor to receive allegations, investigate the allegations, and then not to bring charges or open a wider investigation," Koremenos said by email.

But Koremenos did not explain why Schimel initially thought the videos showed law violations, given that Korte, the director of Schimel’s criminal litigation unit, ultimately concluded the recordings showed little of substance.

“The conversations remain best described as vague and theoretical in many respects," Korte wrote of the videos. "There are no clear or direct statements indicating that voter fraud (bringing in out of state voters) was planned or had occurred."

Democrats criticized Schimel for his handling of the investigation, contending he put politics ahead of the facts.

"Today's news makes it clear that Attorney General Brad Schimel is either woefully incompetent of the laws he is supposed to enforce or he intentionally used his office for politics," state Democratic Party spokesman Brandon Weathersby said in a written statement.

"Two weeks before the election, Brad Schimel suggested with no investigation that a private citizen broke election laws — and then for three months sat on the evidence showing this was false. This is beyond partisan politics, this is abuse of power by Schimel," Scot Ross, executive director of the liberal group One Wisconsin Now, said by email.

The videos concentrated on Wisconsin liberal activist Scott Foval, who bragged on tape about disrupting Republican events and discussed busing people into Wisconsinfrom other states.

ARCHIVE:Eric O'Keefe alleges Chisholm has collected over 1 million emails

Foval did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday, but in a written statement last fall he said the videos showed only “speculative conversations” and that he was involved in “above-board, legal, legitimate organizing work.”

The recordings were made by O’Keefe and his group Project Veritas Action and released just before November's presidential election.

O’Keefe produced videos of ACORN in 2009 that led to the dismantling of the community organizing group. They also resulted in O’Keefe agreeing to pay a $100,000 legal settlement to a former ACORN employee.

In 2010, O'Keefe pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for unlawfully entering federal property when he and people disguised as telephone workers entered the office of then-U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana.

Regarding the recent Wisconsin videos, Project Veritas spokesman Stephen Gordon said by email that a more robust investigation by Schimel's office was in order. The "decision not to further investigate or prosecute seems to be based on politics," Gordon said in his email.

The group provided Schimel's team with additional recordings, according to Project Veritas and the state Department of Justice.

But those recordings “are suspect” because they begin in the middle of conversations, contain gaps and include inaccurate time counters, Korte wrote. Gordon said Veritas provided all the relevant recordings it had, but that some of them suffered from equipment malfunctions.

KILLED JOHN DOE W/ ERIC AND RIVKIN

http://www.progressive.org/news/2016/01/188520/dark-money%E2%80%99s-front-man

In November 2013, a little-known conservative activist named Eric O’Keefe brazenly disobeyed a court order and leaked information to The Wall Street Journal editorial page about a secret “John Doe”investigation involving campaign finance violations by political operatives surrounding Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. O’Keefe’s group, the conservative Wisconsin Club for Growth, was among the parties being investigated.

It was the beginning of an extraordinary scorched-earth campaign by O’Keefe to harass and undermine the John Doe investigators, who had targeted alleged illegal coordination between Walker and conservative groups including Club for Growth and Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce. But O’Keefe had a bigger goal in mind: overturning decades of established law in America saying that independent advocacy groups could not coordinate with political campaigns.

O’Keefe launched a series of suits against the prosecutors leading the investigation, continued to leak information about the probe, and publicly denounced it as a “partisan” attack on free speech. He went on conservative talk radio to accuse prosecutors of imposing “a traumatic, unconstitutional abuse on people” and compared those being investigated to “a rape victim”—adding, “I am saying this deliberately.”

Together with his lawyer, David Rivkin, O’Keefe pushed the idea that the John Doe investigators conducted early morning “paramilitary raids” violating the constitutional rights of those being investigated, and which resulted in stories in conservative publications like National Review. Stories of these abuses were discredited by an audiotape in which investigators treated their alleged victim politely.Yet a majority of the Wisconsin Supreme Court in July released an extraordinary ruling that shut down the John Doe probe, with three of the four-member majority citing unproven violations of constitutional rights.

The Club for Growth and Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce had together provided more than $8 million supporting these four justices in their last elections, accounting for anywhere from 48 percent to 76 percent of the total spent on each justice’s behalf. The justices returned the favor, writing a decision that seemed to ignore Wisconsin law and decades of U.S. Supreme Court decisions holding that independent advocacy groups cannot coordinate with political campaigns, since that would make them no longer independent.

It was a huge victory for O’Keefe and for Walker, one that has legalized the unlimited use of dark money in campaigns in Wisconsin and could influence how such cases are handled in other jurisdictions. Long after the end of Walker’s 2016 Republican presidential campaign, O’Keefe’s national aspirations still have legs.

“Wisconsin has sort of become ground zero for the testing of how far outside groups could coordinate with candidates,” says Tara Malloy, senior counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit advocacy group that has closely followed the Wisconsin fight. But she notes that what is happening here is part of a much larger conservative agenda. Across the country, Malloy says, “The envelope is being pushed on coordination in all areas.”

All of which has made O’Keefe a public figure, despite a long history of quietly effective conservative advocacy. He has been dubbed the “third Koch brother” for his efforts to lead and recruit donors to numerous advocacy groups connected to billionaire industrialists David and Charles Koch.

i forgot how key james o'keefe was in launching this bozo into escalator: prominence, explained by richard hofst paranoid style:

---

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mary-bottari/money-trail-revealed-did_b_6560042.html

In 2014, as March drew to an end but the cold Wisconsin winter refused to let go,State Senate President Mike Ellis (R-Neenah) stopped at his favorite after-work hangout to relax after a long session in the Capitol. After a few drinks, Ellis was approached by what he thought were two young constituents, and the veteran GOP lawmaker started holding forth, as he was wont to do.

What he did not know, however, was that his new-found drinking buddies were not from his district or even from the state of Wisconsin. They were, however, on a mission to end his career. A few weeks later, the right wing’s favorite attack dog for hire, James O’Keefe, released a video of the conversation showing an inebriated Ellis spinning a tale about setting up a “Super PAC” to run attacks on his Democratic opponent in that year’s election.

If Ellis’ barroom boasts were actualized in the cold light of day, Ellis may have run afoul of state law prohibiting coordination between candidate committees and outside groups.

“I guess I have to learn to put duct tape over my mouth because any time you’re out in public you’re fair game,” Ellis told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel when the story broke. As for his Super PAC idea, he explained, “I was informed that the described scenario would be illegal, and the idea went no further.”

But the damage had been done. A few days later, the Senate president who was first elected to the Senate in 1982, announced that he would not be running for re-election. Ellis was an unabashed conservative, but he had split with Gov. Scott Walker and his increasingly right-wing party on issues like school vouchers and the corrupting influence of big money in politics.

James O’Keefe had gotten his man, but who bankrolled the hit?

Costly, Coordinated Wisconsin Job

For James O’Keefe and his Project Veritas franchise, registered as a non-profit in Mamaroneck, New York, the Ellis hit marked a conspicuous departure. O’Keefe gained fame for his hatchet job on the effective voter registration group ACORN, and for an attempt to tamper with the phones of then-U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana), which got him busted by the FBI.

But Republicans have not exactly been the main targets of O’Keefe’s hidden-camera henchmen. In the Ellis video, a smug O’Keefe tells viewers that his investigations know no political boundaries. His mission, he says, is to expose corruption .”

No one believed this. O’Keefe had been accused of many things, but protecting campaign-finance law was never one of them.

“James O’Keefe is a staunch conservative, and I don’t think he’d do a hit job on a Republican political figure unless one of O’Keefe’s far-right buddies gave him the green light to do so,” blogger Aaron Camp wrote.

Now CMD has discovered that O’Keefe indeed received a five-figure check from a “far-right buddy” and another “Scotty boy,” Wisconsin Club for Growth’s Eric O’Keefe. This O’Keefe is an old friend of the brothers Koch, a founder of a plethora of far-right organizations (including the Center for Competitive Politics, which fights clean elections laws), and a national leader in the effort to advance undisclosed dark money in elections.O’Keefe has steadfastly stood behind the extreme Walker agenda.

After Walker introduced a bill to destroy public-sector unions in 2011, sparking a historic uprising and the filing of 1 million signatures to recall Walker and a number of state senators, Wisconsin Club for Growth (WiCFG) played a central role in the GOP response, prompting a “John Doe” criminal probe that has riveted the state for over a year.

Now, CMD has exclusively obtained tax filings showing that Eric O’Keefe (no relations to James) made a $50,000 donation to Project Veritas in 2013. Also among Project Veritas’ 2013 donors were two sources of cash,Donors Trust (for $242,000) and Donors Capital ($55,000), that cloak the identities of some in the Koch network of billionaires and millionaires.

The money trail comports with Ellis’ own theory. Ellis fingered WiCFG as the likely culprit in shortly after the hit. But Eric O’Keefe refuses to explain.

When called by CMD and asked about the $50,000 donation, Eric O’Keefe said, “I didn’t give that in 2013,” before quickly hopping off the phone.

Senate President Ellis, an Obstacle to Walker Agenda

Known as an independent thinker and a curmudgeon, Ellis had a history of taking positions contrary to the party line. Ellis was not involved in the caucus fundraising scandal that rocked the capitol in 2002 with the arrests of Assembly and Senate leaders. In the wake of the scandal, he helped lead a bipartisan effort to restructure the state elections and ethics agencies so that they were no longer under the control of a gridlocked partisan board but led by retired judges appointed by the governor and approved by the legislature.

The nonpartisan board “was his idea,” says Jay Heck, Director of Wisconsin Common Cause. “Ellis consistently supported disclosure and public financing for campaigns, while Eric O’Keefe has opposed both.” Heck worked with Ellis and other legislators to set up the nonpartisan Government Accountability Board, now under attack by Wisconsin’s GOP for its role in initiating the John Doe investigation.

Ellis also had a history of failing to fall in line behind the Walker’s agenda.

Ellis was publicly critical of Walker’s steep cuts to education and attempts to massively expand controversial voucher schools around the state, leading to embarrassing headlines regarding a GOP split.

He also privately voiced concerns over the union-busting bill that became Act 10. Although he voted for it, Ellis would later claim that he was blindsided by Walker and by ads paid for by the WiCFG pressuring him to fall in line after he had raised questions about the bill behind closed doors.

In a with Wisconsin Eye‘s Steve Walters that aired a few days after he announced his departure, Ellis talked about his 44-year career in politics, the “high-tech” operation that brought him down and the new era of hardcore, party-line politics “where you check your brain at the front door.”

“Independent thinking and compromise are two ingredients that our founding fathers were thinking of back in 1776; they are gone today,” said Ellis.

As for the sting operation, Ellis pointed the finger at WiCFG for having set him up because he was not “walking behind the cart” on Act 10. In February 2011, shortly after the union-busting measure was introduced. WiCFG popped up TV ads in support of the controversial bill. They also launched ads pressuring Ellis and another moderate Republican, Luther Olsen, to support the Walker agenda.

“Ellis was the last of the strong independent thinking legislators,” said Common Cause’s Heck. “Although he was very conservative and supported Walker more than 90 percent of the time, I guess he had his own ideas on a few issues and that did not comport with the new lockstep, everyone must be on the same page with no dissent, regime that Walker and the new Republican legislative leadership installed in 2011.”

Wisconsin Club for Growth at Center of Dark Money Investigation

As director of WiCFG, Eric O’Keefe has been a very good friend to Scott Walker. In 2012, the Washington Postinterviewed O’Keefe as he traveled cross-country with Walker in search of cash. WiCFG Director R.J. Johnson served as Walker’s campaign manager in 2010 and during the 2012 recall and was credited by Walker for winning those campaigns.

Wisconsin law prohibits coordination between candidate campaigns and independent “issue ad” groups. According to records inadvertently released by the court regarding the secret John Doe investigation, WiCFG is one of a number of dark-money groups being investigated for potentially illegal campaign coordination with the Walker campaign. A series of emails and campaign donations appear to show Walker fundraising on behalf of WiCFG. “The governor is encouraging all to invest in Wisconsin Club for Growth,” a fundraising consultant wrote in a 2011 email to R.J. Johnson. The consultant added that the governor “wants all the issue advocacy efforts” run through WiCFG to “ensure correct messaging,” while promising complete donor anonymity.

As CMD was the first to report, WiCFG served as a hub to secretly funnel millions to a complex array of groups, which ran ads in support of state senators facing recall and Walker himself. The state criminal investigation has been led by a special prosecutor with Republican credentials and a bipartisan group of Wisconsin county district attorneys, yet it has been portrayed by O’Keefe and his supporters as a partisan witch hunt and an attack on “free speech.” O’Keefe, a longtime advocate for eliminating campaign-finance regulations, has fought back hard: His high-priced Washington, D.C., lawyers at BakerHoestler have filed a series of state and federal lawsuits trying to halt the probe (including by falsely attacking CMD). O’Keefe also defied a secrecy order to speak with the Wall Street Journal editorial board about the case.

“Isn’t it ironic that the very thing they snagged Ellis on is the very thing Eric O’Keefe has been willing to go all the way to the Supreme Court to protect? Their right to engage in illegal campaign coordination under Wisconsin law,” notes Heck.

A New Low for Wisconsin’s Poisonous Politics

Eric O’Keefe has apparently known James for a while. In his book Breakthrough, James thanks Eric for his “role in the citizen journalism movement.” It’s possible Eric may have given James the $50,000 with other Wisconsin targets in mind.

In March 2014, James O’Keefe tried to embarrass Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner with questions about his efforts to expand voting rights. And in the summer of 2014, CMD itself was the subject of an elaborate and costly attempted sting operation tied to James O’Keefe, with operatives sent from California to track CMD. An undercover O’Keefe associate followed CMD’s executive director Lisa Graves around at the July Netroots Nation conference trying to get her on tape, and a woman using a fake name purporting to represent a fake group called “African Americans for Change” approached CMD offering money to help with a documentary on dark-money spending in elections, which CMD refused.

CMD’s reporting on the John Doe criminal investigation has certainly gotten under Eric O’Keefe’s skin. CMD was the first to report that WiCFG collected and distributed millions to other dark-money groups, which cut ads in support of Walker and other candidates facing recall. CMD was also the first to uncover O’Keefe role in helping to launch the Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity, whose Wisconsin Reporterwebsite has written more than 150 stories attacking the John Doe probe without regularly disclosing their relationship to O’Keefe. CMD was also the first to report that a Wisconsin Reporter executive is the president of Citizens for Strong America, another group implicated in the investigation, a shell group entirely funded by WiCFG. CMD has also filed a legal complaint against WiCFG with the IRS and federal prosecutors for abusing its status as a “social welfare” organization under federal law.

For now Eric O’Keefe is mum.

But one thing is for certain: the O’Keefes combined — one a New Yorker and the other a Michigander — have introduced a poisonous new element to Wisconsin politics.

nick surgey?

http://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2017/04/27/conservative-james-okeefe-threatens-investigate-wisconsin-attorney-general-brad-schimel-over-video-flap/100968610/

Conservative activist James O'Keefe ripped into Wisconsin's Republican attorney general on Thursday, contending he had skimped on an investigation into potential voter fraudand hinting he may turn his undercover cameras on the state's top cop.

O'Keefe said Attorney General Brad Schimel's office had closed out the investigation without seeing additional footage that his group, Project Veritas Action, had offered to provide investigators. A Schimel aide never responded to the offer, O'Keefe said in a statement.

O'Keefe made his name in 2009 with videos that brought down the community organizing group ACORN. He later agreed to pay a $100,000 settlement to an ACORN employee and in 2010 pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor as part of another undercover operation.

O'Keefe has performed most of his sting operations on liberals, but at times has gone after conservatives including former Wisconsin Senate President Mike Ellis (R-Neenah)... "If the state of Wisconsin is not going to do their job, then, then, we should — you should be investigated," O'Keefe said into the camera. "We should investigate you and you should lose your job."

Schimel spokesman Johnny Koremenos did not respond to requests for comment.

O'Keefe's statements on Thursday were a response to how Schimel reacted to a series of videos O'Keefe released leading up to last year's presidential election that O'Keefe claims reveal a voter fraud scheme and other crimes. At the time, Schimel's office released a statement saying the video showed “apparent violations of the law."

But the head of Schimel's criminal litigation division, Roy Korte, closed down an investigation into the matter in January, concluding O'Keefe's videos showed only vague and hypothetical talk. Korte's memo did not become public until this week, when it was released to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in response to an open records request it filed months ago.[by?]

Korte's memo said investigators received additional videos that had not been publicly released from O'Keefe's group but that they did not provide any evidence of voter fraud or other crimes. But in his written statement, O'Keefe said the state had not accepted all of the available additional footage.

A Veritas attorney offered to give Schimel's senior counsel at the time, Paul Connell, additional footage if he would agree to allow Veritas to blur out the face of someone with Veritas, O'Keefe wrote. Connell is now Schimel's top deputy.

"No one from your department responded to that offer, a clear indication that there was not a serious interest in conducting a thorough investigation," O'Keefe wrote.

“Our general opinion of the discussion our attorney had with Mr. Connell is that Mr. Connell was generally uninterested. Mr. Korte’s memo reinforces that opinion.”

No one from the Department of Justice interviewed the undercover Veritas workers, O'Keefe said. Schimel's spokesman has not said if other interviews were conducted as part of the investigation.

In his memo, Korte wrote that some of the videos appeared to be shot in a Wisconsin bar, but that it was unclear where others were filmed.

O'Keefe said key footage was recorded at the Milwaukee bar Garfield's 502 and criticized Korte for saying some locations were unknown.

"Any two-bit investigator worth their salt looking at a bunch of videos inside an establishment in Milwaukee would deduce that it’s in Milwaukee," O'Keefe said in the video he released Thursday. "C’mon, attorney general, you’re showing your cards here. You didn’t watch the tapes and you don’t care to investigate. This is about politics."

O'Keefe took to Twitter on Thursday to criticize Schimel and his team, at one point posting Korte's phone number and email address.

Schimel is also taking heat from Democrats over how he handled the investigation because his office suggested before the election that laws were broken but then quietly reached the opposite conclusion after voters went to the polls.

O’Keefe produced videos of ACORN in 2009 that led to the dismantling of the group. They also resulted in O’Keefe agreeing to pay a $100,000 legal settlement to a former ACORN employee.

no link

THE BLOG 07/23/2010 11:36 pm ET | Updated May 25, 2011

Why Does Anyone Take Andrew Breitbart Seriously?

By Peter Dreier , Christopher R. Martin

Andrew Breitbart has a job to do and he does it well. Breitbart’s job is to lie and distort the truth in order to advance a right-wing agenda, embarrass liberals, and undermine the Obama administration.

Breitbart is not a journalist, researcher, or pundit. He is a propagandist. He operates several websites (BigGovernment, BigJournalism, and BigHollywood), where he and other right-wing bloggers spew their political pornography. The articles that appear on these websites are contemporary versions of what historian Richard Hofstadter called, in a famous 1964 essay, the “paranoid style” of American politics practiced by extreme conservatives.

Breitbart is part of the “paranoid style” conservative echo chamber that includes Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Mark Levin, and thousands of lesser-known activists who use a combination of talk radio, Fox News, dozens of conservative publications, and the new media (emails, blogs, youtube, facebook) to mobilize support for their right-wing crusade. Breitbart was a featured speaker at the Tea Party conference in Nashville in February and is a frequent guest on Fox News and right-wing TV and radio talk shows. His websites are propaganda vehicles for building a political movement. Unlike Fox News, he doesn’t even pretend to be “fair and balanced.” What much of America learned this week is that Andrew Breitbart is unfair and unbalanced.

:{:{}:

What’s distressing is not that Breitbart does his job, but that the mainstream media and mainstream politicians, including the Obama Administration, take him seriously. The recent dust-up over the firing of federal Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod, fueled by a doctored video on Breitbart’s website, is only the latest example of this.}:

Since he began his website operation, Breitbart has sought to inject himself and his blogger network into the political debate. Sometimes he succeeds in getting wider attention, outside the right-wing silo, for the manufactured scandals he tries to provoke.

Breitbart’s public visibility has peaked twice, according to an analysis of stories on the Lexis/Nexis database.

His first brush with fame occurred in September 2009, after he sponsored two young right-wing video activists — Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe — who visited 10 ACORN offices with a hidden video camera, claiming they were a prostitute and her friend, and tried to entrap the group’s staff into giving them advice about buying a home to use for their prostitution ring. They recorded their stunt and selectively edited the tapes for release, later splicing in video footage of O’Keefe dressed up in an outlandish pimp costume (hat, sunglasses, fur coat, and walking stick) with racist overtones.

In fact, O’Keefe actually wore a dress shirt and slacks and identified himself as a student or friend of the young woman who was trying to protect her. Although O’Keefe’s costume change was exposed months ago, the image has been imprinted in the media’s mind. On Thursday, for example, the Associated Press story about Breitbart referred to O’Keefe and Giles as “actors posing as a prostitute and her pimp.”

Breitbart not only defended the duo’s actions but said that O’Keefe “is already well on his way to being one of the great journalists” and that he deserved a Pulitzer Prize. Breitbart has refused to release the original, unedited videos to any of the organizations investigating the ACORN controversy.

By the second week of September 2009, the ACORN videos became a national story. The videos were posted on Breitbart’s website, then quickly became the top story on the Glenn Beck Show, the rest of Fox News, conservative talk radio (including Rush Limbaugh and his local counterparts), and CNN’s Lou Dobbs Show. The controversy proved irresistible for the mainstream news media, which reported the story and broadcast clips of the videos many times. These video attacks compounded ACORN’s problems, having been the victim of another manufactured scandal before and during the 2008 presidential campaign, when Karl Rove, John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the Republican establishment falsely accused ACORN of “voter fraud.”

The videos led many of ACORN’s supporters to abandon the community organizing group. Soon after the video scandal surfaced in the mainstream media, the U.S. House of Representatives (including many Democrats who had worked with ACORN in the past) voted to de-fund the organization. In reality, less than 10 percent of ACORN’s budget came from federal grants. But the symbolism of Congress’ action was more important than the money itself. Congress’ action provoked ACORN’s cautious foundation funders to drop the group like a hot potato.

Within a few months, ACORN had been exonerated of wrongdoing by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office, the Attorney General of California, and a federal judge, who ruled that the law barring the group’s receipt of federal funds was unconstitutional. By then, however, it was too late. In April, ACORN laid off its entire staff and closed its offices in over 100 cities. (Meanwhile, last January O’Keefe was arrested for breaking into Sen. Mary Landrieu’s New Orleans office in another “gotcha” attempt,; he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years of probation, a fine of $1,500 and 100 hours of community service).

(Full disclosure: We were a target of Breitbart’s smear tactics after we published a study last year revealing the distorted media coverage of the manufactured ACORN controversy. An updated and expanded version of that study will be published in a few weeks in the fall issue of Perspectives on Politics, a journal sponsored by the American Political Science Association).

Now Breitbart is back in the news as a result of another manufactured controversy, this one regarding Shirley Sherrod. He’s gotten even more media attention for this episode than he did for his ACORN shenanigans. But the current firestorm has many of the same elements as the phony ACORN scandal that he cooked up last year.

First, Breitbart posted a highly doctored video on his website that was intended to put its target (both African Americans — hardly a coincidence) in the worst possible light. Then the right-wing echo chamber — including Fox News and the conservative blogosphere — picked up Breitbart’s ball and ran with it. Next, the mainstream media — the daily newspapers and the TV networks — took the false accusations at face value and repeated them without bothering to verify and fact-check, acting more like stenographers than reporters. Finally, liberal groups like the NAACP and liberal politicians (in this case, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and the White House), wary of any controversy, jumped the gun and distanced themselves from the target of Breitbart’s attacks — by firing Sherrod before she even had an opportunity to explain or they bothered to investigate the accusations.

Unlike the manufactured ACORN controversy, Breitbart’s deception in the Sherrod “scandal” was uncovered quickly. A few media outlets, including CNN, dug a bit deeper, interviewed Sherrod, talked to the white farmers that Sherrod helped, reviewed the entire videotape of her speech to the NAACP in Georgia, and disclosed what should have been apparent from the beginning — that what Sherrod actually said had no relationship to what Breitbart claimed she said. This led the White House, Vilsack, the NAACP and others to offer apologies and led Vilsack to offer Sherrod another job with the Department of Agriculture.

There are thousands of right-wing websites and bloggers, but so far Breitbart is the most successful, having mastered — indeed, having helped create — the new rules of political combat made possible by the internet and cable TV.

Breitbart has not only drawn attention to his manufactured scandals but also to himself. Time magazine, the New Yorker, Wired, Slate, and other publications have published profiles of Breitbart. These profiles could hardly be called fawning or even admiring. He comes across as an obnoxious, self-centered bully. But the profiles are nevertheless respectful, in the sense that they recognize his entrepreneurial skill and his take-no-prisoners attitude.

Both the right-wing echo chamber and the mainstream media don’t quite know how to categorize Breitbart and what he does. The Philadelphia Daily News called him a “rising conservative media figure.” The Washington Post called him a “conservative activist” and an “internet entrepreneur.” NPR described him as a “conservative online news entrepreneur.” The New York Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution called him a “blogger,” while Newsday and the New Republic called him a “conservative blogger.” The Las Vegas Review-Journal called him an “online muckraker and journalist.” Sean Hannity, the San Francisco Chronicle, and ABC’s “Good Morning America” labeled him a “publisher.”

Regardless of what he’s called, the Sherrod story is a good example of Breitbart’s skill at what academics call “agenda-setting” and “framing”.A week ago, hardly anyone had ever heard of Shirley Sherrod. Now, she’s practically a household name. And many people who might not recognize her name at least know something of the story. In the past few days, almost every major news outlet has published or broadcast something about this story. That’s the art of agenda-setting.

Americans not only know who Sherrod is, they already have an opinion about her, because they’ve been told that she’s a black federal employee who used her position to discriminate against whites. That’s the art of framing. Within a matter of hours, that frame burned through the media like prairie fire.

This process is easily verified by an examination of Lexis-Nexis. Among daily newspapers, the conservative Washington Times has been the most likely to report Breitbart’s propaganda over the past few years, followed by the Wall Street Journal. Among magazines, the conservative National Review, followed by the right-wing American Spectator, have given Breitbart a megaphone. Among TV networks, Fox News has been Breitbart’s best customer, followed by CNN.

Only after his smears are reported in the right-wing echo chamber do the mainstream media outlets pick it up, where it reaches a much wider audience. The mainstream media are mesmerized by the Tea Party and controversies that it and its political allies have stoked. In bending over backwards to cover the right wing — and downplay comparable activities by liberal and progressive activists — the reporters and editors have lost sight of the journalists’ responsibilities not only to fact-check and verify, but also to provide context.

By now it is clear what Breitbart is selling. But the real question is why the mainstream media and Democratic politicians bought it. Breitbart is a con artist, but con artists succeed if consumers don’t know they are being conned — or don’t care.

Given Breitbart’s track record, why does anyone — reporters and editors, foundations, advocacy groups, and elected officials — take him seriously? Or why not at least treat him like an arm of the Tea Party, as a political activist, and a propagandist, not as a source of credible information?

Of course, Breitbart has offered no apology and is still trying to defend and justify his actions. Perhaps this most recent brouhaha will destroy Breitbart’s credibility with the mainstream media and even with his right-wing colleagues at Fox News and elsewhere, who were embarrassed by the Sherrod mishap.

But it isn’t only the mainstream media that needs to do some soul-searching. It is also the Obama Administration and, more broadly, liberal Democrats and liberal advocacy groups and foundations, who were too quick to distance themselves from ACORN and now Sherrod.

Clearly the Obama administration over-reacted, fearful, as a high-level official put it, of having the Sherrod story show up on Glenn Beck’s Fox News show. Why they are so intimidated by Beck and his ilk is a mystery. Their followers, and those who identify with the Tea Party, represent no more than 15 percent of all voters. Moreover, very few of Beck’s (or Limbaugh’s) devotees would even consider voting for a Democrat. After all, they think Obama is a Marxist, a Muslim, and a foreigner. This is not a constituency that Obama and the Democrats are going to win over by appearing to be bipartisan or middle-of-the-road.

And if Obama and his inner circle are worried that Breitbart’s and Beck’s poison will spread from their base among right-wing zealots and start influencing “independent” and “swing” voters — and thus help sway close elections toward Republican candidates — then the best way to prevent that from happening is to fight back, and challenge their lies and distortions, not run away and hide, or capitulate, as they did by firing Van Jones, abandoning ACORN, and firing Shirley Sherrod.

Breitbart’s credibility may or may not survive the Sherrod controversy. But what’s important is whether responsible journalists — as well as the Obama administration, the Democrats, and liberals and progressives — learn some lessons from this episode.

Peter Dreier teaches politics at Occidental College. Christopher Martin teaches communications at the University of Northern Iowa.

Follow Peter Dreier on Twitter: www.twitter.com/peterdreier

Peter Dreier

E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, Occidental College

Christopher R. Martin

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/why-does-anyone-take-andr_b_657964.html

---

http://money.cnn.com:(style="background-color:#fafafaff"):}::{/2017/:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}::{02/22/media/james-okeefe-cnn/index.html

Conservative provocateur James O'Keefe is setting his sights on CNN.

O'Keefe said in a telephone interview with CNN on Wednesday that he has "a few hundred hours" of "secretly recorded material" from inside the network. "We're calling it CNN Leaks," he said, drawing inspiration from WikiLeaks' document dumps.

He said "part one" would be published Thursday at about 10 a.m. ET. "This is all legally recorded information," he said, declining to be more specific.

O'Keefe, who uses undercover stings to trap his targets, has a reputation for shady tactics and exaggerated statements.

Some of his so-called exposés have relied on misleading editing techniques. And an incident in 2010 landed him in legal trouble. After he was arrested at Senator Mary Landrieu's office, O'Keefe pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for entering federal property under false pretenses. He was sentenced to three years of probation, plus community service and a fine.

Given his track record, many consider O'Keefe discredited, and not a serious journalist.

In the phone interview on Wednesday, he said that characterization is "very false and very inappropriate."

O'Keefe's fans, who cheer him on via social media and donate to his nonprofit group, Project Veritas, say he is serious about rooting out liberal corruption, voter fraud and media bias.

His detractors say his salesman techniques are an attempt to mask unethical practices.

Armed with donations, hidden cameras and his YouTube account, O'Keefe has repeatedly tried to embarrass big news organizations in the past. Most of his other subjects have been liberal groups.

Asked why CNN is one of his targets, he said, "My audience, the American people, are deeply upset at the media." He cited President Trump's critiques of "fake news."

"We think our media needs to be held to account, and CNN is kind of the leader of that. CNN has a very important role as an arbiter of news," he said.

Beyond just CNN, "the media is a huge target of mine right now," O'Keefe said.

"We have a dozen investigations going on, which is one of the reasons I don't have time to go through hundreds of hours of tape," he added.

So the "raw information" will be posted, calling to mind WikiLeaks' dumps of stolen emails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta last fall.

Along with Thursday's release, O'Keefe said he would announce a "financial award" to encourage other sources to come forward.

O'Keefe is best known for a 2009 takedown of a prominent community organizing group called ACORN. In a series of stings, O'Keefe presented himself as a pimp and sought advice from ACORN staffers about operating a brothel and evading taxes.

The scandalous caught-on-camera conversations led to firings and federal defunding of the group. Some ACORN supporters raised questions about the ethics and the legality of the stings, however, and one employee sued O'Keefe, alleging that O'Keefe broke the law by taping him without consent. O'Keefe settled for $100,000.

Later targets included NPR and Planned Parenthood. Sometimes his stunts backfired. In 2010, O'Keefe tried to "punk" Abbie Boudreau, then a CNN correspondent, with hidden cameras aboard a boat, but the plan was thwarted. At the time, O'Keefe's mentor, the late Andrew Breitbart, said the plan was "patently gross and offensive."

O'Keefe has a tendency to exaggerate his findings, with video titles like "Rigging the Election." A profile in The New Yorker last year called him an "amateurish" spy.

O'Keefe told the reporter, Jane Mayer, that "he is not a dirty trickster but an investigative journalist and a leading practitioner of modern political warfare."

Last fall, O'Keefe of Democratic operatives with ties to Hillary Clinton's campaign talking about inciting violence at Trump rallies. One man, Scott Foval, was dismissed, and another, Robert Creamer, resigned from his campaign-related responsibilities.

The Democratic National Committee said the recorded conversations were only hypothetical, butthe embarrassing video clips received widespread attention, including from Trump, who brought up the tapes during one of the presidential debates.

PolitiFactnoted that O'Keefe's investigators often goad their subjects "with leading statements," and "the videos are edited in ways that the context of the conversation or the meaning of the statement isn't always clear."

But the fact-checking site also noted that what Project Veritas found was "eyebrow-raising."

O'Keefe said Thursday that "the media was dragged kicking and screaming to cover that story."

In recent interviews and speeches, O'Keefe foreshadowed his desire to target newsrooms, even though he also said in one speech that "social media is now more powerful than the mainstream media."

In a presentation last November, he said "the media in this country" is "dead, and we have killed it."

Last month O'Keefe said at a party for Trump supporters that he had spies "embedded in your institutions."

"We are inside the newsrooms, and that is going to be our next target," he said.

O'Keefe previewed the CNN investigation, without naming CNN, on Sean Hannity's radio show on Tuesday.

Hannity sounded gleeful about it. But others have a much more skeptical view of O'Keefe. Hannity also hosts a prime time show on Fox News, and some of his colleagues have openly questioned O'Keefe's credibility.

"He's had to pay lawsuit settlements," Fox host Juan Williams said last fall, saying O'Keefe "doesn't have a high level of credibility."

CNNMoney (New York) First published February 22, 2017: 4:31 PM ET

AN 1/17

James O’Keefe, the conservative operative whose discredited video “stings” have resulted in him paying massive fines and apologizing to his targets, is up to his usual stunts. This time, O’Keefe’s Project Veritas—a hilarious name for an organization that has nothing but contempt for the truth—is taking aim at anti-Trump activists and critics. The group’s latest con, which takes a page right out of the FBI’s 1960s COINTELPRO book, involves attempts at bribing progressive activists to disrupt inauguration activities, creating violence, sowing discord and generating lots of bad press for conservative media to gloat over. Unfortunately for O'Keefe, two left-leaning groups conducted a video counter-sting that caught him and his would-be accomplices in the act.

Huffington Post reports that after getting wind of O’Keefe’s effort, members of the Undercurrent andAmericans Take Action set up hidden cameras to document the kinds of underhanded dealings the group had planned. In footage released by the Undercurrent, O’Keefe-aligned conspirator Alison Maass—who gained fame last August for trying, and failing, to infiltrate Wisconsin Democratic Senator Russ Feingold’s campaign—is captured trying to enlist recruits in the right-wing scheme. She tells an activist her group has “unlimited resources” to pay a rabblerouser willing to create enough chaos to “put a stop to the inauguration...interrupt the parties.” In a video that suggests the pricetag for said acts rises as high as $500,000, Maass explains what would satisfy O’Keefe.

“He’d like to turn on some TV, and maybe not even see Trump,” Maas says in one of the clips from the video below. In another she states that a shutdown of the inauguration would make O’Keefe “ultimately the happiest, and wanting to open up his wallet.”

The counter-sting video is just the first in a series Americans Take Action is set to release uncovering O’Keefe’s sleazy methods. Executive producer Lauren Windsor says there’s more where that came from.

O’Keefe became a right-wing darling in 2009, after his phony sting on ACORN, a community organization and voter registration group doing the kind of good work for poor people that infuriates Republicans. The resulting footage, deceptively edited to make it look as if ACORN workers were engaging in unethical and illegal activities, resulted in a media firestorm, which led to the group being defunded and wiped out of existence. In the months that followed, it became clear that the video was hamfistedly cut together to present an altogether different picture than the truth. In 2013, O’Keefe was ordered to pay $100,000 and offer a public apology to a former ACORN employee.

The fact that O’Keefe’s methodology has serious ethical issues and demonstrates a willingness to lie to produce the desired political ends must be what attracted Donald Trump and his campaign team. Numerous outlets report that the Trump Foundation gave O’Keefe’s organization $10,000 to get dirt on supporters of Hillary Clinton during the presidential campaign. Trump also invited O’Keefe to a presidential debate last October. American Family Voice was among the groups O’Keefe attempted to frame as part of his anti-Democratic videos earlier this year.

O’Keefe has stumbled and bumbled through a series of would-be stunts, resulting in a number of failures that have made the news. Back in 2010, still basking in the light of his ACORN win, he tried to prank CNN correspondent Abbie Boudreau, but she found outright before the shoot started. As part of a ludicrous series titled “To Catch a Journalist”—which at least implies he recognizes he doesn’t doesn’t deserve the title—O’Keefe became the unintended punchline of his own joke, and waslaughed out of the halls of Columbia Journalism School. Last year, one of O’Keefe’s agents failed to nail a Clinton campaign staffer for international T-shirt sales; at a “press conference” O’Keefe held, one journalist asked, “Is this a joke?” In May, O’Keefe attempted one of his pranks against the Open Society Institute (George Soros is right-wing enemy number one), but failed after he forgot to hang up a phone and accidentally left a voicemail giving his plan away.

Ryan Clayton, the progressive activist who helped carry out the counter-sting on O’Keefe’s latest project, told the Huffington Post he was honored to help out. “It was my pleasure to work with the highly skilled operatives who pulled off this reverse sting of political conman James O’Keefe and his Project Veritas cohorts.”

bak

okeefeJ516

---

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/james-okeefe-stings-himself

n March 16th, a man who said his name was Victor left a voice message at the offices of the Open Society Foundations, which are funded by George Soros, saying that he was a potential donor. Then, he forgot to hang up the phone, and the machine recorded “Victor” and his staff describing what sounded like an entrapment scheme. This week, James O’Keefe, the conservative activist who has used undercover videos to try to embarrass Planned Parenthood, NPR, and ACORN, admitted that he was the caller and apologized to his supporters for the failed operation. On “The New Yorker Radio Hour,” the staff writer Jane Mayer goes through the voice-mail recording to see what it tells us about O’Keefe’s methods and the scope of his ambitions.

---

Dana Geraghty recalls it, March 16th was a “rather quiet Wednesday.” That afternoon, she was in her cubicle at the Open Society Foundations, on West Fifty-seventh Street, where she helps oversee the nonprofit group’s pro-democracy programs in Eurasia. The Foundations are the philanthropic creation of George Soros, the hedge-fund billionaire, who is a prominent donor to liberal causes, including Hillary Clinton’s Presidential bid. Soros, who has spent nineteen million dollars on the 2016 Presidential campaign, is regarded with suspicion by many conservatives. National Review has suggested that he may be fomenting protests against Donald Trump by secretly funding what it called a “rent-a-mob.” Geraghty, who is twenty-eight, had programmed her office phone to forward messages from unfamiliar callers to her e-mail inbox. She was about to review several messages when she noticed that one of them was extraordinarily long. “Who leaves a seven-minute voice mail?” Geraghty asked herself. She clicked on it.

“Hey, Dana,” a voice began. The caller sounded to her like an older American male. “My name is, uh, Victor Kesh. I’m a Hungarian-American who represents a, uh, foundation . . . that would like to get involved with you and aid what you do in fighting for, um, European values.” He asked Geraghty for the name of someone he could talk to “about supporting you guys and coördinating with you on some of your efforts.” Requesting a callback, he left a phone number with a 914 area code—Westchester County.

She heard a click, a pause, and then a second male voice. The person who had introduced himself as Kesh said, “Don’t say anything . . . before I hang up the phone.”

“That piqued my interest,” Geraghty recalls. Other aspects of the message puzzled her: “Who says they’re with a foundation without saying which one? He sounded scattered. And usually people call to get funding, not to offer it.” Victor Kesh, she suspected, was “someone passing as someone else.”

She continued to listen, and the man’s voice suddenly took on a more commanding tone. The caller had failed to hang up, and Kesh, unaware that he was still being recorded, seemed to be conducting a meeting about how to perpetrate an elaborate sting on Soros. “What needs to happen,” he said, is for “someone other than me to make a hundred phone calls like that”—to Soros, to his employees, and to the Democracy Alliance, a club of wealthy liberal political donors that Soros helped to found, which is expected to play a large role in financing this year’s campaigns. Kesh described sending into the Soros offices an “undercover” agent who could “talk the talk” with Open Society executives. Kesh’s goal wasn’t fully spelled out on the recording, but the gist was that an operative posing as a potential donor could penetrate Soros’s operation and make secret videos that exposed embarrassing activities. Soros, he assured the others, has “thousands of organizations” on the left in league with him. Kesh said that the name of his project was Discover the Networks.

The money that would be offered, Kesh said, couldn’t come from “offshore British Virgin Island companies,” because “Soros’s people don’t want to take money from a group like that.” He claimed that “Bill Clinton would” take suspect cash, “and Hillary Clinton would, and Chelsea would.”

One member of the team suggested to Kesh that he knew someone who could infiltrate the Soros network: an English orthopedic surgeon with “a real heavy British accent,” who was in the U.S. and was “more than happy to do anything he can do for us.” The surgeon was sophisticated about technology and would not “have any problem with the cameras.” The team member said, “He’s a very talented guy, so, I mean, he’ll be able to pull it off.” As Kesh mapped out the covert attack, however, he had no idea that the only person he was stinging was himself.

The accidental recording reached farcical proportions when Kesh announced that he was opening Geraghty’s LinkedIn page on his computer. He planned to check her résumé and leverage the information to penetrate the Soros “octopus.” Kesh said, “She’s probably going to call me back, and if she doesn’t I can create other points of entry.” Suddenly, Kesh realized that by opening Geraghty’s LinkedIn page he had accidentally revealed his own LinkedIn identity to her. (LinkedIn can let users see who has looked at their pages.) “Whoa!” an accomplice warned. “Log out!” The men anxiously reassured one another that no one checks their LinkedIn account anyway. “It was a little chilling to hear this group of men talking about me as a ‘point of entry,’ ” Geraghty says. “But—not to sound ageist—it was clear that these people were not used to the technology.”

Geraghty forwarded the voice-mail recording to Chris Stone, the president of the Open Society Foundations. “The Watergate burglars look good compared to these guys,” Stone told me last month. “These guys can’t even figure out how to use an Internet browser, let alone conduct an undercover operation. You read the transcript and you can’t help but laugh.” He went on, “But the issues here aren’t funny. There’s some kind of dirty-tricks operation in play against us.”

In the Westchester County suburb of Mamaroneck, a street-level office has reflective glass doors and windows that make it impossible to see inside. This is the headquarters of James O’Keefe III—the conservative activist who placed the phony phone call pretending to be Victor Kesh. As he showed me around, in late April, O’Keefe, who is thirty-one, told me that he is not a dirty trickster but an investigative journalist and a leading practitioner of modern political warfare. “We’ve got this guerrilla army, and it’s coming to fruition soon,” he said. “This is our base of operations.” Waving his hand around seven thousand square feet of empty office space, he said, “This is our NORAD. It’s our field operation.”

The back wall of the office, he explained, would soon be hung with an enormous corkboard covered with maps. Affixed to each map would be a card with the location and the assumed name of every undercover political operative working for his nonprofit, Project Veritas. Created in 2010 as a charity that could accept tax-deductible contributions, Project Veritas says on its Web site that it is dedicated to exposing “corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud, and other misconduct.”

O’Keefe graduated from Rutgers University in 2006. He says that a professor there, David Knowlton, urged him to follow Saul Alinsky’s rule book, which advised radicals to use their enemies’ rules against them. On St. Patrick’s Day in 2005, O’Keefe lampooned campus political correctness by demanding that the dining hall ban Lucky Charms cereal. The box’s depiction of a leprechaun, he proclaimed, perpetuated “offensive” stereotypes about Irish-Americans. He videotaped a confrontation that he’d had with a school administrator and posted the footage on YouTube, launching his career as a political stunt artist. The Lucky Charms prank remains “a crowd favorite,” O’Keefe told me.

In 2014, his organization became more directly involved in electoral politics, sprouting a “social welfare” limb called the Project Veritas Action Fund. Such organizations, referred to in the tax code as 501c4 groups, have proliferated since 2010, when the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Citizens United case essentially legalized unlimited corporate and individual spending on politics. Unlike ordinary charities, 501c4 groups can accept unlimited contributions from secret donors and spend the cash directly on campaigns. They just need to make a plausible case that they promote social welfare and that politics is not their primary purpose. O’Keefe says that the new group “allows us to literally put someone undercover in a campaign.”

In the era of “dark money,” as anonymous political donations are often described, Project Veritas has been thriving. According to its federal tax filings, between 2013 and 2014 its budget doubled, from $1.2 million to $2.4 million. O’Keefe told me that he has “about a dozen undercover operations ongoing at any given time.” One of these, he said, involves “someone working for Hillary Clinton full time, as a paid staffer.” This “embedded” operative, he said, “is employed in the campaign in the highest echelons.” (He declined to be more specific.) Every day, the operative sends “video to us over our own server.” He added, “Just like Hillary Clinton, we have our own Internet server in Westchester County!” He went on, “We see everything. We have thousands of hours of video. You’ll see infighting, plans, strategy.” O’Keefe said that he has been compiling a feature film from the operative’s footage, but won’t release it until the late summer or fall, when it will have maximum impact. In the meantime, he has posted teasers online; several of the clips end with the words “Stay tuned, Hillary, and check your e-mail.”

O’Keefe promised that footage he has acquired through his various operatives “will force people to resign.” He later added that he had video of “top, top, top-ranking officials discussing how and why they commit” voter fraud “to sway races.”

Given O’Keefe’s track record, it would be a mistake to take his grand statements too seriously. He first gained wide notoriety in 2009, when he released a series of undercover videos attacking the liberal community-organizing group ACORN. The videos had an immediate effect, but raised serious questions about his methods and ethics—questions that have trailed him ever since. He secretly filmed encounters in which he and a female colleague showed up at ACORN offices in various cities, claiming to be a pimp and an underage prostitute who wanted advice on how to make prostitution look like a legal business. ACORN officials appeared to oblige them, in one instance advising them to make sure that the immigrants O’Keefe claimed he was going to prostitute actually went to school as exchange students. After O’Keefe began releasing his exposés of ACORN, the House of Representatives voted to cut off federal funds to the group, which soon collapsed. But an ACORN official filmed in California, who was fired because he seemed to embrace the proposed scheme, successfully settled a lawsuit against O’Keefe for a hundred thousand dollars. He argued that he had not consented to be videotaped, as is required in California, and that after learning about the prostitution idea he had called the police. O’Keefe hadn’t bothered to contact the employee before airing the damning footage.

In January, 2010, the F.B.I. arrested O’Keefe and three accomplices, two of whom had disguised themselves as telephone repairmen in order to enter the New Orleans office of Mary Landrieu, then a Democratic senator for Louisiana. (O’Keefe says he had hoped to disprove Landrieu’s claim that her phone lines were too clogged to answer the many angry calls coming from Tea Party activists.) O’Keefe was sentenced to three years of probation and a hundred hours of community service; he also paid a fifteen-hundred-dollar fine.

In 2011, O’Keefe embarrassed National Public Radio when two accomplices, pretending to represent a radical Muslim group, proposed to donate five million dollars to the network in exchange for favorable programming about Islam. After O’Keefe released videos depicting two NPR employees chatting with the undercover operatives about the need to put Muslim voices on the air, and criticizing the Republican Party as “not just Islamophobic but really xenophobic,” two top NPR officials, including its chief executive, Vivian Schiller, resigned.

Many O’Keefe operations, however, have fallen flat, including his repeated efforts to prove that voter-identity fraud is pervasive. “It seems like most of the fraud O’Keefe uncovers he commits himself,” Richard Hasen, a professor of election law at the University of California, Irvine, says. A sting aimed at Hillary Clinton last year was considered especially feeble. Veritas operatives persuaded a staffer at a rally to accept a Canadian citizen’s money in exchange for a Hillary T-shirt—a petty violation of the ban on foreign political contributions. Brian Fallon, the communications director for the Clinton campaign, says, “Project Veritas has been repeatedly caught trying to commit fraud, falsify identities, and break campaign-finance law. It is not surprising, given that their founder has already been convicted for efforts like this.”

O’Keefe’s unseemly tactics have increasingly caused other conservatives, including Glenn Beck, to distance themselves from him. But the 2016 campaign cycle appears to be reinvigorating the political art form that Richard Nixon’s operative Donald Segretti infamously called “ratfucking.”

The use of deception and other subversive tactics to undermine voter choice is as old as the American republic. Thomas Jefferson enlisted surrogates to publish attacks on Alexander Hamilton, who responded with anonymous ripostes. In the eighteen-seventies, cities were infamous for using ballots printed on multi-ply tissue paper in order to multiply candidates’ votes. In 1972, Segretti published a phony letter that he claimed had been written by one of Nixon’s rivals, the Democratic Presidential candidate Edmund Muskie. The letter slurred Canadians as “Canucks,” and the resulting furor sent Muskie’s campaign into a tailspin.

With cash streaming into dark-money groups, negative campaigning is a growth industry. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of “Dirty Politics” (1992), told me, “Dirty tricks have always been covert operations. But more money means it’s more possible to cover your tracks in ways that make it insidious.” Over the years, Jamieson says, opposing campaigns have attempted to sabotage one another by planting scandalous material, releasing doctored photographs, and undertaking sting operations. In 2008, a “citizen journalist” attended a private San Francisco fund-raiser and posted a video of President Barack Obama making a maladroit reference to embittered Americans who “cling to guns or religion.” Four years later, a bartender working at a private fund-raiser for Mitt Romney recorded him dismissing forty-seven per cent of the electorate as freeloaders “dependent upon government.” Afterward, Romney could not shake the perception that he was élitist.

According to Jamieson, the ability to download videos from smartphones directly onto the Internet has normalized what used to be shadowy practices. “In the past, you were the uncredited hero who got the candidate elected,” she says. “Now the brazenness of the process is such that you will admit it and put it on your résumé!”

The expected contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is likely to be one of the nastiest in history, with putatively independent “opposition research” operations fuelling both parties. Meanwhile, negative campaigns funded by private donors and private interests are aiming at targets far beyond conventional candidates—among them intellectuals who have no official role.

O’Keefe declined to tell me why he had targeted George Soros. But Matthew Tyrmand, a recent addition to the Project Veritas board, has publicly declared his fierce opposition to Soros. Tyrmand is a thirty-five-year-old Polish-American investor who is an informal adviser to Poland’s right-wing nationalist government as well as a contributing writer at Breitbart, the conservative news site. As street protests have sprung up in Poland, Tyrmand has repeatedly suggested online that Soros is stoking the unrest. On the Web site of the Polonia Institute, a nonprofit that promotes Polish culture, he wrote that the “recent protest movement” was “rumored to be funded by George Soros’s Open Society Foundations” in order to “undermine and destabilize the new government.”

Tyrmand deflected numerous requests for an interview. When I finally reached him by phone, he said that he was too busy to talk. He was in France, on his way to the Cannes Film Festival for the première of “Clinton Cash,” a film adaptation of a scathing 2015 book by Peter Schweizer, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, which accuses the Clintons of enriching themselves by giving speeches to dubious sponsors. The film, along with other independently financed attacks on the Clintons, will significantly help Trump’s campaign by reducing its need to spend money on oppo research.

The first time I asked O’Keefe who Victor Kesh was, he declined to comment on what he called “investigations, real or imagined.” But, after learning that he had been caught on tape trying to infiltrate Soros’s group, he tried to put the best face on it. On May 11th, he, Tyrmand, and a cameraman showed up in the lobby of the Open Society Foundations, saying that they were conducting a serious investigation. O’Keefe phoned Dana Geraghty again, admitting that he had previously called her “posing as Victor,” and said that he had some “follow-up questions” about whether the Foundations were as transparent as they claim to be about the activities they fund. With the camera rolling, O’Keefe and his team stood outside the lobby and buttonholed people, asking them if Soros was funding Polish street protests.

Laura Silber, the chief communications officer for the Open Society Foundations, told me, “We were asked if we fund the Polish opposition—we don’t, directly or indirectly. We do support groups that advance the rule of law and human rights, which are under threat in Poland today.”

O’Keefe portrays himself as a rigorous journalist who is dedicated to furthering “a more ethical and transparent society.” He refuses, however, to be transparent about who is funding him. According to tax records obtained by PRWatch.org, an investigative watchdog group run by the Center for Media and Democracy, in recent years hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to Project Veritas have come through a fund in Alexandria, Virginia, called Donors Trust, which specializes in hiding the money trails of conservative philanthropists. In its promotional materials, Donors Trust says that it will “keep your charitable giving private, especially gifts funding sensitive or controversial issues.” The records obtained by PRWatch.org also show that one donor, a conservative political activist in Wisconsin, contributed fifty thousand dollars just before Project Veritas undertook a sting of one of his political enemies—a state senator.

O’Keefe, when asked if donors to his group can pay for him to investigate particular people or groups, answered, “It depends.” He will pursue a requested target “if it’s an idea I want to do, or if it advances our mission.” But he added, “Not many people can tell me what to do, because they don’t know how we do it.”

As O’Keefe’s budget has grown, so has his ambition. “I want to expand to every state,” he told me. “I want to be everywhere.” If uncovering the truth requires deception, fake names, disguises, and other subterfuge, he makes no apology. The signature O’Keefe method is to try to entrap his subjects into breaking the law—a strategy that most political operatives consider a step too far.

He showed me a tiny video camera that had been hidden inside an Aquafina water bottle, and others embedded in a wristwatch and in an iPod Shuffle. A device in his shirt button, which used Bluetooth technology, could relay live audio to his control room. He argued, “What I do is the truest form of journalism there is. We hit the record button and show people what we found.”

The political left also outsources much of its dirty work to privately funded super PACs and dark-money groups. After the Democrats were eviscerated in the 2010 midterm elections—the first congressional campaigns after the Citizens United decision—an independently funded group named American Bridge 21st Century began supplying opposition research to Democratic groups and candidates. The network was founded by David Brock, a self-described former “conservative hit man” who became notorious in the early nineties for having described Anita Hill as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.” In the aughts, Brock, who is gay, joined the Democratic Party—in part because he found the Republican Party homophobic—bringing with him an insider’s expertise in cutthroat politics. He describes American Bridge, which employs a hundred and fifty people, as a political “utility” for progressives.

The American Bridge network includes Media Matters, a watchdog operation that identifies what it sees as distortions by the right-wing press, and Correct the Record, a rapid-response unit that focusses on defending Hillary Clinton. Brock’s group also oversees political action committees, dark-money nonprofit organizations, and at least fifty video “trackers,” who hound Republican candidates in the hope of recording politically damaging moments. Video trackers have been mainstays of campaigns since 2006, when a Democratic volunteer upended George Allen, the Republican gubernatorial candidate in Virginia, by releasing a video of him uttering a racist slur. In 2012, one of the trackers with Brock’s organization captured Todd Akin, a Missouri Republican running for the Senate, defending “legitimate rape.” With American Bridge’s success has come funding, largely from labor unions and wealthy liberals. One of the biggest contributors this year is George Soros—which may help explain why he was the object of an O’Keefe sting.

After Mitt Romney lost the 2012 Presidential election, conservative operatives concluded that they needed their own putatively independent negative-campaign machine. Out of this partisan arms race grew America Rising—the unofficial oppo-research affiliate of the Republican Party—which was founded in 2013 by Matt Rhoades, the former head of Romney’s campaign. Based in Arlington, Virginia, it diverges from Brock’s network in one crucial respect: It is a limited-liability corporation. Instead of relying on charitable and political donations, America Rising serves as a for-profit vender to conservative clients, who pay it to conduct customized negative research.

Rhoades and others declined to respond to interview requests, but when I stopped by America Rising’s headquarters, on May 18th, the office was filled with young researchers bent over their laptops. The walls were decorated with photographs of conservative icons (though Trump’s portrait seemed to be missing). An office door was covered with bull’s-eye targets, and a sign reminded staffers of the “Research Checklist: Nexis, Google Alerts, Facebook, Twitter.”

Brock told me that his group had rejected the vender model. “We didn’t want to be under clients’ thumbs,” he said. “If you work for them, you’re subservient. We wanted to build an independent progressive infrastructure.” Recently, some donors wanted video trackers to trail the Koch brothers, but Brock turned them down. American Bridge does a huge amount of oppo research on the Kochs, but Brock says he believes that tracking private citizens is unethical. He claims that he has also rejected the use of subterfuge. “We’re not in that game,” he says.

By contrast, in late April the dark-money arm of Rhoades’s group, America Rising Squared, announced the creation of a negative campaign to target leading environmentalists as well as prominent donors to environmental causes and candidates. The campaign’s initial budget was a hundred thousand dollars, which, among other things, would cover the extensive use of video trackers. According to the political tip sheet The Hill, the campaign would subject environmentalists to “the same level of scrutiny . . . that opposition research firms apply to presidential candidates.” America Rising Squared’s executive director, Brian Rogers, told The Hill that his group planned to hold “the Environmentalist Left accountable for their epic hypocrisy and extreme positions which threaten America’s future prosperity.”

Almost simultaneously, in early May, the organization announced the launch of an affiliated venture, run by many of the same operatives, called Definers Public Affairs. Definers offers to wage political-style negative campaigns, for profit, on behalf of undisclosed private clients, including corporations. According to its Web site, Definers will “create dossiers” on opponents, monitor them from a “full-service war room,” and build both “grassroots” alliances and “a paid online presence.” This raises the possibility that undisclosed business interests are paying to choose the targets they want Republican operatives to attack.

Soon after the campaign against environmentalists was announced, Bill McKibben, who teaches environmental studies at Middlebury College, in Vermont, got an alarming phone call from a librarian at Texas Tech University, in Lubbock, who supervises a literary archive to which McKibben had contributed his research papers. McKibben has been an outspoken activist against the Keystone XL pipeline, and in 2008 he co-founded 350.org, a “global grassroots climate movement.” For many years, he was a staff writer for this magazine. (He is now a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, where he recently reviewed a book of mine.) He is a political thinker, but not a candidate, a major political donor, or a paid campaign operative.

The Texas librarian, Diane Warner, told McKibben that a man had shown up at the archive and requested copies of all his papers—fifty-four boxes of documents. The man identified himself as Aaron Goss, and said that he worked for Definers Public Affairs. Goss spent a week copying pages from McKibben’s archive. Meanwhile, as McKibben was getting ready to speak about the environment at a church in Durham, New Hampshire, an unfamiliar man aimed a video camera at him. The next day, a wordless two-second snippet of footage appeared online, showing McKibben looking at the camera and then turning away uncomfortably, to the accompaniment of the song “Show Me That Smile.” The video, which was titled “Bill McKibben: Ready for His Closeup,” was posted to the Twitter account of Corenews.org.

The site is another recent creation of America Rising Squared, as is an app called Grill, which enables users to track the location of ideological enemies, including Hillary Clinton, and lists hostile questions to ask at public events, such as “Will you drop out of the Presidential race if you are indicted?” Within days, another contentless video snippet of McKibben popped up, this time showing him in Australia. The threat was clear: wherever he went, his enemies would be recording him.

Who paid for a professional oppo-research team to mock an environmental activist? The answer is secret. One could argue that the campaign isn’t substantially different from that of a corporate lobbyist, but, unlike registered lobbyists, America Rising Squared doesn’t have to file public disclosures or pay taxes, because it purports to be a social-welfare organization.

McKibben told me, “I have no fear of debating these people on the issues, but this is just intimidation.” He added, “It’s bad enough to do this to anyone who runs for office. But to do it to anyone who dares protest?”

Tom Steyer, the retired hedge-fund billionaire who runs the environmental-action group NextGen Climate and has been one of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors, is another target of America Rising Squared. Corenews.org has featured posts calling Steyer hypocritical, because he made a fortune investing in fossil fuels. America Rising Squared has accused him of self-interest in supporting green energy, as he has substantial investments in solar power. Steyer says that this is “complete and utter nonsense,” because his investments are held by trusts and structured in a way that any profits are transferred to charity. “They have to know they’re lying,” Steyer said. “It’s completely dishonest, unethical, and pitiful. And it’s creepy.” He says that the anonymously funded attacks won’t stop him, but he worries that such campaigns may deter others from engaging in activism. As he puts it, they “are another reason people are reluctant to get involved in politics.”

It may be that the shock value of such exposés is diminishing. A recent series of sting videos against Planned Parenthood, created by a group called the Center for Medical Progress, involved deceptions so devious—including an attempt by undercover operatives to buy fetal tissue—that the campaign backfired. Pro-choice activists united in anger at the sting’s perpetrators, and a Texas grand jury cleared Planned Parenthood of wrongdoing and indicted the C.M.P. In Presidential politics, gaffes may be less damaging. As Brock notes, “In the year of Trump, people are more inured to the outrageous.”

O’Keefe promises that his covert documentary of the Hillary Clinton campaign will command attention. But on May 19th he publicly conceded defeat in the Open Society Foundations investigation. In an interview posted on Breitbart News, he confessed that he had “been forced to abandon an ambitious undercover investigation into billionaire left-wing financier George Soros.” O’Keefe acknowledged that he “forgot to hang up” the phone, but declined to be more specific about the operation, saying, “I don’t like to reveal the tactics of what we do.” He apologized to his supporters and promised that his many other investigations had not been compromised. “Unfortunately, I’m burned on this particular investigation,” he said, adding that he was “very disappointed,” because he believes that the influence of billionaires such as Soros is “the most important topic undermining democracy.” But he concluded, “If I wanted to be perfect, I would give up.” ?

just when you think he's gone:

7/15 planned parenthood body par scam inspired by?

vitter rep

For those of you who can't get enough of all the turmoil at NPR, here's an unedited 46-minute interview with James O'Keefe III. O'Keefe's hidden camera video of a lunch between two NPR fundraisers and a faux Muslim group managed to do more damage to NPR than O'Keefe ever could have envisioned.

Here's the tease:In this interview, On the Media hostBob Garfield asks O'Keefe about his tactics. O'Keefe occasionally gets angry at Garfield's questions, claiming that when some in the media question his tactics, they are "obfuscating" real issues.

If James O'Keefe is staging guerrilla theater to expose hypocrisy and hate, a la Sasha Baron Cohen of Borat fame, maybe that's no big deal. But O'Keefe claims to be acting in the tradition of undercover investigative muckrakers. Bob asks James O'Keefe about misleading editing, distorted quotes, and how much untruth he is entitled to in his quest for veritas.

O'Keefe points out repeatedly that even revelations that his NPR video sting was heavily edited don't change the outcome: former NPR chief fundraiser Ron Schiller said some egregious things. (Ron Schiller has acknowledged this.)

O'Keefe calls himself a citizen journalist, but respected journalists do not selectively edit to make a political point.

O'Keefe could have played it straight and skipped the selective editing. But that would have reduced the impact of what he clearly wanted to do: Make NPR look as bad as possible.

Dave Davies, of Philadelphia station WHYY, has a thoughtful piecethat speaks to the speed with which stories break. He also wonders if NPR had had more time to digest the full two-hour video, if they might have reacted differently.

By the way, O'Keefe is asking supporters to help him defer the $50,000 cost of making the NPR sting video.

http://www.npr.org/sections/ombudsman/2011/03/24/134808849/on-the-media-interviews-james-okeefe-iii

OMFG:

The role Sea Change plays as a member of the Billionaire’s Club is deeply troubling,

especially in light of recent revelations that environmental activists, many of whom are clearly

benefiting from this extreme “dark money,” do not have any moral qualms over where their

money comes from – so long as it supports the far-left cause.

416

[CODE for ISLAM]

This sentiment was captured by

a recently released investigative video that revealed Hollywood producers of far-left

environmental films were eager to accept Middle Eastern money to produce an anti-fracking

video. Notably, in speaking with a man believed to represent rich Middle Eastern oil interests

opposed to American energy independence through fracking, one producer said:

416 Project Veritas, Full Un edited raw video, exclusive release by Project Veritas, available at YouTube.com,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6HZ5VLmyes&list=UUL9PlYkRD3Q-RZca6CCnPKw (last visited July 29,

2014).

This is not the first major project that we’ve had funded through a funding source

which you know, for various reasons – we didn’t disclose. It would have been

very unwise for everybody to understand the dynamics of that funding. So we

know how tricky it is…. It’s money, so in that sense we have no moral issue. OKEEFE

---

I also wanted to point out that last week we broke the story that notorious media-for-hire hatchet man James O'Keefe (remember ACORN?) appeared to be working hand in hand with Wisconsin Club for Growth's Eric O'Keefe in attacking Wisconsin Republicans who were not working in lockstep with Governor Walker. Last year, James released a video of an inebriated Wisconsin Senate President Mike Ellis, which forced him out of office. CMD exclusively revealed that the Koch-tied dark money guru Eric O'Keefe gave James O'Keefe $50,000, presumably for the hit on Ellis who was a quiet critic of the extreme Walker agenda.

http://www.prwatch.org/news/2015/01/12714/eric-okeefe-james-okeefe-mike-ellis

moderation:

4.3.5 Video (ACORN)

Just as the Internet initially made everyone publishers, it is now making us all a potential television station. Video has become omnipresent because of cell phones. It has a visceral seeing-is-believing power, even though we commonly understand that editing (selection and juxtaposition) can alter meaning a great deal. It has had a dampening effect on politicians’ pronouncements at even semi-public events, since some offhand remarks can become persisting damaging sound bites. The ability of videos to go viral increases their effect (Posting them on popular blog greatly increases possibility of going viral. For example, Andrew Breitbart endorsed his protégé James O'Keefe's videos attacking (and in fact quickly destroying) ACORN, a longstanding and successful grassroots organization that was particularly effective at registering poor people to vote (1.3 million in the 2008 election). O'Keefe was the recipient of funding from the Scaife-funded Collegiate Network to start a conservative college newspaper (see incubators 4.3). In addition, he participated in training others at the Leadership Institute (Rove, Norquist, Abramoff are alums), but was kicked out for endangering its putative non-political tax status (See 5.4).

O'Keefe (and an accomplice, Hannah Giles, whose father is a political evangelical minister) appeared to have dressed up in absurd Superfly pimp outfit and purported to elicit advice from ACORN on how to engage in prostitution, which they surreptitiously videotaped and then misleadingly edited. In fact O'Keefe dressed in normal attire and asked for assistance in getting his girlfriend OUT of prostitution, which he received. An ACORN staffer reported the incident to the police, but to no avail. A House resolution to honor the "fact-finding reporting" done by Giles and O'Keefe, the "government watchdogs" was introduced by Texas Rep. Pete Olson (R-TX) for the "exemplary actions" of the young conservatives, who "are owed a debt of gratitude by the people of the United States" (Olson). The videos led to a vote in the House that de-funded and thus destroyed ACORN.

O’Keefe created another misleadingly edited video of Shirley Sherrod, head of the Department of Agriculture's rural development office in Georgia which led to her forced resignation, although her speech made the exact opposite point regarding racism of the edited version. (O'Keefe was subsequently convicted for attempting to bug the offices of Rep. Mary Landrieu, defended by a very expensive Federalist Society lawyer who normally defends corporate malfeasance).

A more recent O’Keefe effort led to the resignation of two senior National Public Radio officials before the tape was shown to be heavily edited and thus distorted (as in previous instances). The tape was not just condensed (six separate statements that funding could not affect editorial content were left out), but statements were rearranged in sequence, and laughter was spliced in where none actually occurred, significantly affecting the meaning). But again, because of the compressed news cycle, and the echo chamber’s lack of correctives, the damage is quickly done and almost never remedied. [gasland etc fails?]

Analysis: During political campaigns, politicians (particularly those who are more progressive) have discovered that failing to respond to attacks, however absurd, is damaging. Thus, "War Rooms" are set up for quick response. This may be in part because the 24/7 news cycle, and the voracious appetite for sensation by media. Campaigns, and thus war rooms, are now perennial, which short-circuits deliberation. Not content with building its own “mirror” versions, the conservatives have tried to defund and discredit what little infrastructure the Left has (e.g., non-commercial and thus independent public broadcasting, ACORN, Public Interest Research Groups, and even "card-carrying member[s] of the ACLU"). None of this is an accident, [ nor a conspiracy theory, since] and the plan has been laid out explicitly by Norquist and others.

---

salon stories:

http://www.salon.com/topic/james_okeefe/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/17/james-okeefe-voter-fraud-video_n_1524146.html

Further doubt is being cast on conservative activist James O'Keefe's latest undercover video after a ThinkProgress report finds that another of the film's alleged fraudulent voters is actually a U.S. citizen who is eligible to vote.

O'Keefe and his Project Veritas group have been on a mission to uncover the supposed perils of voter fraud in an effort to make a case for voter ID laws. Critics have claimed that such legislation is a hysterical reaction to an incredibly rare problem that would end up denying thousands of eligible Americans the right to vote.

In their latest offering, O'Keefe's team heads to North Carolina, where, as in earlierproductions, they go undercover to suggest that non-citizens and the dead are empowered to vote because individuals don't need to present photo identification in order to receive their ballots.

ThinkProgress, which earlier reported that one of the supposed non-citizens in the video actually became a citizen decades ago, now finds that the film's second subject is also a naturalized U.S. citizen. From ThinkProgress:

In fact, [William] Romero’s family told ThinkProgress he became a naturalized citizen in early 2011.

What’s more, Romero’s family told ThinkProgress that they had began receiving harassing telephone calls two weeks before the incident in the video asking if Romero was a citizen. They confirmed to the caller -- it’s unclear whether they were speaking with O’Keefe himself or another individual -- that Romero is indeed a citizen. Nevertheless, O’Keefe proceeded to ambush the family at their home and publish this video claiming he’s not a citizen.

Beyond these issues, the supposed proof of a "dead voter" ploy was already beendebunked earlier this week. It turned out that O'Keefe's video had been edited to remove an interaction between a poll worker and Veritas "investigator" indicating that Michael Bolton -- the deceased voter in question -- had been survived by his son, Michael Bolton, Jr. In the raw footage, the election official asks if the man asking for the deceased Bolton's ballot is Michael Bolton, Jr., who is registered at the same address.

Of course, none of this is to say that the electoral system in North Carolina is flawless. As the Tar Heel State's WRAL reports:

In 2011, the North Carolina State Board of Elections identified 12 non-citizens who had improperly voted in a North Carolina election.

That's 12 out of 6.3 million registered voters.

WRAL also reports that dead voters cast votes all the time, primarily when somebody casts a mail-in or in-person absentee ballot and then dies before Election Day.

Gasland director Josh Fox recently found himself in a game of “Gotcha.” That is, until he turned the tables back around on the man who tried entrapping him.

Conservative activist James O’Keefe had loads of fun in recent years staging scams and releasing audio and video recordings of notable people who were supposedly caught in compromising or contradictory situations. He thought he had the perfect plan for Fox—an over-the-phone offer to fund a future project with so much oil money that even an environmentalist like Fox wouldn’t pass it up.

However, a listen to the recording lets you know just how poorly O’Keefe thought this thing out. He also didn’t anticipate that Fox would recording the conversation as well. That was perfect for exposing how O’Keefe edited the chat to give people the perception that Fox was a sellout.

MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes captures it all and lets Fox explain why he also recorded the odd conversation:

Fox reveals that representatives for O’Keefe’s fictitious financier had been sending emails for six months. He knew he was already involved in a “web of deception,” so hitting the record button once he received some phone time made a lot of sense.

“You do a brilliant job of setting that up, and it’s a laughing matter when you actually have the tape,” Fox told Hayes, “but let’s say I didn’t have it.

“Why did I record this? I recorded it because it looked shady, it looked like a scam, it looked like entrapment.”

——–

http://ecowatch.com/2014/05/25/gasland-josh-fox-james-okeefe-entrapment/

---

http://wonkette.com/549868/you-are-not-going-to-believe-this-but-james-okeefes-hollywood-sting-may-have-been-deceptively-edited

May 23, 2014 |

Conservative videographer James O’Keefe tried to make a big splash at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this week, debuting a 20-minute video that he claims exposes hypocrisy among notable documentary filmmakers and Hollywood activists. But the film ended up backfiring on O’Keefe as one of his targets,Gasland director Josh Fox, recorded his end of a phone conversation with O’Keefe’s cohorts, and exposed deceptive editing by O’Keefe.

O’Keefe also secretly recorded and filmed environmentalists Josh and Rebecca Tickell and their friends, actors Ed Begley, Jr., and Mariel Hemingway, trying to trap them into accepting financing for an anti-fracking film from Middle East oil interests.

But while the Tickell’s might have taken the bait from O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, Fox was wary of the group that contacted him several months back and made his own secret recording. Fox claims that he’s become careful with his contacts, as he’s frequently a target of the energy industry since the debut of his landmark 2010 documentary.

The latest O’Keefe saga began in December 2013, when Fox said that a large number of emails from a group called Beacon International began to arrive in his inbox. The organization claimed to be an overseas consortium interested in funding an anti-fracking film. Smelling a rat, Fox took to Google. All he could find was a hastily slapped-together site that “basically looked like a joke site up up overnight.”

Recognizing that he was likely being scammed, Fox began to ignore the emails. But Beacon International was persistent, even visiting Fox’s New York City apartment, where they left their calling cards in his mailbox and on his door.

Fox was even more suspicious at this point, and he decided to engage into the suspicious filmmakers. With a fellow filmmaker in the room, Fox made the call, recording the conversation from his end. In the recording Fox gave The Daily Beast, he asks a representative from Beacon International the names of the individuals the group represents. But the person on the other end of the phone, “Brandon Turner” would only tell Fox that they were from Europe and the Middle East. At this, Fox balked, repeatedly explaining to Turner that he wouldn’t participate in a project if he didn’t know the names of the individuals funding it.

On the recording Fox says: “We don’t know much about your company…I would need to have more transparency than you’re giving me right now to feel comfortable with doing that.”

Fox concluded that his contact with Beacon International was just a scam and didn’t give it much of a thought after that…until this week when James O’Keefe debuted his latest sting video at Cannes.

Toward the end of O’Keefe’s video, Fox is recorded as saying: “Obviously there are projects that we are working on ahead of time, that we’re working on now, that do sound like they would be interesting to your clients.” But Fox’s worries about Beacon International’s lack of transparency had been cut from the audio clip.

“We have them caught in total deception,” Fox told The Daily Beast. “This phone call reveals exactly how they work. They willfully portray it in the wrong light. They edit it so it sounds like you said something that you didn’t. Luckily I had the full tape.”

O’Keefe is a conservative activist who infamously produced audio and video recordings of staged encounters with public figures and workers in a variety of organizations, purportedly showing abusive or illegal behavior. He first gained national attention by recording ACORN workers supposedly aiding a couple (himself and a colleague pretending to be a pimp and a prostitute) in criminal planning in 2009. While the video footage virtually destroyed ACORN, California prosecutors later found that O’Keefe selectively and heavily edited the raw footage.

O’Keefe has receives monetary support from conservative media and interest groups to produce videos where he ‘punks’ individuals and organizations considered liberal. In 2009 Andrew Breitbart paid the activist to produce videos for BigGovernment.com. In June 2010 O’Keefe formed a 501(c)(3) organization, dubbed Project Veritas with the stated mission to “investigate and expose corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud and other misconduct.”

Despite his tactics, O’Keefe’s productions are praised by conservative pundits like Weekly Standard Editor Fred Barnes, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Bill O’Reilly.

O’Keefe’s activities have generated legal trouble for him. He was arrested and sentenced to three years’ probation for his involvement in a break-in and attempted wiretap at Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office in 2010.

In this latest sting operation, O’Keefe claims to have been inspired by the 2012 film Promised Land, where an anti-fracking activist was actually an operative for the energy companies trying to buy land rights from a small, rural community. The film was financed, in part, by an organization partially owned by the United Arab Emirates government.

After Fox didn’t take the bait, Brandon Turner dangled it in front of the Tickells, producers of the documentary,Fuel, a few months later. The Tickells are currently working on a documentary on hydraulic fracturing. The duo, however, were less suspicious of Turner and appeared grateful to have found possible funding for a film that they felt was very important.

Turner told the Tickells that his client — who wished to remain a silent parter — was from the Middle East and was heavily steeped in oil energy interests. The Tickells then participated in a series of follow-up conversations. The recordings portray the couple as promising to keep the identity of their new-found funding source a secret.

“We’re confident that we can keep this zip-locked, you know tight, tight, air-tight forever,” Josh Tickell says in one recording. “Money to us…It’s money…we have no moral issue…But we know how a lot of people that would be necessary to pull this off, they would have issue.”

The Tickells now claim that they were trapped and prodded into responses by Turner, although Josh Tickell admits they were gullible. “We flat out deny any implication of impropriety,” he told the Hollywood Reporter.

Turner asked the Tickells to participate in another meeting two other men at the Beverly Hills Hotel. One of the men was “Muhammad,” who Turner identified as the son of Beacon International’s funding source. The Tickells brought their friends Begley and Hemingway for support. In the meeting, Muhammad complains that fracking and energy efficiency in America are a threat to Middle Eastern oil interests.

Toward the end of the meeting, the Tickells say they started to get worried, but instead of going with their instincts they continued to talk to Beacon International.

In response to the O’Keefe video, Begley and Hemingway have both released statements insisting that they attended the meeting solely to help their friends get financing for their film. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Begley even insisted that hearing problems kept him from understanding much of what Muhammad was saying and that his agreeable demeanor shown on tape was just him being polite.

The Tickells have contacted the FBI and local authorities wondering if O’Keefe broke any laws by recording their conversations, considering that they signed a non-disclosure agreement presented by Beacon International.

For his part, Fox says that he’s disappointed in the Tickell’s behavior. However, Fox points out that the real villain in this Hollywood drama is O’Keefe.

Watch Josh Fox on Chris Hayes below:

---

http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2013/08/27/james_o_keefe_and_jim_letten_project_veritas_provocateur_accuses_former.html

The Times-Picayune has a nice recap of “journalist provocateur” James O’Keefe’s latest stunt. It’s not nearly as ambitious as his Planned Parenthood, ACORN, or NPR sting operations, but it’s far more entertaining, if you ask me. In it, O’Keefe’s Project Veritas crew confronts former U.S. Attorney and current Tulane Law School assistant dean Jim Letten on the Tulane campus. O’Keefe blames Letten for his 2010 prosecution for entering Mary Landrieu’s offices under false pretenses (Letten recused himself from the case, which was ultimately settled with a guilty plea), and attempts to give Letten a copy of his new book.

The Times-Picayune’s photo caption team sums up the clip’s highlights better than I ever could:

The video shows an agitated Letten accusing O'Keefe of "terrorizing" the former U.S. attorney's wife at their home, of harassing him and trespassing on the Tulane campus. He called O'Keefe a coward and a spud and referred to O'Keefe and his companions as hobbits.

The hobbit stuff, which is quite excellent, starts around the 36-second mark, and the footage of Letten losing his temper goes on for another two and a half minutes before police detain O’Keefe and his crew. Also very funny, at the four-minute mark O’Keefe accuses Letten of engaging in “minor assault” for grabbing the book from him and then tossing it back at him.

This kind of thing is clearly more personal vendetta than investigative journalism, but it provides an embarrassing portrait of Letten losing his cool. And as a stunt in book publicity cooking, Letten played right into O’Keefe’s hands—the clip has 66,000 views and has inspired numerous sucker bloggers (guilty!) to write about it.

Tulane has issued an order banning O’Keefe from the campus, but this is clearly a mission accomplished for Project Veritas.

---

Destroyed by court order: The footage of a Landrieu staffer admitting the senator’s office had no problem with their phones

POSTED AT 1:12 PM ON MAY 29, 2010 BY PATTERICO

http://hotair.com/archives/2010/05/29/destroyed-by-court-order-the-footage-of-a-landrieu-staffer-admitting-the-senators-office-had-no-problem-with-their-phones/

I recently reported that the judge in James O’Keefe’s criminal case ordered the destruction of the footage of James O’Keefe’s entry into Senator Mary Landrieu’s offices. O’Keefe has confirmed on Twitter that the Government returned his recording equipment, but deleted the footage from inside Sen. Landrieu’s offices. The AP is now catching up to the story:

Conservative activist-videographer James O’Keefe said video he shot of conversations with staffers of U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu was deleted when his cell phone was returned after he and three others pleaded guilty to charges in a caper he orchestrated at the Democrat’s New Orleans office.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office said Saturday that U.S. Magistrate Daniel Knowles III ordered the footage removed. O’Keefe made the claim Friday in a posting on his Twitter social networking site.

What the AP overlooks, however, is what the destroyed footage would have revealed.

I recently published court documents in which the Government admitted that a member of Landrieu’s staff had told O’Keefe’s companions, on tape, that there had been no problem with Senator Landrieu’s phones:

One of Senator Landrieu’s staff members (WITNESS 1) told BASEL and FLANAGAN that she did not report any phone problems and that the office was not experiencing any issues with the phone system.

I’m interested in the First Amendment implications of a court ordering the destruction of a copyrighted work with possible political relevance — with no apparent statutory authority, plea agreement provision, or national security concern to justify it.

I know of no justification for the destruction of the taped footage. A defendant’s property can be forfeited under certain circumstances — if he commits a felony. O’Keefe pled to a misdemeanor. Surrendering the footage was not part of the plea agreement, which you can readhere. Nor is there any national security issue in play; O’Keefe has confirmed to me that he and his companions accessed only the public reception area of Landrieu’s office.

In addition, the footage was potentially exculpatory evidence in O’Keefe’s criminal case, and as such should have been turned over immediately after his arrest. The Government has admitted, in court documents signed by the Government lawyer, that O’Keefe’s intent was “not to actually tamper with the phone system, or to commit any other felony” but rather “to orchestrate a conversation about phone calls to the Senator’s staff and capture the conversation on video.” This means that the tape recording made by O’Keefe was exculpatory evidence, which would have helped him prove the lack of intent that the Government eventually admitted.

The First Amendment would prohibit the judge from returning the footage to O’Keefe, and then ordering him not to publish it. Yet he managed to accomplish the same thing in ordering its destruction.

Now, the public will never learn what was on that footage, including what it revealed about the weakness of the Government’s charges against O’Keefe — and possibly about Sen. Landrieu’s having dissembled about the state of her “jammed” phone lines.

What possible justification is there for destroying such evidence?

selectively enforced shield law

North Jersey Media Gp

Col School of J

NJ Star Ledger jennifer borg print full trans

evin whitmer ed in ch Bergen Record

jay Rosen nyu

Gavin McInnes vice mag street carnage 41 king

ironic racist http://gawker.com/5358130/vice-vs-street-carnage-hipster-medias-battle-produces-draconian-non+competes

NO evid destroyed

j christian adams Election law ctr http://www.electionlawcenter.com/

We include detailed information like the server IP Address which is 208.109.80.14. Electionlawcenter.com resides at GoDaddy.com, LLC in Scottsdale, AZ, United States.

asst AG NH asked nadia naffe for 7 yrs of email, did npt know illegal

foia for all doj past date X

// req by krushner sp

mike rogers went to Murdoch sp house looking for spud; dead of night, showed px, terorized

would/could not commenton grand jury subp

threshold S&S

John Christian Adams (born 1968)[1][2] is an American attorney and former United States Department of Justice official who has accused the department of racial bias in many affairs, most notably its handling of a voter intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party.[3][4]

Contents [hide]

1 Career

1.1 Justice Department Civil Rights Division

1.2 Post-Justice Department career

2 Bibliography

3 See also

4 References

5 External links

Career[edit source | editbeta]

Adams grew up in Hempfield Township in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania and graduated from Hempfield Area High School.[5] Adams received hisBachelor of Arts degree in English from West Virginia University, then his juris doctor from the University of South Carolina School of Law in 1993, and was admitted to the South Carolina Bar in 1994.[6][7] From 1993 to 1997, Adams served as counsel for Jim Miles, the Secretary of State of South Carolina.[8] In 1999, the Virginia State Bar admitted Adams.[1]

The Washington Times noted in February 2001 that Adams filed a formal ethics complaint with the Florida Bar against Hugh Rodham, brother of then-U.S. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, that accused Rodham of violating bar regulations by representing people considered for presidential pardon from former president Bill Clinton, husband of Hillary Rodham Clinton.[9] Citing United States Department of Justice confidentiality rules, the Florida Bar ruled that Hugh Rodham did not violate any rules.[10] Adams responded to the Bar by emphasizing that his complaint accused Rodham of illegally taking a contingent fee to represent the two clients appealing for a pardon.[11] The San Francisco Chronicle reported in 2003 that the Transportation Security Administration falsely placed Adams in a No Fly List along with other people with names like "J. Adams".[12]

In December 2007, Columbia, South Carolina newspaper The State reported that Adams called on increased oversight of the South Carolina Supreme Court in response to a controversy over the court reversing the grades of 20 who failed the bar exam.[8]

Justice Department Civil Rights Division[edit source | editbeta]

See also: New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case

The United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division under the George W. Bush administration hired Adams in 2005.[13] In 2008, Adams was one of three federal attorneys probing Lake Park, Florida for possible bias against African-Americans being elected to town commission.[14]

In December 2009, Adams's supervisor and Civil Rights Division attorney Christopher Coates stepped down as chief of the voting division in December 2009 amid controversy over his objections to the dropping of the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case.[13] Coates' testimony before the United States Civil Rights Commission supported Adams' allegations,[15] and the Commission's report that found "a cover-up of a possible racial double standard in law enforcement in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice," and, detailing "a year of DOJ’s intransigence and baseless refusals to comply with our subpoenas," that "the Department of Justice is unquestionably hostile to any serious investigation of these allegations."[16] In May 2010, Adams resigned from the Justice Department.[17]

Post-Justice Department career[edit source | editbeta]

After leaving the Justice Department, Adams became counsel for the Election Law Center and a contributor to the center's blog. Additionally, he became a contributor to Pajamas Media.[5] On June 28, 2010, The Washington Times published a guest commentary by Adams in which Adams accused the Justice Department of racial bias by dropping the New Black Panthers case.[18] Subsequently, Adams accused Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez of lying under oath in investigative hearings before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.[5] On July 6, 2010, Adams testified before the Commission on Civil Rights that the Justice Department's decision was driven by racial bias against white Americans.[19]

During the 2012 Republican presidential primaries in Virginia, Adams represented candidate Michele Bachmann in a multi-candidate lawsuit to add Bachmann and others to the primary ballot in Virginia.[20] Bachmann and the other candidates lost the lawsuit.[21]

Bibliography[edit source | editbeta]

Adams, J. Christian (2011), Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department, Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing,ISBN 1596982772