pjt veritas 2 bak

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621 just wondering what he's up to post trump big lie BS finally sorta dies [trump concedes he lost]

trifecta

see o’keefe 2

merri ok

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MMA 2 25

02/19/2025

Kyle Mantyla

Sarah Rumpf @ Mediaite: Trump Calls Himself ‘The King’ While Tooting His Own Horn for Killing Controversial NYC Congestion Pricing

President Donald Trump crowned himself with a new title Wednesday as he gave himself credit for “saving” Manhattan from congestion traffic pricing, writing a Truth Social post in which he declared “LONG LIVE THE KING!”

Josh Fiallo @ The Daily Beast: Why DOGE’s ‘Receipts’ Show Elon Musk’s Math Doesn’t Add Up

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency finally released a “wall of receipts” as part of its “maximum transparency” promise Monday, but some of their figures are not quite adding up.

Zack Beauchamp @ Vox: The obscure manifesto that explains the Trump-Musk power grab

Russ Vought, Trump’s OMB director, wrote an essay in 2022 that reads like a blueprint for what was to come.

Lawrence Norden and Derek Tisler @ Slate: The Trump Administration Is Going After Our Elections Too

Government employees have long protected the ballot from attacks. The president is preparing to fire many of them.

Angry White Men: Christian Nationalist Pastor Joel Webbon Promotes Pizzagate Conspiracy Theory

On a recent livestream, white Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon and his co-hosts were asked for their thoughts on a Trump-themed goat statue displayed at Mar-a-Lago. In response, Webbon suggested it was indicative of demon worship and promoted the debunked Pizzagate conspiracy theory.

Khaya Himmelman @ Talking Points Memo: Project Veritas Video At Heart Of Latest Trump Admin Improper Interference At DOJ

A right-wing conspiracy theory website is at the heart of the latest Justice Department resignation in protest of the Trump administration’s interference at the DOJ.

REF

A right-wing conspiracy theory website is at the heart of the latest Justice Department resignation in protest of the Trump administration’s interference at the DOJ.

In her Tuesday resignation letter to acting U.S. Attorney Ed Martin, federal prosecutor Denise Cheung, who was in charge of the criminal division in the Washington, D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office, cited her refusal to open a grand jury investigation into Biden-era Environmental Protection Agency grants and to freeze assets of the grant initiative.

Cheung noted in her resignation letter that there’s simply not enough evidence to support these actions — actions that Martin, a Trump ally, directed her to take. The only evidence driving the Trump administration push for an investigation and potential asset freeze is a 5-minute video clip from the known misinformation purveyor Project Veritas, which purports to show a former EPA employee speaking about distributing climate specific funding to non-profit organizations before the start of Trump’s presidency.

The issue at hand centers on EPA administrator Lee Zeldin’s push to rescind $20 billion in grants that were already allocated for climate projects by the Biden administration, according to reports from the Washington Post and CNN. In a video posted on X last week, Zeldin claimed that the grant money, which he referred to as being part of a “scheme,” had been improperly dolled out by the Biden administration.

In his post on X, Zeldin references what he calls an “extremely disturbing video” of a former Biden-era EPA employee talking about “tossing gold bars off the Titanic.”

The “disturbing” video in question is a Project Veritas clip that shows a former Biden-era EPA employee speaking about distributing funding to “nonprofits, states, tribes” ahead of Trump’s presidency. It’s the only supposed proof that Zeldin has put forward as justification for his attempts to claw back the money and contracts tied to the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.

Zeldin also mentioned in his announcement on X that he “found” $20 billion worth of funding in an “outside financial institution”, but, later, in the same clip also says “there is zero reason to suspect any wrongdoing by the bank.”

“It’s ridiculous that the head of the EPA is justifying an illegal funding blockade with a selectively edited video from a far-right, shady organization known for spreading misinformation to serve Republican political narratives,” Seth Nelson, Evergreen Action Deputy Communications Director, told TPM.

The reliance on this video and the lack of supporting evidence for wrongdoing is in large part the reason why Cheung refused to support a grand jury investigation into the Biden administration’s EPA grants.

“I was asked to review documentation supplied by the Office of the Deputy Attorney General (ODAG) to open a criminal investigation into whether a contract had been unlawfully awarded by an executive agency before the change in Administration and to issue grand jury subpoenas pursuant to this investigation,” she wrote in her Tuesday resignation letter.

Cheung goes on to explain in her letter that she had conferred with others in the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office, “all of whom have substantial white collar criminal prosecution experience,” to determine whether or not there was enough evidence to open a grand jury investigation. Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove’s office insisted that the Project Veritas clip provided enough evidence to justify an investigation, according to CNN. But Cheung determined that there was not.

Cheung noted that she then “took point” on a process to request that “the bank freeze assets” of the EPA funding. Coordinating with an FBI official in the Washington field office, Cheung drafted a letter to the bank recommending an asset freeze.

Martin, however, told Cheung to use more explicit language in her draft letter that said “the government has probable cause to believe that the funds on deposit in the above-referenced account(s) at [named bank] are subject to seizure and forfeiture to the United States based upon violations, ” Cheung said in her letter.

Cheung then told Martin that there is insufficient evidence to use this type of language.

“When I explained that the quantum of evidence did not support that action, you stated that you believed that there was sufficient evidence,” she continued. “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.”

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an 2 25

Last week, Marana High School physics teacher Les Beard learned about a chromosomal disorder with relevance to current events and decided to share what he’d learned with his students.

This week, followers of right-wing provocateur James O’Keefe are calling for Beard to be fired for defying an executive order from President Donald Trump in which he declared that “it is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female.”

Beard is a former geophysicist who has taught physics at Marana High for six years.

It started when Beard was doing some nighttime scrolling on his phone and came across a news clip about a woman with androgen insensitivity syndrome, a rare genetic disorder, and decided to share what he’d learned with his students.

Those with the syndrome have the XY chromosomes of a male but their bodies don’t react to the hormones that cause development of male sex characteristics. Many of those with the syndrome outwardly appear to be female, but have internal sex organs of a male, according to the National Library of Medicine. Some have characteristics of both sexes.

“It piqued my interest, so I thought I would mention it,” Beard told the Arizona Mirror during a Jan. 31 phone interview.

Beard told his students that those with the syndrome are often raised as girls and don’t find out that their chromosomes are XY until they go to the doctor to find out why their menstrual cycle never started. Many of them balk when told that they’re actually male, Beard said.

“None of them really believe it, because they’ve been women all their lives,” he told the students last week.

Beard showed the class clothed photos of some of the women with the syndrome, which he said “looked every bit like a woman” and asked the class, “Are these guys? Mr. Trump says so.”

The lesson caused a “ruckus” in the classroom, which Beard — who speaks in a slow Texas drawl — said he expected, with some kids loudly disagreeing or shaking their heads while others seemed to agree with his point.

“I wanted the kids to understand that, if we make rules, they should encompass all situations that might appear,” Beard said. “It was all too easy to find an outlier that doesn’t seem to fit the two gender idea.”

The following week at school began uneventfully for Beard, but on Jan. 28, he learned that one of his students had recorded the discussion and shared it with her mother, who had then sent it to O’Keefe.

O’Keefe posted the video on the social media site X, formerly known as Twitter, where he has 3 million followers.

In the post, O’Keefe accused Beard of “misleading students by contradicting the NIH and referring to people affected by AIS as ‘women.’”

“Then all sorts of craziness broke loose,” Beard said.

Commenters on social media called Beard a “groomer,” a label that generally means a person who preys on children to condition them for sexual abuse but which has become a catch-all term for conservatives to refer to adults who are accepting of trans students and members of the LGBTQ community. Some of them said that Beard’s lesson on biology was proof of their claims that public school teachers were indoctrinating students with their “woke agenda.”

Others called for him to be arrested and charged with sexual harassment or endangering the welfare of a child. O’Keefe himself repeatedly called a Marana Unified School District spokeswoman to ask if Beard would be punished for defying Trump’s executive order.

O’Keefe’s followers sent Beard nasty emails and contacted the district, calling for him to be fired for sharing “gender ideology” with students.

The video about Beard’s lesson, which O’Keefe posted on X Jan. 28, garnered 600,000 views, 10,000 likes and 332 comments over the next three days.

On Tuesday, Beard was called into a meeting with an administrator to talk about the off-topic lesson and the district’s expectation that teachers stick to their curriculum and avoid sharing personal and political opinions. The next day, he was told to work from home and ordered not to have contact with any Marana teachers or students.

Next week, he expects to find out if he still has a job.

Beard said that he had not previously received any criticism from administrators for the content of his lessons.

Allison Benjamin, a spokesperson for the district, told the Mirror via email that she couldn’t answer specific questions surrounding Beard’s suspension or school policies, but instead supplied a statement similar to one she previously provided to O’Keefe.

In the statement, Benjamin shared two “policies that address expectations for classroom instruction that include: 1. Teaching to the state standards that are focused on course content. 2. Providing a learning environment where teachers remain neutral and refrain from sharing their personal beliefs and opinions.”

“The administration will continue to follow appropriate guidelines detailed in district policy to ensure all staff fulfill these expectations,” she wrote.

O’Keefe’s video features an at-times combative phone call between him and Benjamin. In it, O’Keefe tells her that trying to get comments from the district is a “kafkaesque nightmare.” Benjamin later agrees with O’Keefe that this was “an extraordinary situation and I’m glad that you’re reporting on it.”

Who is James O’Keefe?

O’Keefe, who already had a penchant for publishing highly-edited and misleading undercover recordings, founded Project Veritas in 2010.

Project Veritas became a mainstay of the conservative media ecosystem for sending its “undercover journalists” — some of whom were trained by a former spy on how to covertly infiltrate their targets — to secretly record liberals and journalists in an effort to catch them saying something embarrassing.

One of the so-called reporters set up a date with a top Twitter employee and secretly recorded him venting about Elon Musk. Another made a secret recording of Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs’ twin sister, Becky Hobbs. In the video, apparently recorded during dinner at a restaurant, the governor’s twin said the Democratic Party had been donating to MAGA Republicans in Arizona primary elections to give Democratic candidates a better chance of winning in the general election.

The Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics says journalists should only opt to work undercover in rare circumstances, when there’s no other way to obtain the information.

O’Keefe was pushed out as the chairman of Project Veritas in 2023 following accusations that he mistreated staff by yelling at them and making them do his personal errands and mismanaged finances, the Associated Press reported.

O’Keefe has continued publishing sting-style videos since his ouster from Project Veritas. He even recruited volunteers to make undercover recordings of election worker training in Maricopa County ahead of the November election. He later claimed that trainers’ accurate description of the state’s election laws brought up “serious questions about the integrity of the voting process.”

The recording of Beard was submitted anonymously to O’Keefe’s recently launched Citizen Journalism Foundation, according to the article on O’Keefe’s website.

Numerous commenters who reacted to the video said that they thought Beard belonged in jail for his disregard of Trump’s executive order.

In reality, the White House doesn’t have any legal authority to control local school district curricula. But Beard said that his administrators are worried about losing federal funding.

He admitted that he veered from physics and into a politically charged subject, which his supervisors did not appreciate.

“I didn’t intend to bring politics too sharply into the discussion, but it got there,” Beard said.

Beard, 69, moved to the Tucson area 12 years ago with his wife and two children. His daughter has since graduated from the University of Arizona and his son, who often features his father in his own goofy YouTube videos, is a freshman at Marana High. Beard said that he enjoys teaching the students at Marana High, and he hopes to hold onto his job, even after administrators suggested that he voluntarily resign.

“I think it would make things very easy for them if I resigned,” Beard said, adding that his administrators are not “nasty people” and that he understands the difficult position that they’re in.

College professors have some First Amendment protections when it comes to academic expression in the classroom, but court decisions over the last 20 years have not given the same protections to K-12 teachers.

Beard said he believes teaching opportunities are lost when instructors are strictly limited in topics of discussion, causing students to wonder why teachers steer clear of interesting, socially relevant subjects.

“To be able to freely express yourself will lead to a richer conversation among people who may have very different opinions,” Beard said.

YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE. SUPPORT

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com.

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mma 8 24

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]

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1 22 an

[media crit]

Donald Trump went into the 2020 election with some of the worst approval ratings on record for a sitting president. He made virtually no effort to appeal to those who didn’t vote for him. How was he able to remain standing, and how did he even potentially have a chance at a second term even if he lost the popular vote? One big reason is that he and his acolytes had convinced their base that the media can’t be trusted.

As we know by now, whenever the media aired even mildly critical coverage of Trump or those who were supposedly helping him make America great again, the response on the right was some variation of “(noun) (verb) fake news!” Indeed, it’s almost an article of faith among the Republican base that the media can’t be trusted.

If your news diet consists of the likes of Fox News, Newsmax, right-wing social media, and Christian conservative outlets, you probably think that when the mainstream media isn’t making things up, it’s crossing lines that should never be crossed in order. But there’s one problem—with few exceptions, it’s right-wing media that engages in that very behavior. And while some of those elements are finally answering for the worst of their sins, others are long overdue for a dose of accountability.

Contrary to what Trump and his diehards would have us think, whenever mainstream media outlets make a mistake, those mistakes are usually corrected fairly quickly once caught.A case in point was a 2017 editorial in *The New York Times* that held 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin partly responsible for a grisly 2011 mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona. The Old Grey Lady’s editorial board claimed that just days before the shooting, Palin’s political action committee circulated a map that placed stylized crosshairs on the districts of 19 Democratic House members. The implication was clear—that map was a big reason why one of those lawmakers, then-Rep. Gabby Giffords of Arizona, nearly died that day.

That claim was slammed on all sides of the aisle, prompting the Times to partly retract the editorial within five hours of it going online. All of the inaccurate information was retracted within two days.Despite this, Palin sued the Times for defamation. As near as can be determined, Palin is suing because she didn’t just want the Times to retract, but to grovel. The suit was due to go to trial in late January, but was pushed back to early February after the rabidly anti-vaccine Palin caught COVID-19.

Palin faces tough sledding under current precedent for libel and defamation suits. As a public figure, she would have to prove that when the editorial board greenlighted the initial version of the editorial, it did so acting with actual malice. That is, Palin would have to convince a jury that the editorial board either knew the story was false or published it with reckless disregard for whether it was true or false. Remember, the statements at issue were retracted in almost no time at all in modern media terms. Her onlychance of winning is to take this case all the way to the Supreme Court in hopes of making it easier for public figures to win libel suits.

As it currently stands, Palin’s suit betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how media outlets with actual standards work. Indeed, the Times’ quick retraction stands in marked contrast to the behavior of celebrity gossip blog Gawker. In March 2016, Gawker was effectively forced out of business when it was ordered tocough up $140 million in damages to pro wrestler Hulk Hogan for posting a clip of a sex tape of Hogan. While its sister sites (such as sports culture blog Deadspin, tech blog Gizmodo, and feminist blog Jezebel) were sold to Univision at a bankruptcy auction, Gawker itself wasshut down that August. Ultimately, Gawker settled with Hogan for $31 million that November.

A number of observers slammed the verdict for itspotential chilling effect on freedom of the press, especially after billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thielrevealed that he had bankrolled the suit. Thiel openly admitted that he wanted to punish Gawker after its now-defunct tech gossip sister, Valleywag, outed him as gay in 2007. Indeed, in a post-mortem about Gawker on its last day of business, NPR media reporter David Folkenflikobserved that Thiel’s involvement in Hogan’s suit against Gawker portended “ugly implications for press freedom in light of adversaries with nearly infinite resources.”

At its peak in 2015, Gawker hadover 23 million visits per month, making it one of the most visited sites in the world. With that level of popularity, it’s only fair to wonder—why was no one willing to ride to Gawker’s rescue? Granted, potential buyers might have beenskittish about having to deal with the massive legal headache of a lawsuit bankrolled by a billionaire. But surely someone with the wherewithal to withstand Thiel’s resources would have rescued Gawker solely on the principle of defending freedom of the press, right?

By then, however, Gawker had lost a lot of goodwill as a result of two instances where its disregard for standards dating back to the days of typewriters and leaflets was exposed for all to see. In 2015, Gawker ran an article that claimed Conde Nast Chief Financial Officer David Geithner, the brother of President Obama’s Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, was being extorted by a gay porn star and male escort. As the story goes, when Geithner reneged on a deal to meet up with the porn star on a trip to Chicago, the escort went to Gawker and offered to tell all. He supplied copies of text exchanges between himself and Geithner and a selfie that Geithner supposedly sent him.

When the story went live, the criticism came inhard,fast, and fromall directions.Most of the detractors argued that it served no public interest to even imply that Geithner was gay. For example, the University of Minnesota’s Jane Kirtley, a media law expert, told The Daily Beast that absent evidence that Geithner gave “preferential treatment to people in the hiring process” or was guilty of sexual harassment, she was “really hard-pressed” to see a legitimate reason for running the story.

But this story had a more fundamental problem than lack of public interest. It was sourced almost entirely from a guy who was extorting Geithner. Specifically, the bulk of the story came from texts provided to Gawker staff writer Jordan Sargent. Despite this, according to Mother Jones, Gawker took onlyone working day to research, vet, and fact-check the story before it went live.

A number of media experts found the rapid turnaround time for this story extremely problematic. Ken Paulson, former editor-in-chief of USA Today and current president of the First Amendment Center, told Mother Jones that stories that could even potentially wreck someone’s reputation “are typically vetted over a longer period.” Over that time, Paulson added, details could come up that “could give you pause about publishing.” First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams was interviewed in the same article, saying that when there is evidence of blackmail or extortion, it ought to be “a blinking yellow light, or even a blinking red light” to thoroughly vet it before you even consider publishing it.

Gawker’s defense, at the time, seemed to be that the story was true and nothing else mattered. In response to withering criticism—including from Gawker’s own readers—Natasha Vargas-Cooper of Jezebel harrumphed in a since-deleted tweet that in her mind, “if it’s true, you publish.”

The fact that Gawker seemed to justify this story simply because it was true appeared especially tone-deaf a mere four years after the News of the World wasforced out of existence due to rampant phone-hacking. Indeed, Gawker’s ethos appeared little different from that of WikiLeaks. By then, we’d known since at least 2010 that Julian Assange’s idea of transparency includedreleasing unredacted Social Security numbers—and dismissing any potential harm as “collateral damage.”

A mere 18 hours after the story went live, Gawker Media’s six-member managing partnershipvoted to remove it over thefurious objections of Gawker’s editorial staff. But when Gawker founder and CEO Nick Denton deliveredthe official explanation for removing the post, he proved that he still didn’t get it.

Denton said that the story about Geithner was “true and well reported,” which would have been enough to justify running it “in the early days of the Internet.” However, he said, “Gawker is no longer the insolent blog that began in 2003,” and this meant that potential stories “have to be true and interesting” in order to pass editorial muster. Denton went further in a memo to Gawker’s editorial team, saying that he was “ashamed” to have his name attached to the story, even if “we were within our legal right to publish.”

There are times when what was considered good reporting years ago is patently unacceptable now. For instance, the relentless coverage of Britney Spears in the early 2000swould never be tolerated today given greater awareness about mental health and sexism. But this didn’t even come close to being one of those times. By suggesting that an article that essentially amounted to aiding and abetting extortion would be even remotely acceptable in 2003, Denton made his statement announcing the article’s deletion amount to a non-apology apology. It also casts a pall on the good that Gawker actually did—like turning the hot lights on Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s substance abuse, or revealing that Bill O’Reilly used his influence to start an investigation of his ex-wife’s boyfriend.

Soon after the furor over the Geithner article died down, it became even clearer just how serious Gawker’s cultural problem was. In July 2015, Vanity Fair writer Richard Lawsontweeted a mea culpa about his days at Gawker. He admitted that he’d written, on orders from his boss, “baseless posts accusing an actor of raping an ex-boyfriend.” That actor wasJames Franco.

From 2008 to around 2014, Gawker churned out a series of articles that attempted to out Franco. The first of these articles, penned by Lawson, was a follow-up to ablind item in the New York Postin which an unidentified actor reportedly broke into his former boyfriend’s apartment and violently raped him. Inhis article, Lawson mused that the three likely suspects were Will Smith, Christian Bale—and Franco.

Soon afterward, Lawsonwrote another article suggesting that based on Gawker commenters’ sentiment, “the people” felt Franco was a gay rapist. He then followed that up witha third article suggesting that the “gay rapist” Franco had actually been mentioned by the person who tipped off the Post about the supposed violent attack. If there is any difference between that article and Trump’s penchant for spewing baseless garbage that’s supposedly based on what “many people are saying,” I don’t see it.

Later, other Gawker writerspenned articles suggesting that Franco was gay, based on the thinnest reeds of evidence. According to The Daily Beast, this was part of Gawker’s “creepy obsession with outing closeted men.” Granted, Franco is no angel. In 2021, he not only settled a lawsuit alleging that he harassed several students at the acting school he ran from 2014 to 2017, but admitted sleeping with some of his students.

Seen in this light, it’s no wonder that it took more than six years and at least one false start for Gawker to be revived. It returned in the summer of 2021 as a sister publication to women’s magazine Bustle, who bought Gawker’s remains in 2019. One would have thought that given Gawker’s popularity, it would have been revived sooner. However, NPR’s Folkenflik noted that when Univision bought Gawker’s sister sites, it concluded that Gawker itself was “too toxic to touch.”

Given how long it took for Gawker to be revived, any potential white knights must have reached the same conclusion. Who would want to take on an organization that not only believed there was a time where extortion was at all acceptable, but had no qualms about running libel?

Indeed, even as I write this, the articles libeling Franco are still available on Gawker’s website. That contrasts sharply with how the Times handled the initial version of its editorial attack on Palin. Contrary to what she and her fellow deplorables would have us believe, mainstream media outlets have standards—and those that lack standards get culled.

The same, however, can’t be said for some mainstays of right-wing media. For instance, when former Alabama chief justice Roy Moore made a bid for the U.S. Senateseat that came open when Jeff Sessions was tapped as Trump’s attorney general, Breitbart led a relentless smear campaign against the women who claimed Moore sexually assaulted them or pursued improper relationships with them. And it did so even though its editor-in-chief, Alex Marlow,believed at least one of the accusers was credible.

Marlow made this shocking assertion in an interview with CNN’s Oliver Darcy in December 2017, a month after Moore’s narrow loss to Democrat Doug Jones. He revealed that he believed that Moore’s initial accuser, Leigh Corfman, had “a lot of credibility.” Corfman, you may recall, claimed Moore sexually assaulted her when she was 14.

By admitting that he believed Moore’s accusers were credible even as Breitbart was smearing them, Marlow effectively put big, fat asterisks by every story Breitbart ran about the election. Victim shaming is bad enough, but doing so when you have reason to believe a victim is telling the truth is absolutely heinous. It’s even more so considering that Marlow admitted Breitbart went all-in for Moore to protect Trump.

Project Veritas also joined in on this disgraceful campaign. Its ringleader, James O’Keefe, even went as far as having one of his minions, Jaime Phillips, try to plant a bogus story in The Washington Postclaiming that Moore had impregnated her.But that story came apart when the Post did some actual journalism and discovered Phillips’ story had more red flags than a lifetime of Alabama football games. Most damningly, Phillips had created a GoFundMe page boasting about her goal to join “the conservative media movement” in exposing “the liberal MSM.”

To pile obscenity on top of insult, O’Keefe revealed in December 2017 that he believed Moore’s accusers were credible. And yet, he felt compelled to smear them because—wait for it—he felt their credibility was “not my subject matter,” and his real goal was exposing “bias in the media.” So the man whose stock in trade is targeting journalists for supposed bias admitted that doing so was so important that he felt compelled to shame victims that he believed were credible. Let that sink in.

To give you an idea how outrageous Breitbart and Project Veritas’ behavior was here, imagine if every news outlet that passed on the prospect of exposing Harvey Weinstein’s depravities had reason to believe Weinstein’s accusers were credible—and yet ran stories effectively calling them liars. It makes Palin’s squawking about theTimes’ failure to basically grovel before her look hypocritical as all hell.

Fortunately, at least two other members of the deplorable fever swamp are facing long-overdue accountability. Take InfoWars, for instance. Even after Alex Jones was kicked off mainstream social media and blackballed from smartphone app stores, it looked like he was going to continue his years-long promotion of conspiracy theories and hate speech—albeit with a much reduced audience.

But what may have been the beginning of the end for Jones came in 2018, not long after Facebook and YouTube gave him the boot. Several families of Sandy Hook victims, along with an FBI agent who responded to the shooting, sued Jones for defamation. Specifically, they wanted Jones held to account for his numerous claims that the Sandy Hook victims and survivors were “crisis actors.” These claims have resulted in the survivors being relentlessly harassed and trolled. The family of Noah Pozner, for instance, has had to move numerous times due to the harassment, and now live under high security in an undisclosed location. They have never been able to visit their son’s grave.

A series of legal reversals for Jones and InfoWars culminated in the fall of 2021. That September, a Texas judge issued three default judgments against Jones and InfoWars in two defamation suits filed by Sandy Hook families. The judge had lost patience with Jones’ refusal to turn over documents, and found it egregious enough to conclude that Jones had already lost. In November, a Connecticut judge issued a default judgment in a suit filed against Jones in another lawsuit. While damages will be determined at trial later this year, they are likely to add up to hundreds of millions of dollars—in all likelihood, enough to put InfoWars out of business.

Another fixture of the deplorable fever swamp, Gateway Pundit, may also face extinction after beingsued for orchestrating a vicious trolling campaign that falsely accused Georgia election workers of stealing their state for Joe Biden. The two workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, claim that Gateway Pundit started a flood of disinformation that reached all the way to Trump, who attacked Freeman by name in his now-infamous attempt to shake down Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

Dozens of bogus stories about Freeman and Moss resulted in death threats, doxing, and kidnapping attempts, among other things. Rather than apologize, Gateway Pundit actually tried to raise money off the lawsuit, netting over $81,000.If there is any justice, though, that fundraising effort will be a futile exercise. Gateway Pundit and its impresarios, the Hoft brothers, ought to get a very hard lesson on why private citizens only need to prove negligence in order to win libel suits.

The Times moves in almost no time at all by current media standards to retract claims about Palin—and yet, Breitbart, Project Veritas, and Gateway Pundit refuse to even attempt to apologize for far worse. What’s wrong with this picture?

The answer to that question is simpler than you may think. For all the caterwauling we hear from the right about the media not having any standards, we have seen instance after instance where the media has shown it actually does. Moreover, whenever elements of the mainstream press show they don’t have standards, they are weeded out. The demise of Gawker is a stark example of what happens when you catapult your way into the mainstream, only to show you have little regard for basic standards of decency.

If we are to remove the tinder from our politics, we must subject the media to the same level of accountability that Gawker faced, and what InfoWars is more than likely to face. As Gawker learned in 2016, that standard ought to apply regardless of political shade. But if Palin and other right-wingers are willing to take off their blinders, they would see that their own side of the media divide is long overdue for a cleaning.

Poll 426 votes Show Results

===

5? 21 mta philna punkd?

WT BS

project Veritas jumped into the debate over vaccine mandates with an undercover video that shows two Pfizer scientists agreeing that naturally acquired immunity offers more protection than vaccination from the novel coronavirus.

The 10-minute video released late Monday featured three men identified as scientists at Pfizer, maker of the widely used two-dose Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

A man identified as Pfizer biochemist Nick Karl was shown explaining that after recovering from COVID-19, “your antibodies are probably better at that point than the vaccination.”

---

Media Panic! 3 Pfizer Employees BUSTED By Project Veritas ...https://www.imdb.com › title

What is the English language plot outline for Media Panic! 3 Pfizer Employees BUSTED By Project Veritas On Tape ADMITTING Some Shocking Things (2021)?.

WE LOOK AT: The Project Veritas Pfizer controversyhttps://www.faqcheck.org › stories › we-look-at-project...

Nov 19, 2021 — faqchecklab. This week we will be bringing you a three-part infographic series on our latest story -- about misleading claims on COVID-19 ...

Project Veritas 'Sting' Spreads Vaccine Falsehoodshttps://www.polygraph.info › fact-check-project-veritas...

Claim: “BREAKING: @Pfizer Scientists: ‘Your [COVID] Antibodies are Probably Better than the [Pfizer] Vaccination’ … #ExposePfizer”

Claimed by: Eric Spracklen

Fact check by POLYGRAPH.info: False

Feedback

Pfizer scientists tout natural immunity in Project Veritas stinghttps://www.washingtontimes.com › news › oct › projec...

Oct 5, 2021 — Project Veritas jumped into the debate over vaccine mandates with an undercover video that shows two Pfizer scientists agreeing that ...

Project Veritas amplifies false vaccine information in latest videohttps://firstdraftnews.org › articles › project-veritas-amp...

Sep 23, 2021 — Project Veritas, the far-right disinformation group that has engaged in sting operations and been accused of manufacturing content to ...

Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine does not contain fetal cells ...https://www.berkshireeagle.com › factcheck › pfizer-s-co...

Oct 11, 2021 — Claim: Newly leaked emails among Pfizer employees show that the company's COVID-19 vaccine contains fetal cells.

How to watch on Roku BREAKING NEWS - Pfizer Whistleblowerhttps://www.roku.com › What's On › Movies

A_Z and Callie shows portion of the Pfizer whistleblower's interview with Project Veritas (streaming service tried to censor from 3:00 minute mark but ...

NOT REAL NEWS: A Look at What Didn't Happen This Weekhttps://www.usnews.com › News › Political News

Oct 8, 2021 — Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine does not contain fetal cells, ... Pfizer did not respond to questions about the Project Veritas video, ...

is this reg col?

NOT REAL NEWS: A Look at What Didn't Happen This Week

Social media users shared a range of false claims this week, including erroneous information about vaccines and the infrastructure bill.

By Associated Press

Oct. 8, 2021

The Associated Press

FILE - In this Sept. 14, 2021, file photo, a health worker administers a dose of a Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine during a vaccination clinic at the Reading Area Community College in Reading, Pa. On Friday, Oct. 8, The Associated Press reported on stories circulating online incorrectly claiming newly leaked emails among Pfizer employees show that the company’s COVID-19 vaccine contains fetal cells. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File) THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

By The Associated Press

A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. The Associated Press checked them out. Here are the facts:

---

[Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine does not contain fetal cells, contrary to online claims

twitter suspends right-wing activist James O’Keefe

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement

April 15, 2021

**James O'Keefe**, the activist best known for producing and promoting selectively edited, deceptive videos used to advance a far right wing agenda, appears to have been suspended from Twitter, and that...

===

after 1/6 am radio // universe o'keefe cited BS]

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/13/dark-money-gop-fund-funneled-millions-groups-that-pushed-voter-fraud-claims.html

dark-money group used by Republican donors funneled millions of dollars to high-profile conservative organizations that pushed or investigated claims of election fraud before and after Joe Biden defeated President Trump.

That group, the Donors Trust, is officially labeled as a nonprofit. The designation allows financiers to give to the organization anonymously. That money is then channeled to other dark-money groups.
Among the pro-Trump groups that have received money from the Donors Fund are pro-Trump students organization Turning Point USA and an anti-immigration organization that has been called a hate group.
a dark-money group used by Republican donors funneled millions of dollars toward high-profile conservative organizations that pushed and in some cases investigated claims of election fraud either before or after Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump in November.

Many of these stances matched points that Trump and his team made as they attempted to undermine the election.

Almost all of the groups mentioned in this story denied to CNBC they were attempting to undermine the election with their own claims of fraud and voting irregularities. State and federal officials, including the former attorney general, have said there was no widespread election fraud during the 2020 presidential election.

That funding group, the Donors Trust, is officially labeled as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. The designation allows financiers to give to the organization anonymously. That money is then channeled to other dark-money groups.

Among the recent pro-Trump groups that have received money from the Donors Trust are:

pro-Trump students organization Turning Point USA
an anti-immigration organization that has been labeled a hate group
Project Veritas, a conservative outfit that specializes in “sting” videos
a group founded by a man who pushed false conspiracy theories about former President Barack Obama

“A donor-advised fund account allows you to have charitable dollars ready to put into action on your own schedule. It works like a charitable savings account,” the Donors Trust website says. Such associations are labeled as “dark money” because they do not publicly disclose their donors.

In 2019, the Donors Trust gave over $20 million to at least a dozen organizations that would go on to question the integrity of the election process, according to the group’s 990 tax return. They have supported many of these organizations in prior years, as well. The 2020 filings won’t be made available until later this year, so it is not yet clear whether Donors Trust gave money to these groups last year.

Donors Trust finished 2019 raising over $300 million, just under double the amount they raised the prior year. It gave a total of over $160 million in grants in 2019. The group’s top anonymous donor gave over $150 million. Nonprofits often release their financial information a full year after their coverage dates.

In a lengthy statement to CNBC, Donors Trust CEO Lawson Bader said these organizations represent only a fraction of those seeing their donor funds and he condemns last week’s violence in Washington.

“The grants described were made in 2019 for general operations. These listed organizations are but a few of the many hundreds of different public charities that Donors Trust account holders supported that same year,” Bader said Tuesday. “Contributions made through a DonorsTrust DAF (Donor-Advised Funds) are made only to IRS recognized charitable and educational organizations. Donors Trust, like all donor-advised fund providers, does not make grants to 501(c)(4) organizations. Further, Donors Trust condemns violence of any kind. Espousing violence violates the ideas of personal responsibility and free exchange which we support wholly,” he added.

“I was appalled by the actions taken by protestors last week to violate the Capitol building and physically threaten lawmakers. Whether against public or private property, such actions are not only offensive, dangerous and illegal, but damage an already fragile civic discourse and embarrass the reputation of the United States as a place where political transitions happen within the context of the Constitution.”

Aligned with Trump

At least five people, including a Capitol police officer, died in connection to the riot, which happened after Trump and some of his closest allies led a rally urging supporters to fight to prevent Congress’ declaration of Biden’s victory.

Several pro-Trump groups were involved with planning the rally, which was held near the White House. Trump encouraged people who attended the rally to march on the U.S. Capitol. Critics, including several Republicans, accused him of inciting the violence. On Tuesday, Trump said the comments were “totally appropriate.”

Groups with the same 501(c)(3) status as Donors Trust are prohibited under tax regulations from supporting specific candidates. However, they can skirt those rules by supporting and promoting policies that align with a particular politician. In the case of Trump-fueled unrest, several groups historically backed by Donors Trust money aligned themselves with Trump’s false claims about widespread election fraud.

Turning Point USA, a nonprofit founded by staunch Trump ally Charlie Kirk, received over $850,000 from the Donors Trust. Kirk has continued to parrot the president’s attacks on the election, falsely claiming Biden’s victory was fraudulent.

“I will say it very bluntly. This election was stolen from President Trump. And the changes to the election, to the ballot questions, to the voter registration, to the access problems in these states” Kirk said in December.

Kirk’s affiliated 501(c)(4) Turning Point Action was listed as a participant in last week’s “March to Save America” rally, which preceded the attack on Capitol Hill. Prior to the rally, in a tweet he later deleted, Kirk said the group would be involved with sending over 80 buses to the rally. CNBC captured a screenshot of tweet before it was deleted.

Kirk recently said on his podcast that those from Turning Point got back on their buses and left following the conclusion of the rally.

A Turning Point Action spokesperson said the group did not include a march to the Capitol on its itinerary.

“Turning Point Action (TPA) did bus some students to the January 6th rally, which included a speech from the President of the United States. Following the president’s remarks, TPA then bused those students immediately out of the area,” the spokesperson said. “The march to the Capitol Building was never part of TPA’s itinerary,nor did TPA encourage participation in the march. TPA’s leadership condemns political violence and immediately did so as soon as news broke of the incident at the Capitol Building. ”

The New York Times reported that the group ended up sending only seven buses to the rally from New Jersey, North Carolina and other locations. twt]

other connections

The 85 Fund, a group with ties to longtime Trump judicial advisor Leonard Leo, received over $10 million from the Donors Trust in 2019. According to a report by The Guardian and the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, it was once known as The Judicial Education Project. It was run by Carrie Severino, who also is in charge of the Leo-affiliated Judicial Crisis Network. Severino’s Judicial Crisis Network actively campaigned in support of Trump’s nominees to the Supreme Court.

The Donors Trust lists an address for the 85 Fund in Washington that matches the address on The Judicial Education Project’s 2018 990 form. Leo also told Axios that the 85 Fund would be one of the groups used to funnel millions of dollars into conservative battles around the country.

The Judicial Education Project, though, has another alias, according to the report: the Honest Elections Project. The organization claims to be nonpartisan and says that “through public engagement, advocacy, and public-interest litigation, the Honest Elections Project will defend the fair, reasonable, common sense measures that voters want in place to protect the integrity of the voting process.”

A review of advertisements and litigation reveals that, in some cases, the group is aligned with claims about election fraud that are similar to Trump’s. The group lists two Michigan-related lawsuits linked to Republicans that took place before the November election.

In September, The Detroit News reported on one of those lawsuits, which featured two former Republican secretaries of state. The former officials challenged Michigan’s plan to count absentee ballots that are postmarked before Election Day but arrive up to 14 days afterward. Biden went on to win Michigan, even though an appeals court did rescind the 14-day extension of mail in ballots.

Fox News reported in June on another suit featuring theHonest Elections Project.In that case, a Republican named Tony Daunt claimed that Michigan voter registration rates in some counties are too high because their voting records have not been updated to remove ineligible voters, such as those who have died or convicted of crimes.

A leader of the Honest Elections Project told CNBC that the group concluded after the election that no widespread voter fraud occurred and they did not get involved with any post-election legal challenges. It also condemned the violence on Capitol Hill.

“HEP was created to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. Before the election, HEP fought to preserve the rule of law as left-wing groups, including the Democratic Party, filed over 200 lawsuits to challenge existing election laws,” Honest Elections Project executive director Jason Snead said in a statement. “After the election, HEP concluded that there was no widespread fraud and did not challenge or support any challenge to the results of the 2020 election. The violent insurrection at the Capitol was a heinous attack against democracy, the rule of law, and the election system HEP was created to defend.”

Former U.S. Attorney General William Barr said in December that the Department of Justice has found no evidence of voter fraud.

the anti-immigration VDARE Foundation, which the Southern Poverty Law Center labeled a hate group, received just under $2 million from the Donors Trust in 2019. The foundation is run by Peter Brimelow, somebody the Southern Poverty Law Center says is a “leading anti-immigration activist.”

Brimelow did not return a request for comment.

Since the riot last week, VDARE has become a platform for several writers standing with Trump and people who attended the rally.

“I believe Trump won the election and I believe that this matters,” says an article on the foundation’s site. The writer also says he believes the anti-fascist protesters and frequent Trump targets known as antifa were “amongst the crowd.” Ken Kohl, a senior official in the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office, recently said that investigators saw no indication of antifa being part of the riot.

Another writer on VDARE’s site admitted to cheering on the Capitol invasion. “I’m going to open with a confession here: watching those protestors rampaging through the halls of Congress on Wednesday afternoon, there was a part of me that was cheering them on,” the article says.

Project Veritas, an activist group founded by investigator James O’Keefe, received over $4 million in 2019 from the Donors Trust. In August, The New Republic reported that Project Veritas was secretly moving ahead with sting operations that would “undermine the integrity of absentee and mail-in ballot counts.”

Jered Ede, chief legal officer for Project Veritas, told CNBC that the group condemns the violence at the Capitol and pushed back on the idea their investigations are attempts to undermine the election. He also said Project Veritas has proved at least two instances of fraud and irregularities, including in New Hampshire and Texas.

“Project Veritas has been exposing voter fraud and election integrity stories for nearly a decade. We did so prior to 2020, we did so prior to 2019, we did so prior to Mr. Trump announcing his candidacy, and we will continue to do so for as long as we are around,” Ede said in part of his lengthy responses to CNBC. “Neither our donors nor any politician control or direct what stories we cover. We have and will continue to cover these stories because voters deserve to know the truth and have faith in their electoral system.”

Project Veritas pushed a Pennsylvania postal worker’s claim about mail-in ballots that the Trump campaign would cite in a lawsuit that eventually went nowhere, according to The Washington Post.

The Center for Security Policy received over $800,000 from Donors Trust in 2019.It was founded by Frank Gaffney, who pushed conspiracy theories about President Barack Obama’s administration and the Muslim Brotherhood. In the buildup to the riot, Gaffney questioned the results of the election.

Fred Fleitz, president of the Center for Security Policy, told CNBC late Tuesday that the group acknowledges that Biden is going to be the new president. He said Gaffney was no longer running the organization. The website lists Gaffney as executive chairman.

“Center for Security Policy accepts Joe Biden as the legal President of the United States,” Fleitz said. “It’s time to move on. We are an organization that is going to focus on holding Biden accountable when it comes to national security. Gaffney does not run the organization. He’s not the president of the organization, I am,” Fleitz added.

In a post on the group’s website, Gaffney himself claimed in December the media is pushing a “false narrative” that “there’s no evidence of electoral larceny in the 2020 presidential race — or at least none that would have made a difference,” he said. Gaffney also wrote that “the online resource EveryLegalVote.com makes clear that election integrity was systematically compromised.”

In January, a Center for Security Policy article claimed there are 10 truths about election fraud, including that election fraud has become “more sinister and sophisticated.”

An article on Jan. 5, a day before the riot, is headlined “Exercising your First Amendment rights? How to avoid Antifa violence at the upcoming January 6th protests.” Then article then goes on to give protesters tips on how to avoid fights with antifa.

Gaffney’s own condemnation of the violence after the protest included him calling for a hearing that would show “evidence of electoral grand larceny.”

The Gaffney posts disappeared off the group’s website shortly after CNBC reached out for comment. CNBC has screenshots of the posts.

===

// grover

no twt

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/aoc-twitter-abc-veritas/

walter kos

Racial disparities in society are only accentuated by emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, all inequities in our society have just been exposed that much more by the current crisis. Our system is a capitalist one that has relied on racism and concentration of capital and wealth to control a massive population of have nots. One of the symptoms of this racism is that small businesses owned by Black and Latino Americans have been frozen out of an already rigged process of COVID-19 stimulus relief. This is due in part to the fact that historically and presently, people of color have a considerably harder time getting loans from banks.

Not having a relationship with a bank makes getting Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) stimulus money considerably harder and as a result, while small businesses in general have been mostly kept out of the Republican, big business-focused package, it has been much harder on businesses of color. (Disclosure: Kos Media received a Paycheck Protection Program loan.) Already undercapitalized, Black-owned businesses weren't going to ask for the large amounts that other bigger small businesses were going to ask for—and banks make bigger fees on bigger loans. NBC News' Olivia Solonpointed out that while fiscal conservative, anti-"welfare" crusaders like the fake news makers over at Project Veritas decry the big government spending of the CARES package, they didn't seem to have an issue with taking more than half a million of taxpayer money to keep their lights on.

The "non-profit" organization, most recently known for hyping up a completely empty and veryquickly debunked election fraud "exclusive," received $558,900 in PPP stimulus, according to searchppp.com.The right-wing, make-em-up investigative organization is fronted by James O'Keefe—a sort of older version of pathetic GOP fraudster Jacob Wohl. He's best known for hiring people to say they were sexually assaulted in order to discredit real victims of sexual assault. It's this kind of dirtbaggery that gets Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' ultra right-wing wife to present you with an award at the Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C. (True story.)

democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez boosted this story, synthesizing the racism and hypocrisy wrapped up in a holiday season bow.

This led to some right-wingers rubbing their tiny braincells together to attack Rep. Ocasio-Cortez for selling $58 "Tax the Rich" sweatshirts on her campaign's website. Unfortunately, there's math and the small factor of paying workers living wages. Not everything can be made for cheap in China, guys who seem to want to have a trade war with China but don't understand how costs work....

aoc: Black-owned small businesses were widely shut out from accessing PPP loans, yet right-wing disinfo org PV took half a million in public money while decrying direct federal assistance as “radical socialism.”

Republicanism in a nutshell.

https://www.mediamatters.org/sinclair-broadcast-group/sinclair-broadcast-group-spreads-debunked-project-veritas-disinformation

no lnx vid pix

Sinclair Broadcast Group is spreading misinformation from the far-right group Project Veritas about Michigan ballots -- even though the premise behind the claim was debunked the same day as Sinclair began spreading it.

On November 4, Project Veritas published a video which included a conversation between the discredited organization’s founder, James O’Keefe, and an anonymous “whistleblower” whose voice is altered. The anonymous person alleges, without evidence, that the post office they supposedly work for in Traverse City, Michigan, was backdating mail-in ballots to make it look like they were received by Election Day on November 3 when they were actually collected November 4. The video attempts to make this person look more legitimate by showing blurred photos of what appears to be a U.S. Postal Service ID card.

Both PolitiFact and the Record-Eagle, a local newspaper based in Traverse City, debunked the premise central to these allegations the day after Project Veritas released its video. PolitiFact, citing city and county elections officials, explained that “the postmark on a ballot in Michigan isn’t relevant to whether or not the ballot gets counted. That’s because ballots in Michigan must have been received on Election Day in order to have been counted. ... The postmark date is not a factor.” The Record-Eagle also explicitly stated that “this backdating narrative could not have impacted the local election”:

“We already counted all the ballots received by 8 p.m. and they’re all secured, so we’re not counting any late ballots. So it doesn’t even matter if they did that, because it’s not going to affect anything,” said Bonnie Scheele, Grand Grand Traverse County Clerk.

Ron Krumrie, union vice-president, confirmed the video does use the name of a current Barlow Branch supervisor and does depict a postal worker badge.

Krumrie echoed Sheele’s assessment, saying no such scheme, if attempted, could not have succeeded in getting late ballots counted.

In Michigan, it is arrival time, not postmark date, that determines the cut-off.

“Absentee ballots had to be addressed to whatever town office the voter is registered in, and they had to be in the hands of the precinct by 8 p.m. Tuesday night,” Krumrie said.

Tracy Wimmer, the secretary of state’s director of media relations, dismissed the video’s claims.

“Postmarks on ballots don’t matter in Michigan because they have to be physically received by 8 p.m. on Election Day,” she said in an email. “Any ballot that someone attempted to turn in yesterday, regardless of the postmark, would be rejected.”

Despite multiple postal and election officials debunking Project Veritas’ claims, Sinclair still published and spread an article by conservative political writer Ellie Bufkin uncritically repeating the far-right group’s unfounded fraud allegations:

The nation is now in the third day of waiting for a result on the highly contentious presidential election, reports of irregularities among ballots and concerns over fraud have been shared in multiple states.

Project Veritas, a conservative news outlet, published a video late Wednesday in which an unidentified person claiming to be a Michigan postal worker alleged that postal marks were being altered to show that ballots arrived before the Nov. 3 deadline.

Veritas’s report was similar to several other accusations across the country that alleged ballot irregularities, most of which would swing in favor of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. Key battleground states were called for Biden Wednesday, including Michigan and Wisconsin, but as of Thursday, President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign has requested a recount in Wisconsin and filed a suit over reports of fraudulent vote counts in Michigan.

This right-wing election disinformation was shared on dozens of local Sinclair TV station websites across the country.

Sinclair Broadcast Group articles uncritically repeating Project Veritas claims about Michigan ballots

The article was also shared on at least 20 Facebook pages belonging to Sinclair-owned or -operated stations.

Sinclair stations sharing articles pushing false Project Veritas claims on Facebook

Additionally, at least two Sinclair stations broadcast the Project Veritas allegations on their local news programs. WPBN in Traverse City covered the allegations at least five times -- though unlike the Sinclair article, it mentioned both that the claims were unverified and that according to Michigan law, this alleged scheme wouldn’t work.

Video file

CitationFrom the November 5, 2020, edition of WPBN's 7&4 News at 11PM

AMANDA SKRZYPCHAK (ANCHOR): Accusations made in a video interview by Project Veritas has launched an investigation by the U.S. Postal Service.UpNorthLive News has not been able to independently confirm the authenticity of the interview or video, and will not air it at this time. However, this is video of the Traverse City Barlow Branch, where the video claims a postal supervisor instructed employees to take mail-in ballots received on Wednesday and postmark them Tuesday, November 3. According to Michigan law, ballots have to be in the clerk's office by 8 at night on Election Day. A communication spokesperson for the Postal Service sent us this statement saying the postal service “is aware of the video, which has been referred to the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and the Office of the Inspector General.”

WSBT in South Bend, Indiana, likewise mentioned that the Project Veritas allegations were unverified, but it failed to include an explanation that these claims would have no effect on the election even if they were true.

vid CitationFrom the November 6, 2020, edition of WSBT 22 First in the Morning 6am

LEANNE TOKARS (ANCHOR): The inspector general is investigating an allegation of voter fraud involving mail-in ballots in Michigan. Federal investigators arrived at a post office branch in Traverse City yesterday. The investigation comes after a conservative group called Project Veritas posted a video that implied postal workers were backdating mail-in ballots. Now in that video, a postal supervisor allegedly instructs employees to take ballots received Wednesday and backdate them with a Tuesday postmark. Nothing in this claim or video has been independently verified.

Project Veritas has released multiple videos after Election Day that attempt to discredit how the Postal Service is handling mail-in ballots, usually by claiming that postal workers are backdating ballots received after November 3. So far, the group has targeted Michigan and Pennsylvania with this narrative and also released a secretly recorded video that purports to show a postal worker in Nevada offering ballots to a Project Veritas operative. These post-Election Day videos are heavily edited, short, and offer no corroboration, but they have already received widespread attention from right-wing figures -- including Rush Limbaugh, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and Donald Trump Jr.-- who are citing them as evidence to falsely suggest significant voter fraud is happening in swing states. Project Veritas, in the meantime, continues to beg for tips from supporters about alleged voter fraud.

===

wapo

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/10/03/controversial-project-veritas-hit-with-restraining-order-sought-by-teachers-union/

no lnx docs

Answer Sheet

Analysis

Controversial Project Veritas hit with restraining order sought by teachers union

James O’Keefe, right, a conservative U.S. activist and head of the Project Veritas group, testifies as a witness in a trial in Warsaw on June 21. O’Keefe testified on behalf of his colleague and friend Matthew Tyrmand, an American activist with his group who is suing a Polish journalist and his publisher for defamation. (Vanessa Gera/AP)

]

Valerie Strauss

Oct. 3, 2017

A judge in Michigan just issued an emergency restraining order on a controversial group known as Project Veritas for allegedly attempting to infiltrate a teachers union in the state and illegally obtain information about it.

The organization, which is famous for its “sting” operations aimed primarily at mainstream news organizations and liberal groups, was said in a civil complaint filed by the American Federation of Teachers Michigan to have planted an operative who used an alias to get a job at the union and spy on its operations.

The restraining order (see below) was signed by Circuit Court Judge Brian R. Sullivan and bars Project Veritas from publishing, releasing to the public or in any way disclosing any information any of its agents or employees may have gathered on the union. Representatives for the organization are ordered to appear in court this week to address the complaint.

Stephen Gordon, communications director for Project Veritas, said: “Project Veritas doesn’t comment on ongoing investigations, real or imagined.”

The AFT Michigan lawsuit says that a woman named Marissa Jorge got an internship at the union in May 2017, using the pseudonym “Marissa Perez,” and saying she was a University of Michigan student who wanted to be a teacher. It says that she “showed an interest in charter schools and in instances of educators who had supposedly engaged in ‘sexting’ with students; there were no such instances.”

It also says that she sought information that was beyond her assignment, sought and was granted permission to see confidential databases, sent confidential information from those databases to herself or copied them, accessed the computers of several staff members, and secretly recorded conversations.

Project Veritas, which says its mission is to expose corruption, has been in the news in recent years for targeting organizations — including Planned Parenthood and CNN — with videos later shown to have been significantly edited.

Project Veritas has been sued repeatedly in the past. In 2013, James O’Keefe, the project’s founder, agreed to pay $100,000 to a former employee of ACORN who was fired as a result of a Veritas operation but was later vindicated. Here’s how this Forbes article described it:

It seems that the master of the cleverly edited — if highly deceptive — video reel is now being required to pay the sum of $100,000 to Juan Carlos Vera, a one time California employee of ACORN. Mr. Vera had been portrayed by O’Keefe as being a willing participant when O’Keefe and his accomplice, Hanna Giles, proposed smuggling young women into the United States to work as prostitutes.

While Mr. Vera had no idea he was being surreptitiously video taped — which is not surprising given that California law expressly bars the secret recording of one’s voice or image — there was also something Mr. O’Keefe did not know until after he released the damaging video of his conversation with Vera for broadcast.

As soon as O’Keefe and his partner-in-crime left the ACORN location, Mr. Vera called the police to report the entire incident. It turns out that Vera had been playing along with O’Keefe in an effort to ensnare O’Keefe and Giles whom Vera believed were in the act of breaking the law by proposing to engage in the importing of young women to become prostitutes.

Oops.

Project Veritas was hit with a $1 million conspiracy lawsuit this past summer by some key players in the political consulting firm called Democracy Partners after it was infiltrated by Veritas.This Washington Post story says:

The allegations: Project Veritas infiltrated a Democratic consulting firm under false pretenses, secretly recorded private conversations and published deceptively edited footage — all to mislead the public and hurt former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the White House. In doing so, Project Veritas violated federal and Washington wiretapping laws, among other things, said attorney Joseph Sandler, a former Democratic National Committee general counsel who represents the plaintiff, Democracy Partners, a consulting group working with the Clinton campaign.

Project Veritas’s founder, James O’Keefe, has denounced the lawsuit as an intimidation tactic to impede Project Veritas’s “army of guerrilla journalists” and their pursuit of the truth.

Here’s the AFT complaint against Project Veritas, and below is the judge’s restraining order:

Here’s the judge’s new restraining order (and below it is the civil suit):

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/youre-not-supposed-to-understand-the-hunter-biden-smear-chaos-is-the-point

kos

Acclaimed journalist and historianAnne Applebaumunderstands the universe of propaganda as well as anyone alive today. Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, she has devoted the past three decades to studying Russia and Eastern and Central Europe, with an emphasis on disinformation and propaganda so acute that she washerself targeted—by a Russian-originated smear campaign in retaliation for her writings about Vladimir Putin's annexation of Crimea. She now contributes her cache of knowledge toThe Atlantic, among other publications.

For someone so well-versed, analyzing the blatant behavior of propagandist right-wing media outlets such as Fox News is something akin to a chess master analyzing the strategy of Tic-Tac-Toe—simple, and even relaxing. So after watching the antics of Donald Trump during his final debate with Joe Biden, she wrote a piece for *The Atlantic*on Friday that explains what millions of Americans are still shaking their heads in bewilderment about today: the source—and more importantly, the purpose—of Trump's bizarre accusations about Hunter Biden and his allegedly nefarious dealings with certain obscure individuals.

Of course the direct conduits of this nonsense are what we in the sane world regard as the fever swamps of paranoiac right-wing conspiracy thinking, most visibly manifested on the Fox News channel. As Applebaum notes, the actual storyline, spun out of whole cloth, is purposefully designed to be opaque, leading someone trying to divine the actual facts to become frustrated and give up trying to make sense of them. In fact, as her article's title suggests, "You're not supposed to understand the rumors about Biden."

Because the story is not intended to make sense, but to create a fog of doubt.

Just like the fictional legend these same people wove around "Hillary's emails," the Hunter Biden fiction also concerns emails—these ones allegedly kept by a former business partner of Hunter Biden, and miraculously disclosed to a peripheral former and supposed "investigative journalist" named Matthew Tyrmand. Tyrmand, notably, was formerly (and peripherally) associated with the right-wing fraudster and provocateur James O'Keefe.

That piece of critical information would lead most knowledgeable people to immediately shelve the unfounded Hunter Biden scheme in that mental compartment where bad ideas go to eventually die. But the Fox News audience is by definition anything but "knowledgeable people." On that network, the Hunter Biden nonsense is not something analogous to the disappointingly empty caverns of "Al Capone's vault," but rather an ever-opening flower, chock full of conspiracy-thinking goodness.

In releasing the 26,000 emails, Tyrmand and his collaborator, the Breitbart News contributor Peter Schweizer, are not bringing forth any evidence of actual lawbreaking, or an actual security threat, by either Hunter or Joe Biden. They are instead creating a miasma, an atmosphere, a foggy world in which misdeeds might have taken place, and in which corruption might have happened. They are alsoproviding the raw material from which more elaborate stories can be constructed. The otherwise incomprehensible reference in last night's debate to "the mayor of Moscow's wife," from whom Joe Biden somehow got rich, was an excellent example of how this works.A name surfaces in a large collection of data; it is detached from its context; it is then used to make an insinuation or accusation that cannot be proved; it is then forgotten, unless it gains some traction, in which case it is repeated again.

Applebaum provides some basic background for the uninformed and uninitiated (i.e., normal Americans).

Those who live outside the Fox News bubble and intend to remain there do not, of course, need to learn any of this stuff. Judging by what has been published, the very worst thing that Tyrmand's email cache could reveal (if it is authentic) is that some unattractive people sought to use Hunter Biden's surname and connections to get business deals or score a visit to the White House for their clients. But we already know about Hunter Biden's involvement with unattractive people, and his struggles with addiction; we also know that, under normal circumstances, dozens of people visit the White House every day. On the grand scale of misdeeds committed by politicians and their relatives, this kind of thing barely registers.

Applebaum then helpfully includes a laundry list of Trump's corruption that puts to shame whatever the right hopes to spin out of this email concoction. As readers of Daily Kos, you're more than familiar with these.

But there is a purpose lurking here in the mind of Fox News mogul Rupert Murdoch. The first and most obvious? To assist Trump in deflecting attention—for these final 10 days—from his horrific malfeasance in the face of a pandemic whose vicious resurgence is soon likely to be the sole focus of the nightly newscasts. The second reason is to provide a ready well of sludge to draw upon in the seemingly likely event (as Murdoch himself has acknowledged) that the polls turn out to be correct, and Trump loses the election.

They will continue to serve a function after the election as well. If Biden wins, Foxworld will need some way to keep its audience focused on something other than the Cabinet he appoints, the new legislation he passes, and all the other events, decisions, and changes that used to constitute "news." Instead of all that real-life stuff—laws and regulations, statistics and investigations, debates about the economy and health care—the leading figures of the right-wing conspiracy bubble will,over the next months and years, dip into the email caches to keep their followers focused on an alternate reality in which Joe Biden is a secret oligarch, his son is an important figure in the Chinese mafia, and LOL nothing matters. Just as you need to know the backstories of the stars in the DC Comics universe in order to understand the nuances of a Batman movie, six months from now you might also need to know all about Cooney and Archer and the wife of the mayor of Moscow if you want to understand Ingraham's monologues.

Applebaum, a rapt student of propaganda, knows that outside of hosting the inevitable guest appearances (between court dates) that Donald Trump will insist on during the next four years—assuming he loses—the Fox News yappers need something to talk and talk about, and it certainly isn't going to be Republican policies. So this fictional narrative serves the interests both of Fox News—whose main concern is keeping its soon-to-be demoralized audience content and soporific—and also helps to deflect the inevitable horror stories that will be uncovered by a Democratic-controlled Congress investigating the Trump crime family's vast trail of detritus throughout our government.

By talking about Hunter Biden, the Trump family, especially the Trump children, also hopes to deflect attention from their own greatest weakness, namely the amoral, kleptocratic nepotism that they embody like no family ever before in American history...

[...]

None of them can win using ideas anymore, because they don't have any. All they can do is seek attention: gesticulate, wave their arms in the air, shout at the crowd, invent things, and try to attract the fame and attention they feel they deserve, even though they can no longer explain why they deserve it.

Put simply, assuming Joe Biden wins this election, we should all gear up for four long years of Fox News-inspired fantasy programming.

Of course, there's always the mute button.

===

https://newrepublic.com/article/159543/cozy-relationship-project-veritas-proud-boys

no lnx pix see matt t

9/20

The Cozy Relationship Between Project Veritas and the Proud Boys

The conservative movement’s go-to media grifters have a dark history of collaborating with Trump’s new favorite far-right gang.

MARK PETERSON/REDUX

For Project Veritas, the 2020 Democratic primaries offered an embarrassment of riches. A historically large field meant plenty of targets against which James O’Keefe’s journalism-cosplay organization could deploy its signature tactic of getting low-level political operatives to say something embarrassing into a hidden camera, then hype a selectively edited video for maximum echo-chamber outrage. As we’ve already reported, based on internal Project Veritas documents, the group ran a sting, code-named “Gold Mine,” with operatives attempting to infiltrate the campaigns of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, and others, hoping to catch candidates or their staff members in a gaffe.

So far, so familiar—this is what Veritas does. Yet it’s worth looking at just who O’Keefe recruits to do it. To infiltrate the Biden campaign in Iowa, Veritas tapped an avowed Proud Boy, while a second operative aligned with the Proud Boys tried to infiltrate the Sanders and Warren campaigns. Project Veritas employs a Proud Boy who pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct for his part in a brawl following a speech by Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes. O’Keefe himself has palled around with McInnes for years, and Veritas devoted an entire sting to defending the current leader of the Proud Boys.

The Proud Boys, for those not yet in the know, is an amorphous group of far-right men who claim not to be racists but promote the idea that white men are under siege; Proud Boys are frequently found in the company of avowed racists, and the Southern Poverty Law Center calls them a hate group. McInnes has repeatedly called for violence against left-wing activists, and the Proud Boys have been caught planning violent “rallies,” most recently in Portland, Oregon.

O’Keefe has always implausibly claimed that his organization is nonpartisan, but the proof is in the output: reliably right-wing, and more than a little bit fraught with disturbing racial tensions. This is to be expected. Project Veritas has always had a troubling history when it comes to race, and the specific overlap between it and the Proud Boys is increasingly out in the open. When President Trump says, as he did in Tuesday night’s debate, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” he may as well be speaking to Veritas as well.

The Gold Mine document outlines how four Project Veritas operatives were sent to Iowa to infiltrate Democratic primary campaigns. One of them, code-named “Sundance,” targeted the Buttigieg and Biden campaigns. The document suggests he made contact with people named Joe and Ken in the Buttigieg camp and someone named Cas among Biden’s people. The Biden campaign did not recall having any interactions with Sundance, and his operation was apparently a bust—Project Veritas has released nothing on Biden from the primaries. At least, so far.

A source close to Project Veritas reveals that Sundance is actually Jackson Voynick, a 21-year-old from New Jersey who has declared himself a third-degree Proud Boy, according to the group’s arcane rules. In early 2017, he contributed his first article to Proud Boy magazine, after which he briefly contributed to Milo.net, the website of disgraced right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. By the 2018 midterm elections, Voynick was working with Veritas, popping up in Georgia to cajole a pair of small-town poll workers into advising him on how to vote, a misdemeanor in that state. (Project Veritas hyped this as “Georgia electioneering.”)

In 2018, Voynick was also in Indiana, posing as “Jack McCarthy,” where he shot undercover video of Jill Donnelly, wife of then-Senator Joe Donnelly,and members of Donnelly’s campaign, in which they admitted that Donnelly downplays his support for unions to appeal to conservative Indiana voters. Donnelly’s defeat that year became another sad slide in Project Veritas’s pitch deck to its wealthy benefactors. As primary season began, Voynick made his way to Iowa for the Gold Mine operation. Cassandra Spencer, the Gold Mine operative who targeted the Warren and Sanders campaigns—and, based on an internal review of Biden staffers and volunteers, shadowed one of their campaign events just before the Iowa caucuses—called herself a “Proud Boys’ Girl” and retweeted Michelle Malkin saying “God Bless the #ProudBoys.” That means that, of Project Veritas’s four infiltrators, at least two declared support for the group.

The connections between the Proud Boys and Project Veritas are not always so covert. In October 2018, Jake Freijo worked the door at a Gavin McInnes event hosted by the Metropolitan Republican Club in New York City. Afterward, he was involved in a Proud Boys attack on anti-fascist protesters; police eventually arrested 10 Proud Boys. Charged with four counts of misdemeanor assault and one count of misdemeanor second-degree rioting, Freijo eventually pleaded down a single charge of disorderly conduct and was sentenced to five days of community service.

Just about a year later, according to his LinkedIn profile, Freijo began working as Project Veritas’s development officer, where he oversees charitable gifts of stocks, bonds, and other securities—an increasingly common anonymizing technique for the group’s wealthy donors. One of its most generous supporters, Robert “Dr. Bob” Shillman, appears to use this technique to avoid messy public disclosures of his patronage, eschewing more transparently partisan intermediaries like Donor’s Trust. Shillman’s $50,000 pledge to Veritas last year coincided with an equivalent and anonymous Fidelity Charitable deposit of $50,000 on its third-quarter deposit report. And tax records show that, in advance of the last presidential cycle, Shillman had moved over $4.97 million from his ample Fidelity Portfolio to his Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund destined for charities unknown.

It’s not clear whether Freijo’s bachelor’s degree in economics and years of experience as an NYC realtor qualify him to be a development officer, but there he is, prominently mentioned on the Veritas donation page.

It’s hard to imagine that O’Keefe’s organization has been unaware of Freijo’s well-publicized arrest and plea deal; in fact, just after Freijo’s case concluded in April 2019, the group unveiled avideo defending the current leader of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio,coyly described on Veritas’s webpage as “a man whose Chase bank account was shut down without [his] being given a reason” and “whose website sells provocative conservative merchandise.”

That website was 1776.shop, which, according to Slate, sold far-right merchandise (think shirts reading “Pinochet did nothing wrong,” for example) and charity bracelets said to help support the Proud Boys arrested in NYC. Numerous payment providers had stopped servicing Tarrio’s website, leading O’Keefe to profile him as a conservative provocateur who’d been “debanked.” O’Keefe homed in on Chase, claiming the company had never satisfactorily explained why it cut ties with Tarrio, who, the full video acknowledges, is “chairman of the Proud Boys and entrepreneur.” (Chase later disputed the report, saying it doesn’t close accounts based on political affiliation and that one of Veritas’s covertly recorded “sources” was not who the organization claimed.) [pix gavin hartsock]

gavin McInnes also appears in the video, part of a long-standing professional—and apparently personal—relationship between the Proud Boys founder and O’Keefe. The two have been on camera together as far back as 2013, predating the official founding of the Proud Boys in 2016. O’Keefe was honored as a “Proud Boy of the Month” in 2017 in the group’s official magazine; the two tried to crash the Tribeca Film Festival in the same year. McInnes showed up to O’Keefe’s American Pravda book parties in 2018. O’Keefe has appeared on McInnes’s show, as well as that of white supremacist Stefan Molyneux. In June 2020, both McInnes and O’Keefe appeared on The Alex Jones Show—thereby completing some sort of unholy right-wing conspiracy-mongering trifecta.

Behind the scenes, McInnes lives a short distance from the Mamaroneck, NY, headquarters of Project Veritas and, according to sources, frequently drops by to bask in the adulation of O’Keefe’s motley coterie of eager young conservatives. “I remember fellow employees being like, ‘I can’t believe I just met Gavin McInnes!’” one former Veritas member recalled, using a mock-giddy octave.

For his part, McInnes may see O’Keefe mostly as a tool of ideological and financial convenience. After attending a decidedly uncool May 3, 2014, housewarming at O’Keefe’s then-new condo in Jersey City, McInnes groused privately about how lame the party was. Recollecting it again on a podcast years later, McInnes could not help but rag on O’Keefe between bouts of praise, saying James was “a little on the spectrum,” “a little nerdy,” and more “like a work friend.” After losing to O’Keefe in a dance competition on the eve of Trump’s inauguration, McInnes told The New Yorker, “Fuck that guy. He just memorized a bunch of moves. I was dancing from the heart.”

On a personal level, James O’Keefe’s coziness with white nationalists dates back to well before his founding of Project Veritas. In 2006, O’Keefe was photographed at the Robert Taft Club’s “Race and Conservatism” conference, an event headlined by Jared Taylor,the self-styled academic white supremacist and publisher of American Renaissance, a journal devoted to, well, white supremacy. Reportedly, just about 40 people attended the event, so it’s not as if O’Keefe had accidentally wandered into the wrong ballroom. Around the same time, he added white nationalist Kyle Bristowto his Facebook friends, according to an archive of O’Keefe’s early online life—but he was already among his own. The event’s organizer, Marcus Epstein, was at that time O’Keefe’s friend and his co-worker at the conservative Leadership Institute.

[James O’Keefe socializing at the 2006 Race and Conservatism conference. White supremacist publisher Jared Taylor can be seen at the top right.

LAURA SENNET]

photojournalist Laura Sennett, who documented the event with anti-racist/anti-fascist researcher Daryle Lamont Jenkins of the One People’s Project, remembers seeing O’Keefe hanging with a “clique” beforehand that included Epstein and other future figures on the alt-right. O’Keefe appeared to be particularly chummy with Kevin DeAnna, future contributor to name-brand white nationalist Richard Spencer’s Radix Journal and founder of the short-lived, far-right campus group Youth for Western Civilization. “Marcus was setting up his literature table, and all his little buddies were kind of hanging out around him talking,” Sennett recalls. “DeAnna and O’Keefe were obviously chatting as friends. They were sitting right next to each other, chatting.”

Ascendant a decade later, Epstein and O’Keefe had a reunion of sorts when they both attended the pro-Trump art show “#DaddyWillSaveUs” put on by Milo Yiannopoulos in Manhattan (after a Brooklyn gallery punted the event, which had evidently been billed to the owner as “a satirical, Andy Kaufman–esque project”). “The Proud Boys had just got started,” according to Jenkins, who covered the show, “so this was, more or less, their first appearance: They chased somebody out; Gavin McInnes smashes his phone; that kind of nonsense—and O’Keefe was there. That was the last time I saw him.”

In Jenkins’s own footage of the incident, just after McInnes slams the protester’s phone onto the pavement, the Proud Boys founder can be seen delivering a fist bump to the late communications strategist for Project Veritas, Stephen Gordon. He then shakes hands with a cheering spectator named Matthew Tyrmand, a Polish nationalist who has served for many years as a conduit between the European and American far right, as well as a director on the Project Veritas board.

[vide gavin neo-fas art show]

through the years, O’Keefe and Project Veritas’s operations have featured, to put it charitably, a racial element. As Salon recounted in 2010, at Rutgers, he and his conservative friends held an “affirmative action bake sale,” charging whites more than their Black and Latino peers. In 2008, O’Keefe called Planned Parenthood and posed as a donor asking whether his money could go specifically to aborting Black babies. In “James O’Keefe Ambushes Republican Congressman Over Racist Bill” (2014), he claims a Congressman’s voting rights legislation “is racist because it excludes white voters.”

These are, of course, only the ideas that O’Keefe actually carried out. Perhaps just as revealing is an idea Project Veritas brainstormed but never executed. As revealed by CNN in 2010, the group once discussed whether it should create an altered video of civil rights icon John Lewis. After he and his colleagues walked through a crowd of Tea Party protesters, Lewis claimed he’d heard the n-word hurled in his direction; several colleagues backed him up. Andrew Breitbart didn’t believe it and offered up a $100,000 donation to the United Negro College Fund for proof that the epithet had been used. “This is 2010,” said media-savvy Breitbart. “Even a racist is media-savvy enough not to yell the n-word.”

Veritas, the CNN documents revealed, considered producing a fake video proving Lewis right. “The video evidence just needs to be simple, just Lewis walking by with a faint ‘n*****’ said in the background, yelled by someone there,” the document reads, spelling out the word entirely. “The video evidence would need to be sufficient to get by the potential fact-checkers at CNN who might analyze the video and audio.” Getting its tape on air, the Project Veritas crew argued, would undercut CNN’s credibility, suggesting the network would do anything—even accept as real an unvetted videotape secretly doctored by right-wing activists—to paint conservatives as racist.

Project Veritas has moved on to other things. The group’s recent releases have focused mostly on Covid-19 denial and undermining confidence in the electoral process, including targeting an older transgender man who voted twice, once under each of his two gender “personas.” From that rather sad example, Veritas sought to spin a whole tale of New Hampshire’s alleged failures to protect the ballot this November. What remains constant is that Project Veritas is not unique amid the flora and fauna of the conservative movement. This is what the right is becoming, increasingly up at its highest levels. Working with Proud Boys both openly and covertly, making appearances on racist podcasts, casually planning videos deploying the n-word—in its comfortable and long-lasting proximity to white supremacists, Project Veritas simply reflects the present and future of the Republican Party.

Matthew Phelan @CBMDP

Matthew Phelan has written for Chemical Engineering, New York, Jacobin, and Gawker, where he founded the conspiracy vertical Black Bag in 2014.

Jesse Hicks @jessehixxx

Jesse Hicks is a journalist whose work has appeared in Vice, Politico, Harper’s, and elsewhere.

Elizabeth Farkas @

Liz Farkas is a New York state–licensed private investigator.

Read More: The Soapbox, Politics, Election 2020, Proud Boys, Project Veritas, James O'Keefe, Donald Trump, Gavin Macinnes, Milo Yiannopoulos, Far Right, Conservative Media, The Insecurity Complex

===

https://www.cre8noh8.org/educate/fake-news-propaganda/project-veritas/

beware many strikeouts

Project Veritas

The Movement

Fake News & Propaganda

Private Intelligence– WPA Intelligence (Jacob Wohl)

James O’Keefe-2010 Founded Project Veritas and in January 2010, F.B.I. arrested O’Keefe and three accomplices

Matthew Tyrmand, Project Veritas, is an adviser to a senator from Poland’s anti-immigration ruling Law and Justice party. The Global Machine Behind the Rise of Far-Right Nationalism The New York Times Jo Becker August 10, 2019

The Koch Brothers and Robert Mercer Bankrolled Right-Wing Firm Project Veritas Observer

By Davis Richardson December 4, 2017 “Through Gravitas Maximus LLC—Mercer’s investment shell for Breitbart that once had the same Long Island address as Renaissance Technologies—the Republican funneled $25,000 to the organization. Mercer announced his plans to resign as co-CEO of Renaissance Technologies following Buzzfeed’s report linking his investments in Breitbart and Milo [Yiannopoulos] Inc. with white supremacists. Meanwhile, Internal Revenue Service documents uncovered by the Washington Post indicate that Koch-affiliated organization Donors Trust poured $1.7 million to Project Veritas last year alone…Before Project Veritas’ sting was revealed by the Post, the Mercer-funded outlet Breitbart sent two reporters to Alabama to discredit Moore’s accusers…Though the John Birch Society’s fringe libertarianism has long overshadowed every Koch-funded institution (from Americans for Prosperity’s grassroots squabbling to the harrowed halls of George Mason’s Mercatus Center), the ideology now chokes the political landscape. Strangled by oligarchy, the American people gasp for air, only to be greeted by Project Veritas’ James O’Keefe masquerading as a paramedic.”

Donors Trust– Koch Network Funds Project Veritas

Rebekah Mercer– Funds Project Veritas “fundraising total for 2019 leaped up to more than $13.44 million, $4.58 million more than their 2018 returns and the group’s largest reported annual revenue figure to date.” The New Republic

The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind the Trump Presidency How Robert Mercer exploited America’s populist insurgency. The New Yorker By Jane Mayer March 17, 2017

Wealthy Mercer family spent millions on conservative causes in 2018 as they distanced themselves from Trump December 2, 2019 CNBC Brian Schwartz

Gatestone Institute– Islamophobic– John Bolton founded, Mercer-funded. Links to far-right Swedish sites, along with Stormfront (White Supremacist), Voice of Europe (Kremlin-friendly right-wing), Sweden4Rus .nu & FreieWelt net,Infowars (Alex Jones), & Breitbart (Steve Bannon, Mercer-funded)

Cambridge Analytica LLC-Bannon VP-The US investment arm for SCL‘s election interference using psyhops & microtargeting on Facebook predominately but also Twitter, and YouTube

Breitbart News Bannon Editor- Spread Russian Disinformation from RT & Sputnik

Government Accountability Institute–Bannon founded in 2012 with Peter Schweizer of “Clinton Cash” (2015) & anti-Biden book “Profiles in Corruption” (2020). Tallahassee, FL. Rebekah Mercer is Chairwoman

Trump’s Story of Hunter Biden’s Chinese Venture Is Full of HolesBloomberg

By Gregory Korte and Zachary Mider October 3, 2019

“There’s no indication that Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President Joe Biden, has profited from the Chinese deal, much less made billions. The younger Biden’s involvement with the company was initially unpaid, and he didn’t obtain an equity interest in the Chinese venture until after his father left office, according to his lawyer…Trump’s allegations about Hunter Biden have their origins in “Secret Empires,” a 2018 book by Peter Schweizer, the president of the Government Accountability Institute, a self-styled corruption watchdog group chaired and funded by conservative mega-donor Rebekah Mercer”

GAI Board includes Bannon, Peter Schweizer, Hunter Lewis, Ron Robinson (president of Young America’s Foundation), and Wynton Hall.

Citizens UnitedPresident and Bannon’s propaganda producer David Bossie and Catholic, Lenin-loving Steve Bannon. Lawrence Kadish is a wealthy real estate investor/founder of Chairman of the Republican Jewish Coalition, whose Victory Film Group pushes Tweets that work with Breitbart New’s Anti-Muslim stories. Funded by the Koch Brothers and the Mercers.

Erik Prince –Trump Transition Team tried to train Project Veritas at his ranch in Wyoming but they were unable to learn. Criminal Referral by the Senate Intelligence Committee

THE COMPLETE MERCENARY How Erik Prince Used the Rise of Trump to Make an Improbable ComebackThe Intercept Matthew Cole May 3, 2019

Erik Prince Recruits Ex-Spies to Help Infiltrate Liberal Groups New York Times 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. Mark Mazzetti and Adam Goldman Published March 7, 2020 Updated March 9, 2020

“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. Both Project Veritas and Mr. Prince have ties to President Trump’s aides and family. “

Trump Campaign 2020

Inside the Project Veritas Plan to Steal the Election | The New Republic

James O’Keefe’s group is part of a sprawling campaign to delegitimize mail-in balloting in the fall—a campaign being led by the White House. O’Keefe’s May 2020 guest list was going to include “Donald Trump Jr., Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and his activist wife Ginni were all invited, as were several of O’Keefe’s most generous conservative donors, including Texas shale oil billionaire George Bishop and Bullpen Capital founder Paul Martino…For well over a year, Project Veritas has been secretly producing undercover stings designed to undermine the integrity of absentee and mail-in ballot counts—an endeavor codenamed “Diamond Dog,” according to documents we have obtained.

Diamond Dog began as only one facet of Project Veritas’s 2020 rat-fucking strategy, but with the onset of the pandemic, which has made in-person voting a dicey proposition, it has since become one of the group’s top-line action items…be Cognex Corporation founder Robert Shillman, a devoted funder of Islamophobic causes who was also one of O’Keefe’s would-be wedding guests. (Shillman ended up pledging to donate $50,000 to the group.) The slate of investigations in the “Dr. Bob” pitch included schemes to procure evidence of “illegal aliens voting,” mail-in ballot tampering at “nursing homes,” and “the sale of absentee ballots and voter profiles on the ‘Dark Web.

’…In Texas, Project Veritas has also coordinated in secret with a local Republican operative named Aaron Harris, codenamed “Dragon,” currently chief of staff to Republican congressman Lance Gooden. In turn, through the activist group he founded, Direct Action Texas, Harris has helped Project Veritas covertly strategize with a staffer working for the office of the state’s Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton. Paxton is leading the state’s “election integrity initiative,”one of many Republican efforts nationwide to suppress the vote under the guise of rooting out the nearly non-existent threat of voter fraud…a 69-year-old Florida resident, a registered Republican named Joseph Vancheri notifies O’Keefe of his soon-to-be status as a poll worker in Broward County, likely for undercover Election Day snooping on Project Veritas’s behalf.

A first-generation immigrant himself, Vancheri has nevertheless long harbored hardline views on immigration that echo his anxieties over the potential for illicit enfranchisement of foreigners. In another slide, Project Veritas boasts of receiving a tip from a former broadcast meteorologist named Arch Kennedy, who found it suspicious that 300 people were all registered to vote at the address for Emory University’s Emory Muslim Student Association in Atlanta…In 2017, Arch organized one of the anti-Muslim group ACT! For America’s 28 nationwide “March Against Sharia” rallies. Held in Atlanta’s Piedmont Park, it was a sparsely attended affair but still managed to include Republican Georgia State Senator Michael Williams, then mounting a doomed primary campaign for governor. Aaron Harris, a son of white evangelical missionaries who picked up Portuguese while growing up in Brazil and went on to become fluent in Spanish, has been relentlessly stoking paranoia over mail-in ballots since his first failed foray as a paid political consultant in 2014. Despite a sizable war chest from Dallas hotel magnate and Tea Party financier Monty Bennett, Harris’s candidates in the 2015 local election for the Tarrant Regional Water District lost. He quickly became fixated on the idea that thousands of forged mail-in ballot applications had been responsible for their defeat.”

ABC News suspends correspondent David Wright after comments about Trump coverage, socialism, in Project Veritas sting Washington Post Paul Farhi February 26, 2020 “Project Veritas’s founder, James O’Keefe, teased the release of the video on Twitter on Tuesday with the hashtag #ExposeABC.He tweeted that his group “will expose ABC News’ agenda to mislead voters and push their own narratives” and said in response to the upcoming release that ABC News had suspended “the correspondent involved.” He didn’t identify Wright or provide details.”

Antifa–Project Veritas pushes fake news during BLM protests. For ex: Project Veritas Infiltrates Antifa, Says ‘Outside funding’ Could Be Involved Jennie Taer June 4, 2020

Google--In efforts to redirect blame for 2016 election interference onto Google, GAI released internal emails from Google “whistleblower” Zachary Vorhies on AUGUST 14, 2019

An Ex-Google Employee Turned ‘Whistleblower’ and QAnon Fan Made ‘Plandemic’ Go Viral Vice Zach Vorhies leaked documents to the right-wing group Project Veritas, then became a committed anti-vaxxer and promoter of QAnon. In an April video, he laid out his plan to promote ‘Plandemic.’ By Anna Merlan May 14, 2020.

Matthew Tyrmand,Project Veritas board, “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.” The New Yorker

“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.” The New Yorker

Wikipedia

“Project Veritas is an American non-profit organization founded in 2010 by James O’Keefe. Its stated mission is “to investigate and expose corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud, and other misconduct in both public and private institutions in order to achieve a more ethical and transparent society.”[1] The group’s productions have been criticized as misleading, fabricated or taken out of context.[2][3] O’Keefe and Project Veritas were in one case ordered to pay $100,000 damages for defamation.[4][5][6] O’Keefe has been barred from fundraising for Project Veritas in Florida and other states because of his federal criminal record for entering a federal building under fraudulent pretenses.[7] Much of the funding for Project Veritas comes from anonymous donations through Donors Trust, a conservative and libertarian American nonprofit donor-advised fund, which according to its promotional materials, says that it will “keep your charitable giving private, especially gifts funding sensitive or controversial issues.”[8]“

3.^ James O’Keefe Shoots at The Washington Post and Misses. National Review McLaughlin, Dan (November 28, 2017 “In today’s big media news, gonzo video journalist James O’Keefe had yet another of his undercover sting operations blow up in his face. The Washington Post caught O’Keefe and his Veritas Project trying to scam the paper into running a false sexual abuse allegation against Roy Moore:”

Woman’s effort to infiltrate The Washington Post dated back months Washington Post By Beth Reinhard, Aaron C. Davis and Andrew Ba Tran November 29, 2017

Florida bars Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe from fundraising due to criminal conviction.The Washington Post Boburg, Shawn December 8, 2017 “Amateurish spies like James O’Keefe III attempt to sway the 2016 campaign.”

Post reporter confronts woman who made false accusations against Roy MooreWashington Post November 27, 2017 | 11:37 AM EDT

Reporter Stephanie McCrummen of The Washington Post, left, interviews Jaime Phillips at a Greek restaurant in Alexandria, Va., on Wednesday.

Sting of Myself Amateurish spies like James O’Keefe III attempt to sway the 2016 campaign. The New Yorker By Jane Mayer May 20, 2016 “As 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.

“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.” 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.

“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.

“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.”

“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 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.”

A Google whistleblower has gone public with claims of election manipulation and political bias, according to investigative journalism group Project Veritas, which posted a trove of over 950 documents provided by Google insider Zachary Vorhies, who says he has come forward because he “saw something dark and nefarious going on with the company and I realized that they were going to not only tamper with the elections, but use that tampering with the elections to essentially overthrow the United States.”

Google “Machine Learning Fairness” Whistleblower Goes Public, says: “burden lifted off of my soul” GAI-AUGUST 14, 2019

(San Francisco) A Google insider who anonymously leaked internal documents to Project Veritas made the decision to go public in an on-the-record video interview.

Project Veritas has released yet another report about tech giant Google, this time a Google insider named Zachary Vorhies has gone public with claims that Google planned to tamper with U.S. elections. Vorhies turned over a trove of documents to Project Veritas and has reportedly given over 950 documents to the Department of Justice’s Antitrust division.

Andrew Breitbart and James O’Keefe Ruined Him, and Now He Gets $100,000. The Atlantic.

Friedersdorf, Conor March 8, 2013 “Juan Carlos Vera worked at an ACORN office in San Diego. One day, O’Keefe and Hannah Giles walked in with a hidden video camera and pretended to be a pimp and prostitute as part of a sting meant to prove that some of ACORN’s employees were depraved leftists. They asked Vera for help smuggling underage girls across the Mexican border so that they could work in a brothel. Confronted with what appeared to be a sex-trafficking plot, you’d hope that someone in Vera’s position would play along, get as much information as possible, and call the police. And guess what? That’s exactly what Vera did.

“Unbeknownst to O’Keefe or Giles, he called his cousin, a police officer, shortly after they left his office. Perhaps you know what happened next. Internet entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart published the ACORN hidden videos, which exposed some actual instances of bad behavior at the organization, but also turned out to be egregiously misleading to the millions who watched them. This is true of a lot of the ACORN videos.

But the San Diego ACORN video was particularly misleading. O’Keefe produced, and Breitbart published and publicized, videos that made an innocent man look as if he was complicit in a would-be plot to traffic underage girls across the border. They didn’t do this on purpose. Still, it happened. And it cost the guy his job:”When last I wrote about this story in 2010, long after all the facts had come to light, there was no correction appended to the story. And look at the page today: The original story is still up with no correction, no clarification, no editor’s note — nothing. Long ago I confronted O’Keefe on Twitter about Vera. Back when he was alive I confronted Andrew Breitbart about the man too.”

Elements of NPR Gotcha Video Taken out of Context NPR March 14, 2011. Folkenflik, David

===

2020 accuse ilhan buying votes; trifecta: islam, AA, immigrant, (terrorist)

only reliable things in the world are death, taxes, and James O'Keefe's videos falling apart under scrutiny.

O'Keefe's latest major video for Project Veritas was a video making wild claims about the Minnesota election of Rep. Ilhan Omar. The details aren't worth getting into, but the important thing is that, despite a big roll out that featured Sean Hannity, O'Keefe's claims have fallen apartas actual reporting has come out. But most of the actual reporting only occurred after the video racked up millions of views combined on Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook -- and even now, there is no fact check appended to the videos at all. These companies have made big claims about protecting the election -- but seem to have no plan whatsoever for a proven charlatan like O'Keefe.

Also: Recall that the last we saw O'Keefe, he was wandering the streets of New York City, claiming that the coroners were lying about the death toll from COVID-19. Hannity loved that one too.

===

https://www.mediamatters.org/voter-fraud-and-suppression/james-okeefes-videos-attacking-mail-voting-minnesota-fall-apart-after

no lnx many pix

James O’Keefe’s videos attacking mail-in voting in Minnesota fall apart after being spread by right-wing media

WRITTEN BY ERIC KLEEFELD

PUBLISHED 10/07/20

Serial political fraudster James O’Keefe, founder of the right-wing group Project Veritas, is now facing the collapse of yet another of his purported “sting” videos — this time, involving accusations of ballot fraud and bribery in Minneapolis. But the fraud and bribery might really be coming from Project Veritas itself.

About Project Veritas

Project Veritas’ basic modus operandi is to secretly record videos, then deceptively edit and release them in order to create a “gotcha” moment for right-wing media. These attempts often backfire. [Business Insider, 11/28/17]

Project Veritas has a long history of distorting videos, claiming they show things they do not actually show, and deceptively editing secret recordings to make the subjects look worse. Project Veritas also has a history of targeting low-level volunteers and staff, then attributing uninformed statements to organizers higher up in authority. [Media Matters, 10/6/14]

Project Veritas refuses to ever release unedited videos, only clips. “We treat our raw video as the same as a reporter’s notebook and we do not release it,” said Project Veritas spokesman Neil McCabe. [Snopes, 10/01/20]

Another O’Keefe stunt from earlier this year involved supposed inflation of coronavirus death statistics in New York City. Despite containing no evidence or meaningful information, it was widely picked up in right-wing media. [Media Matters, 4/30/20]

Project Veritas’ latest scheme is a project codenamed “Diamond Dog” meant to discredit mail-in voting. The intention of this scheme is “literally to get Trump reelected,” as a source said. [The New Republic, 8/3/20]

Project Veritas’ latest claims

O’Keefe’s first new video claimed to implicate an “Ilhan Omar connected Ballot Harvester.” The video featured Snapchat videos by a man referred to as “Liban Mohamed” with absentee ballots collected in his car. Though he is described as “connected” to Omar, he identifies himself in an audio clip as working for his brother Jamal Osman’s successful campaign in an August special election for the Minneapolis city council. [YouTube, 9/27/20]

A second video claimed to show an exchange of $200 for a single vote. Both videos relied heavily on the statements of a community “insider” named Omar Jamal. O’Keefe claimed that “our sources inside the Somali community here allege that the architect of this pay-for-votes scheme is none other than U.S. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.” [YouTube, 9/28/20]

The new video releases appear to have been promoted beforehand with Trump campaign officials. The latest Project Veritas release was teased on Twitter by Donald Trump Jr. and businessman Mike Lindell, Trump’s Minnesota campaign chair. [Election Integrity Partnership, 9/29/20]

The videos’ release may have been moved ahead of schedule to distract from The New York Times’ reporting on Trump’s personal finances.“Mr. O’Keefe’s promotional posts had said the video would be released on Monday, but Project Veritas released it on Sunday instead, a few hours after the publication of The Times’s investigation. … Many of the same accounts that had shared promotional tweets also shared the video as soon as it was released, moving it quickly into Twitter’s trending topics alongside The Times’s tax investigation.” [The New York Times, 9/29/20]

Fact-checking Project Veritas’ claims

The collection of absentee ballots by a designated person who delivers them to be counted, which right-wing media refer to as “ballot harvesting,” was legal in Minnesota for a period this summer, during which the man in the Snapchat videos claims to have been working. The Minnesota Supreme Court reinstated a limit on collecting ballots in early September, after the state’s primary election had already taken place. [Star Tribune, 9/9/20]

Project Veritas has provided no direct evidence for any vote-buying. Any such allegations in the video “come solely from unnamed people who speak with Project Veritas operatives in the video and whose faces are not shown.” [The New York Times, 9/29/20]

Now, “Liban Mohamed” has come forward — though his name is actually Liban Osman, and he was not working for Rep. Ilhan Omar’s campaign. Osman also said that Project Veritas misleadingly edited together two different videos he had taken a month apart from each other, as he boasted of his brother’s campaign and its successful fundraising against a wide field of 11 opponents. [KMSP-TV, 10/5/20]

An Omar campaign spokesperson confirmed that Liban Osman had never worked or volunteered for Omar’s campaign. [Snopes, 10/1/20]

Liban Osman says Project Veritas’ main “insider” source, Omar Jamal, had offered him a bribe of $10,000, to be paid by Project Veritas. Osman says Jamal wanted him to say he was harvesting ballots for Rep. Ilhan Omar, and claims Jamal said to him, “They [Project Veritas] are not after you or your brother. Why are you defending her?” Project Veritas is denying the accusation. [KMSP-TV, 10/5/20]

Video file

CitationVia Fox 9, KMSP-TV, October 5, 2020

KMSP-TV in Minneapolis reports that the video showing an exchange of $200 was actually Project Veritas' source, Omar Jamal. “But two sources tell the FOX 9 Investigators the man is a relative of Omar Jamal, and that during the encounter outside Cedar Riverside Apartments, it is Jamal who is handing the man $200 which was intended for the family of a sick relative in Somalia.” [KMSP-TV, 10/5/20]

Project Veritas’ source Omar Jamal

Omar Jamal claims to be the chairman of “Somali Watchdog Group,” but the organization does not appear to exist. It is also unclear if Jamal is at all associated with the Ramsey County Sheriff Department, which he claims to be working for in the Project Veritas video. “Further, according to records obtained by the Daily Dot, Jamal isn’t currently a U.N. Permanent Representative to the Federal Republic of Somalia, which he has also claimed on LinkedIn.”[Daily Dot, 10/1/20]

Jamal has also admitted the video purportedly showing an exchange of $200 for a ballot was a staged dramatization. “I think that incident was one that was depicting how [cash-for-ballot] works,” he said in an interview with a Somali American TV program. He also admitted that he had never met anyone who had received cash in exchange for a vote. [Sahan Journal, 10/1/20]

Project Veritas is now promoting a GoFundMe for their “#BallotHarvesting Insider Omar Jamal,” with a goal of $500,000. The money is allegedly to support efforts to “further expose potentially more election fraud come November.” At time of writing, it has raised just over $31,000. [Twitter, 9/28/20]

Right-wing media and President Donald Trump spread the latest apparent hoax from Project Veritas

On September 28, O’Keefe appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, to promote the video. [Fox News, Hannity, 9/28/20]

Video file

CitationFrom the September 28, 2020, edition of Fox News' Hannity

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones hosted O’Keefe to talk about the story. [Infowars, The Alex Jones Show, 9/28/20]

Video file

CitationFrom the September 28, 2020, edition of InfoWars’ The Alex Jones Show

O’Keefe was interviewed by former National Rifle Association spokesperson Dana Loesch. [YouTube, 9/28/20]

O’Keefe also appeared on The Larry Elder Show. [YouTube, 9/29/20]

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon hosted Project Veritas’ Neil McCabe to discuss the story on his War Room: Pandemic podcast. [Twitter, 9/28/20]

Far-right blogger and white nationalist sympathizer Michelle Malkin hosted state Rep. Steve Drazkowski (R-MN) to discuss the Project Veritas video. [YouTube, 9/28/20]

Glenn Beck promoted the video on his Blaze TV show in a segment titled “Vote Buying In Ilhan Omar’s District?” [YouTube, 9/28/20]

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[New York Post, 9/27/20]

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[Breitbart, 9/27/20]

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[National Review, 9/27/20]

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[The Gateway Pundit, 9/27/20]

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[The Post Millennial, 9/27/20]

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[RedState, 9/28/20]

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[The Epoch Times, 9/28/20]

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[CBN, 9/28/20]

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[The Washington Times, 9/28/20]

Right-wing YouTuber Tim Pool: “Trump Proven RIGHT After Video Shows Voter Fraud By Ilhan Omar Supporters, He DEMANDS Investigation” [YouTube, 9/28/20]“Trump Proven RIGHT After Video Shows Voter Fraud By Ilhan Omar Supporters, He DEMANDS Investigation” [YouTube, 9/28/20]

Pro-Trump cartoonist Scott Adams: “Trump Taxes, Mail-In Ballot Fraud Scandal, How Trump Wins Without Trying” [YouTube, 9/28/20]

Trump amplified the claims at his campaign rally in Duluth, Minnesota. “And what about Omar? Where she gets caught [ballot] harvesting. What the hell is going on? I hope your U.S. attorney is involved,” Trump said, as the crowd chanted, “Lock her up.” [Vox, 10/1/20]

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), in a now-deleted tweet: “Project Veritas offers further evidence of the need to ban ballot harvesting. It's not a partisan issue. It's been abused to help both R & D candidates, including in North Carolina & California. Please help by telling your congressional rep to pass our bipartisan bill HR8285.” [Twitter, 9/28/20]

Gabbard posted a new tweet after the latest allegations broke about the videos:

---

https://www.mediamatters.org/james-okeefe/james-okeefe-cycle-after-sean-hannitys-eager-promotion-another-project-veritas-video

no vid

fox News star Sean Hannity hosted disgraced right-wing fabulist James O’Keefe last week to promote his latest video “sting,” which seeks to aid President Donald Trump’s reelection by undermining the credibility of U.S. elections. The video has since been discredited -- an incredibly predictable outcome for anyone remotely familiar with O’Keefe’s oeuvre -- but Hannity hasn’t bothered to let his audience know, because he’s a shill for the president.

Every news cycle about an O’Keefe “sting” video is the same (though every cycle about one of his efforts fizzling before launch is hilariously different). O’Keefe’s Project Veritas group targets a Democratic candidate, a progressive group, or a media outlet. His operatives use hidden cameras and leading questions to elicit responses from low-level participants that he can decontextualize and distort. His team edits together the footage into a video which he presents as damning evidence of widespread illegal or unethical behavior. The published result gets blasted through the right-wing infrastructure of social media storytellers, digital media outlets, and talk radio, moving up the food chain until it reaches Fox and the president. And then people take a closer look at the video and its participants and point out the particular ways in which O’Keefe has misled the public this time.

O’Keefe’s latest target is U.S. elections. His latest video is a two-part Project Veritas investigation into a “Cash For Ballots Voter Fraud Scheme” in the Somali American community in Minneapolis. And his latest wild allegation is that his team has identified “the biggest systemic voter fraud smoking gun in American history.”

There is no systemic voter fraud in the U.S. elections and mail-in voting is a secure way to cast ballots, despite the right-wing disinformation campaign to the contrary. And the videos in question are a mishmash of decontextualized snippets, some from anonymous individuals, which ultimately provide no “hard evidence of cash in exchange for votes.” Nonetheless, the video had rocketed through the right-wing noise machine to Hannity’s radio show, his Fox show, and the president in one day.

On his September 28 broadcast, Hannity presented O’Keefe as a credible investigator who had documented corruption. O’Keefe’s video, Hannity warned, “should scare every American.” After acknowledging that “Fox News has not independently verified the contents of the video,” he proceeded to show part of it to his millions of viewers. He brought on O’Keefe himself, who claimed he had produced “incontrovertible evidence” of “voter fraud” that is “all on tape.” “I hope the attorney general of the United States is watching tonight and will watch that video,” Hannity concluded at the end of the interview. “We need to get to the truth."

[vid]

and then the Project Veritas claims started to fall apart.

The “insider” at the center of O’Keefe’s tale who explains the purportedly crooked “scheme” is Omar Jamal, a local gadfly who presents himself as a leader in the Somali American community but has few apparent followers. Subsequent reporting revealed he isn’t a credible source, and he reportedly backtracked on key claims he made to O’Keefe in a subsequent interview -- notably, that he had ever seen cash exchanged for ballots. In fact, he “specifically alleges that he thinks a clip that purports to show a ‘ballot harvester’ paying a voter $200 in exchange for a vote was instead a demonstration of how that process allegedly works” -- a statement he may have been in good position to make, since he is reportedly the “ballot harvester” shown in the clip.

The local Fox owned-and-operated affiliate, KMSP, added to the implosion on Monday with an interview with Liban Osman, another subject of the Project Veritas videos. KMSP provided at least one clear-cut case of Project Veritas deceptively taking Osman out of context to suggest he had been offering money for votes, and Osman told the station that Jamal had offered him $10,000 from the group if he were to claim to be harvesting ballots for Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN). “Project Veritas denies manipulating or misrepresenting its undercover video and claims it never offered Liban Osman $10,000,” KMSP reported.

Hannity’s audience hasn’t heard any of this from him, and they shouldn’t expect to. The Fox star knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s been promoting O’Keefe’s purported bombshells for years, despite his lack of credibility, because it’s propaganda intended to benefit the Republican Party, and Hannity is a Republican Party propagandist.

In this case, O’Keefe is the leading edge of an insidious and wide-ranging GOP plan to damage the credibility of absentee and mail-in ballot counts, suppress as many Democratic votes as possible, and undermine confidence in the election results. As part of that effort, Project Veritas has “worked to infiltrate the groups of volunteers and paid canvassers who collect absentee and mail-in voter applications from low-income, elderly, and minority groups--a perfectly legal practice in most states that conservatives have tried to label as nefarious ‘ballot harvesting,’” The New Republic reported over the summer.

That means we can expect more dubiously edited videos from O’Keefe’s crew in the month before the election -- and there’s little doubt he’ll be back on Hannity’s show to talk about it. That’s Fox’s role in the scheme -- an outlet willing to feed its viewers nonsensical, overblown attacks on the election process to benefit the president.

Matthew Phelan, Jesse Hicks/August 3, 2020

Inside the Project Veritas Plan to Steal the Election

James O’Keefe’s group is part of a sprawling campaign to delegitimize mail-in balloting in the fall—a campaign being led by the White House.

https://newrepublic.com/article/158622/inside-project-veritas-plan-steal-election

James O’Keefe had big plans for 2020. The founder of Project Veritas, the conspiratorial right-wing group that specializes in Fox News–friendly “stings” intended to expose supposed liberal bias and corruption in American society, was planning on getting married this past May. The wedding, to a public school teacher, was to be at an exclusive country club in upstate New York. The guest list was packed with Make America Great Again world cognoscenti: Donald Trump Jr., Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and his activist wife Ginni were all invited, as were several of O’Keefe’s most generous conservative donors, including Texas shale oil billionaire George Bishop and Bullpen Capital founder Paul Martino.

The wedding was, per an email blast, “postponed indefinitely” over the coronavirus, as the pandemic swept across the state this spring and early summer. Although O’Keefe himself declined to comment on this and many other details for this story, a well-placed frenemy is “90 percent sure they broke up.” In any event, while the pandemic may have derailed his personal life, it has only heightened the urgency of some of O’Keefe’s most lucratively funded dirty tricks.

For well over a year, Project Veritas has been secretly producing undercover stings designed to undermine the integrity of absentee and mail-in ballot counts—an endeavor codenamed “Diamond Dog,” according to documents we have obtained. Diamond Dog began as only one facet of Project Veritas’s 2020 rat-fucking strategy, but with the onset of the pandemic, which has made in-person voting a dicey proposition, it has since become one of the group’s top-line action items.

The shift reflects the Republican Party’s near-existential concerns about mail-in voting in November. Donald Trump has disingenuously railed against the practice numerous times over the past few months, betraying a deep anxiety. “Mail in ballots substantially increases the risk of crime and VOTER FRAUD!” he has tweeted. At other times he has claimed: “It will be the greatest Rigged Election in history”; “IT WILL ALSO LEAD TO THE END OF OUR GREAT REPUBLICAN PARTY”; and “SCAM!” Last week, he went so far as to suggest that the election should be delayed, saying that because of “Universal Mail-in Voting,” the vote would be “INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT.”

The purpose of Diamond Dog, as one source close to the organization put it, is “literally to get Trump reelected.” This source, like other past and present Project Veritas employees who have talked to us for this article,expressed fear of reprisals from the group and would only speak under the condition of anonymity.

Last year, Project Veritas’s donor development team solicited big-ticket funders with a pitch deck—frequently tailored to a given patron’s pet ideological grievances and personal hang-ups—offering tantalizing details about the group’s undercover operations for the 2020 campaign cycle. One iteration of this Apple Keynote file was prepared for an ask meeting with a person who appears to beCognex Corporation founder Robert Shillman, a devoted funder of Islamophobic causes who was also one of O’Keefe’s would-be wedding guests. (Shillman ended up pledging to donate $50,000 to the group.) The slate of investigations in the “Dr. Bob” pitch included schemes to procure evidence of “illegal aliens voting,” mail-in ballot tampering at “nursing homes,” and “the sale of absentee ballots and voter profiles on the ‘Dark Web.’”

By the end of summer 2019, Diamond Dog had already grown to be a cross-country effort, based on internal Project Veritas memos, research notes, and other documents that we have obtained. InCalifornia and Texas, Project Veritas has tasked its operatives with unearthing supposed evidence of widespread mail-in ballot forgery. In both states, Project Veritas has worked toinfiltrate the groups of volunteers and paid canvassers who collect absentee and mail-in voter applications from low-income, elderly, and minority groups—a perfectly legal practice in most states that conservatives have tried to label as nefarious “ballot harvesting.”

In Texas, Project Veritas has also coordinated in secret with a local Republican operative named Aaron Harris, codenamed “Dragon,” currently chief of staff to Republican congressman Lance Gooden. In turn, through the activist group he founded, Direct Action Texas, Harris has helped Project Veritas covertly strategize with a staffer working for the office of the state’s Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton. Paxton is leading the state’s “election integrity initiative,” one of many Republican efforts nationwide to suppress the vote under the guise of rooting out the nearly non-existent threat of voter fraud.

Granted, Project Veritas, whose fervor to own the libs is matched only by its comical incompetence, is hardly likely to tip the election in Donald Trump’s favor all by itself. But it is at the vanguard of a larger underhanded approach that Republicans, starting at the very top, are taking to the 2020 cycle. If they want to win, they really have no other choice but to undermine the vote: Trump’s poll numbers are in the basement, and he appears constitutionally incapable of making appeals beyond his hardcore supporters on the right.

Republicans have all but admitted that this is their strategy. In coordination with the Republican National Committee and a raft of independent conservative groups, Trump has staked the success of his entire reelection campaign to a widespread voter suppression effort built on the pretext of preserving election integrity.The project, led by his campaign’s senior counsel Justin Clark, has worked to place operatives in at least 10 battleground states to challenge voter rolls and procedures. Between lawsuits and local advertising blitzes—all regularly relayed to Trump in the Oval Office—the effort could cost “well over $20 million,” as the RNC told The Washington Post.

Project Veritas has been among the on-the-ground organizations at the forefront of these efforts and has benefited substantially as a result. According to internal Project Veritas documents, the group’s fundraising total for 2019 leaped up to more than $13.44 million, $4.58 million more than their 2018 returns and the group’s largest reported annual revenue figure to date. The group may be comically incompetent, but in these cursed times, we all know how dangerous comical incompetence can be once enough money and clout line up behind it.

For an operation premised on conspiracy theories and fueled by raging paranoia, it will come as no surprise that the agents helping to spearhead Project Veritas’s election mischief are oddballs on the fringes of American political life. In one slide prepared for Dr. Bob, a 69-year-old Florida resident, a registered Republican named Joseph Vancheri notifies O’Keefe of his soon-to-be status as apoll worker in Broward County, likely for undercoverElection Day snooping on Project Veritas’s behalf. Vancheri, an ex-cop and die-hard Trump supporter, has routinely taken to Facebook to lash out against “all the Trump haters” and “SHEEP,” including “SHIFTY SCHIFF” and “the Idiot Warren,” using Trump’s preferred epithet “Pocohontas [sic].” A first-generation immigrant himself, Vancheri has nevertheless long harbored hardline views on immigration that echo his anxieties over the potential for illicit enfranchisement of foreigners.

In another slide, Project Veritas boasts of receiving a tip from a former broadcast meteorologist named Arch Kennedy, who found it suspicious that 300 people were all registered to vote at the address for Emory University’s Emory Muslim Student Association in Atlanta. (In all likelihood these voters, who constitute 2 percent of Emory’s total student population and .0028 percent of Georgia’s population, have their mail forwarded there.) In 2017, Arch organized one of the anti-Muslim group ACT! For America’s 28 nationwide “March Against Sharia” rallies. Held in Atlanta’s Piedmont Park, it was a sparsely attended affair but still managed to include Republican Georgia State Senator Michael Williams, then mounting a doomed primary campaign for governor. [graf]

Iit’s unclear if either Vancheri or Kennedy’s offerings matured into full-fledged stings banked for the 2020 election. Neither they nor Project Veritas responded for comment, while the Project Veritas source who supplied the “Dr. Bob” pitch deck admitted that “a lot of it was kinda BS,” another example of the group “hyping themselves up to make themselves look better” and squeeze more money out of donors.Project Veritas went back to the well this weekend, soliciting donors in a mass email Saturday afternoon that promised a major ballot harvesting investigation that needs to be “completed as soon as possible.”

But other stings outlined in the Keynote file did materialize. The presentation, for example, teased an inside man at Pinterestwho was “increasingly worried” about the platform’s “expanding community safety restrictions.” Sure enough, two months later, an ex-Pinterest Android app developer named Eric Cochran came forward with (later debunked) allegations in a series of Project Veritas and a *Newsweek*op-ed claiming that the platform was censoring anti-abortion Christian advertisers. The pitch deck also promised an exposé from a “CNN Insider” named Cary Poarch, a bombshell that fizzled in October 2019 when Poarch’s hidden recordings, taken while working as a freelance satellite truck operator for the news network, failed to expose more than the personal opinions of a few random employees.

Well before the pandemic drew national attention to mail-in voting, these documents show a discernible focus on “ballot harvesting” as part of the larger Republican effort to paint voting by mail as a threat to democracy. The concern stems from the party’s entrenched belief that, as Trump has tweeted, vote-by-mail “doesn’t work out well for Republicans,” since it often helps low-income people and minorities.

By late August 2019, the “Story Objective” for Diamond Dog had expanded, per one internal meeting document, to exposing “corruption within CA ballot harvesting companies and other states (TX) based on intel gains.” A Project Veritas undercover operative codenamed “Magnum” had been busy “attending local Democratic events in CA to find discussions of harvesting.” Another operative codenamed “GDog” was creating anentrapment scheme by posting “ads online looking for people to join his ballot harvesting.”

Texas has been a major theater for Project Veritas’s Diamond Dog operations, in no small measure because raw demographics have been threatening to turn the state blue for years. The sense of crisis comes from the state GOP’s failure to bring Latinos into their voting bloc. The legacy of such botched strategizing has been an assault on the state’s Latino electorate itself, with right-wing officials and political operatives raising suspicions about their very legitimacy as legal participants in the voting process.

Aaron Harris, a son of white evangelical missionaries who picked up Portuguese while growing up in Brazil and went on to become fluent in Spanish, has been relentlessly stoking paranoia over mail-in ballots since his first failed foray as a paid political consultant in 2014. Despite a sizable war chest from Dallas hotel magnate and Tea Party financier Monty Bennett, Harris’s candidates in the 2015 local election for the Tarrant Regional Water District lost. He quickly became fixated on the idea that thousands of forged mail-in ballot applications had been responsible for their defeat.

Unlike some Project Veritas associates, Harris has already managed to stir up some public alarm about alleged balloting fraud in cooperation with elected officials from the Republican Party. He has made repeated open records requests for “applications for ballot by mail” and copies of signed “ballot carrier envelopes” in Tarrant County and elsewhere in Texas, eyeballing the signatures on each for signs of fraud. (Emily J. Will, the board-certified forensic document examiner who tried to warn 60 Minutes about the dubious provenance of President George W. Bush’s supposedly doctored Air National Guard records in 2004, told us that a non-expert like Harris couldn’t be relied upon to discern a forged signature.)

In 2016, Harris sent the fruits of that labor to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, leading to four conspicuously timed indictments two years later on the eve of the 2018 midterm elections. Paxton described the four Hispanic women, paid canvassers soliciting mail-in ballot applications door-to-door, as an “organized voter fraud ring.” He named (but did not charge) a former local Democratic Party leader, Stuart Clegg, as the ringleader in the court filings.

That case, which is still ongoing, reveals the ways in which the official GOP subtly coordinates with its army of right-wing irregulars in the field. Paxton stridently enforces one of the strictest voter I.D. laws in the nation, while Harris and his political allies at Direct Action Texas and Empower Texans work to independently legitimize the attorney general’s partisan vendettas. Harris and local Republican lawyer Alex Kim, for example, inserted themselves into the prosecution’s caseby independently visiting one of the charged canvassers in prison, seemingly on their own initiative, in an effort to coerce the woman into flipping on Clegg.(A month after helping Harris sneak into the Tarrant County Jail to harass the canvasser, Kim won a local race to preside over the entire county as a judge for Texas’s 323rd District Court.)

Paxton’s office has often pursued these voter fraud cases through a prosecutorial diversion program, allowing them to juke their stats with “de minimis” cases without ever having to prove their arguments in open court or subject their methods to independent review. Their biggest confirmed conviction to date: sending a 37-year-old Mexican citizen and mother of four, Rosa Maria Ortega, to prison for eight years for the high crime of being confused that her status as a legal resident in Texas did not actually confer unto her the voting privileges of full United States citizenship. Ortega voted in five elections between 2004 and her 2017 sentencing, casting ballots for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2012—and, tragically, for Ken Paxton himself in the 2014 Texas attorney general’s race.

All signs point toward Paxton getting even more aggressive in 2020, thanks to a wrecked-up and paralyzed response to the pandemic by both Trump and Texas Governor Greg Abbott. Republicans are nervous that even blood-red Texas might be in play come November. Last April, Paxton threatened felony charges for anyone who requests or advocates for mail-in ballots “based solely on fear of contracting Covid-19”—a move that was upheld by the Texas Supreme Court in May, then by the Trump-stacked U.S. Supreme Court in June. It’s now sure to set the stage for many of the alleged mail-in schemes that Project Veritas will purport to expose later this year.

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One local Project Veritas operative assigned to coordinate with Aaron Harris in Texas is also a former undercover volunteer: Cassandra Spencer, codenamed “Foxtrot” and sometimes “Foxtrot Smith” internally. In 2017, Spencer became O’Keefe’s “Facebook Insider” after leaving a public information officer post with the Pflugerville, Texas, police department to join Facebook’s contingent workforce operations at BCForward in Austin as a social media content moderator.

Spencer has positioned herself at the extremely online intersection of gaming culture and the alt-right. She has described herself as a “Proud Boy’s Girl” on Medium and attended “Austin’s premier anime convention” IKKiCON in Final Fantasy X cosplay. She traveled to Washington, D.C., for the inaugural DeploraBall and operates her own Twitch stream, which she dubbed “a First Amendment zone” for her conservative followers, “not like many others.”For the 2020 Democratic primary in Iowa, Spencer posed as a volunteer for presidential hopefuls Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders as part of a Project Veritas sting then-codenamed “Gold Mine."

[graf doc]

al?ready staked out on the Texas ballot-harvesting vanguard, Aaron Harris “met with Foxtrot” in person and “gave her a lead with someone to follow,” per internal Project Veritas research notes. As Diamond Dog progressed, Harris’s ties to Project Veritas deepened to include longtime employee and recruiting director Spencer Meads, codenamed “Brady,” and possibly an undercover journalist (UCJ) codenamed “Peter Pan.” Project Veritas’s expanding pool of Texas sources was meant to be a state secret, but the document offered a huge clue about who might be involved in an all-caps and highlighted portion that read: “CANNOT MENTION ATTORNEY GENERAL.” In the same document, after listing a series of major metropolitan areas in Texas as potential sites for their “ballot harvesting” investigation,a question is proposed: “Where does the AG’s guy suggest they go?”

When pressed for comment on his apparent role in facilitating communications between the Texas attorney general’s office and Project Veritas, Harris responded via his congressional email, “Do not contact me about my previous employment on official channels. Learn to be competent at your job.” After it was pointed out to Harris that the internal Project Veritas documents were sourced in the early fall of 2019, approximately 10 months after he became Congressman Gooden’s chief of staff, Harris became belligerent. To questions reiterated via personal text message, he responded, “I’ve asked you to stop harassing me and you want to argue about it? You are an idiot. You just keep proving it.”

Spencer did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

Only two principal targets, old Harris foes, were mentioned by name in the Project Veritas strategy document: Texas-based personal injury attorney Domingo Garcia, a former state representative and the president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC; and the Harvest Project Food Rescue of Dallas, a community group that Harris seems to believe is an insidious front through which the state’s left-wing operatives entice immigrant communities, with the lure of unsold fresh produce donated by local distributors, into filling out their own mail-in ballots and thus enfranchising themselves. (“I wake up usually at 4:30 in the morning, I have to go pick up the food by six,” Harvest Project co-founder Danaë Gutiérrez-Martínez said when asked about Harris’s allegations. “I don’t get home ’til eight at night, nine at night, sometimes, to get up the next day and do it again, especially right now with everything that’s happening. You know, I must be Superwoman if I have time to do anything else.”)

A long-since-ousted co-founder of the Harvest Project, Jose Barrientos was very publicly implicated in a mail-in ballot forgery scheme in 2017. But Paxton and the local district attorney ultimately indicted someone else entirely, 27-year-old Miguel Hernandez, for the felony offense. After 180 days stewing in jail, Hernandez was allowed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor with the understanding that his sentence would be limited to time served.

The beef between Harris’s groups and LULAC has been considerably more fraught. In the fall of 2016, Garcia publicly offered a $25,000 reward, funded through LULAC, for any information leading to the conviction of individuals “trying to intimidate a senior in Fort Worth or anywhere in Texas.” The target of their bounty was pretty clear, teed-up as it was by a Texas state representative, Ramón Romero, who had called out Harris by name for his door-to-door inquisition of seniors in Fort Worth’s predominantly Hispanic north side. Later at that same press conference, a related community service nonprofit, the United Hispanic Council of Tarrant County, announced that it had filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice against Harris’s Direct Action Texas for creating “an atmosphere of fear and intimidation” in local Hispanic neighborhoods.

In January 2019, LULAC filed a lawsuit against Attorney General Paxton and the secretary of state in Texas, David Whitley, accusing them both of violating the Voting Rights Act in their haphazard attempt to purge the state’s voter rolls of non-citizens.

Whitley’s offices would quietly walk back their initial list of 95,000 suspicious voters, many of whom were discovered to be, in fact, naturalized citizens. Shortly thereafter, San Antonio federal district court Judge Fred Biery put a stop to the purge, declaring that state Republicans were trying “to ferret the infinitesimal needles out of the haystack of 15 million Texas voters.” Harris, for his part, was unrepentant, telling the*Texas Observer*, “We are changing the entire discussion on voter fraud in Texas.” He was not wrong. While Harris is now planning to run for a House seat himself, his tireless efforts there have laid the groundwork for Project Veritas and its GOP partners this election season.

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When mainstream Americans think about James O’Keefe, if they think about James O’Keefe at all, it’s usually in reference to his most hilarious failures: ruining his own sting on George Soros’s Open Society Foundation by leaving a self-incriminating voicemail; failing to lure a CNN reporter onto his yacht for a detailed “faux seducing” prank; revealing his unseemly ties to the billionaire mercenary Erik Prince by posting his own vanity spy training photos on social media. If Diamond Dog follows the Project Veritas playbook, it will likely focus on goosing a few unguarded comments out of canvassers and other volunteers in the hope of netting an inflammatory sound bite or two.

A modest, practically harmless October Surprise. But it’s typically down ballot where the average Project Veritas video tends to have its most pernicious effects. Less well known than O’Keefe’s blunders on the national stage are the numerous documented instances in which his stings have been cited to justify new and more onerous voter I.D. laws or other election integrity legislation in state legislatures across the country.

In April 2012, Chris McDaniel, then Mississippi’s Senate elections committee chairman, cited a Project Veritas voter fraud video as evidence justifying the passage of the state’s “photo identification requirement” bill⁠, which the state’s Republican Governor Phil Bryant signed that May. Despite legal challenges, this law is still on the books today.

Also that year, a Republican Minnesota state representative, Steve Drazkowski, praised a locally shot O’Keefe video—in which Project Veritas undercover operatives requested ballot applications for their friends “Timothy Tebow and Thomas Brady”—during a floor debate for his party’s own draconian voter I.D. bill. While Minnesota’s Democratic Governor Mark Dayton vetoed a strict version of that voter I.D. legislation, and Minnesota voters backed his decision in a ballot initiative later that year, the state’s Republican Party still plans to revisit the issue again this year. (“We have had a number of studies that have been completed, there’s a lot of new data on this topic, and there are court cases that have been decided,” as Minnesota GOP State Senator Scott Newman ominously put it, “none of which we had in 2012.”)

O’Keefe’s “Primary of the Living Dead” stunts during the and primaries in 2012—in which his operatives requested but crucially did not actually attempt to use, the ballots of deceased primary voters—aided the passage of stringent voter I.D. laws in those states. After New Hampshire enacted a law in 2018 tightening the state’s voting statutes, partly in response to a new series of Project Veritas videos, Democratic legislators made repeated attempts to repeal them, only to be thwarted by Republican Governor Chris Sununu’s veto.

O’Keefe’s wealthy donors surely remember these and other victories in vivid detail, in no small measure because they are reiterated tirelessly during O’Keefe’s paid speaking engagements and fundraising conclaves. Among Project Veritas’s 2019 contributors were several wealthy political groups, charitable foundations, and conservative billionaires with apparent interests in the outcome of Diamond Dog.

From California, a donation of at least $10,000 from a pledged $100,000 came to Veritas from Susan Groff, president of the Los Angeles-area construction equipment rental company Northwest Excavating. A prolific Republican donor along with her husband Howard, both Groffs were praised as “good friends, entrepreneurs and patriots” in a loving tribute entered into the Congressional Record by their longtime beneficiary, former GOP House Rep. Elton Gallegly.(Another $50,000 came into Project Veritas from a donor listed only as “Arnott”; the Orange County-based investment guru Robert D. Arnott, a Koch network ally and prolific Republican donor, denied responsibility when reached via email.)

In Texas, another $50,000 was passed on to Project Veritas from the Texas Free Market Fund through the group Donors Trust, the dark money “donor-advised fund” that has helped make contributions from the Kochs, the DeVos family, and others untraceable in future IRS filings. The charitable foundation of late Texas oilman Ken W. “Stinky” Davis, based like Project Veritas ally Aaron Harris in Tarrant County, also kicked in $5,000 to the group, the latest in the foundation’s influential spending spree on Republican politics in the Lone Star State and across the country.

In Florida, another donation of $50,000 came to the group through Donors Trust, this time from the free market defenders at the Thomas W. Smith Foundation.

There was also a whopping $261,000 donation from the “Smith Family.” Could it be the Smith family that has monopolized local network TV affiliates through Sinclair Broadcasting? Or is it Randall and Barbara Smith, Palm Beach residents whose vulture fund Alden Global Capital was once described by Joshua Benton, the founder of Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab, as “the gelatinous cube scouring the news industry’s dungeon”? Neither Smith families responded to requests for clarification on this issue.

Many additional hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of contributions to Project Veritas were attributed solely to “DT” on the group’s quarterly financial meeting documents. The initials may refer to Donors Trust or to the constellation of corporate and (ostensibly) philanthropic organizations tied to President DonaldTrump himself. While Trump is a well-known past donor to Project Veritas—a framed photo of him and O’Keefe rests prominently on a bookshelf at Project Veritas headquarters in Mamaroneck, New York—many other donors were evidently so secret that they were listed simply as “anonymous” even on the group’s own internal documents.

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Cash matters, but O’Keefe’s personal connectionsare where the depth and seamlessness of this coordination with the Republican Party become truly apparent. They also offer a glimpse into the vast network that has formed to suppress the vote this fall—a network years in the making, of which Project Veritas is but a humble node.

Take litigator William Consovoy, the legal point man on many of the conservative-funded election integrity cases pursued during the Trump era. He is, like O’Keefe, a New Jersey native with a long history in local Republican politics. A former law clerk for Clarence Thomas, Consovoy is also reportedly a friend of Federalist Society Executive Vice President Leonard Leo, whose nephew David Maxham has been a friend of O’Keefe’s since their undergraduate years at Rutgers. (Maxham, naturally, was also invited to O’Keefe’s wedding.)

This year, Leonard Leo has stepped aside from day-to-day management of the Federalist Society to run a new conservative donor group, CRC Advisors, that is pouring money into Consovoy’s legal challenges in key battleground states across the country. CRC has been steering money into something called the “Honest Elections Project,” a fictitious name filed in Virginia for Leo’s old group the Judicial Education Project,now officially called the 85 Fund. As The Guardian reported, 99 percent of the Judicial Education Project’s funding in 2018 was a single $7.8 million donation funneled through Donors Trust.guk?

With generous assistance from the Honest Elections Project and the RNC, Consovoy’s firm Consovoy McCarthy PLLC has recently brought cases against the re-enfranchising of felons in Florida and sued to block California’s plans to deliver absentee ballots to all of the state’s registered voters. Consovoy has contributed to related motions filed in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, Michigan, and Texas, where Ken Paxton’s victory against mail-in voting in May earned praise from President Trump on Twitter.

If you strain to look beyond the lonely partisan kitsch of James O’Keefe’s bungled scams and harebrained hoaxes, it’s plain to see the march of a whole battalion of Diamond Dog operatives and lawyers turned loose on the integrity of the ballot in key battleground states.

Liz Farkas, a New York state–licensed private investigator, provided additional reporting and research for this article.

Matthew Phelan @CBMDP

Matthew Phelan has written for Chemical Engineering, New York, Jacobin, and Gawker, where he founded the conspiracy vertical Black Bag in 2014.

Jesse Hicks @jessehixxx

Jesse Hicks is a journalist whose work has appeared in Vice, Politico, Harper’s, and elsewhere.

The Soapbox, Politics, Election 2020, Donald Trump, Project Veritas, James O'Keefe, Clarence Thomas, Donald Trump Jr., Michelle Malkin, Sean Hannity, FOX News, Texas, California, Republican Party, Federalist Society, Ken Paxton, Greg Abbott, Aaron Harris, George Soros, Erik Prince, Voting Rights

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https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2020/03/17/koch-linked-charity-bankrolled-project-veritas

no lnx doc list

Koch-Linked Charity Bankrolled Project Veritas as It Worked With Ex-Spies to Infiltrate Liberal Groups

Alex Kotch

By Alex Kotch | March 17th, 2020 at 2:55 PM (CDT)

Democracy, Featured Investigations, Koch, NewsLeave a Comment

Erik Prince, the former head of private mercenary firm Blackwater Worldwide, recruited ex-spies to work with right-wing sting operation Project Veritas to infiltrate liberal groups, The New York Times reported on March 7. He also gave Project Veritas staff access to his Wyoming ranch, where they took “surveillance and elicitation training” from a former British MI-6 officer, as The Intercept reported in May 2019.

In 2017, the former British spy helped direct an operation to copy files and record conversations in a Michigan office of the American Federation of Teachers, a major teachers’ union that his sister, Education Sec. Betsy DeVos, and her husband’s family have fought for years. The same operative who went undercover at the union infiltrated the campaign of now-Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) the following year.

The DeVos family is one of the right wing’s major political donors. (The Prince family is also very wealthy and gives money to conservative causes.) While the DeVos family foundations have not donated directly to Project Veritas, several of their wealthy political allies, and multiple donor-advised fund sponsors, have been bankrolling the group. It’s not clear who paid the ex-spies to work with Project Veritas, or if they were paid.

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.

The favorite DAF sponsor of the Right is DonorsTrust. Used heavily by Charles Koch, Robert Mercer, and Adolph Coors, it pours money into a network of right-wing charities and social welfare nonprofits. DonorsTrust gave more than $8.4 million to Project Veritas from 2014-18, or nearly one-third of the group’s contribution revenue. DonorsTrust’s yearly contribution rose from $607,000 in 2014 to a high of $2.4 million in 2017. Several members and staff of DonorsTrust have close ties to Koch-backed operations. The related Donors Capital Fund gave $20,000 to Project Veritas from 2014-15.

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.

The 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.

2x?

https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2020/03/17/koch-linked-charity-bankrolled-project-veritas

3/20

Erik Prince, the former head of private mercenary firm Blackwater Worldwide, recruited ex-spies to work with right-wing sting operation Project Veritas to infiltrate liberal groups, The New York Times reported on March 7. He also gave Project Veritas staff access to his Wyoming ranch, where they took “surveillance and elicitation training” from a former British MI-6 officer, as The Intercept reported in May 2019.

Donor-Advised Fund Sponsors Bankroll Project Veritas

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.[doc lisr]

...

[[Known Donors to Project Veritas, FY2014-2018

CMD has tracked nearly $12 million in donations to Project Veritas, or roughly 43 percent of the group's contribution revenue, from the 2014 fiscal year through 2018. Below are donors who gave $10,000 or more.

Donor Amount

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

- Show less

Table: Center for Media and Democracy Source: Internal Revenue Service Get the data ]]

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 CM

===

7/2019

https://www.dispatch.com/news/20190722/group-sues-for-right-to-go-undercover-inside-2020-political-campaigns

A conservative group that has gone undercover to record officeholders, journalists, Planned Parenthood and other groups is suing the Ohio Elections Commission over a piece of state election law that bars individuals from surreptitiously joining and undermining a political campaign.

Project Veritas filed the lawsuit Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio. It argues that state law violates its First Amendment rights and should be declared unconstitutional.

The organization wrote in its lawsuit that it intends to use the same tactics to investigate campaigns in Ohio during the 2020 election cycle.

The lawsuit stems from a 2018 Ohio Elections Commission complaint filed against Project Veritas, which took undercover recordings in the Grove City office for the combined campaigns of former Gov. Ted Strickland’s 2016, who was running for senate, and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

The organization embedded two people in the campaign to take recordings. It published a video in October 2016 about Strickland’s position on “coal and guns.”

The Elections Commission complaint argued that Project Veritas violated the portion of Ohio law that prohibits someone from serving on an election campaign “for the purpose of acting to impede the conduct” or “reporting information to the employee’s employer or the agent’s principal without the knowledge of the candidate or the candidate’s organization.”

The commission dismissed the case, saying the two-year statute of limitations had expired. But Project Veritas is asking the court to determine that the law is unconstitutional as it prepares to use similar tactics to infiltrate Ohio campaigns during the 2020 election cycle.

Among Project Veritas’ targets are presidential and congressional campaigns that are “publicly proclaiming positions that differ from their actual intentions on issues that are important to Ohioans,” including the environment, taxes and immigration, among others.

Project Veritas “will need to alter or eliminate their plans if the Reporting Restriction persists, because the restriction essentially criminalizes Project Veritas’ proven and most effective practices.”

A spokesman for Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, who represents the elections commission, declined to comment.

The complaint was filed by Lauren Windsor, who is affiliated with the left-wing political consulting firm Democracy Partners. Project Veritas wrote in its lawsuit that it has previously investigated Democracy Partners as well.

The original complaint calls Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe a “notorious right-wing political hitman” and “political mercenary,” but the organization’s lawsuit refers to it as “a nonprofit organization that engages almost exclusively in undercover journalism to report to the public about instances of corruption, fraud, waste, and abuse.”

The lawsuit says Project Veritas is not “a political organization” and doesn’t take stances on “controversial political topics,” support or oppose candidates.

O’Keefe has made secret recordings of Planned Parenthood, posing as an adult boyfriend of an underage teenager to allegedly show the organization wouldn’t report the relationship, according to a 2018 Politico profile. Project Veritas has distributed edited recordings of several political candidates, including former Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat.

The Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics says journalists should avoid undercover or “other surreptitious methods of gathering information unless traditional, open methods will not yield information vital to the public.”

rrouan@dispatch.com

@RickRouan

===

https://theintercept.com/2018/07/23/project-veritas-lawsuit-american-federation-of-teachers/

A MICHIGAN JUDGE issued a ruling late last week granting the American Federation of Teachers the right to discovery in an ongoing legal battle with Project Veritas, the sting group launched by conservative provocateur James O’Keefe.

The escalating fight, which is being played out in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, began last September, when the teachers union filed a lawsuit accusing Project Veritas of infiltrating and illegally gathering proprietary information from its Michigan affiliate.

Project Veritas, a right-wing activist group known for releasing undercover video exposés of liberal organizations like ACORN and Planned Parenthood, has taken a special interest in targeting teacher unions over the last eight years. The group has been accused of routinely doctoring its videos, and last year it was caught trying to feed a false story about Roy Moore, then a U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama, to the Washington Post. The discovery in the Michigan case may shed new light on its internal operations.

according to the September complaint, which was filed in state court, Marisa Jorge, a political operative for Project Veritas, presented herself as a University of Michigan student named Marissa Perez who was interested in becoming a teacher. She applied for a summer internship with AFT Michigan and was hired in May 2017. For the next three months, she allegedly gathered a wide range of confidential information on the teachers union. The lawsuit claims that on multiple occasions Jorge was found alone in other employees’ offices, accessing information she, as an intern, had no right to see. In other cases, she requested to attend bargaining sessions, was given access to internal databases, and secretly recorded conversations, according to the complaint.

A Michigan judge responded to the lawsuit by issuing a restraining order against Project Veritas in September, barring the group from publishing or disclosing any materials it may have collected from the union. The next month, following a motion by Project Veritas, the case was moved from state to federal court. In December,U.S. District Judge Linda Parker lifted the restraining order. Parker said the AFT had not sufficiently demonstrated it would be harmed by what Project Veritas had collected. In her decision she wrote that “a preliminary injunction most certainly will infringe upon Defendants’ First Amendment right.”

The union went back to court in early May to try once more to prevent Project Veritas from releasing any documents or videos it had obtained from its Michigan affiliate. Parker denied the AFT’s second request, again citing First Amendment concerns.:{

}::{

}:Project Veritas began releasing information from AFT Michigan immediately thereafter. In its first post, headlined “BREAKING: Alleged Child Molester Paid Off in Union Negotiation by Michigan American Federation of Teachers,” Project Veritas boasted of releasing documents and undercover footage “which reveals that the union protected a teacher after accusations of sexual misconduct with a seven- or eight-year-old girl arose.”

AFT president Randi Weingarten and AFT Michigan President David Hecker released a joint statement following the video’s release, calling it a “heavily spliced” smear tactic intended to undermine educators and their unions.

“In this particular case, following accusations of a teacher’s misconduct with a child of a woman he was dating years before, the union and district officials worked together to separate a teacher from service and make sure students were protected,” Weingarten and Hecker stated. “To this day, the teacher denies the accusations, and no charges have been filed.AFT Michigan continues to prioritize the well-being of students and the promise of high-quality public education in Michigan.”:{

PARKER’S NEW RULING, issued on Thursday, allows the AFT to amend its legal complaint to include information about the video Project Veritas released in May. It also paves the way for the union to begin requesting information through the discovery process.

“It’s going to get interesting now because we have the opportunity to dig pretty deep into Project Veritas and their activities,” AFT Michigan attorney Mark Cousens told The Intercept. “We can discover not only how they work, but what they did in Michigan.” Cousens said the union, through discovery, might request information on Jorge’s relationship to Project Veritas, background on Jorge, and what materials she may have taken while working as an intern.:{

}::{

}:Weingarten said in a statement that her union is “committed to holding Project Veritas accountable for its unlawful misrepresentations, infiltrations, and splicing and dicing of unlawfully obtained material to smear teachers and public schools.” Weingarten pledged to “move forward in our efforts to bring to light the deceptive, unscrupulous distortion tactics Project Veritas is known for.”

Marco Bruno, a spokesperson for Project Veritas, dismissed the decision. He told The Intercept that the AFT “is winning only the highest award for delusional self-congratulations. Contrary to its claims, AFT’s reckless efforts throughout this lawsuit to censor a Veritas publication failed repeatedly. As far as the case goes, they have won nothing, and their latest pleadings are as weak as their previous complaint. AFT is wasting union members’ dues on a frivolous lawsuit that it has no chance of winning.”

Project Veritas has long targeted teacher unions. In 2010, O’Keefe, the group’s founder, infiltrated a New Jersey Education Association leadership conference and produced a project called “Teachers Union Gone Wild.” His group produced another video:{ last summer that purported to show a New Jersey teacher offering journalists cocaine at a union convention. After that video was released, O’Keefe went on the radio to say his teacher union exposés }:{. “I don’t ever, }::{ever}::{ expect the institutions to hold people accountable, so it’s up to exposures,” O’Keefe said, promising that “we have more coming out.”}:

And indeed, they did. In May, on top of its AFT Michigan work, Project Veritas released two more undercover videos of New Jersey union officials discussing how to protect teachers accused of abuse, which subsequently led to the suspension of two union presidents. New Jersey Democrats, including state Senate president Steve Sweeney and Gov. Phil Murphy, have since called for investigations into the union’s behavior.

The NJEA released a statement in response to the videos, saying it “does not, in any instance, condone the abuse or mistreatment of children or the failure to properly report allegations of abuse.” The union also announced it would be commissioning an independent review of its local affiliates to ensure that staff and leaders “understan[d] and clearly communicat[e] the responsibility of all school employees to report any suspected abuse of children.”

While the NJEA charged Project Veritas with being a political group “with a long history of releasing deceptively edited videos that later prove to have been dishonest and misleading,” Sweeney did not back down. “They can attack the videos and who did the videos all they want,” he told NJ Advance Media,referring to the union.“But those words were real, those actions were real, and they need to be dealt with.”

Also in May, Project Veritas released another video, showing teachers union officials in Ohio discussing how they would defend educators who abused students. State union officials called the videos doctored and edited to fit the organization’s agenda.

O’Keefe hinted at more videos in the future. Following the Michigan, New Jersey, and Ohio videos, Project Veritas promised to release “more undercover videos of teachers unions from ALL ACROSS THE COUNTRY in the coming days and weeks.”

===

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 tactics sometime 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.

===

https://www.aft.org/press-release/federal-judge-denies-james-okeefes-attempt-dodge-accountability-illegal

Federal Judge Denies James O’Keefe’s Attempt to Dodge Accountability for Illegal Michigan Sting

Case Exposing Infiltration and Eavesdropping of Union Offices by Fake Intern Moves Ahead

For Release:

Thursday, March 28, 2019

Contact:

Andrew Crook

o: 202-393-8637 | c: 607-280-6603

acrook@aft.org

DETROIT—A federal judge has rejected right-wing smear merchant James O’Keefe’s bid to dismiss a lawsuit over an illegal sting operation perpetrated on Michigan teachers.

O’Keefe’s organization, Project Veritas, orchestrated an intrusion on AFT Michigan’s offices in 2017, dispatching a mole to covertly access documents and record private discussions. AFT Michigan sued Project Veritas, seeking injunctive relief, compensatory damages and punitive damages. Discovery was granted in June 2018.

Today, Judge Linda Parker of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan denied Project Veritas’ motion to dismiss the union’s lawsuit seeking accountability and redress. It upheld the majority of the union’s claims, including eavesdropping, breach of duty of loyalty, fraudulent misrepresentation, trespass, civil conspiracy and unlawful interception of oral communications.

The scam began in May 2017, when the mole, Marisa Jorge, adopted the pseudonym “Marissa Perez” and posed as a student at the University of Michigan to secure a job as an AFT Michigan intern. In fact, Jorge, a graduate of Liberty University, was a clandestine operative deployed by O’Keefe’s network to infiltrate the union.

Jorge exploited her access to hack computers, steal private documents and covertly record union employees with her smartphone. Portions of her spliced-and-diced recordings were later uploaded to YouTube and promoted by O’Keefe.

This is the second time this month that Project Veritas has lost a legal bid to have a case against it tossed. A case involving a Democratic National Committee sting is now moving forward to a jury trial.

AFT Michigan President David Hecker said: “The court has agreed that the illegal political espionage carried out by Marisa Jorge was substantive. Jorge callously exploited the goodwill of our staff with the goal of damaging the union that represents 30,000 Michigan educators. We look forward to proceeding with this case to hold O’Keefe and the other scammers associated with Project Veritas to account.”

AFT President Randi Weingarten said: “Judge Parker’s decision means we can now move forward to expose how Project Veritas perpetrated an illegal scam meant to harm Michigan educators and their representatives by undermining our union’s fight for a better life for our communities—including great public schools. We went to court to pierce Project Veritas’ veil and to halt, once and for all, its dirty tricks. Project Veritas has tried to cloak itself in the First Amendment to shield itself from breaking the law—but today’s ruling means that we can now do everything in our members’ power to make sure James O’Keefe’s reprehensible organization pays the price for its brazen deception.”

===

https://patch.com/michigan/across-mi/aft-president-responds-report-mi-teachers-union-spy-operation

Lori Higgins, Chalkbeat Detroit

Originally published on Sunday, March 8

The case was strange from the beginning. In 2017, the American Federation of Teachers filed a lawsuit against a controversial conservative organization, accusing it of planting a spy within the union to secretly and illegally record conversations and steal documents.

That spy, the union said, secured a job as an intern and was given access to "a substantial amount of confidential and proprietary information," according to the lawsuit, which was filed against the conservative group, Project Veritas, and Marisa Jorge, the alleged spy.

The case got more interesting over the weekend, when the New York Times — citing interviews and documents — reported that Erik Prince, the brother of Betsy DeVos, was behind the recruitment of the British spy who helped run the operation. DeVos, the U.S. secretary of education, is a West Michigan native who has been influential in promoting school choice policies in Michigan and beyond.

the newspaper described it as one of multiple instances in which Prince had recruited former American and British spies for operations that included "infiltrating Democratic congressional campaigns, labor organizations and other groups considered hostile to the Trump agenda."

This is what the Times story said about the spy operation against the union:

"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."

David Hecker, the president of the AFT-Michigan, declined to comment this weekend.

But Randi Weingarten, the president of the national American Federation of Teachers, of which the Michigan union is an affiliate, was vocal on social media.

.@BetsyDeVosED brother #ErikPrince now found part of #projectveritas attempt to spy & steal @aftmichigan documents. They didn't succeed in their attempt to hurt our union but note what the right wing will do to try to eliminate workers' voice. https://t.co/E2UHyOIgNv

— Randi Weingarten (@rweingarten) March 7, 2020

"@BetsyDeVosED brother #ErikPrince now found part of #projectveritas attempt to spy & steal @aftmichigan documents. They didn't succeed in their attempt to hurt our union but note what the right wing will do to try to eliminate workers' voice," Weingarten wrote on Twitter.

Let's be clear who the wrongdoer is here: Project Veritas used a fake intern to lie her way into our @AFTMichigan office, to steal documents and to spy — and they got caught. We're just trying to hold them accountable for this industrial espionage. https://t.co/An8Cc65eGf

— Randi Weingarten (@rweingarten) March 7, 2020

Later, she said: "Let's be clear who the wrongdoer is here: Project Veritas used a fake intern to lie her way into our @AFTMichigan office, to steal documents and to spy — and they got caught. We're just trying to hold them accountable for this industrial espionage."

She noted Sunday that Project Veritas has subpoenaed her to sit for a deposition, the latest action in the history of the lawsuit. The union has filed a motion to limit the subject matter of the deposition to the facts underlying the current claims and defenses in the lawsuit.

James O'Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, had this to say on Twitter, in response to the New York Times story:

Retracto the Correction Alpaca is going to be very busy in the coming days. May he continue to keep the Fourth Estate honest.

We are a proud independent news organization. No one tells @Project_Veritas who or what to investigate. We are bound by no "commercial imperative." pic.twitter.com/uTXTZtcRNn

— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) March 7, 2020

"We are a proud independent news organization. No one tells @Project_Veritas who or what to investigate. We are bound by no 'commercial imperative.' "

The lawsuit, which seeks $3 million, accuses Project Veritas and Jorge — who is also known as Marissa Perez — of fraudulent misrepresentation, trespassing, eavesdropping, larceny, civil conspiracy, breach of fiduciary duty, unlawful interception of oral communications, and violating the electronic communications privacy act.

The case was originally filed in Wayne County Circuit Court, where a judge issued a temporary restraining order preventing Project Veritas from distributing any information it obtained from the union. Months later, after the case was moved to federal court, a judge revoked that earlier order.

Last year, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel intervened in the case, pushing the federal court to ask the Michigan Supreme Court to resolve a claim by the defendants that Michigan's eavesdropping law is unconstitutional and vague.

Documents filed in the court case provide a glimpse into how Jorge pulled off the scam. The union offers internships during the summer to people who have an interest in the labor movement or public education. Jorge, who was going by Perez, was recommended to the union by the friend and colleague of an AFT Michigan official. She claimed to be a University of Michigan student pursuing a career in teaching.

Once hired, according to the lawsuit, "she was seen sitting in offices of staff members when those staff members were not in their offices, which we now know she was not authorized to do, using computers which we now know she had not been authorized to use, and seen looking through paper files which we now know she was not authorized to view."

AFT Michigan staff became suspicious "following several conversations with staff regarding her behavior," according to the documents.

"AFT Michigan staff had begun to share information about 'Perez' including her contradictions about the residence, her reasons for being in the office late at night, her apparent review of files regarding matters to which she had not been assigned, and her habit of carrying a cell phone with her everywhere."

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/abc-news-suspends-reporter-caught-in-right-wing-sting-operation-report/

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ABC News suspends reporter caught in right-wing sting operation: report

Written by Matthew Chapman / Raw Story February 26, 2020

On Wednesday, the Washington Post reported that ABC News correspondent David Wright has been suspended ahead of footage that will be released by the right-wing group Project Veritas.

“The network disciplined David Wright, who reports for ABC’s signature news programs, including ‘World News Tonight,’ ‘Good Morning America’ and ‘Nightline.’ Several people confirmed Wright’s suspension, but it wasn’t clear what specifically prompted ABC to take action against the reporter,” reported Paul Farhi. “Network officials reviewed the footage of Wright that Project Veritas recorded, according to people familiar with the episode. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the issue.”

James O’Keefe, the head of Project Veritas, has teased the upcoming release of the footage using the hashtag #ExposeABC.

Project Veritas specializes in setting up sting operations against members of the media and Democratic campaign operatives, disguising their identity and striking up casual conversations while secretly recording them, then editing and splicing up the footage to make it look as though the targets are engaging in corruption or liberal bias.

Several of their stunts have backfired, including an incident where O’Keefe tried to seduce a CNN reporter on a boat filled with sex toys, and another in which a Project Veritas operative lied to the Washington Post that she had been raped by former Alabama Chief Justice and Senate candidate Roy Moore.He also once set up a shell corporation in Belize and funneled money through it to a pro-Hillary Clinton political group to try to prove they illegally accept foreign money, only to be thwarted because the transfer wasn’t illegal.

cspan hearing with bickett/ pickle and 3rd FB? altrnate gop /dems, polar on pov and attack levels eg higgins champion PV victim

https://theintercept.com/2019/06/11/facebook-rules-project-veritas/

A MEMBER OF Project Veritas gave testimony in a federal court case indicating that the right-wing group, known for its undercover videos, violates Facebook policies designed to counter systematic deception by Russian troll farms and other groups. The deposition raises questions over whether Facebook will deter American operatives who use the platform to strategically deceive and damage political opponents as vigorously as it has Iranian and Russian propagandists. But is the company capable of doing so without just creating more problems?

Close observers of Veritas and Facebook, including one at a research lab that works with the social network, said the testimony shows thegroup is clearly violating policies against what Facebook refers to as “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” The company formally defined such behavior in a December 2018 video featuring its cybersecurity policy chief Nathaniel Gleicher, who said it “is when groups of pages or people work together to mislead others about who they are or what they’re doing.” The designation, Gleicher added, is applied by Facebook to a group not “because of the content they’re sharing” but rather only “because of their deceptive behavior.”That is, using Facebook to dupe people is all it takes to fit the company’s institutional definition of coordinated inauthentic behavior.

In practice, “coordinated inauthentic behavior” has become a sort of catchall label for untoward meddling on Facebook, snagging everyone from Burmese military officers to Russian meme spammers. But curbing such activity has become a very public crusade for Facebook in the wake of its prominent role as a platform for the spread of disinformation, propaganda, and outright hoaxes during the 2016 presidential campaign. This past January, Gleicher announced the removal of coordinated inauthentic behavior from Iran, which spread when operatives “coordinated with one another and used fake accounts to misrepresent themselves,” thus triggering a Facebook ban. Similarly, in a 2017 update on Facebook’s internal investigation into Russian online propaganda efforts, the company’s then-head of security Alex Stamos assured the world’s democracies the company was providing “technology improvements for detecting fake accounts,” including “changes to help us more efficiently detect and stop inauthentic accounts at the time they are being created.”

Throughout all of this, coordinated inauthentic behavior has remained more or less synonymous with “foreign actors” and “nation-states,” the cloak-and-dagger stuff of an increasingly militarized internet filled with enemies of the Western Democracy who seek to subvert it from abroad.

Project Veritas, a hybrid of an opposition research shop and a ranting YouTube channel, has taken pride in its ability to deceive since its creation in 2010. With conservative backers like Peter Thiel, the Koch brothers, and the Trump Foundation, the group and its founder James O’Keefe have worked relentlessly to target and malign individuals at institutions they deem leftist, whether it’s Planned Parenthood (reportedly targeted by O’Keefeposing as a young teen’s 23-year-old boyfriend), George Soros (the progressive philanthropist whose professional circle Veritas tried andspectacularly failed to infiltrate), or the Washington Post (whose reporter was offered a fake story on Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore).

O’Keefe has long attempted to position himself in the context of dogged, daring, traditional journalism, describing Veritas’s efforts as “investigative” reporting executed by “undercover journalists.” But his efforts are often executed by what the New Yorker has called “amateurish spies” — their efforts against the Post and Soros resembled a Three Stooges bit — and packaged with mendacious editing, duplicitous production, and outright lying, making Veritas’s audience as much a victim of its productions as the subjects. Debates over who or what is to be considered “real journalism” are almost always counterproductive and contrived, but Veritas stands out for the shamelessness with which it pursues nakedly partisan ends.

There is, of course, a proud tradition of undercover journalism executed unequivocally in the name of informing the public. Writers like Barbara Ehrenreich and Shane Bauer have taken jobs they were not otherwise interested in in order to reveal injustices in society’s margins, and some of the most damning details of the Cambridge Analytica scandal were exposed by a reporter with the UK’s Channel 4 posing as a foreign politician interested in the company’s services. This reporting involved lying, sure — or at least the withholding of true intent, and a willingness to let others deceive themselves — but only as a means to a truthful end. The distinction between these reporters and Veritas operatives may be that the end the latter group seeks, the final media product, is typicallyjust another act of partisan misdirection that doesn’t withstand further scrutiny.

Neither Project Veritas nor Facebook commented for this story.

“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.

“We thus have the admission of intent by the organization and evidence of action by multiple of its agents.”

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?

During his deposition, Halderman, Project Veritas’s self-described “executive producer,” stated under oath that the organization falsifies Facebook accounts 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.

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 and partner at **Democracy Partners** (alongside Robert Creamer) 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.”

“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.

Correction: June 11th, 2019, 11:19 a.m.

This article has been updated to name Lauren Windsor’s employer, Democracy Partners, where she is a partner.

new

no lnx

OPINION

I BLEW THE WHISTLE ON PINTEREST CENSORSHIP | OPINION

ERIC COCHRAN

ON 6/24/19 AT 9:14 AM EDT Eric Cochran

00:50

Melania Trump Praises Twitter, Facebook As 'True Partners'

OPINION

ABORTION

INTERNET AND TECHNOLOGY

I worked as an Android app software developer at Pinterest for nearly two years. I spoke at tech conferences around the world. I worked on open-source code that runs in most major apps. I wanted to do good in the world with my career in technology. I thought Pinterest could be different from its sibling tech giants. I hoped Pinterest might be a tech company that respected its users and was honest with them.

My illusions vanished when I saw Pinterest fall in line with the other Big Tech companies in its crackdown on content that went against the social agenda of my colleagues in Silicon Valley. I saw the normalization of censorship.

Pinterest's covert censorship of pro-lifers, Christians and conservatives has been exposed. Live Action, one the nation's largest pro-life organizations, has been blocked by Pinterest. Users cannot make posts that link to Live Action and are not given a clear error message when they try. Go ahead and try it yourself on Pinterest. Other conservative sites, like ZeroHedge.com and PJMedia.com, have also been kept off Pinterest.

When the Project Veritas exposé about my findings was released earlier this month, Pinterest was faced with a choice: Correct the behavior and pledge to be a neutral platform or double-down and declare these pro-life organizations and websites peddlers of bannable misinformation. Pinterest chose the latter.

Not only are users still unable to link to Live Action, but Live Action's Pinterest account is now permanently suspended. The reason Pinterest gave is that the company does not allow content "that may have immediate and detrimental effects on a Pinner's health or on public safety," according to a screenshot Live Action shared.

By its treatment of Live Action, Pinterest has drawn a hard line in the sand on what it believes about pro-life content. This comes at a critical time in the abortion debate, as bills tightening or loosening restrictions on abortion are being passed across the country.

American culture relies on social trust. Americans have assumed that we all agreed on issues like freedom of speech. This trust is now broken, and Big Tech companies have played no small part, as censorship of conservatives becomes normal. Censorship is done in secret, as is the case at Pinterest.

Since the Project Veritas report, the entire Project Veritas exposé video has been removed by YouTube, Tim Pool's video covering the report has been removed by YouTube, and Steven Crowder's video interviewing Project Veritas founder James O'Keefe and myself has been flagged by YouTube for privacy violations. Big Tech is moving in unison to stifle this story and protect its own.

Until now, YouTube has never removed a Project Veritas video report.

The leaked Pinterest documents speak to the worldview of the leadership of Big Tech. This worldview is not just leftist; it is one of un-American censorship and belief that users cannot be trusted to hear from any other viewpoints but their own. Censorship behind the dark doors of Silicon Valley is an imminent threat to our democracy. The public must be informed, and we must be able to trust one another to live together in this nation.

Abortion Protest Supreme Court

A pro-choice supporter, second from left, argues with a pro-life supporter in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on May 21.

ANNA GASSOT/AFP/GETTY

The users of these social media sites have a right to know about this increased censorship. Big Tech companies have advertised themselves as neutral on big ideological issues, like abortion, but it's clear they have chosen a side.

This is the watershed moment. This story struck a nerve with Big Tech because it forces Pinterest to declare its opinion publicly on pro-life groups like Live Action. The abortion issue is hot. The tech companies are scurrying to protect their Big Tech friends, but they can no longer do it in secret. With Project Veritas' reveal, the public now knows.

Clarence Thomas's wife presents award to James O'Keefe at Trump ...

https://thehill.com/.../363623-clarence-thomass-wife-presents-award-to-conservative-a...

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{Dec 6, 2017 - :{James O'Keefe:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, the conservative activist who attempted to plant a false story in ... Charlie Kirk, Rick Manning, Star Parker, Chris Plante, :{Leonard Leo:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:. ... :{Project Veritas:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, at an event hosted by the conservative group United for ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Missing: breakthrough ‎| ‎Must include: ‎breakthrough

James O'Keefe Receives Award After Botched Attempt To Expose ...

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/james-o-keefe-award-trump-tower

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{Dec 7, 2017 - Fresh off :{Project Veritas:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:' failed attempt to undermine the credibility of the ... Charlie Kirk, Rick Manning, Star Parker, Chris Plante, :{Leonard Leo:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:.:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Missing: breakthrough ‎| ‎Must include: ‎breakthrough

Ex-Staffer Slams James O'Keefe: He Crossed A Line With Vile 'Kill Cops'

https://talkingpointsmemo.com › News › Muckraker

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{Mar 20, 2015 - Conservative provocateur :{James O'Keefe:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: allegedly instructed an ... of special operations for :{O'Keefe's:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: organization :{Project Veritas:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, told TPM on Thursday ... What would you do if we could get Officer :{Pantoleo:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: (who killed Eric ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Missing: leonard ‎breakthrough

Breakthrough: Our Guerilla War to Expose Fraud and Save Democracy

https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1476706182

James O'Keefe - 2014 - ‎Biography & Autobiography

Our Guerilla War to Expose Fraud and Save Democracy James O'Keefe ... videos in Congress; Leonard Leo, who introduced me to Mike Madigan; Shane Cory and Kate Doner, who helped build Project Veritas into a sustainable c3; Ed Hulse, ...

[PDF]

James O'Keefe - American Pravda - Avalon Library

avalonlibrary.net/.../James%20O'Keefe%20-%20American%20Pravda%20-%20My%20...

May 25, 2016 - Dedicated to the memory of James E. O'Keefe Sr. ..... The Project Veritas journalist has a profound faith in the power of a free people to make their own ...... documented at length in my earlier book Breakthrough, the judge served up ...... criminal defense, and Leonard Leo for his excellent guidance in areas ...

https://www.projectveritas.exposed/operations

As a protégé of Andrew Breitbart, James O'Keefe believes that he is at #WAR with the progressive movement. Accordingly, Project Veritas primarily targets politicians, activists, and institutions of the Left, such as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, ACORN, Planned Parenthood, and unions in general, but teachers' unions in particular. Common themes are voter fraud, immigration, environmentalism, gun reform, attacks on the mainstream media, and since O'Keefe obtained funding from the Donald Trump Foundation in 2015, increasingly the defense of Donald Trump.

Since O'Keefe created Project Veritas Action, the 501(c)4 political advocacy armof his organization, he has escalated the tactic of embedding his operatives within political campaigns. This is political espionage, and it poses a major threat to election integrity. This activity and other major operations of relevance are listed below.

can't get list below, saved as web page, not much new?}:

Veritas Operatives Embedded Within Political Campaigns

Updated 11.5.18

Infiltrations Bolstering Donald Trump

Year/Sting/Targets/Operative/ID Source

1. 2017 Roy Moore False Rape Sting Washington Post Jaime Tennille Phillips, "Karl Bradley," "Michael Condon"

Washington Post

2. 2017 American Pravda CNN, New York Times Christian Hartsock, Kiera Holding, et al.

Victim IDs

3. 2017 CNN Leaks CNN ---

4. 2017 Disrupt #J20 Inauguration protesters Seija Drake, "Max Hunt," Marisa Jorge, Allison Maass, Tarah Price, Trevor Kendrick

Activist IDs

5. 2017 10 Hours of Walking in NYC trolling Appears to be Seija Drake in :}:

as a Black Trump Voter

6. 2016 Rigging the Election Series Democracy Partners, Allison Maass, Christian Hartsock, Dan Sandini,

the DNC, orgs aligned Brittney Rivera, likely Mike Rogers

with Clinton campaign IDs from Lauren Windsor (a victim and the producer of this website) et al.

DISCLOSURE: This website is a project of The Undercurrent, which is produced by Lauren Windsor and sponsored by American Family Voices. In 2016, Project Veritas operatives infiltrated Democracy Partners, an affiliated organization with which we share an office. In the aftermath, we launched an investigation into what happened. The fruits of that investigation spawned ProjectVeritas.Exposed.

Other Notable Operations

Year/Sting-Targets/Operative/ID Source

1. 2017 Currently unpublished due to litigation AFT Michigan Marisa Jorge

On September 27, 2017 the Michigan affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT Michigan) filed suit against Project Veritas and its undercover operative Marisa Jorge in the U.S. District for the Eastern District of Michigan. The complaint alleges Jorge, at the behest of Project Veritas and O’Keefe, misrepresented her identity, engaged in unlawful surveillance of AFT Michigan staff, leaders and associates, and gathered confidential information from them. In response, Michigan Circuit Court Judge Brian R. Sullivan granted the group’s request for an emergency injunction and issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting Jorge, her agents, and anyone acting in concert with her from releasing private and confidential information gathered from any unlawful surveillance. Initial reporting from The Intercept.

U.S. Judge Linda Parker lifted the restraining order and denied AFT a temporary injunction on December 27, 2017. However, the judge also stated that AFT would likely win in court if it pursued a claim for breach of fiduciary duty, per The Washington Post.

2. 2017 Currently unpublished due to litigation CA League of Conservation Voters, Christian Hartsock,Dan

CA Senate Pro Tem Kevin De Leon Sandini, Ann Vandersteel

On August 4, 2017 the League of Conservation Voters (LCV), an environmental non-profit organization, wrote to the California Attorney General’s Office requesting a criminal investigation after the organization discovered they had been infiltrated by operatives associated with Project Veritas. In their letter, LCV states the three operatives used fake identities to gain access to the organization and then sought and obtained confidential information about the organization’s operations and strategic goals. The letter also expressed concerns that the operatives may have surreptitiously recorded meetings because two of the operatives were revealed to be known associates of Project Veritas and had worked on projects involving surreptitious recordings. To date, no such footage as yet to be released. Reported by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker.

3. 2014 Hollywood Fracking Documentaries Susan Sarandon, Mariel Hemingway, Travis Irvine, Rich Valdes,

& Mid-East Oil Investors Ed Begley Jr., Josh Fox, Rebecca and Chris Heneghan

Josh Tickell

4. 2014 Battleground Texas/Voter Fraud Battleground Texas/Obama --

5. 2011 NPR/Muslim Brotherhood sting Shaughn Adeleye, Ken Larrey

6. 2010 CNN sex boat sting O'Keefe, Ben Wetmore, Isabel Santa, et al.

7. 2010 Mary Landrieu phone tampering Joe Basel, Stan Dai, Robert Flanagan

8. 2009 ACORN stings Hannah Giles et al.

9. 2008 Planned Parenthood stings Lila Rose

Methodology

Project Veritas operatives use a variety of approaches to conduct stings: casual social interaction at protests, bars, conferences, and fundraising receptions; fundraising pitches wherein the operative is an investor, donor consultant, or donor who just happens to want to fund your project or organization; and embeds within organizations and campaigns as volunteers and interns.

The latter two approaches entail building social media profiles for their aliases, a front group or company where the operative allegedly works, and relationships with people associated with the relevant issue or organization being targeted.

Some tips to avoid infiltration:

1. At the end of the day, you won’t be able to remember all the faces in this dossier, so you have to be alert to O’Keefe’s methodology.

2. Operatives will concoct elaborate covers and often write pitch e-mails introducing themselves and requesting a meeting. They might present themselves as consultants, donors, investors, students, etc. ALWAYS VET people you don’t already personally know.

Check their Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn/company website.

Do you havemutual connections?

How many friends/followers/connections are there?

Was the account set up in the last six months? If yes – proceed with caution.

Are there lots of personal photos with other people, or is it sparsely populated?

Have you heard of their organization before? Look it up on LinkedIn. Look at the website. Are the pages suspiciously

bland or recently set up?

3. Sometimes, the operatives have already developed relationships with people you trust. Ask these people how long they have known this person. Less than six months? Proceed with caution.

4. Did they give you a business card? Do they have a business e-mail? Does the card look suspicious?

5. Always get a copy of a government-issued ID and a resumé with verifiable references. CALL the references.

6. Be suspicious if the person does not have a government ID – often moles use student IDs.

7. Consider also getting a signed non-disclosure or non-surveillance agreement.

8. When operatives are not pitching targets via e-mail, they often set up shop at hotel bars for conferences. Why? Because people are drinking and it’s a public space – you usually can’t get into meetings without credentials, BUT that does not mean that operatives can’t get their hands on them.

They are often attractive women. They often work in teams of two.

They often pose as progressive political consultants with donors looking to fund YOUR issue. Every progressive

organization I know is always hungry for cash. Don’t believe anyone you’ve never heard of offering easy money.

9. They will lure you into hypothetical conversations about illegal, unethical, or politically contentious behavior. You don’t actually have to condone it, but your willingness to entertain the conversation can be deceptively cut to make you and your organization look terrible.

Do not engage in personal conversations about contentious subject matter with strangers!

10. Be on the lookout for suspicious behavior that looks like fidgeting with hidden cameras, affecting absurd accents, and wearing outlandish costumes like lederhosen and kilts.

11. If you are suspicious - report it to management.

12. ALWAYS document encounters that make you suspicious. Be sure to note physical characteristics of the suspected mole, their names, and all of the details of their cover stories. Preserve all text and e-mail correspondence you may have had with them. Screenshot social media accounts like Facebook or LinkedIn that may have been used in their cover stories. Try to take a picture of the suspect.

13. Send all of your documentation to your campaign's or organization's attorney for safekeeping. Consider sharing that information with ProjectVeritas.Exposed - we are happy to help identify possible operatives.

Contact tips@theundercurrent.tv if you encounter suspected agents of Project Veritas.

https://www.projectveritas.exposed/blog

New Operative Identified: Jim Kent

Jim Kent is an associate producer at Project Veritas, and has held that position since March of 2018.He was previously a field director at Turning Point USA, the conservative college organizing group, which is known to be a recruiting ground for James O'Keefe. Kent is a fervent Trump supporter, and has been photographed with both Donald, Jr. and Eric Trump (see profile). He may have beenembedded in the Senate campaign of Claire McCaskill in 2018.You can find his profile HE

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Lauren Windsor

May 5

2 min

Is DeVos Money Funding James O'Keefe's Hit Jobs on Teachers' Unions?

According to The Intercept, Blackwater mercenary Erik Prince arranged for Project Veritas operatives to be trained in espionage tactics on at least two occasions, once during the 2016 election and once in February of 2017 at his family's ranch in Wyoming. The publication's sources allege that Prince teamed up with James O'Keefe and Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser and Breitbart chairman, to offer espionage services to Qatar. The author believes that business partnership

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Lauren Windsor

Jan 28

1 min

Using Polls, O'Keefe Targets Progressive Women

Rightwing political hitman James O'Keefe is planning his "investigations" for 2019, and like any good "journalist" he's polling his conservative audience for approval of his next political targets: progressive firebrand presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, and women's health provider Planned Parenthood. The last goes back to O'Keefe's roots -- he got his start infiltrating its clinics with anti-abortion activist Lila Rose more than a decade ago. You kn

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Lauren Windsor

Nov 29, 2018

5 min

Republican activist with ties to Project Veritas infiltrates the Sierra Club

Project Veritas-linked operative allegedly tried to use Sierra Club credentials to access Democratic campaigns. This article originally appeared in ThinkProgress, and was authored by Mark Hand. The Sierra Club, one of the nation’s oldest and most prominent environmental groups, was infiltrated earlier this year by a right-wing activist with alleged connections to Project Veritas, a conservative undercover video production company that has faced multiple lawsuits and criminal

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Lauren Windsor

Nov 19, 2018

3 min

Windsor v. Project Veritas Action Fund

On Thursday, Nov. 15, the Ohio Elections Commission convened a preliminary review in Windsor v. Project Veritas Action Fund et al., for the infiltration of the campaign offices of Hillary Clinton, Ted Strickland, and the Ohio Democratic Party in 2016 by rightwing political hitman James O'Keefe and his operatives. Ohio elections law expressly prohibits embedding agents in political campaigns, who report to external principals, for the purpose of harming campaigns. Anyone with

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Lauren Windsor

Nov 8, 2018

1 min

New Undercover Identified: Anna Khait

Anna Khait, going by the name "Jennifer Williams," infiltrated the Metro DC Democratic Socialists of Americain late summer of this year, according to multiple sources. Khait is a Russian-born rightwing media personality and fervent Trump supporter; formerly a pro poker player and contestant on the 2016 season of the CBS show Survivor. This cycle Veritas released videos on the Democratic candidates in the Florida and Oregon gubernatorial races (Gillum and Brown), a U.S. House

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Lauren Windsor

Nov 5, 2018

1 min

New Undercover Identified: Leonardi Jose Guzman

Leonardi Jose Guzman, going by the name "Leo Rod," infiltrated the Metro DC Democratic Socialists of America in late summer of this year, according to multiple sources. He may have infiltrated Rose City Antifa in Portland, OR as well. He is an artist and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. This cycle Veritas has released videos on the Democratic candidates in the Florida and Oregon gubernatorial races (Gillum and Brown), a U.S. House race in Virginia (Spanberger), and the U.S. Se

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Lauren Windsor

Nov 3, 2018

1 min

SENATE CAMPAIGN ALERT

New Operative in Indiana Race The man pictured above, going by the name "Jack McCarthy," infiltrated the Joe Donnelly for U.S. Senate campaign in Indiana as a volunteer. He filmed interactions inside a campaign office with Donnelly's wife, Jill, asking her questions about masking the candidate's support for unions. This cycle Veritas has released videos on the Democratic candidates in the Florida and Oregon gubernatorial races (Gillum and Brown), a U.S. House race in Virginia

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Lauren Windsor

Nov 1, 2018

1 min

ARIZONA CAMPAIGN ALERT

Operative "Earl White" ID'd The man pictured above, Veritas undercover operative and rightwing media personality Ernie White, used the alias Earl White to infiltrate the Kyrsten Sinemacampaign for U.S. Senate in Arizona. White lives in Southern California, and has been a member of the Riverside Republican Central Committee, as most recently as 2015. Whether that membership is current could not be verified. He is also the founder and president of Citizens Against Agenda 21. T

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Lauren Windsor

Oct 31, 2018

2 min

VIRGINIA CAMPAIGN ALERT

Spanberger Campaign Targeted Early this afternoon, the Abigail Spanberger campaign for Congress discovered that a Project Veritas operative was in their midst, after finding a picture of the woman on Project Veritas Exposed. Going by the alias "Monica Nelson" and now a blonde as pictured above, Marisa Jorge walked in the door to volunteer about a month ago. Staffers grew suspicious over time after she repeatedly peppered them with questions about immigration, abortion, impeac

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Lauren Windsor

Oct 30, 2018

1 min

FLORIDA CAMPAIGN ALERT

Tipster: Gov & Sen Races Infiltrated by Washington Post Stinger I just received a tip that the woman pictured above, "Amanda Bosch," has infiltrated both the Florida gubernatorial and U.S. Senate campaigns ofAndrew Gillum and Ben Nelson respectively, in Broward County. The tipster identified the woman as Jamie Tennille Phillips, and said that she had access to the Broward Democratic Party's website. Phillips was the Veritas operative who told the Washington Post last year in

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Lauren Windsor

Oct 24, 2018

1 min

SENATE CAMPAIGN ALERT: Undercover Agents Target Staffers Using Dating Apps

"Laura" and "Maria" are two undercover operatives working in the DC area, and targeting staffers of Democratic senators. They have both used dating apps like Tinder to initiate contact, and may be involved in other political campaign infiltrations across the country. So far this cycle, Project Veritas has targeted Oregon Governor Kate Brown, U.S. Senate candidate Phil Bredesen in Tennessee, and Senators Claire McCaskill (D-MO) and Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND). James O'Keefe has teas

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Lauren Windsor

Oct 19, 2018

1 min

Senate Campaign Alert - UPDATE Missouri

In our last post, we erroneously identified Kate Brown as the governor of Ohio. She is the governor of Oregon. Regarding the McCaskill infiltration, we have new information from the Kansas City Star. The Project Veritas operative posed as "Adam Thomson" to gain an internship, which lasted from May through July. During this period, he had access to the voter information database for 20 hours. It is not known whether he shared this voter data with other Republican operatives or

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Lauren Windsor

Oct 18, 2018

1 min

Senate Campaign Alert

According to new reporting from The Intercept, James O'Keefe will soon be releasing sting videos on U.S. Senate campaigns in Arizona, Florida, and "a lot of the swing states." The Democratic candidates in the two respective states are Rep. Kyrsten Sinema and Sen. Bill Nelson. This cycle, Veritas has published videos on Ohio Gov. Kate Brown, U.S. Senate candidate for Tennessee, Phil Bredesen, and Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri. If you are working in campaigns, please take s

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Lauren Windsor

Oct 12, 2018

1 min

New Profiles Added

William Keiper is the Chief Operations Officer of Project Veritas. His stepson, Austin Wright, is a fundraiser for Veritas and a friend of James O'Keefe. Both Keiper and Wright are employees of First Global Partners, a consultancy Keiper founded in New York City. O'Keefe and Wright, pictured below, attended Donald Trump's Election Night victory party in Manhattan. Having launched a major sting against Hillary Clinton, the DNC, and coordinated organizations that fall, O'Keefe

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Lauren Windsor

Oct 11, 2018

1 min

New Undercover ID'd: "Mallory Camp"

"Mallory Camp" is an undercover operative who infiltrated the Phil Bredesen campaign for U.S. Senate in Tennessee for approximately a month as a volunteer in September and October. James O'Keefe has teased that he will be releasing more footage from other U.S. Senate campaigns in the coming days. Mallory may have been involved those infiltrations. If you think you may have been a victim of Mallory, please reach out to us at tips@theundercurrent.tv.

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Lauren Windsor

Oct 8, 2018

1 min

New Employee ID'd: Yvonne Dean-Bailey

Yvonne Dean-Bailey is a development associate at Project Veritas. She was formerly a state representative in New Hampshire. Get more details on Yvonne here: https://www.projectveritas.exposed/yvonne-dean-bailey If you think you may have been a victim of Yvonne, please reach out to us at tips@theundercurrent.tv.

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Lauren Windsor

Sep 27, 2018

1 min

New Undercover ID'd: Jaimie Sukanya Bagwell

Jaimie Sukanya Bagwell is a paramedic and periodic undercover operative for Project Veritas living in Ohio. We previously identified her by her alias "Jai Bravo." Read more about Jaimie here: https://www.projectveritas.exposed/jai-bravo

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Lauren Windsor

Sep 19, 2018

6 min

Project Veritas Broke Ohio Elections Law

On October 5, 2016, Project Veritas Action Fund, led by notorious rightwing political hitman James O’Keefe, published “UNDERCOVER: O’Keefe Exposes Ted Strickland’s True Positions on Coa

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Lauren Windsor

Sep 19, 2018

6 min

Project Veritas Broke Ohio Elections Law

On October 5, 2016, Project Veritas Action Fund, led by notorious rightwing political hitmanJames O’Keefe, published “UNDERCOVER: O’Keefe Exposes Ted Strickland’s True Positions on Coal and Guns.” The video features clips filmed surreptitiously by different operatives within the Grove City, OH coordinated campaign office of the Ohio Democratic Party for the Hillary Clinton and Ted Strickland campaigns, and within other locations. The problem for James O'Keefe and company is

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Lauren Windsor

Sep 16, 2018

1 min

New Operatives & Exposé of Upcoming DSA Sting

Our newest profiles are of "Leo Rod" (true identity Leonardi Jose Guzman) and "Jennifer Williams," pictured below in meetings of the Metro DC Democratic Socialists of America. Project Veritas has been hyping a new video release for next week featuring socialists allegedly working in agencies across the federal government to undermine the Trump administration. My latest exposé details the infiltration of Metro DC DSA meetings going back to at least late July by Rod, Williams,

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Lauren Windsor

Sep 16, 2018

4 min

Project Veritas' WaPo Stinger Strikes Socialist Group

The Project Veritas operative who falsely alleged that Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore impregnated her as a teenager, in an attempted sting of the Washington Post last year, is at it again. Using the alias Kimmie Gibson, Jaime Tennille Phillips has been infiltrating Metro DC Democratic Socialists of America since at least early August, according to four DSA members who interacted with her at meetings, actions, and happy hours. She often came early and stayed late for these

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Lauren Windsor

Jun 27, 2018

1 min

New Undercover ID'd

Happy Election Night! Our newest profile is Hannah Louise Shattuck Maruyama, pictured below. Read more about Hannah on her profile, and download an updated excel of dossier names via the drop-down menu on the home page of the website. If you think you may have been a victim of Hannah, please reach out to me at tips@theundercurrent.tv.

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Lauren Windsor

May 29, 2018

2 min

OH & MI Democratic Legislators Targeted in Teachers Union Stings

In the last few months, James O'Keefe and Project Veritas launched a blitzkrieg of stings against teachers unions in New Jersey, New York, New Mexico, and Ohio. Union officials told me there may have been operations in Arizona, California, and Florida as well. The release of a video from Ohio last week was accompanied by e-mails and calls requesting statements to the offices of at least two Democratic state legislators there, according to a source with knowledge of the corres

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Lauren Windsor

Apr 27, 2018

1 min

New Undercover ID'd: Ermine Desir

Ermine Desir is an actress and singer based in Brooklyn, NY. She participated in a sting against the American Federation of Teachers with fellow operative Ryan Lopez (pictured below), as part of a national surge in attacks against the union by Project Veritas operatives in recent weeks. AFT believes long-time operative Christian Hartsock attempted to infiltrate one of its affiliates in a separate sting in Albuquerque. This is a developing story.

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Lauren Windsor

Mar 19, 2018

2 min

New Operatives Identified in Twitter Sting

Last week, Gizmodo reported on Project Veritas' sting of Twitter using multiple undercover operatives and a fake tech start-up called "Tech Jobs Box."The operatives named included James O'Keefe, Dan Sandini, Allison Maass aka "Kelly Dale," and "Eric Williams," whom we later uncovered to be Trump activist Eric Spracklen. But we now know there were other operatives involved: "Michael Evans;" "Rand Kinsley;" "Gavin Grant," whose profile claims he currently works at both Twitter

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Lauren Windsor

Mar 16, 2018

1 min

New Undercover Operative ID'd: Trump Activist Eric Spracklen

Source: Eric Spracklen on Pinterest On Tuesday, Kashmir Hill at Gizmodo detailed the skeevy tactics used by Project Veritas to infiltrate Twitter starting in April of 2017. The undercover operatives involved included James O'Keefe, Dan Sandini, Allison Maass aka "Kelly Dale," and "Eric Williams," whose true identity was then unknown. Thanks to research from Liz Farkas and Matthew Phelan, we now know that "Eric Williams" is really Eric Spracklen, an outspoken Trump activist. S

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Lauren Windsor

Mar 14, 2018

14 min

How Conservative Activists Catfished Twitter

This post originally appeared at Gizmodo. Authored by Kashmir Hill. Mo Norai has worked in Silicon Valley for a decade. He’s done stints at Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Apple, but only as a contract worker, meaning he has missed out on the tech giants’ storied perks, benefits and job security. So when he was approached last April by a recruiter from a company called Tech Jobs Box about a full-time job, he was intrigued. A woman named Kelly Dale contacted him via LinkedIn pr

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Lauren Windsor

Mar 2, 2018

2 min

Project Veritas Operative Apparently Targeting CA Senate Candidate Kevin de León

I caught long-time Project Veritas operative Christian Hartsock at the California Democratic Convention not once, but twice the Friday ni...

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