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O'KEEFE, James

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James O’Keefe and right-wing content creators are using disguises and fake identities to trick poll workers and undermine confidence in elections

Right-wing media and the Trump administration have used video footage published by O’Keefe to sow doubt about primary elections and the upcoming midterms

Written by Jack Winstanley & Gideon Taaffe

Published 09/01/26

Former Project Veritas CEO James O’Keefe and several other right-wing content creators have recently released videos targeting election processes across the country, including Minnesota's voter voucher system, Michigan’s recent primary election, and Alaska's questioned ballot option. Using stereotypical disguises and footage captured on hidden cameras, the videos depict manufactured situations designed to trick election workers into providing ballots under false pretenses and fearmonger about normal election processes like provisional ballot mechanisms while obscuring safeguards in place to prevent fraud. These safeguards may include requiring additional identifiers such as a Social Security or drivers license number and additional review by a bipartisan board.

Often appearing under the banner of O’Keefe’s new Citizen Justice League, O’Keefe and his collaborators are yet again pulling pages from his more than decade-old playbook to produce content that attempts to support both right-wing media’s claims of widespread election fraud and the Trump administration’s efforts to undermine election integrity.

O’Keefe and his new Citizen Justice League have a history of producing provocative videos to undermine confidence in elections

O'Keefe, Rubin, and Higby used disguises at polling places to target Minnesota’s voter voucher system, and right-wing media promoted the stunt

An O’Keefe Media Group operative infiltrated polling places in Michigan and provided false identities to trick poll workers into providing ballots

In Alaska, O'Keefe sought the ballot for GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s brother

Right-wing media are aiding Trump’s attempts to undermine the midterm elections

//

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

  1. 06/18/26 6:28 PM EDT

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

  1. 02/18/26 4:25 PM EST

The Trump campaign touted a 2020 voter fraud report from James O'Keefe. It's now the latest such claim to fall apart.

  1. 02/08/2

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

ACORN KILLED 2009?

Texas Republicans back away from arrested activist who had targeted ACORN

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

Rep. Pete Olson

That was then.

And this is now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It cannot be withdrawn.

==

==

But he does have close ties to Higgins. She contacted Friess to get funding to begin James O’Keefe’s controversial campaign against ACORN.

==

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, ...

==

mma archive, see bak

bluff does not pan out; not a factor in trump win, tho some freeper called on him to inveitigate the bus scam in austin?

http://mediamatters.org/research/2016/10/12/james-okeefes-anti-clinton-october-surprise-shows-hes-still-hack-not-journalist/213783

voter fails:

try at acorn glory?

O’Keefe’s Battleground Texas Video Declared “Little More Than A Canard And Political Disinformation” By State Investigation.In February 2014, Project Veritas released a video purporting to show employees of the progressive voter registration group Battleground Texas using “potentially illegal methods to change elections.” Outraged Republican state officials pushed for an investigation into the video, ultimately resulting in two Texas special prosecutors disparaging O’Keefe’s tactics and the video itself. The special prosecutors concluded their investigation by asking that complaints against Battleground Texas be dismissed, calling the Veritas video “little more than a canard and political disinformation.” *Media Matters*, [4/7/14]

O’Keefe “Confronted” Lawmaker About Nonexistent Language In “Race Hustler” Voting Rights Legislation.In a March 2014 video, O’Keefe bizarrely attempted to “ambush” Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI) about his bipartisan bill designed to reaffirm civil rights protections in the Voting Rights Act. After dancing to a New Order song while wearing camouflage, O’Keefe attempted to confront Sensenbrenner at several Wisconsin town hall meetings for so-called “racialist language” in his bill that “excludes whites,” which Sensenbrenner correctly noted the bill does not, in fact, do. Media reporter Dave Weigel described the bizarre video’s “strange” focus at Slate:

[K]udos to James O'Keefe for going undercover, in hunting gear for some reason, and posing as a constituent. It's just confusing what he decided to do when he got in the room. O'Keefe insists that Sensenbrenner's attempt to restore some version of voting rights law pre-clearance is de facto racist.

There is no mention of the "Voting Rights Act" in the intro. It's called "a part of federal law that gives Eric Holder the power to approve election law in 16 states," and Sensenbrenner's amendment is called "legislation to give Eric Holder back power over state elections."

[...]

In the room, asking questions, O'Keefe does use the law's name. He asks Sensenbrenner whether it's true that the bill "removes white people from the protections of the Voting Rights Act." Sensenbrenner says it isn't -- a red buzzer goes off. We're directed to language in Sec. III, subsection 4 of the bill, which defines "the term 'minority' as used throughout.

This is strange. That's not the bill's only mention of race -- it's a pretty trivial one, actually.

[...]

:{But most people who covered the bill have been over this already. O'Keefe's claims just don't wash. Slate,:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:[3/5/14; Media Matters, 3/5/14]

O’Keefe Forced To Pay $100,000 And Publicly Apologize In Settlement Related To Sham 2010 ACORN Exposé.

==

trump security voter suppression new bl panthers:

Whenright-wing activistJames O’Keefetried to pull together one of hisundercover video operations in the Boston area in 2010, at the behest ofright-wing button-pushers Foster Friess and John Fund, Roman was one of the peoplethe disgraced smear merchant reached out to for tactical advice. A

couple years earlier, O’Keefe had managed to destroy an organizing

collective called ACORN — which Roman himself had been targeting for

years on his election fraud website, with minimal success — with

deceptively edited videos that tricked the media into believing ACORN

had tried to help cover up child prostitution.

The

particulars of Roman’s resume only reinforce the sense that Trump’s

outfit is gearing up for a voter suppression effort far more explicit

and modern than the traditional GOP approach. Republicans used to rely

on a tactic called voter caging, where operatives would try to get tens

of thousands of voters tossed off the rolls because they hadn’t

responded to a sham letter generated by the party ahead of election day.

David Daleiden Has A Long History With Discredited Conservative Groups And Activists

Daleiden Was Formerly Director O f Research At Anti-Abortion Organization Live Action , Which Also Published Deceptively Edited Videos Targeting Planned Parenthood .

Daleiden previously worked as director of research for the discredited

anti-abortion group Live Action, which deceptively-edited undercover

footage of abortion clinics in an attempt to smear Planned Parenthood.

Live Action, [**8/17/09**; Media Matters for America, **2/4/11**; Media Matters for America, **5/31/12**]

Daleiden Consulted With And Used Playbook Of Anti-Choice Group Whos e False Allegations Were Debunked By Congress ional Investigation . Daleiden

has cited the late-1990s work of Mark Crutcher's anti-choice

organization, Life Dynamics, as the reason for his interest in fetal

tissue used for medical research and has said he consulted Crutcher

prior to starting his own campaign against Planned Parenthood. In the

late '90s, Crutcher circulated unproven claims that a local Planned

Parenthood clinic in Kansas was illegally selling fetal tissue

donations. The allegations were investigated by Congress but fell apart

when the key witness admitted to lying about having seen illegal

activity. *Media Matters*, [9/24/15]

Snopes: Daleiden Is Reportedly Friends With Conservative Activist James O'Keefe, Known For "Severely Edited" Videos. A

Snopes.com takedown of one of the CMP videos noted that Daleiden is

reportedly a friend of James O'Keefe -- another conservative figure

notorious for using "severely edited" videos to target liberal

organizations:

An individual named David Daleiden has been widely

credited as the "leader" of the Center for Medical Progress.:{While

Daleiden's online footprint is minimal, a 2009 Claremont University

article (penned by fellow conservative activist Chuck Johnson) reported:}:

"James O'Keefe is a friend of David Daleiden's.O'Keefe and Hannah

Giles have been going coast to coast documenting instances of ACORN

employees willingly giving advice on how to avoid paying taxes and

shielding a would be pimp (running for congress) and a [prostitute] from

the watchful eye of the law. They've brought their investigation to New

York City, Washington D.C., and Baltimore."

O'Keefe came to prominence in 2009 after he produced "egregiously

misleading" and "severely edited" videos targeting agencies such as

ACORN. Snopes.com, [**7/14/15**]

http://mediamatters.org/research/2016/01/26/what-you-need-to-know-about-indicted-anti-choic/208183

==

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

On March 16th, a man who said his name was Victor left a voice message at

the offices of the Open Society Foundations, which are funded by George

Soros, saying that he was a potential donor. Then, he forgot to hang up

the phone, and the machine recorded “Victor” and his staff describing

what sounded like an entrapment scheme. This week, James O’Keefe, the

conservative activist who has used undercover videos to try to

embarrass Planned Parenthood, NPR, and ACORN, admitted that he was the caller and

apologized to his supporters for the failed operation. On “The New

Yorker Radio Hour,” the staff writer Jane Mayer goes through the

voice-mail recording to see what it tells us about O’Keefe’s methods and

the scope of his ambitions.

Dana Geraghty

recalls it, March 16th was a “rather quiet Wednesday.” That afternoon,

she was in her cubicle at the Open Society Foundations, on West

Fifty-seventh Street, where she helps oversee the nonprofit group’s

pro-democracy programs in Eurasia. The Foundations are the philanthropic

creation of George Soros, the hedge-fund billionaire, who is a

prominent donor to liberal causes, including Hillary Clinton’s

Presidential bid. Soros, who has spent nineteen million dollars on the

2016 Presidential campaign, is regarded with suspicion by many

conservatives. National Review has suggested that he may be

fomenting protests against Donald Trump by secretly funding what it

called a “rent-a-mob.” Geraghty, who is twenty-eight, had programmed her

office phone to forward messages from unfamiliar callers to her e-mail

inbox. She was about to review several messages when she noticed that

one of them was extraordinarily long. “Who leaves a seven-minute voice

mail?” Geraghty asked herself. She clicked on it.

“Hey,

Dana,” a voice began. The caller sounded to her like an older American

male. “My name is, uh, Victor Kesh. I’m a Hungarian-American whorepresents a, uh, foundation. . . that would like to get involved with

you and aid what you do in fighting for, um, European values.” He asked

Geraghty for the name of someone he could talk to “about supporting you

guys and coördinating with you on some of your efforts.” Requesting a

callback, he left a phone number with a 914 area code—Westchester

County.

She heard a click, a pause,

and then a second male voice. The person who had introduced himself as

Kesh said, “Don’t say anything . . . before I hang up the phone.”

“That

piqued my interest,” Geraghty recalls. Other aspects of the message

puzzled her: “Who says they’re with a foundation without saying which

one? He sounded scattered. And usually people call to get funding, not to offer it.” Victor Kesh, she suspected, was “someone passing as someone else.”

She

continued to listen, and the man’s voice suddenly took on a more

commanding tone. The caller had failed to hang up, and Kesh, unaware

that he was still being recorded, seemed to be conducting a meeting

about how to perpetrate an elaborate sting on Soros. “What needs to

happen,” he said, is for “someone other than me to make a hundred phone

calls like that”—to Soros, to his employees, and to the Democracy

Alliance, a club of wealthy liberal political donors that Soros helped

to found, which is expected to play a large role in financing this

year’s campaigns. Kesh described sending into the Soros offices an

“undercover” agent who could “talk the talk” with Open Society

executives. Kesh’s goal wasn’t fully spelled out on the recording, but

the gist was that an operative posing as a potential donor could

penetrate Soros’s operation and make secret videos that exposed

embarrassing activities. Soros, he assured the others, has “thousands of

organizations” on the left in league with him. Kesh said that the name

of his project was Discover the Networks.

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

One

member of the team suggested to Kesh that he knew someone who could

infiltrate the Soros network: an English orthopedic surgeon with “a real

heavy British accent,” who was in the U.S. and was “more than happy to

do anything he can do for us.” The surgeon was sophisticated abouttechnology and would not “have any problem with the cameras.” The team

member said, “He’s a very talented guy, so, I mean, he’ll be able to

pull it off.” As Kesh mapped out the covert attack, however, he had no

idea that the only person he was stinging was himself.

Theaccidental recording reached farcical proportions when Kesh announcedthat he was opening Geraghty’s LinkedIn page on his computer. He plannedto check her résumé and leverage the information to penetrate the Soros“octopus.” Kesh said, “She’s probably going to call me back, and if shedoesn’t I can create other points of entry.” Suddenly, Kesh realizedthat by opening Geraghty’s LinkedIn page he had accidentally revealedhis own LinkedIn identity to her. (LinkedIn can let users see who haslooked at their pages.) “Whoa!” an accomplice warned. “Log out!” The men

anxiously reassured one another that no one checks their LinkedIn

account anyway. “It was a little chilling to hear this group of men

talking about me as a ‘point of entry,’ ” Geraghty says. “But—not to

sound ageist—it was clear that these people were not used to the

technology.”

Geraghty

forwarded the voice-mail recording to Chris Stone, the president of theOpen Society Foundations. “The Watergate burglars look good compared to

these guys,” Stone told me last month. “These guys can’t even figure

out how to use an Internet browser, let alone conduct an undercover

operation. You read the transcript and you can’t help but laugh.” He

went on, “But the issues here aren’t funny. There’s some kind of

dirty-tricks operation in play against us.”

:{Inthe Westchester County suburb of Mamaroneck, a street-level office hasreflective glass doors and windows that make it impossible to seeinside. This is the headquarters of James O’Keefe III—the conservative

activist who placed the phony phone call pretending to be Victor Kesh.

As he showed me around, in late April, O’Keefe, who is thirty-one, told

me that he is not a dirty trickster but an investigative journalist and a

leading practitioner of modern political warfare. “We’ve got this

guerrilla army, and it’s coming to fruition soon,” he said. “This is our

base of operations.” Waving his hand around seven thousand square feet

of empty office space, he said, “This is our NORAD. It’s our field operation.”}:

The

back wall of the office, he explained, would soon be hung with an

enormous corkboard covered with maps. Affixed to each map would be a

card with the location and the assumed name of every undercover

political operative working for his nonprofit, Project Veritas. Created

in 2010 as a charity that could accept tax-deductible contributions,

Project Veritas says on its Web site that it is dedicated to exposing

“corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud, and other

misconduct.”

:{O’Keefe graduatedfrom Rutgers University in 2006. He says that a professor there, DavidKnowlton, urged him to follow Saul Alinsky’s rule book, which advised

radicals to use their enemies’ rules against them. On St. Patrick’s Day

in 2005, O’Keefe lampooned campus political correctness by demanding

that the dining hall ban Lucky Charms cereal. The box’s depiction of a

leprechaun, he proclaimed, perpetuated “offensive” stereotypes about

Irish-Americans. He videotaped a confrontation that he’d had with a

school administrator and posted the footage on YouTube, launching his

career as a political stunt artist. The Lucky Charms prank remains “a

crowd favorite,” O’Keefe told me.}:

:{In2014, his organization became more directly involved in electoralpolitics, sprouting a “social welfare” limb called the Project VeritasAction Fund. Such organizations, referred to in the tax code as 501c4groups, have proliferated since 2010, when the Supreme Court’s ruling in

the Citizens United case essentially legalized unlimited corporate and}:

individual spending on politics. Unlike ordinary charities, 501c4 groups

can accept unlimited contributions from secret donors and spend the

cash directly on campaigns. They just need to make a plausible case that

they promote social welfare and that politics is not their primary

purpose. O’Keefe says that the new group “allows us to literally put

someone undercover in a campaign.”

Inthe era of “dark money,” as anonymous political donations are oftendescribed, Project Veritas has been thriving. According to its federaltax filings, between 2013 and 2014 its budget doubled, from $1.2 millionto $2.4 million. O’Keefe told me that he has “about a dozen undercoveroperations ongoing at any given time.” One of these, he said, involves

“someone working for Hillary Clinton full time, as a paid staffer.” This

“embedded” operative, he said, “is employed in the campaign in the

highest echelons.” (He declined to be more specific.) Every day, the

operative sends “video to us over our own server.” He added, “Just like

Hillary Clinton, we have our own Internet server in Westchester County!”

He went on, “We see everything. We have thousands of hours of

video. You’ll see infighting, plans, strategy.” O’Keefe said that he has

been compiling a feature film from the operative’s footage, but won’t

release it until the late summer or fall, when it will have maximum

impact. In the meantime, he has posted teasers online; several of the

clips end with the words “Stay tuned, Hillary, and check your e-mail.”

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

Given

O’Keefe’s track record, it would be a mistake to take his grand

statements too seriously. He first gained wide notoriety in 2009, when

he released a series of undercover videos attacking the liberal

community-organizing group ACORN. The videos had an

immediate effect, but raised serious questions about his methods and

ethics—questions that have trailed him ever since. He secretly filmed

encounters in which he and a female colleague showed up at ACORN

offices in various cities, claiming to be a pimp and an underage

prostitute who wanted advice on how to make prostitution look like a

legal business. ACORN officials appeared to oblige them,

in one instance advising them to make sure that the immigrants O’Keefe

claimed he was going to prostitute actually went to school as exchange

students. After O’Keefe began releasing his exposés of ACORN, the House of Representatives voted to cut off federal funds to the group, which soon collapsed. But an ACORNofficial filmed in California, who was fired because he seemed toembrace the proposed scheme, successfully settled a lawsuit againstO’Keefe for a hundred thousand dollars. He argued that he had notconsented to be videotaped, as is required in California, and that afterlearning about the prostitution idea he had called the police. O’Keefehadn’t bothered to contact the employee before airing the damningfootage.

In January, 2010, the

F.B.I. arrested O’Keefe and three accomplices, two of whom had disguised

themselves as telephone repairmen in order to enter the New Orleans

office of Mary Landrieu, then a Democratic senator for Louisiana.

(O’Keefe says he had hoped to disprove Landrieu’s claim that her phone

lines were too clogged to answer the many angry calls coming from Tea

Party activists.) O’Keefe was sentenced to three years of probation and a

hundred hours of community service; he also paid a

fifteen-hundred-dollar fine.

In

2011, O’Keefe embarrassed National Public Radio when two accomplices,

pretending to represent a radical Muslim group, proposed to donate five

million dollars to the network in exchange for favorable programming

about Islam. After O’Keefe released videos depicting two NPR employees

chatting with the undercover operatives about the need to put Muslim

voices on the air, and criticizing the Republican Party as “not just

Islamophobic but really xenophobic,” two top NPR officials, including

its chief executive, Vivian Schiller, resigned.

ManyO’Keefe operations, however, have fallen flat, including his repeatedefforts to prove that voter-identity fraud is pervasive. “It seems likemost of the fraud O’Keefe uncovers he commits himself,” Richard Hasen, aprofessor of election law at the University of California, Irvine,says. A sting aimed at Hillary Clinton last year was considered

especially feeble. Veritas operatives persuaded a staffer at a rally to

accept a Canadian citizen’s money in exchange for a Hillary T-shirt—a

petty violation of the ban on foreign political contributions. Brian

Fallon, the communications director for the Clinton campaign, says,

“Project Veritas has been repeatedly caught trying to commit fraud,

falsify identities, and break campaign-finance law. It is not

surprising, given that their founder has already been convicted for

efforts like this.”

O’Keefe’s

unseemly tactics have increasingly caused other conservatives, including

Glenn Beck, to distance themselves from him. But the 2016 campaign

cycle appears to be reinvigorating the political art form that Richard

Nixon’s operative Donald Segretti infamously called “ratfucking.”

The

use of deception and other subversive tactics to undermine voter choice

is as old as the American republic. Thomas Jefferson enlisted

surrogates to publish attacks on Alexander Hamilton, who responded with

anonymous ripostes. In the eighteen-seventies, cities were infamous for

using ballots printed on multi-ply tissue paper in order to multiply

candidates’ votes. In 1972, Segretti published a phony letter that he

claimed had been written by one of Nixon’s rivals, the Democratic

Presidential candidate Edmund Muskie. The letter slurred Canadians as

“Canucks,” and the resulting furor sent Muskie’s campaign into a

tailspin.

With cash streaming intodark-money groups, negative campaigning is a growth industry. KathleenHall Jamieson, the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at theUniversity of Pennsylvania, and the author of “Dirty Politics” (1992),told me, “Dirty tricks have always been covert operations. But moremoney means it’s more possible to cover your tracks in ways that make itinsidious.” Over the years, Jamieson says, opposing campaigns have

attempted to sabotage one another by planting scandalous material,

releasing doctored photographs, and undertaking sting operations. In

2008, a “citizen journalist” attended a private San Francisco

fund-raiser and posted a video of President Barack Obama making a

maladroit reference to embittered Americans who “cling to guns or

religion.” Four years later, a bartender working at a private

fund-raiser for Mitt Romney recorded him dismissing forty-seven per cent

of the electorate as freeloaders “dependent upon government.”

Afterward, Romney could not shake the perception that he was élitist.

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

The

expected contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is likely to

be one of the nastiest in history, with putatively independent

“opposition research” operations fuelling both parties. Meanwhile,

negative campaigns funded by private donors and private interests are

aiming at targets far beyond conventional candidates—among them

intellectuals who have no official role.

O’Keefedeclined to tell me why he had targeted George Soros. But MatthewTyrmand, a recent addition to the Project Veritas board, has publiclydeclared his fierce opposition to Soros. Tyrmand is athirty-five-year-old Polish-American investor who is an informal adviserto Poland’s right-wing nationalist government as well as a contributingwriter at Breitbart, the conservative news site. As street protests

have sprung up in Poland, Tyrmand has repeatedly suggested online that

Soros is stoking the unrest. On the Web site of the Polonia Institute, a

nonprofit that promotes Polish culture, he wrote that the “recent

protest movement” was “rumored to be funded by George Soros’s Open

Society Foundations” in order to “undermine and destabilize the new

government.”

Tyrmand deflected

numerous requests for an interview. When I finally reached him by phone,

he said that he was too busy to talk. He was in France, on his way to

the Cannes Film Festival for the première of “Clinton Cash,” a film

adaptation of a scathing 2015 book by Peter Schweizer, a fellow at the

Hoover Institution, which accuses the Clintons of enriching themselves

by giving speeches to dubious sponsors. The film, along with other

independently financed attacks on the Clintons, will significantly help

Trump’s campaign by reducing its need to spend money on oppo research.

The

first time I asked O’Keefe who Victor Kesh was, he declined to comment

on what he called “investigations, real or imagined.” But, after

learning that he had been caught on tape trying to infiltrate Soros’s

group, he tried to put the best face on it. On May 11th, he, Tyrmand,

and a cameraman showed up in the lobby of the Open Society Foundations,

saying that they were conducting a serious investigation. O’Keefe phoned

Dana Geraghty again, admitting that he had previously called her

“posing as Victor,” and said that he had some “follow-up questions”

about whether the Foundations were as transparent as they claim to be

about the activities they fund. With the camera rolling, O’Keefe and his

team stood outside the lobby and buttonholed people, asking them if

Soros was funding Polish street protests.

Laura

Silber, the chief communications officer for the Open Society

Foundations, told me, “We were asked if we fund the Polish opposition—we

don’t, directly or indirectly. We do support groups that advance the

rule of law and human rights, which are under threat in Poland today.”

O’Keefe

portrays himself as a rigorous journalist who is dedicated to

furthering “a more ethical and transparent society.” He refuses,

however, to be transparent about who is funding him. According to tax

records obtained by PRWatch.org, an investigative watchdog group run by

the Center for Media and Democracy, in recent years hundreds of

thousands of dollars in donations to Project Veritas have come through a

fund in Alexandria, Virginia, called Donors Trust, which specializes in

hiding the money trails of conservative philanthropists. In its

promotional materials, Donors Trust says that it will “keep your

charitable giving private, especially gifts funding sensitive or

controversial issues.” The records obtained by PRWatch.org also showthat one donor, a conservative political activist in Wisconsin,contributed fifty thousand dollars just before Project Veritas undertooka sting of one of his political enemies—a state senator.

O’Keefe,

when asked if donors to his group can pay for him to investigate

particular people or groups, answered, “It depends.” He will pursue a

requested target “if it’s an idea I want to do, or if it advances our

mission.” But he added, “Not many people can tell me what to do, because

they don’t know how we do it.”

As

O’Keefe’s budget has grown, so has his ambition. “I want to expand to

every state,” he told me. “I want to be everywhere.” If uncovering the

truth requires deception, fake names, disguises, and other subterfuge,

he makes no apology. The signature O’Keefe method is to try to entrap

his subjects into breaking the law—a strategy that most political

operatives consider a step too far.

Heshowed me a tiny video camera that had been hidden inside an Aquafinawater bottle, and others embedded in a wristwatch and in an iPodShuffle. A device in his shirt button, which used Bluetooth technology,could relay live audio to his control room. He argued, “What I do is thetruest form of journalism there is. We hit the record button and showpeople what we found.”

The political left also outsources much of its dirty work to privately funded super PACs

and dark-money groups. After the Democrats were eviscerated in the 2010

midterm elections—the first congressional campaigns after the Citizens

United decision—an independently funded group named American Bridge 21stCentury began supplying opposition research to Democratic groups andcandidates. The network was founded by David Brock, a self-described

former “conservative hit man” who became notorious in the early nineties

for having described Anita Hill as “a little bit nutty and a little bit

slutty.” In the aughts, Brock, who is gay, joined the Democratic

Party—in part because he found the Republican Party homophobic—bringing

with him an insider’s expertise in cutthroat politics. He describes

American Bridge, which employs a hundred and fifty people, as a

political “utility” for progressives.

The

American Bridge network includes Media Matters, a watchdog operation

that identifies what it sees as distortions by the right-wing press, andCorrect the Record, a rapid-response unit that focusses on defendingHillary Clinton. Brock’s group also oversees political action

committees, dark-money nonprofit organizations, and at least fifty video

“trackers,” who hound Republican candidates in the hope of recording

politically damaging moments. Video trackers have been mainstays of

campaigns since 2006, when a Democratic volunteer upended George Allen,

the Republican gubernatorial candidate in Virginia, by releasing a video

of him uttering a racist slur. In 2012, one of the trackers with

Brock’s organization captured Todd Akin, a Missouri Republican running

for the Senate, defending “legitimate rape.” With American Bridge’s

success has come funding, largely from labor unions and wealthy

liberals. One of the biggest contributors this year is George

Soros—which may help explain why he was the object of an O’Keefe sting.

AfterMitt Romney lost the 2012 Presidential election, conservativeoperatives concluded that they needed their own putatively independentnegative-campaign machine. Out of this partisan arms race grew AmericaRising—the unofficial oppo-research affiliate of the RepublicanParty—which was founded in 2013 by Matt Rhoades, the former head ofRomney’s campaign. Based in Arlington, Virginia, it diverges from

Brock’s network in one crucial respect: It is a limited-liability

corporation. Instead of relying on charitable and political donations,

America Rising serves as a for-profit vender to conservative clients,

who pay it to conduct customized negative research.

Rhoades

and others declined to respond to interview requests, but when I

stopped by America Rising’s headquarters, on May 18th, the office was

filled with young researchers bent over their laptops. The walls were

decorated with photographs of conservative icons (though Trump’s

portrait seemed to be missing). An office door was covered with

bull’s-eye targets, and a sign reminded staffers of the “ResearchChecklist: Nexis, Google Alerts, Facebook, Twitter.”

Brock

told me that his group had rejected the vender model. “We didn’t want

to be under clients’ thumbs,” he said. “If you work for them, you’re

subservient. We wanted to build an independent progressive

infrastructure.” Recently, some donors wanted video trackers to trail

the Koch brothers, but Brock turned them down. American Bridge does a

huge amount of oppo research on the Kochs, but Brock says he believes

that tracking private citizens is unethical. He claims that he has also

rejected the use of subterfuge. “We’re not in that game,” he says.

Bycontrast, in late April the dark-money arm of Rhoades’s group, AmericaRising Squared, announced the creation of a negative campaign to targetleading environmentalists as well as prominent donors to environmentalcauses and candidates. The campaign’s initial budget was a hundred

thousand dollars, which, among other things, would cover the extensive

use of video trackers. According to the political tip sheet The Hill,

the campaign would subject environmentalists to “the same level of

scrutiny . . . that opposition research firms apply to presidential

candidates.” America Rising Squared’s executive director, Brian Rogers,told The Hill that his group planned to hold “theEnvironmentalist Left accountable for their epic hypocrisy and extremepositions which threaten America’s future prosperity.”

Almostsimultaneously, in early May, the organization announced the launch ofanaffiliated venture, run by many of the same operatives, calledDefiners Public Affairs. Definers offers to wage political-stylenegative campaigns, for profit, on behalf of undisclosed privateclients, including corporations:{. According to its Web site, Definers

will “create dossiers” on opponents, monitor them from a “full-service

war room,” and build both “grassroots” alliances and “a paid online

presence.” This raises the possibility that undisclosed business

interests are paying to choose the targets they want Republican

operatives to attack.}:

:{Soon after

the campaign against environmentalists was announced, Bill McKibben, who

teaches environmental studies at Middlebury College, in Vermont, got an

alarming phone call from a librarian at Texas Tech University, in

Lubbock, who supervises a literary archive to which McKibben had

contributed his research papers. McKibben has been an outspoken activist

against the Keystone XL pipeline, and in 2008 he co-founded 350.org, a

“global grassroots climate movement.” For many years, he was a staff

writer for this magazine. (He is now a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books,

where he recently reviewed a book of mine.) He is a political thinker,

but not a candidate, a major political donor, or a paid campaign

operative.}:

:{The Texas librarian,

Diane Warner, told McKibben that a man had shown up at the archive and

requested copies of all his papers—fifty-four boxes of documents. The

man identified himself as Aaron Goss, and said that he worked for

Definers Public Affairs. Goss spent a week copying pages from McKibben’s

archive. Meanwhile, as McKibben was getting ready to speak about the

environment at a church in Durham, New Hampshire, an unfamiliar man

aimed a video camera at him. The next day, a wordless two-second snippet

of footage appeared online, showing McKibben looking at the camera and

then turning away uncomfortably, to the accompaniment of the song “Show

Me That Smile.” The video, which was titled “Bill McKibben: Ready for

His Closeup,” was posted to the Twitter account of Corenews.org.}:

:{Thesite is another recent creation of America Rising Squared, as is an appcalled Grill, which enables users to track the location of ideologicalenemies, including Hillary Clinton, and lists hostile questions to askat public events, such as “Will you drop out of the Presidential race if

you are indicted?” Within days, another contentless video snippet of

McKibben popped up, this time showing him in Australia. The threat was

clear: wherever he went, his enemies would be recording him.}:

:{Who

paid for a professional oppo-research team to mock an environmental

activist? The answer is secret. One could argue that the campaign isn’t

substantially different from that of a corporate lobbyist, but, unlike

registered lobbyists, America Rising Squared doesn’t have to file public

disclosures or pay taxes, because it purports to be a social-welfare

organization.}:

:{McKibben told me, “I

have no fear of debating these people on the issues, but this is just

intimidation.” He added, “It’s bad enough to do this to anyone who runs

for office. But to do it to anyone who dares protest?”}:

:{TomSteyer, the retired hedge-fund billionaire who runs the

environmental-action group NextGen Climate and has been one of the

Democratic Party’s biggest donors, is another target of America Rising

Squared. Corenews.org has featured posts calling Steyer hypocritical,

because he made a fortune investing in fossil fuels. America Rising

Squared has accused him of self-interest in supporting green energy, as

he has substantial investments in solar power. Steyer says that this is

“complete and utter nonsense,” because his investments are held by

trusts and structured in a way that any profits are transferred to

charity. “They have to know they’re lying,” Steyer said. “It’s

completely dishonest, unethical, and pitiful. And it’s creepy.” He says

that the anonymously funded attacks won’t stop him, but he worries that

such campaigns may deter others from engaging in activism. As he puts

it, they “are another reason people are reluctant to get involved in

politics.”}:

It may

be that the shock value of such exposés is diminishing. A recent series

of sting videos against Planned Parenthood, created by a group called

the Center for Medical Progress, involved deceptions so

devious—including an attempt by undercover operatives to buy fetal

tissue—that the campaign backfired. Pro-choice activists united in anger

at the sting’s perpetrators, and a Texas grand jury cleared Planned

Parenthood of wrongdoing and indicted the C.M.P. In Presidential

politics, gaffes may be less damaging. As Brock notes, “In the year of

Trump, people are more inured to the outrageous.”

O’Keefe

promises that his covert documentary of the Hillary Clinton campaign

will command attention. But on May 19th he publicly conceded defeat in

the Open Society Foundations investigation. In an interview posted on

Breitbart News, he confessed that he had “been forced to abandon an

ambitious undercover investigation into billionaire left-wing financier

George Soros.” O’Keefe acknowledged that he “forgot to hang up” the

phone, but declined to be more specific about the operation, saying, “I

don’t like to reveal the tactics of what we do.” He apologized to his

supporters and promised that his many other investigations had not been

compromised. “Unfortunately, I’m burned on this particular

investigation,” he said, adding that he was “very disappointed,” because

he believes that the influence of billionaires such as Soros is “the most important topic undermining democracy.” But he concluded, “If I wanted to be perfect, I would give up.” ♦

The transcript is below.

VICTOR KESH:

“Hey, Dana. My name is, uh, Victor Kesh. I’m a Hungarian-American who

represents a, uh, foundation, and I’m interested particularly in Central

European issues, and I’m representing a foundation that would like to

get involved with you guys and aid what you do in fighting for, um,

European values and some other issues. I wanted to know if there’s a

point of contact at Open Society that I could talk to about supporting

you guys and coordinating with you on some of your efforts. My number is

xxx-xxx-xxxx. That’s xxx-xxx-xxxx. I’m, uh, I’m an American citizen,

but, uh, dual citizenship, Hungarian-American, who wants to aid, and

give me a call back when you can. Thank you.”

Sound of phone being moved around and/or put down.

UNKNOWN 1: “Shoot.”

KESH: “Don’t say anything before I hang up the phone.”

KESH: “Um, so what needs to happen—”

UNKNOWN 2: “Check that number dialed there—you can see [inaudible].”

KESH:

“What needs to happen is someone other than me make a hundred phone

calls like that. To Soros, to these foundations, and—and Soros

Foundation is an octopus, that Democracy Alliance, you’ve got Democracy

Alliance, uh—”

UNKNOWN 3: “Democracy Alliance Fund—all those [inaudible]—portfolio I found, a long time ago, do you remember that?”

[inaudible]

KESH: “This is Discover the Networks, O.K.? These are organizations funded directly by Soros and Open Society Institute.”

UNKNOWN 2: “Yeah, there’s a ton of ’em.”

KESH: “There’s, there’s—”

UNKNOWN 3: “Do you remember that?”

KESH: “There’s thousands of organizations—I remember it, yes.”

UNKNOWN 3: “That is the main document that we should be—that has every contact information, for the entire network.”

UNKNOWN 2: “James send that to me [inaudible].”

KESH: “Yeah.”

KESH:

“So, obviously, the Open Society Institute funds all these groups now—I

just figured Matt Tyrmand is willing to be undercover [inaudible], he

knows how to talk the talk. Getting a meeting, you know, through our

foundation that exists—would be—would be a good one. We’re not gonna do

it on offshore, you know, British Virgin Island Companies, in this case,

because Soros’s people don’t want to take money from a group like

that—now Clinton would, Hillary would, um, Chelsea would—”

UNKNOWN 2: “The third one.”

KESH: “Center of American Progress would.”

UNKNOWN 2: [Inaudible]

KESH: “I don’t think that Open Society would.”

UNKNOWN 2: “Yeah.”

KESH: “You could try. But I think you’re better off using an existing foundation that—that we could borrow or leverage.”

UNKNOWN 2: Coughing.

KESH: “Um, I’m trying to get one.”

UNKNOWN 2: “Let me dig in—so where, do we just—”

KESH: “So, so this situation—I just got a name—right? I don’t remember, I didn’t write this down.”

UNKNOWN 2: “Dana.”

KESH: “Dana.”

UNKNOWN 2: “Dana Geraghty.”

KESH: “Dana Geraghty. What’s her, what’s—what’s the last name?”

UNKNOWN 2: “She is—I thought it was G-E-R-R-I-T-Y [inaudible]”

UNKNOWN 2: “Could be G-A-”

UNKNOWN: “Yeah.”

KESH: “Dana Geraghty, Open Society.”

KESH:

“Dana Leigh Geraghty, Open Society Foundation—there she is. Eurasian

programs, Senior Program Operations Specialist. There’s her résumé. So,

just by making a phone call, I was able to understand who she is, I was

able to understand her title, and I know that she deals with Hungary

Poland issues.”

UNKNOWN 2: “Correct.”

KESH:

“And she’s probably gonna call me back. Now even if she doesn’t, I can

create other points of entry, to get people like that. And when I have

those people like that, what I would do is print ’em out, get ’em

onboard.”

UNKNOWN 3: “Actually, it’s [inaudible] connections, probably.”

KESH: “You probably find out all the other people—”

UNKNOWN 4: “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you’re logged in over your name [inaudible].”

KESH: “Yeah, that’s true.”

UNKNOWN 3: “[Inaudible] Open up a different browser.”

UNKNOWN 4: “Or log your—I just log out.”

UNKNOWN

4: “Um, I mean, we have on—on that sheet are the head people at her

thing, so we can just [inaudible] with these two [inaudible] if that’s

the specific target we’re going after, I’ll find it—there’s like fifteen

things that operate [inaudible] in Eastern Central Europe.”

KESH: “Yeah”

UNKNOWN 4: “And I’ll just go through them, I have all—on the Web site.”

UNKNOWN: “You’re still worried that [inaudible]”

KESH:

“Uhm, it’s—it’s really not, it’s, it’s, I’m trying to make things

happen, I’m trying to make things happen. I—I doubt that she’s gonna be

able—”

UNKNOWN 2: “Well the mere fact, though, that—”

UNKNOWN: [Inaudible]

UNKNOWN 2: “Even if she knows who he is or what he does, the fact that he looked at her—”

UNKNOWN: “It’s not setting off alarms for anybody.”

UNKNOWN: “No, it does—”

UNKNOWN 2: “But she’s not gonna connect it—”

UNKNOWN 5: “I mean, here’s the thing, is—”

UNKNOWN 2: “[Inaudible] The other thing [inaudible] to check—”

UNKNOWN 5: “I log into—”

UNKNOWN: “I agree with you.”

UNKNOWN 5: “Once a week, and I don’t even look at my connections, so I doubt she’s—”

UNKNOWN: “I don’t even think—I haven’t logged into LinkedIn and I haven’t looked at my LinkedIn stuff in years, so—”

UNKNOWN 2: “Yeah.”

UNKNOWN: “Were you logged in? Did you?”

KESH: “Ooh, yeah.”

MANY VOICES AT ONCE: [Inaudible]

UNKNOWN 2: “Because you could do the same thing—you could do the same thing without [inaudible] link.”

KESH: “I really don’t—I’m not—I’m not gonna look at her again, I’m just—do we have a dummy LinkedIn account that we could use?”

UNKNOWN

2: “Yeah, but we—my point is you don’t have to, ’cause if you’re not

connected to the person then you Google them, and get the same results

if you’re not connected to the person through someone else.”

UNKNOWN: “That’s true.”

UNKNOWN 2: “You can see the same thing.”

UNKNOWN: “I don’t know—I don’t know if you can get the same thing if you can look at the, uh, friend.”

UNKNOWN

2: “You’re—you’re not gonna see any more unless you’re connected with

her already, if you think—connected—I think if you’re a third generation

or somethin’ like that then you can see a little bit more, but I’m

assuming you’re not connected [chuckles] you might—”

KESH: “Um, I need to log out.”

UNKNOWN 2: “Just, uh, log up—log out on top of the right page, Dave.”

UNKNOWN: “I’m gonna find that portfolio, O.K.?”

KESH: “O.K.”

UNKNOWN 2: “Click on your name, on your picture, sign out.”

KESH: “O.K., so then we copy and paste that, there she is.”

UNKNOWN 2: “Same thing?”

KESH: “Yeah, some of them are grayed out, but that’s the same thing. So yeah.”

UNKNOWN

2: “Just to bring you up to speed, I’m gonna talk to Carl, and, and—and

Joe about this. About half an hour, an hour, ago, we spoke with my

friend in Atlanta who’s the [inaudible]—”

KESH: “Mhm.”

UNKNOWN

2: “—the [inaudible] surgeon, in, uh, from England. He’s all for this.

He’s gonna come up. He said he’s able to come up here next week, 23rd

and 24th.”

KESH: “Mhm”

UNKNOWN

2: “And [inaudible] call and sit down, we’ll train him. And, um, he’s

more than happy to do anything he can do for us. He’s got a real heavy

British accent, and, um, he, um, he’s very technical, as I’m sure he’s

not gonna have any problem with the cameras. And he’s a very talented

guy, so I mean, he—he’ll be able to pull it off. But I think that’s—I

think it’s better than trying to use [inaudible]. He’s in his late

sixties, he looks like he’s about sixty.”

KESH: “Yeah.”

UNKNOWN

2: “He doesn’t look that old, but it’s probably gonna be better than

having a young person go in there, I think. So, um, I’m working the

details out with him now. So, it will [inaudible].”

KESH: “So in terms of their points of entry—just establishing who these individuals are [inaudible].”

Click noise.

==

just when you think he's gone:

7/15 planned parenthood body par scam inspired by?

==

liberal St. Louis blogger passes on thiNovember 29, 2009video of James O’Keefe and Joseph Basel — who would bearrested two months laterfor a still-mysterious hidden camera operation they attempted in the New Orleans office of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.).

Blogger Adam Shriverarguesthat the video reveals the activists to be “jerks” who moved

conspiratorially around a rally protesting the Catholic Church’s

donations to an anti-gay marriage initiative. I’m just wondering what

Basel was doing there. We know that O’Keefe was in St. Louison November 28to speak at a Tea Party rally. But here we see O’Keefe and Basel

working together — on an apparently unsuccessful project — long before

New Orleans.

===

vitter rep

==

For those of you who can't get enough of all the turmoil at NPR, here's an unedited 46-minuteinterviewwith James O'Keefe III. O'Keefe's hidden camera video of a lunch between two NPR fundraisers and a faux Muslim group managed to do more damage to NPR than O'Keefe ever could have envisioned.

Here's the tease:In this interview, *On the Media* hostBob Garfield asks O'Keefe about his tactics. O'Keefe occasionally gets angry at Garfield's questions, claiming that when some in the media question his tactics, they are "obfuscating" real issues.

If James O'Keefe is staging guerrilla theater to expose hypocrisy and hate, a la Sasha Baron Cohen of Borat fame, maybe that's no big deal. But O'Keefe claims to be acting in the tradition of undercover investigative muckrakers. Bob asks James O'Keefe about misleading editing, distorted quotes, and how much untruth he is entitled to in his quest for veritas.

O'Keefe points out repeatedly that even revelations that his NPR video sting was heavily edited don't change the outcome: former NPR chief fundraiser Ron Schiller said some egregious things. (Ron Schiller has acknowledged this.)

O'Keefe calls himself a citizen journalist, but respected journalists do not selectively edit to make a political point.

O'Keefe could have played it straight and skipped the selective editing. But that would have reduced the impact of what he clearly wanted to do: Make NPR look as bad as possible.

Dave Davies, of Philadelphia station WHYY, has a thoughtful piecethat speaks to the speed with which stories break. He also wonders if NPR had had more time to digest the full two-hour video, if they might have reacted differently.

By the way, O'Keefe is askingsupporters to help him defer the $50,000 cost of making the NPR sting video.

http://www.npr.org/sections/ombudsman/2011/03/24/134808849/on-the-media-interviews-james-okeefe-iii

==

OMFG:

The role Sea Change plays as a member of the Billionaire’s Club is deeply troubling,

especially in light of recent revelations that environmental activists, many of whom are clearly

benefiting from this extreme “dark money,” do not have any moral qualms over where their

money comes from – so long as it supports the far-left cause.

416

[CODE for ISLAM]

 This sentiment was captured by

a recently released investigative video that revealed Hollywood producers of far-left

environmental films were eager to accept Middle Eastern money to produce an anti-fracking

video. Notably, in speaking with a man believed to represent rich Middle Eastern oil interests

opposed to American energy independence through fracking, one producer said:

416 Project Veritas, Full Un edited raw video, exclusive release by Project Veritas, available at YouTube.com,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6HZ5VLmyes&list=UUL9PlYkRD3Q-RZca6CCnPKw (last visited July 29,

2014).

65

This is not the first major project that we’ve had funded through a funding source

which you know, for various reasons – we didn’t disclose. It would have been

very unwise for everybody to understand the dynamics of that funding. So we 

know how tricky it is…. It’s money, so in that sense we have no moral issue. OKEEFE

===

I also wanted to point out that last week we broke the story that notorious media-for-hire hatchet man James O'Keefe (remember ACORN?) appeared to be working hand in hand with Wisconsin Club for Growth's Eric O'Keefe in attacking Wisconsin Republicans who were not working in lockstep with Governor Walker. Last year, James released a video of an inebriated Wisconsin Senate President Mike Ellis, which forced him out of office. CMD exclusively revealed that the Koch-tied dark money guru Eric O'Keefe gave James O'Keefe $50,000, presumably for the hit on Ellis who was a quiet critic of the extreme Walker agenda.

--

http://www.prwatch.org/news/2015/01/12714/eric-okeefe-james-okeefe-mike-ellis

==

moderation:

4.3.5 Video (ACORN)

Just as the Internet initially made everyone publishers, it is now making us all a potential television station. Video has become omnipresent because of cell phones. It has a visceral seeing-is-believing power, even though we commonly understand that editing (selection and juxtaposition) can alter meaning a great deal. It has had a dampening effect on politicians’ pronouncements at even semi-public events, since some offhand remarks can become persisting damaging sound bites. The ability of videos to go viral increases their effect (Posting them on popular blog greatly increases possibility of going viral. For example, Andrew Breitbart endorsed his protégé James O'Keefe's videos attacking (and in fact quickly destroying) ACORN, a longstanding and successful grassroots organization that was particularly effective at registering poor people to vote (1.3 million in the 2008 election). O'Keefe was the recipient of funding from the Scaife-funded Collegiate Network to start a conservative college newspaper (see incubators 4.3). In addition, he participated in training others at the Leadership Institute (Rove, Norquist, Abramoff are alums), but was kicked out for endangering its putative non-political tax status (See 5.4).

O'Keefe (and an accomplice, Hannah Giles, whose father is a political evangelical minister) appeared to have dressed up in absurd Superfly pimp outfit and purported to elicit advice from ACORN on how to engage in prostitution, which they surreptitiously videotaped and then misleadingly edited. In fact O'Keefe dressed in normal attire and asked for assistance in getting his girlfriend OUT of prostitution, which he received. An ACORN staffer reported the incident to the police, but to no avail. A House resolution to honor the "fact-finding reporting" done by Giles and O'Keefe, the "government watchdogs" was introduced by Texas Rep. Pete Olson (R-TX) for the "exemplary actions" of the young conservatives, who "are owed a debt of gratitude by the people of the United States" (Olson). The videos led to a vote in the House that de-funded and thus destroyed ACORN.

O’Keefe created another misleadingly edited video of Shirley Sherrod, head of the Department of Agriculture's rural development office in Georgia which led to her forced resignation, although her speech made the exact opposite point regarding racism of the edited version. (O'Keefe was subsequently convicted for attempting to bug the offices of Rep. Mary Landrieu, defended by a very expensive Federalist Society lawyer who normally defends corporate malfeasance).

A more recent O’Keefe effort led to the resignation of two senior National Public Radio officials before the tape was shown to be heavily edited and thus distorted (as in previous instances). The tape was not just condensed (six separate statements that funding could not affect editorial content were left out), but statements were rearranged in sequence, and laughter was spliced in where none actually occurred, significantly affecting the meaning). But again, because of the compressed news cycle, and the echo chamber’s lack of correctives, the damage is quickly done and almost never remedied. [gasland etc fails?]

Analysis: During political campaigns, politicians (particularly those who are more progressive) have discovered that failing to respond to attacks, however absurd, is damaging. Thus, "War Rooms" are set up for quick response. This may be in part because the 24/7 news cycle, and the voracious appetite for sensation by media. Campaigns, and thus war rooms, are now perennial, which short-circuits deliberation. Not content with building its own “mirror” versions, the conservatives have tried to defund and discredit what little infrastructure the Left has (e.g., non-commercial and thus independent public broadcasting, ACORN, Public Interest Research Groups, and even "card-carrying member[s] of the ACLU"). None of this is an accident, [ nor a conspiracy theory, since] and the plan has been laid out explicitly by Norquist and others.

===

salon stories:

http://www.salon.com/topic/james_okeefe/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/17/james-okeefe-voter-fraud-video_n_1524146.html

Further doubt is being cast on conservative activist James O'Keefe's latest undercover video after a ThinkProgress report finds that another of the film's alleged fraudulent voters is actually a U.S. citizen who is eligible to vote.

O'Keefe and his Project Veritas group have been on a mission to uncover the supposed perils of voter fraud in an effort to make a case for voter ID laws. Critics have claimed that such legislation is a hysterical reaction to an incredibly rare problem that would end up denying thousands of eligible Americans the right to vote.

In theirlatest offering, O'Keefe's team heads to North Carolina, where, as in earlierproductions, they go undercover to suggest that non-citizens and the dead are empowered to vote because individuals don't need to present photo identification in order to receive their ballots.

ThinkProgress, which earlier reported that one of the supposed non-citizens in the video actually became a citizen decades ago, now finds that the film's second subject is also a naturalized U.S. citizen. From ThinkProgress:

In fact, [William] Romero’s family told ThinkProgress he became a naturalized citizen in early 2011.

What’s more, Romero’s family told ThinkProgress that they had began receiving harassing telephone calls two weeks before the incident in the video asking if Romero was a citizen. They confirmed to the caller -- it’s unclear whether they were speaking with O’Keefe himself or another individual -- that Romero is indeed a citizen. Nevertheless, O’Keefe proceeded to ambush the family at their home and publish this video claiming he’s not a citizen.

Beyond these issues, the supposed proof of a "dead voter" ploy was already beendebunked earlier this week. It turned out that O'Keefe's video had been edited to remove an interaction between a poll worker and Veritas "investigator" indicating that Michael Bolton -- the deceased voter in question -- had been survived by his son, Michael Bolton, Jr. In the raw footage, the election official asks if the man asking for the deceased Bolton's ballot is Michael Bolton, Jr., who is registered at the same address.

Of course, none of this is to say that the electoral system in North Carolina is flawless. As the Tar Heel State's WRAL reports:

In 2011, the North Carolina State Board of Elections identified 12 non-citizens who had improperly voted in a North Carolina election.

That's 12 out of 6.3 million registered voters.

WRAL also reports that dead voters cast votes all the time, primarily when somebody casts a mail-in or in-person absentee ballot and then dies before Election Day.

==

Gaslanddirector Josh Fox recently found himself in a game of “Gotcha.” That is, until he turned the tables back around on the man who tried entrapping him.

Conservative activist James O’Keefe had loads of fun in recent years staging scams and releasing audio and video recordings of notable people who were supposedly caught in compromising or contradictory situations. He thought he had the perfect plan for Fox—an over-the-phone offer to fund a future project with so much oil money that even an environmentalist like Fox wouldn’t pass it up.

However, a listen to the recording lets you know just how poorly O’Keefe thought this thing out. He also didn’t anticipate that Fox would recording the conversation as well. That was perfect for exposing how O’Keefe edited the chat to give people the perception that Fox was a sellout.

MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes captures it all and lets Fox explain why he also recorded the odd conversation:

Fox reveals that representatives for O’Keefe’s fictitious financier had been sending emails for six months. He knew he was already involved in a “web of deception,” so hitting the record button once he received some phone time made a lot of sense.

“You do a brilliant job of setting that up, and it’s a laughing matter when you actually have the tape,” Fox told Hayes, “but let’s say I didn’t have it.

“Why did I record this? I recorded it because it looked shady, it looked like a scam, it looked like entrapment.”

——–

http://ecowatch.com/2014/05/25/gasland-josh-fox-james-okeefe-entrapment/

===

http://wonkette.com/549868/you-are-not-going-to-believe-this-but-james-okeefes-hollywood-sting-may-have-been-deceptively-edited

==

May 23, 2014 |

Conservative videographer James O’Keefe tried to make a big splash at the Cannes Film Festivalearlier this week, debuting a 20-minute video that he claims exposes hypocrisy among notable documentary filmmakers and Hollywood activists. But the film ended up backfiring on O’Keefe as one of his targets,Gaslanddirector Josh Fox, recorded his end of a phone conversation with O’Keefe’s cohorts, and exposed deceptive editing by O’Keefe.

O’Keefe also secretly recorded and filmed environmentalists Josh and Rebecca Tickell and their friends, actors Ed Begley, Jr., and Mariel Hemingway, trying to trap them into accepting financing for an anti-fracking film from Middle East oil interests.

But while the Tickell’s might have taken the bait from O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, Fox was wary of the group that contacted him several months back and made his own secret recording. Fox claims that he’s become careful with his contacts, as he’s frequently a target of the energy industry since the debut of his landmark 2010 documentary.

The latest O’Keefe saga began in December 2013, when Fox said that a large number of emails from a group called Beacon International began to arrive in his inbox. The organization claimed to be an overseas consortium interested in funding an anti-fracking film. Smelling a rat, Fox took to Google. All he could find was a hastily slapped-together site that “basically looked like a joke site up up overnight.”

Recognizing that he was likely being scammed, Fox began to ignore the emails. But Beacon International was persistent, even visiting Fox’s New York City apartment, where they left their calling cards in his mailbox and on his door.

Fox was even more suspicious at this point, and he decided to engage into the suspicious filmmakers. With a fellow filmmaker in the room, Fox made the call, recording the conversation from his end. In the recording Fox gaveThe Daily Beast, he asks a representative from Beacon International the names of the individuals the group represents. But the person on the other end of the phone, “Brandon Turner” would only tell Fox that they were from Europe and the Middle East. At this, Fox balked, repeatedly explaining to Turner that he wouldn’t participate in a project if he didn’t know the names of the individuals funding it.

On the recordingFox says: “We don’t know much about your company…I would need to have more transparency than you’re giving me right now to feel comfortable with doing that.”

Fox concluded that his contact with Beacon International was just a scam and didn’t give it much of a thought after that…until this week when James O’Keefe debuted his latest sting video at Cannes.

Toward the end of O’Keefe’s video, Fox is recorded as saying: “Obviously there are projects that we are working on ahead of time, that we’re working on now, that do sound like they would be interesting to your clients.” But Fox’s worries about Beacon International’s lack of transparency had been cut from the audio clip.

“We have them caught in total deception,” Fox toldThe Daily Beast.“This phone call reveals exactly how they work. They willfully portray it in the wrong light. They edit it so it sounds like you said something that you didn’t. Luckily I had the full tape.”

O’Keefe is a conservative activist who infamously produced audio and video recordings of staged encounters with public figures and workers in a variety of organizations, purportedly showing abusive or illegal behavior. He first gained national attention by recording ACORN workers supposedly aiding a couple (himself and a colleague pretending to be a pimp and a prostitute) in criminal planning in 2009. While the video footage virtually destroyed ACORN, California prosecutors later found that O’Keefe selectively and heavily edited the raw footage.

O’Keefe has receives monetary support from conservative media and interest groups to produce videos where he ‘punks’ individuals and organizations considered liberal. In 2009 Andrew Breitbart paid the activist to produce videos for BigGovernment.com. In June 2010 O’Keefe formed a 501(c)(3) organization, dubbed Project Veritas with the stated mission to “investigate and expose corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud and other misconduct.”

Despite his tactics, O’Keefe’s productions are praised by conservative pundits like Weekly Standard Editor Fred Barnes, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, andBill O’Reilly.

O’Keefe’s activities have generated legal trouble for him. He was arrested and sentenced to three years’ probation for his involvement in a break-in and attempted wiretap at Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office in 2010.

In this latest sting operation, O’Keefe claims to have been inspired by the 2012 filmPromised Land, where an anti-fracking activist was actually an operative for the energy companies trying to buy land rights from a small, rural community. The film was financed, in part, by an organization partially owned by the United Arab Emirates government.

After Fox didn’t take the bait, Brandon Turner dangled it in front of the Tickells, producers of the documentary,Fuel, a few months later. The Tickells are currently working on a documentary on hydraulic fracturing. The duo, however, were less suspicious of Turner and appeared grateful to have found possible funding for a film that they felt was very important.

Turner told the Tickells that his client — who wished to remain a silent parter — was from the Middle East and was heavily steeped in oil energy interests. The Tickells then participated in a series of follow-up conversations. The recordings portray the couple as promising to keep the identity of their new-found funding source a secret.

“We’re confident that we can keep this zip-locked, you know tight, tight, air-tight forever,” Josh Tickell says in one recording. “Money to us…It’s money…we have no moral issue…But we know how a lot of people that would be necessary to pull this off, they would have issue.”

The Tickells now claim that they were trapped and prodded into responses by Turner, although Josh Tickell admits they were gullible. “We flat out deny any implication of impropriety,” he told the Hollywood Reporter.

Turner asked the Tickells to participate in another meeting two other men at the Beverly Hills Hotel. One of the men was “Muhammad,” who Turner identified as the son of Beacon International’s funding source. The Tickells brought their friends Begley and Hemingway for support. In the meeting, Muhammad complains that fracking and energy efficiency in America are a threat to Middle Eastern oil interests.

Toward the end of the meeting, the Tickells say they started to get worried, but instead of going with their instincts they continued to talk to Beacon International.

In response to the O’Keefe video, Begley and Hemingway have both released statements insisting that they attended the meeting solely to help their friends get financing for their film. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Begley even insisted that hearing problems kept him from understanding much of what Muhammad was saying and that his agreeable demeanor shown on tape was just him being polite.

The Tickells have contacted the FBI and local authorities wondering if O’Keefe broke any laws by recording their conversations, considering that they signed a non-disclosure agreement presented by Beacon International.

For his part, Fox says that he’s disappointed in the Tickell’s behavior. However, Fox points out that the real villain in this Hollywood drama is O’Keefe.

Watch Josh Fox on Chris Hayes below:

===

http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2013/08/27/james_o_keefe_and_jim_letten_project_veritas_provocateur_accuses_former.html

The Times-Picayunehas anice recapof “journalist provocateur” James O’Keefe’s latest stunt. It’s not nearly as ambitious as hisPlanned Parenthood, ACORN, or NPR sting operations, but it’s far more entertaining, if you ask me. In it, O’Keefe’s Project Veritas crew confronts former U.S. Attorney and current Tulane Law School assistant dean Jim Letten on the Tulane campus. O’Keefe blames Letten for his 2010 prosecution for entering Mary Landrieu’s offices under false pretenses (Letten recused himself from the case, which was ultimately settled with a guilty plea), and attempts to give Letten a copy of his new book.

The Times-Picayune’s photo caption team sums up the clip’s highlights better than I ever could:

The video shows an agitated Letten accusing O'Keefe of "terrorizing" the former U.S. attorney's wife at their home, of harassing him and trespassing on the Tulane campus. He called O'Keefe a coward and a spud and referred to O'Keefe and his companions as hobbits.

The hobbit stuff, which is quite excellent, starts around the 36-second mark, and the footage of Letten losing his temper goes on for another two and a half minutes before police detain O’Keefe and his crew. Also very funny, at the four-minute mark O’Keefe accuses Letten of engaging in “minor assault” for grabbing the book from him and then tossing it back at him.

This kind of thing is clearly more personal vendetta than investigative journalism, but it provides an embarrassing portrait of Letten losing his cool. And as a stunt in book publicity cooking, Letten played right into O’Keefe’s hands—the clip has 66,000 views and has inspired numerous sucker bloggers (guilty!) to write about it.

Tulane has issued an order banning O’Keefe from the campus, but this is clearly a mission accomplished for Project Veritas.

---

Destroyed by court order: The footage of a Landrieu staffer admitting the senator’s office had no problem with their phones

POSTED AT 1:12 PM ON MAY 29, 2010 BY PATTERICO

http://hotair.com/archives/2010/05/29/destroyed-by-court-order-the-footage-of-a-landrieu-staffer-admitting-the-senators-office-had-no-problem-with-their-phones/

I recently reported that the judge in James O’Keefe’s criminal case ordered the destruction of the footage of James O’Keefe’s entry into Senator Mary Landrieu’s offices. O’Keefe has confirmed on Twitter that the Government returned his recording equipment, but deleted the footage from inside Sen. Landrieu’s offices. The AP is now catching up to the story:

Conservative activist-videographer James O’Keefe said video he shot of conversations with staffers of U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu was deleted when his cell phone was returned after he and three others pleaded guilty to charges in a caper he orchestrated at the Democrat’s New Orleans office.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office said Saturday that U.S. Magistrate Daniel Knowles III ordered the footage removed. O’Keefe made the claim Friday in a posting on his Twitter social networking site.

What the AP overlooks, however, is what the destroyed footage would have revealed.

I recently published court documents in which the Government admitted that a member of Landrieu’s staff had told O’Keefe’s companions, on tape, that there had been no problem with Senator Landrieu’s phones:

One of Senator Landrieu’s staff members (WITNESS 1) told BASEL and FLANAGAN that she did not report any phone problems and that the office was not experiencing any issues with the phone system.

I’m interested in the First Amendment implications of a court ordering the destruction of a copyrighted work with possible political relevance — with no apparent statutory authority, plea agreement provision, or national security concern to justify it.

I know of no justification for the destruction of the taped footage. A defendant’s property can be forfeited under certain circumstances — if he commits a felony. O’Keefe pled to a misdemeanor. Surrendering the footage was not part of the plea agreement, which you can readhere. Nor is there any national security issue in play; O’Keefe has confirmed to me that he and his companions accessed only the public reception area of Landrieu’s office.

In addition, the footage was potentially exculpatory evidence in O’Keefe’s criminal case, and as such should have been turned over immediately after his arrest. The Government hasadmitted, in court documents signed by the Government lawyer, that O’Keefe’s intent was “not to actually tamper with the phone system, or to commit any other felony” but rather “to orchestrate a conversation about phone calls to the Senator’s staff and capture the conversation on video.” This means that the tape recording made by O’Keefe was exculpatory evidence, which would have helped him prove the lack of intent that the Government eventually admitted.

The First Amendment would prohibit the judge from returning the footage to O’Keefe, and then ordering him not to publish it. Yet he managed to accomplish the same thing in ordering its destruction.

Now, the public will never learn what was on that footage, including what it revealed about the weakness of the Government’s charges against O’Keefe — and possibly about Sen. Landrieu’s having dissembled about the state of her “jammed” phone lines.

What possible justification is there for destroying such evidence?

==

selectively enforced shield law

North Jersey Media Gp

Col School of J

NJ Star Ledger  jennifer borg print full trans

evin whitmer ed in ch Bergen Record

jay  Rosen nyu

Gavin McInnes vice mag street carnage 41 king

ironic racist http://gawker.com/5358130/vice-vs-street-carnage-hipster-medias-battle-produces-draconian-non+competes

NO evid destroyed

j christian adams Election law ctr  http://www.electionlawcenter.com/

We include detailed information like the server IP Address which is 208.109.80.14.Electionlawcenter.comresides at GoDaddy.com, LLC in Scottsdale, AZ, United States.

asst AG NH  asked nadia naffe for 7 yrs of email, did npt know illegal

foia for all doj past date X

// req by krushner sp

mike rogers went to Murdoch sp house looking for spud; dead of night, showed px, terorized

would/could not commenton grand jury subp

threshold S&S

==

John Christian Adams (born 1968)[[1]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Christian_Adams#cite_note-Avvo-1)[[2]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Christian_Adams#cite_note-Post_2010-2) is an American attorney and former United States Department of Justice official who has accused the department of racial bias in many affairs, most notably its handling of a voter intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party.[[3]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Christian_Adams#cite_note-3)[[4]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Christian_Adams#cite_note-4)

Contents

 [hide]

Career:{:(style="margin-left:-0.25em;margin-right:0.25em;color:#555555;"):}:[edit source:{|}:edit:{beta:(style="vertical-align:top;padding-left:0.5em;display:inline !important;background-image:none !important"):}::{]}:

Adams grew up in Hempfield Township in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania and graduated from Hempfield Area High School.[[5]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Christian_Adams#cite_note-lawyer_bashes-5) Adams received hisBachelor of Arts degree in English from West Virginia University, then his juris doctor from the University of South Carolina School of Law in 1993, and was admitted to the South Carolina Bar in 1994.[[6]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Christian_Adams#cite_note-6)[[7]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Christian_Adams#cite_note-7) From 1993 to 1997, Adams served as counsel for Jim Miles, the Secretary of State of South Carolina.[[8]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Christian_Adams#cite_note-off_the_hook-8) In 1999, the Virginia State Bar admitted Adams.[[1]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Christian_Adams#cite_note-Avvo-1)

TheWashington Times noted in February 2001 that Adams filed a formal ethics complaint with the Florida Bar against Hugh Rodham, brother of then-U.S. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, that accused Rodham of violating bar regulations by representing people considered for presidential pardon from former president Bill Clinton, husband of Hillary Rodham Clinton.[[9]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Christian_Adams#cite_note-9) Citing United States Department of Justice confidentiality rules, the Florida Bar ruled that Hugh Rodham did not violate any rules.[[10]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Christian_Adams#cite_note-10) Adams responded to the Bar by emphasizing that his complaint accused Rodham of illegally taking a contingent fee to represent the two clients appealing for a pardon.[[11]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Christian_Adams#cite_note-11) The San Francisco Chronicle reported in 2003 that the Transportation Security Administration falsely placed Adams in a No Fly List along with other people with names like "J. Adams".[[12]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Christian_Adams#cite_note-12)

In December 2007, Columbia, South Carolina newspaper The State reported that Adams called on increased oversight of the South Carolina Supreme Court in response to a controversy over the court reversing the grades of 20 who failed the bar exam.[[8]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Christian_Adams#cite_note-off_the_hook-8)

Justice Department Civil Rights Division:{:(style="margin-left:-0.25em;margin-right:0.25em;color:#555555;"):}:[edit source:{|}:edit:{beta:(style="vertical-align:top;padding-left:0.5em;background-image:none !important;display:inline !important"):}::{]}:

See also: New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case

The United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division under the George W. Bush administration hired Adams in 2005.[[13]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Christian_Adams#cite_note-voting_section_chief_out-13) In 2008, Adams was one of three federal attorneys probing Lake Park, Florida for possible bias against African-Americans being elected to town commission.[[14]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Christian_Adams#cite_note-14)

In December 2009, Adams's supervisor and Civil Rights Division attorney Christopher Coates stepped down as chief of the voting division in December 2009 amid controversy over his objections to the dropping of the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case.[[13]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Christian_Adams#cite_note-voting_section_chief_out-13) Coates' testimony before the United States Civil Rights Commission supported Adams' allegations,[[15]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Christian_Adams#cite_note-15) and the Commission's report that found "a cover-up of a possible racial double standard in law enforcement in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice," and, detailing "a year of DOJ’s intransigence and baseless refusals to comply with our subpoenas," that "the Department of Justice is unquestionably hostile to any serious investigation of these allegations."[[16]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Christian_Adams#cite_note-16) In May 2010, Adams resigned from the Justice Department.[[17]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Christian_Adams#cite_note-17)

Post-Justice Department career:{:(style="margin-left:-0.25em;margin-right:0.25em;color:#555555;"):}:[edit source:{|}:edit:{beta:(style="vertical-align:top;padding-left:0.5em;background-image:none !important;display:inline !important"):}::{]}:

After leaving the Justice Department, Adams became counsel for the Election Law Center and a contributor to the center's blog. Additionally, he became a contributor toPajamas Media.[[5]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Christian_Adams#cite_note-lawyer_bashes-5)On June 28, 2010,:{The:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{Washington Times:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:published a guest commentary by Adamsin which Adams accused the Justice Department of racial bias by dropping the New Black Panthers case.[[18]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Christian_Adams#cite_note-18)Subsequently, Adams accused Assistant Attorney GeneralThomas Perezoflying under oathin investigative hearings before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.[[5]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Christian_Adams#cite_note-lawyer_bashes-5)On July 6, 2010, Adams testified before the Commission on Civil Rights that the Justice Department's decision was driven by racial bias against white Americans.[[19]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Christian_Adams#cite_note-19)

During the2012 Republican presidential primaries in Virginia,Adams represented candidate Michele Bachmannin a multi-candidate lawsuit to add Bachmann and others to the primary ballot in Virginia.[[20]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Christian_Adams#cite_note-20)Bachmann and the other candidates lost the lawsuit.[[21]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Christian_Adams#cite_note-21)

Bibliography:{:(style="margin-left:-0.25em;margin-right:0.25em;color:#555555;"):}:[edit source:{|}:edit:{beta:(style="vertical-align:top;padding-left:0.5em;display:inline !important;background-image:none !important"):}::{]}:

See also:{:(style="margin-left:-0.25em;margin-right:0.25em;color:#555555;"):}:[edit source:{|}:edit:{beta:(style="vertical-align:top;padding-left:0.5em;display:inline !important;background-image:none !important"):}::{]}:

References:{:(style="margin-left:-0.25em;margin-right:0.25em;color:#555555;"):}:[edit source:{|}:edit:{beta:(style="vertical-align:top;padding-left:0.5em;display:inline !important;background-image:none !important"):}::{]}:

  1. ^ ***a*** ***b*** "John Christian Adams". Avvo. Retrieved July 7, 2012.
  2. ^ Markon, Jerry; Thompson, Krissah (October 23, 2010). "Dispute over New Black Panthers case causes deep divisions". The Washington Post. Retrieved July 7, 2012. "Adams, 42, was assigned as the lead lawyer."
  3. ^ "Ex-Official Accuses Justice Department of Racial Bias in Black Panther Case". FOXNews.com. 2010-04-07. Retrieved 2010-07-06.
  4. ^ Turner, Channing. "Adams: ‘Lawless’ Civil Rights Division Dismissed Black Panther Case". Mainjustice.com. Retrieved 2010-07-06.
  5. ^ ***a*** ***b*** ***c*** Gazarik, Richard (July 2, 2010). "Lawyer bashes Obama officials over Philadelphia voter-intimidation case". Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Retrieved July 7, 2012.
  6. ^ "The Justice Department and the New Black Panthers Voting Rights Controversy". Federalist Society. Retrieved July 7, 2012.
  7. ^ "John Christian Adams search". South Carolina Bar. Retrieved July 7, 2012.
  8. ^ ***a*** ***b*** Brundrett, Rick (December 2, 2007). "Supreme Court not off the hook". The State (Columbia, South Carolina). Archived from the original on December 4, 2007.
  9. ^ McCaslin, John (February 26, 2001). "Inside the beltway". The Washington Times. Archived from the original on March 3, 2001.
  10. ^ McCaslin, John (July 26, 2001). "Inside the beltway". The Washington Times. Archived from the original on July 30, 2001.
  11. ^ McCaslin, John (July 30, 2001). "Inside the beltway". The Washington Times.
  12. ^ Gathright, Alan (June 8, 2003). "No-fly list ensnares innocent travelers". San Francisco Chronicle. Archived from the original on June 20, 2003.
  13. ^ ***a*** ***b*** Reilly, Ryan J. "Voting Section Chief Out Amid Controversy – Main Justice". Mainjustice.com. Retrieved 2010-07-06.
  14. ^ Dubocq, Tom (July 20, 2008). "Feds probe possible racial bias in Lake Park voting". Palm Beach Post. Archived from the original on September 4, 2008.
  15. ^ Foster, Daniel (September 24, 2010). "Coates Testifies at Civil Rights Commission". The Corner. National Review Online. Retrieved July 7, 2012.
  16. ^ *Race Neutral Enforcement of the Law? The U.S. Department of Justice and the New Black Panther Party Litigation: An Interim Report*, US Commission of Civil Rights, December 3, 2010
  17. ^ Reilly, Ryan J. (May 18, 2010). "DOJ lawyer who brought Black Panthers case resigns". Main Justice. Retrieved July 7, 2012.
  18. ^ Adams, J. Christian (June 28, 2010). "Inside the Black Panther case". Washington Times. p. B1.
  19. ^ Savage, Charlie (July 7, 2010). "Racial Motive Alleged in a Justice Dept. Decision". The New York Times. Retrieved July 7, 2012.
  20. ^ Higgins, Tim; Millard, Mike (January 6, 2012). "Virginia’s Cuccinelli Opposes Changes to March Primary Rules". Bloomberg News. Retrieved July 8, 2012.
  21. ^ Kumar, Anita (January 13, 2012). "Perry, Gingrich lose lawsuit to get on Virginia primary ballot". The Washington Post. Retrieved July 8, 2012.

External links:{:(style="margin-left:-0.25em;margin-right:0.25em;color:#555555;"):}:[edit source:{|}:edit:{beta:(style="vertical-align:top;padding-left:0.5em;display:inline !important;background-image:none !important"):}::{]}:

Categories:

===

tpm

The conservative video maker James O'Keefe has turned his cameras on the former federal prosecutor whose office brought charges against him and his accomplices in the phone-tampering of a Democratic U.S. senator.

In a video released by O'Keefe's Project Veritas on Monday, former U.S. Attorney James Letten can be seen shouting at O'Keefe and his colleagues. Letten can also be seen filming O'Keefe with his own smart phone.

"You went to my house, you terrorized my wife, you're violating federal law, you're trespassing, you're a nasty little cowardly spud," Letten says in the video. "All of you, you're hobbits. You are less than I can ever tell you. You are scum. Do you understand?"

The video also shows O'Keefe going to Letten's house and speaking with his wife.

Letten recused himself from O'Keefe's  phone-tampering case in 2010[won't say why?]. With the cameras rolling, O'Keefe tried to hand Letten a copy of his book, "Breakthrough: Our Guerilla War to Expose Fraud and Save Democracy." Letten then throws the book back at O'Keefe, an act O'Keefe lables a "minor assault in front of police." This is an O'Keefe video, so the usual caveats and grains of salt apply.

Letten resigned his position as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana in late 2012, amid a scandal about anonymous online commenting by high-ranking prosecutors in his office. He is currently an assistant dean at Tulane University Law School.

===

  1. ### Cops Blame :{James O'Keefe:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: for Sinking Investigation into His :{Voter:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: **...**

www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/...james-okeefe...voter-fraud.../61660/‎

https://www.google.com/search?q=james+o'keefe+voter+fraud&oq=james+o'keefe+voter+fraud&aqs=chrome.0.57j62l3.9945j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#

:{:{Jan 31, 2013 -:(style="color:#666666;"):}:There's no publicity in the follow-up. Conservative activist :{James O'Keefe:(style="font-weight:bold;color:inherit"):}:earned praise for secretly taping Virginia Rep. Jim Moran's son **...**:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

  1. There's no publicity in the follow-up. Conservative activist James O'Keefeearned praisefor secretly taping Virginia Rep. Jim Moran's son Patrick seemingly giving advice on how to commit voter fraud in October, but three months later law enforcement has closed their investigation because, they say,O'Keefe wouldn't cooperate.

Patrick Moran resigned from his Democratic dad's campaign immediately following the video's release and cops, as well as commentators who generally don't cheer on O'Keefe's stunts, took it seriously enough to open a criminal investigation. Arlington County police spokesman Dustin Sternbeck told ArlingtonPatch's Jason Spencer that both of the Morans cooperated with the investigators. But what they really needed to make a case was the full, raw video, and O'Keefe wouldn't hand it over. "Who knows what else could be on the video? Our detective wanted to request those two things, and that party failed to comply," Sternbeck told Patch. "We want the full version. That's our job, to do a thorough investigation. And that's a huge piece of the process right there." Update: Sternbeck tells The Atlantic Wire the lead detective spoke to O'Keefe on several occasions.

In the Moran tape, the Project Veritas reporter asks Patrick how to get around voter ID laws with a list of 100 inactive voters. Moran explains, "There will be a lot of voter protection... So, if they just have — you know just the utility bill or bank statement — bank statement would obviously be tough — but, they can fake a utility bill with ease.... You have to forge it."

In October, Patrick Moran released a statement told Politico, "…[A]t no point have I, or will I ever endorse any sort of illegal or unethical behavior. At no point did I take this person seriously. He struck me as being unstable and joking, and for only that reason did I humor him. In hindsight, I should have immediately walked away, making it clear that there  is no place in the electoral process for even the suggestion of illegal behavior, joking or not."

Why wouldn't O'Keefe turn over his video? He's faced criticism for selectively editing his undercover video in the past. O'Keefe and his Project Veritas gained famed for his 2009 undercover video that showed ACORN employees appearing to give advice to people dressed in a ridiculous pimp costume on how to smuggle teen prostitutes and evade. It was later revealed to be edited -- O'Keefe didn't dress as a pimp for the interviews. The tapes killed ACORN. O'Keefe's NPR sting, in which Project Veritas pretended to be Muslim Brotherhood members interested in donating to public radio in a meeting with NPR executives, was edited to make it sound like an NPR executive laughed at the advocacy of sharia law.

O'Keefe wasn't protecting whoever taped Moran. Virginia is a one-party consent state, meaning only one participant in a conversation has to consent for it to be taped. The videographer could not face charges. So why not turn over the tape? 

Update: O'Keefe emails this statement: "The video and the subsequent actions of both Patrick Moran and Congressman Moran speak for themselves. What we saw on the video was so obviously damning and inappropriate that Pat Moran immediately resigned, and his father's office released a statement saying that what he had done was wrong. I don't need to make any comment beyond that."

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:N_qvA9iMSjYJ:www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/01/cops-blame-james-okeefe-sinking-their-investigation-his-voter-fraud-sting/61660/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=usNew :{James O'Keefe:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: video implicates sitting Dem congressman, son **...**

twitchy.com/2012/10/24/james-okeefe-teases-another-bombshell-video/‎

https://www.google.com/search?q=james+o'keefe+voter+fraud&oq=james+o'keefe+voter+fraud&aqs=chrome.0.57j62l3.9945j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#

:{:{Oct 24, 2012 -:(style="color:#666666;"):}::{James O'Keefe:(style="font-weight:bold;color:inherit"):}: (@JamesOKeefeIII) October 24, 2012. O'Keefe, whose Project Veritas has uncovered instances of :{voter fraud:(style="font-weight:bold;color:inherit"):}: across the **...**:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

  1. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6qq2v2p3BEIJ:twitchy.com/2012/10/24/james-okeefe-teases-another-bombshell-video/+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6qq2v2p3BEIJ:twitchy.com/2012/10/24/james-okeefe-teases-another-bombshell-video/+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us:{James O'Keefe:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Scams :{Voter Fraud:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: and Voter ID Laws Into Existence **...**

[](https://www.google.com/search?q=james+o'keefe+voter+fraud&tbs=ppl_ids:--116993690197476337229-,ppl_nps:Brentin+Mock,ppl_aut:1)

www.thenation.com › Blogs  › Voting Rights Watch ‎

https://www.google.com/search?q=james+o'keefe+voter+fraud&oq=james+o'keefe+voter+fraud&aqs=chrome.0.57j62l3.9945j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#

by Brentin Mock - in 384 Google+ circles

May 31, 2012 -The influence of scam artist James O'Keefe on pro-voter ID legislators lately has been jarring.

  1. ### :{James O'Keefe Voter Fraud:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Video Further Debunked - Huffington Post

www.huffingtonpost.com/.../james-okeefe-voter-fraud-video_n_152414...‎

https://www.google.com/search?q=james+o'keefe+voter+fraud&oq=james+o'keefe+voter+fraud&aqs=chrome.0.57j62l3.9945j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#

:{:{May 17, 2012 -:(style="color:#666666;"):}:Further doubt is being cast on conservative activist :{James O'Keefe's:(style="font-weight:bold;color:inherit"):}: latest undercover video after a ThinkProgress report finds that another of **...**:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

  1. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:cTj_b5P_wSUJ:www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/17/james-okeefe-voter-fraud-video_n_1524146.html+&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:cTj_b5P_wSUJ:www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/17/james-okeefe-voter-fraud-video_n_1524146.html+&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=usA 'gotcha' for :{James O'Keefe:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, but exactly what did he get? - Los **...**

articles.latimes.com/.../la-ol-okeefe-patrick-moran-voter-fraud-2012102...‎

https://www.google.com/search?q=james+o'keefe+voter+fraud&oq=james+o'keefe+voter+fraud&aqs=chrome.0.57j62l3.9945j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#

:{:{Oct 24, 2012 -:(style="color:#666666;"):}:The video, :{O'Keefe:(style="font-weight:bold;color:inherit"):}: says, "takes an unprecedented inside view of :{voter fraud:(style="font-weight:bold;color:inherit"):}: in the United States, something that many claim doesn't even exist **...**:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

  1. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:pET8jxC2qroJ:articles.latimes.com/2012/oct/24/news/la-ol-okeefe-patrick-moran-voter-fraud-20121024+&cd=5&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:pET8jxC2qroJ:articles.latimes.com/2012/oct/24/news/la-ol-okeefe-patrick-moran-voter-fraud-20121024+&cd=5&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us:{O'Keefe's:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Latest: :{Voter Fraud:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Investigation Lands On Eric Holder's **...**

www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2012/04/09/Okeefe-Holder‎

https://www.google.com/search?q=james+o'keefe+voter+fraud&oq=james+o'keefe+voter+fraud&aqs=chrome.0.57j62l3.9945j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#

:{:{Apr 9, 2012 -:(style="color:#666666;"):}:O'Keefe :{Voter Fraud:(style="font-weight:bold;color:inherit"):}: Investigation: Young Man Offered Holder's Ballot **...** to Breitbart.com, :{James O'Keefe's:(style="font-weight:bold;color:inherit"):}: Project Veritas demonstrates to the **...**:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

  1. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Sk27WywueksJ:www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2012/04/09/Okeefe-Holder+&cd=6&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Sk27WywueksJ:www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2012/04/09/Okeefe-Holder+&cd=6&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=usSurprise! Tables turned in :{vote:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:-:{fraud:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: case - WND

www.wnd.com/2013/06/surprise-tables-turned-in-vote-fraud-case/‎

https://www.google.com/search?q=james+o'keefe+voter+fraud&oq=james+o'keefe+voter+fraud&aqs=chrome.0.57j62l3.9945j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#

:{:{Jun 17, 2013 -:(style="color:#666666;"):}:Undercover video investigator :{James O'Keefe:(style="font-weight:bold;color:inherit"):}: of Project Veritas has turned**...** to indict him for a video sting that exposed :{vote fraud:(style="font-weight:bold;color:inherit"):}: in the state.:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

  1. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Y96hZk0_7TUJ:www.wnd.com/2013/06/surprise-tables-turned-in-vote-fraud-case/+&cd=7&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Y96hZk0_7TUJ:www.wnd.com/2013/06/surprise-tables-turned-in-vote-fraud-case/+&cd=7&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us:{O'Keefe Voter Fraud:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Investigation: Young Man Offered Holder's Ballot

www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/.../DC-Polling-Place-Holder-Ballot‎

https://www.google.com/search?q=james+o'keefe+voter+fraud&oq=james+o'keefe+voter+fraud&aqs=chrome.0.57j62l3.9945j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#

:{:{Apr 8, 2012 -:(style="color:#666666;"):}:In a shocking new video, :{James O'Keefe's:(style="font-weight:bold;color:inherit"):}: Project Veritas **...** O'Keefe :{Voter Fraud:(style="font-weight:bold;color:inherit"):}: Investigation: Young Man Offered Holder's Ballot **...**:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

  1. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:QcwPBvyYryUJ:www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/04/08/DC-Polling-Place-Holder-Ballot+&cd=8&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:QcwPBvyYryUJ:www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/04/08/DC-Polling-Place-Holder-Ballot+&cd=8&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us:{James O'Keefe's:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Latest Failure To Demonstrate "Widespread :{Voter:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: **...**

mediamatters.org/blog/2012/10/10/james-okeefes-latest...to.../190533‎

https://www.google.com/search?q=james+o'keefe+voter+fraud&oq=james+o'keefe+voter+fraud&aqs=chrome.0.57j62l3.9945j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#

:{:{James O'Keefe's:(style="font-weight:bold;color:inherit"):}: Latest Failure To Demonstrate "Widespread :{Voter Fraud:(style="font-weight:bold;color:inherit"):}:". Blog ››› October 10, 2012 7:33 PM EDT ››› JUSTIN BERRIER & JEREMY HOLDEN **...**:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

  1. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oJKtGsJwCQ4J:mediamatters.org/blog/2012/10/10/james-okeefes-latest-failure-to-demonstrate-wid/190533+&cd=9&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oJKtGsJwCQ4J:mediamatters.org/blog/2012/10/10/james-okeefes-latest-failure-to-demonstrate-wid/190533+&cd=9&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us:{James O'Keefe's:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Project Veritas

www.theprojectveritas.org/‎

https://www.google.com/search?q=james+o'keefe+voter+fraud&oq=james+o'keefe+voter+fraud&aqs=chrome.0.57j62l3.9945j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#

:{:{James O'Keefe:(style="font-weight:bold;color:inherit"):}: Settles Meritless Lawsuit: “This is the Cost of Exposing the Truth” **...** waste,:{fraud:(style="font-weight:bold;color:inherit"):}:, and other misconduct in both public and private institutions in **...**:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

:{====:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

bossie doctored audio tapes re clintons; both leadership alums

:{====:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

https://www.google.com/search?q=related:www.theprojectveritas.org/+james+o'keefe+voter+fraud&tbo=1&sa=X&ei=VELfUdqYIMK-yQH58oDYAQ&ved=0CIIBEB8wCQ

**Conservative activist James O'Keefe plotted a potential voter fraud sting of the Service Employees International Union in 2010 in Massachusetts — a sting that, had it been carried out, could have been funded by Rick Santorum patron Foster Friess.**

The plot is elaborated on and eventually ruled out in an email chain started by conservative writer John Fund, who emailed Republican National Lawyers Association executive director Michael Thielen that the union was "contracting for buses on election day."

"If you're black or brown they'll rope you in and take you to the polls, registration can be worked out," Fund wrote, per his "Boston source." His email was forwarded on to others, forming the basis for the plans.

The email exchange, parts of which may be missing, is below. Read from the bottom. The last email is from James O'Keefe to associates Stan Dai and Nadia Naffe, who later filed harassment charges against O'Keefe.

Others on the thread include Heather Higgins, the founder of the conservative Independent Women's Voice and the late Andrew Breitbart.

Naffe told BuzzFeed she flew to Boston to investigate, but that they never uncovered anything of interest and the project fizzled.

From: "James E. O'Keefe III" Date: January 13, 2010 12:21:54 PM EST To: xxxxxxx@gmail.com, xxxxxx@aol.com Subject: Fwd: brainstorm of sorts, here - far-fetched? Maybe not?...

Your thoughts Nadia?

---------- Forwarded message ----------From: Heather Higgins Date: Wednesday, January 13, 2010 Subject: Re: brainstorm of sorts, here - far-fetched? Maybe not?... To: Steve Friess , James O'Keefe xxxxxxxxxx@gmail.com, Andrew Breitbart Cc: Foster Friess

Andrew and James, I'm forwarding what could be a very clever idea from Steve Friess in response to the intel below from John Fund re SEIU's intentions in Tuesday's election in MA. Don't know what it would cost, but you all should talk.

Warmest regards -Heather Higgins

On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 12:25 AM, Steve Friess wrote:

Wouldn't it be great if a "ACORN sting video" could be produced about these busses?

Dad - maybe bounce this off Breitbart?

Some black /Latina conservatives could be wired for video, and get picked up on one of these busses, and show what goes on. My guess -they are offering cash, (which I am pretty sure is illegal), and I also would wager that at least some of these busses are making more than one stop with the same people - ie getting them to vote twice -though I don't know the mechanics of that.

Perhaps some private detective types would be needed to help track down the busses, and a block or two ahead of them to drop our cameramen off...

Too much to dream? Imagine pulling this off - legal / image problems for SEIU would be a good thing... think there's upside to this?

Brietbart would know, and Fund would know - 'if we catch them doing X, it could mean Y' - I just don't know what the stakes are...

On Jan 12, 2010, at 12:46 PM, Heather Higgins wrote:

Foster --See below from John Fund re SEIU -Acorn is in MA as well. It would be hugely helpful if you would assist with our non-glamorous but highly effective GOTV effort. If you could possibly let me know today, that would be helpful to our planning. This is such a great opportunity for making trouble in the best sort of way - I hope you can help us really capitalize on it.

Many thanks, Heather

-------- Original Message --------Subject: FW: John Batchelor From: "Fund, John" Date: Tue, January 12, 2010 8:25 am To: 'Michael Thielen'

Tip from Boston source (normally reliable)

Seiu contracting for buses on election day and heading to roxbury, mattapan, roslindale and jamaica plain. If you're black or brown they'll rope you in and take you to the polls, registration can be worked out.

Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

In the next installment, O'Keefe, who appears to have contacted Fund at this point, starts setting up

From: "James E. O'Keefe III" > Date: January 13, 2010 4:16:14 PM EST> To: "mikeroman.com" > Subject: Re: ACORN videos / seiu / election>> what time zone are you in. I'm assuming you mean 8Est. That works.> I'm 201-637-0564>> On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 1:10 PM, mikeroman.com wrote:>>>> Have time to talk around 8?>>>>>> On Jan 13, 2010, at 3:41 PM, James E. O'Keefe III wrote:>>>> > Mike,>> >>> > Got your info from John Fund.>> > I was the producer of the ACORN Videos>> > Would like to know whereabouts of the busses in Boston SEIU, et al are using in order to bus people in to vote in the Tuesday special election.>> > Thinking about sending some undercover folks up there.>> >>> > James

Then O'Keefe proposed sending Nadia Naffe up to Boston:

:{From: "James E. O'Keefe III"

Date: January 14, 2010 11:10:49 PM EST

To: xxxxxxx@aol.com

Cc: Stan Dai

Subject: Boston}:

:{Nadia,

We're willing to book you a plane ticket to Boston to get some footage from the SEIU busses.

Joe will be joining you taking care of logistics/equipment--- but i'll be in new orleans causing trouble.

im confident your training will take you far.

Interested in making some more video history?

James}:

A couple days later, O'Keefe has booked travel for Naffe, who was to do the operation. This email included an Orbitz booking confirmation:

From: "James E. O'Keefe III" > Date: January 15, 2010 2:46:09 PM EST> To: nknaffe@aol.com, Stan Dai , Joe Basel > Subject: Fwd: Travel Document - Boston 1/18/10>> Nadia,>> here's what I could come up with- one stop but its along the way - no 12 hour flights, more like 4-5 hour flight.> leaving tampa mon at noon> leaving boston wed at 2pm so you can sleep.>> keep in mind Wed morning is for additional work - if the polls are continuing if its close..>> I'll also get you a hotel room for the mon night - Joe is flying in overnight from San Francisco and arrives at 6:30am.>> Joe will be picking you up shortly thereafter. But you will have to wake up around 7 on tuesday - your country needs you.>> More details to follow.> James

He also set up a place for her and Joe Basel, one of the men later arrested with him after the Senator Landrieu affair, to stay in Boston (Naffe and Basel are copied on the email):

:{From: "James E. O'Keefe III"

Date: January 16, 2010 10:59:14 PM EST

To: Amy Contrada

Cc: xxxxxx@aol.com, Joe Basel

Subject: Boston election day,}:

Amy,

Two of my collegues are coming to Boston to infilrate the SEIU on election day. One of them is a female.

Would you be able to put them her up Monday night?

James

The video from the trip, if it was ever made, was never published.

"I believe there was discussion of doing something but O'Keefe's office will tell you nothing was done," said Fund, reached by email.

"This is a classic example of someone trying to breath life into a three-year old dead horse," said Fund.

He said that other reporters had contacted him about it in the past and that some "pointed out the email thread looked truncated and edited." .

Reached by email, Naffe said the emails were authentic: "Fund and Steve Friess, the son of billionaire Foster Friess, introduced the idea to O'keefe that SEIU would fraudulently register anyone with brown skin to vote."

"James flew me out to Boston to find the SEIU busses, just days after that email was sent," Naffe said. She claimed that "Congressman Steve King from Iowa was waiting at the hotel when we arrived to take us to dinner. He gave us a pep talk about illegal voting."

"O'keefe has the footage, though I'm doubtful he would share any of it. Since, he was arrested a week later in New Orleans while attempting to wire tap Senator Mary Landrieu," Naffe said.

O'Keefe didn't respond to a request for comment.

Update: Fund emailed to say that he thinks his original email was altered: "I maintain the email was edited to take out the fact I was referring to what someone told me might be happening and that I was asking a source (whom I have quoted in the past) if they had heard anything about it."

He also wished to clarify that he did not personally tip O'Keefe to the busing. That has been reflected above.

:{==:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

Meet James O'Keefe at AFP Citizen Journalist Training Sept. 12 and 13

https://www.google.com/search?q=related:www.theprojectveritas.org/+james+o'keefe+voter+fraud&tbo=1&sa=X&ei=VELfUdqYIMK-yQH58oDYAQ&ved=0CIIBEB8wCQ

:{August 20, 2012:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

:{We’re proud to be partnering with the:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:Franklin Center and James O’Keefe (Of exposing ACORN fame) for an exciting two-part event on Sept. 12th and 13th.

The two-part event is FREE but we do need you toregister by CLICKING HERE.

Citizen Watchdog Training- OmahaWednesday and Thursday, September 12-13, 6:00pm to 9pm Americans for Prosperity- Nebraska Omaha Volunteer Center

13216 Cottner Street Omaha, NE 68137

Nebraska and our nation are in a fiscal crisis. You’ve heard the egregious examples of waste, fraud, and abuse on a daily basis. We can no longer afford to sit by and wait for the government or mainstream media to fully inform the public about what’s going on behind closed doors.

The time has come to stand up and take action.  Click here to register for this exciting event.

Please join us at 6:00 pm on Wednesday and Thursday evening, September 12-13, at the AFP- Nebraska Omaha Volunteer Centerto learn how you can get involved to hold our elected officials accountable and set this country on a better path for future generations.

We’ll be joined by some of the nation’s leading experts in information activism and investigative reporting. Join us to hear from leaders such as James O’Keefe (the famed whistle-blower of ACORN and president of Project Veritas).

In the training you will learn:

:{-How to use investigative reporting tools and skills

-How to enhance state transparency with open records laws

-How to hold elected officials accountable through social media

-How to be a video activist}:

Together, we can begin the hard, but important job of taking back America. We hope to see you there!

James O'Keefe, the activist filmmaker who achieved sudden fame for a series of undercover videos recording ACORN workers, has repeatedly said that he is "absolutely independent" and received no outside funding to make his films.

But the Voice has learned that O'Keefe, in fact, has had heavyweight conservative backers who funded the young filmmaker as recently as a few months before his ACORN films were made.

The ACORN videos are actually just the latest of several films O'Keefe has produced and uploaded to YouTube. An earlier film posted in February, "Taxpayers Clearing House" featured nonwhite, working class people being duped by O'Keefe, who led them to believe they had won money in a sweepstakes.

That video was produced with the help of a grant -- said to be about $30,000 [Thiel's spokesman says closer to $10,000 -- see update] -- from Peter Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook -- an investment which made him a billionaire. Thiel is one of Silicon Valley's more interesting figures: a gay man (according to Gawker's "Valleywag") who has railed against the evils of "multiculturalism." He lives in San Francisco and today runs a hedge fund.

O'Keefe is now well known as the young man who dressed up as a pimp with a colleague, Townhall.com blogger Hannah Giles, who was dressed like a prostitute. The pair traveled around the country, seeking advice from ACORN workers about how to hide prostitution money for tax purposes. At five of the offices they visited, ACORN workers gave such advice while O'Keefe's hidden camera was rolling. The videos have cost ACORN the support of Congress, the U.S. Census and the White House, and the organization stands to lose tens of millions of dollars in government grants.

O'Keefe, meanwhile, has repeatedly claimed to be financially independent. In an interview with the New York Post shortly after the ACORN videos hit the Internet, O'Keefe claimed to be "absolutely independent." Giles said she had "drained my entire savings" to spend the summer making the undercover videos. O'Keefe estimated his budget at $1,300, and said that Giles had paid for her own plane ticket to California. The couple said they lived off of Power Bars and Subway sandwiches for two months.

But O'Keefe turns out to have a substantial history of being funded by conservative figures.

:{In February, a video called "}Taxpayers Clearing House:{" was posted to YouTube. In it, O'Keefe and others drive around in a van with a logo on the side that looks like the "Publishers Clearing House" vehicle known for showing up and surprising sweepstakes winners with oversized checks. In O'Keefe's video,}::{working class Blacks}::{are shown jumping up and down in excitement -}::{until they learn that O'Keefe is actually delivering a bill for $28,000, their share of the federal banks bailout.}:

O'Keefe told a friend, Liz Farkas, that he had approached Thiel with the idea for the video, and had walked away with "approximately $30,000" to produce it.

Farkas told the *New York Times* this week that she and O'Keefe, who met at Rutgers University, clashed over publishing incomplete transcripts from another sting involving an abortion provider.

Through a representative, Peter Thiel confirmed that he had funded "Taxpayers Clearing House" through a "small-government group," but denied having any involvement with the ACORN videos. The representative says Thiel first learned of the new O'Keefe videos after they hit the Internet, and having "watched them on YouTube...he shares the view that taxpayer money should not promote human trafficking."

Thiel, who co-runs the Founders Fund, is ahedge fund manager, web entrepreneur and venture capitalist worth $1.2 billion.Fortunemagazinereferred to himas the "don" of "the Pay Pal Mafia." Thiel is also co-author of The Diversity Myth: 'Multiculturalism' and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford. He was also co-founding editor of the conservativeStanford Review and was a member of the Federalist Society,the conservative legal circle that has included Clarence Thomas, Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia.

"Is the new consciousness about race, gender, and sexual preference really the antidote to America's problems or a cause of them?" Thiel's book asks in its introduction. Another representative quote: "Multiculturalists like thinking of themselves as victims far too much to want to end their victimization. They need their imaginary oppressors togive their lives meaning."

Thiel's book does not spare homosexuality. "Much [homosexual] behavior is being conducted in public, for the express purpose of shocking and offending others. The shock is then called 'homophobia' and is used as evidence of the oppression and victimization of homosexuals." The book (published in 1995) argues against Stanford instituting domestic partner benefits, complaining "even in purely economic terms, the costs are substantial...The end result is something of a random scrambling of people into "relationships," all claiming the right to live off of everyone else."

Though Thiel denies directly funding O'Keefe's latest videos, Thiel may have made them financially possible anyway. O'Keefe has, in the past, used support from one project to fuel another.

O'Keefe is a former member of the Leadership Institute, the conservative think tank that has turned out such graduates as Bush strategist Karl Rove, Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed, Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist, and "Talon News" fake White House blogger Jeff Gannon (real name: James Dale Guckert). The Institute has been involved in setting up conservative newspapers at colleges across the country, and gave O'Keefe a $500 "Balance in Media" grant to begin the Rutgers Centurion in 2005.

On his personal blog (quoted at Daily Kos, O'Keefe has taken the original link down), O'Keefe thanks "LI" for a $4,000 monitor to help him make his movies.

In the same way O'Keefe used equipment from the Leadership Institute to make his future films, he may have made use of Thiel's cash infusion for future projects, too. The "Taxpayers Clearing House" video that Thiel's money made possible was posted just a few months before O'Keefe and Giles set off on their summer adventure. The multiple ACORN videos were shot and produced over the course of more than two months, in San Diego, San Bernardino, Brooklyn, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. (plus an unknown number of other cities, like Philadelphia, where O'Keefe attempted to shoot but the sting failed).

O'Keefe declined to be interviewed by phone for this article, and did not respond to e-mailed questions. But he has not publicly explained how the help he's received from either the Leadership Institute or from Peter Thiel has influenced his filmmaking -- or how they may have made a summer traveling around the country for undercover stings possible.

UPDATE: Thiel's spokesman, James O'Neill, disputes Farkas' estimate of $30,000, saying that Thiel's contribution was only "about $10,000."

===

extensive coverage: http://www.newscorpse.com/ncWP/?tag=james-okeefe

O’Keefe’s new video excrement has received attention only on the most disreputable outlets such as WorldNetDaily and the Daily Caller. And from the looks of it, that’s even more attention than it deserves. His circle of propagandists is apparently shrinking. Neither Fox News nor his mentor Breitbart has posted the video or even a story announcing it.

The video itself is ten minutes of mind-numbing boredom as O’Keefe’s flunkies accost people with appeals to put a stupid sign on their lawns. As usual, it was heavily edited to disparage the ambushees and O’Keefe inserted a lame, studio-produced introduction wherein he falsely asserts that gun safety advocates want to “take all guns from everyone,” a policy that no one has proposed. His ludicrous and unsupported conclusion was that “We didn’t find any members of the media with the strength of their convictions.” But that would only be true if any of his victims had ever expressed a conviction to favor the message on his infantile signs – which they did not.

Finally, O’Keefe’s flunkies may have committed yet another crime on behalf of his crusade to debase journalism.When approached by an officer from the Washington, D.C. police departmentoutside of the home of Attorney General Eric Holder, they told him that they were from a gun control organization. Of course, they were not and the organization they claimed to represent does not exist. That may constitute giving false testimony to a law enforcement representative who was investigating a complaint, or even worse, obstruction of justice.

O’Keefe is a serial offender. In addition to his conviction for unlawful actions taken in the office of a United States senator (for which he is still on probation), he has broken election laws and invaded the privacy of people from whom he had not acquired consent to record. He even tried to entrap a CNN reporter in a perverse sting on his “Love Boat.” This latest violation of the law ought to be prosecuted as well and, at the very least, his probation should be revoked. Now that would be justice.

...

The Borat of right-wing pseudo-journalism has just released the latest in his attempts to so thoroughly discredit himself that his mother would be ashamed to take his calls. James O’Keefe, a convicted criminal, has been trying to prove that voter fraud in America is at crisis proportions. But the only thing he has succeeded in proving is that he himself is a recidivist perpetrator of attempted fraud that ultimately fails. And he has never rebutted the studies that show thatvoter fraud is almost non-existentin this country.

O’Keefe’s latest insipidness is a video that purports to show that non-citizens are voting in North Carolina elections. His evidence is a non-citizen named Zbigniew Gorzkowski. The only problem, as ThinkProgess discovered, is that Gorzkowski is, in fact, a citizen and has been for about thirty years. When O’Keefe’s henchman tried to ambush Gorzkowski, he immediately smelled the deceit and repeatedly asked the henchman who he was representing. O’Keefe’s henchman not only evaded the question, at one point he blatantly lied, misrepresenting himself as being associated with an “agency” that implies some official authority.

...

TheConstitution Subcommittee of theHouse Committee on the Judiciaryheld a hearingthis week that illustrated just how far from reality the advocates of photo IDs, and other methods of suppressing votes, will go to peddle their phony message that voter fraud is rampant in America and must be stopped by enacting legislation that disenfranchises legitimate voters.

:{The first indication that these hearings were an outright sham was the inclusion of a video by the notoriously dishonest crockumentary maker, James O’Keefe. O’Keefe is best known for producing videos that have been deliberately edited to give false impressions that advance his political agenda. His antics include plying teachers with alcohol in order to embarrass them, and attempting to seduce a CNN reporter aboard his “Love Boat.”

He is presently on probation for crimes committed in the federal offices of a United States senator where he unlawfully impersonated a telephone repairman. (And, according to a recent appearance on the Christian Broadcast Network, he is now officially the Breitbart videographer, a role the late Andrew Breitbart had never permitted).}:

----

Voter ID Laws Take Center Stage at House Judiciary Hearing

Posted By Elizabeth Murphy On April 18, 2012 @ 1:56 pm In News | Comments Disabled

The controversial video showing a man almost fraudulently accepting a ballot as

Attorney General Eric Holder got more airtime Wednesday at a House Judiciary

subcommittee hearing on the Justice Department’s voting rights enforcement track

record.

The video

[1]

, made by conservative activist James O’Keefe, prompted some

committee members to question the attorney general’s handling of voting cases.

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said he is “shocked the attorney general hasn’t offered a

meaningful response to this.”

On hand for the Republican-led House

Judiciary subcommittee on

the Constitution hearing

[3]

was former

Voting Section lawyer J. Christian

Adams, who has been a vocal critic

[4]of

Holder since his dramatic departure

[5]

from the Justice Department in 2010.

Adams was critical of Holder’s decision to

partially dismiss a voter intimidation civil

lawsuit against the New Black Panther

Party and members — a racially charged

case Adams helped initiate

[6]

. But many

veterans of the Civil Rights Division said

the George W. Bush administration’s

Voting Section took on a highly politicized

agenda

[7]

in choosing cases.

In his prepared testimony

[8]

, Adams went on the attack against the Obama

administration’s Voting Section, saying there is a false perception that it has “more

vigorously protected minority voting rights” than the previous administration.

“What is lacking is not money, but a willingness to enforce all voting laws in an

evenhanded and efficient fashion,” Adams said in the testimony. “This unwillingness is

all the more troubling in the context of the caustic and wicked political attacks on the

good work of Voting Section employees and political appointees during the Bush

administration.”

Adams also said Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez’s criticisms of the past

administration’s Voting Section, given what he believes to be a poor enforcement track

record over the past three years, “pai...

http://www.mainjustice.com/2012/04/18/voter-id-laws-take-center-stage-at-house-judiciary-hearing/

==

John Stossel (Fox News): “Let’s stop saying everyone should vote.”

Matthew Vadum: Registering [the poor] to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country.

Rush Limbaugh: “If people cannot even feed and clothe themselves, should they be allowed to vote?”

Judson Phillips (Tea Party Nation): “If you’re not a property owner, I’m sorry, but property owners have a little bit more of a vested stake in the community than not property owners do.”

Steve Doocy (Fox News): “With 47% of Americans not paying taxes – 47% – should those who don’t pay be allowed to vote?”

===

omg busts a move/moon walks

"try to make us racists"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyVLDCPtVQw&feature=player_embedded#!

yaf interview on journalism http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rLX5350NR0&feature=related

AIM's Benjamin Johnson sits down with James O'Keefe for some hard hitting dance moves.

investigate gov't fraud; drunken teacher, muslim bro;

:{Check out VICTICRAT featuring James O'keefe :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhPqmJynQPU

Directed by Christian Hartsock. Produced by Eric Elder. Performed by James O'Keefe and Anthony Dini. Starring: Dori Russell, Amy Bissonnette, Stacy Fratelli, Jacqueline Gage, Renee Reres, Vanessa Ross, Jessica Lynne Smith, Nick Gust, Shaughn Adeleye, Brian Lloyd, Eric Johnson, Ethan Czahor, Tara Ketterer, Ryan Sorba. Associate Producer: Alvaro Day. First Assistant Director: Adam Weinberg. Director of Photography: Andrew Hrera. Lightly Edited by: Victor Shklyar. Production Designer: Rae Deslich. Costume Designer: Jacquelynn Nicolle Remery. Set Photographers: Andrew Kim, Brandon Williams. EPK/DIT: Robert Deltour. Steadicam Operator: Aaron Smith. First Assistant Camera: Casey Todd. Sound Mixer: Phillip Bladh. Gaffer: Brody Culbertson. Best Boy: Ronnie Gotch. Set Dressers: Vinny Chance, Caroline Louis. Caterer: Chris Holm. Production Assistants: Alexander Haberbush, Gabriella Hoffman, Kelly Steele. Special Thanks: Daniel Smith, The City of Pasadena. POV PICTURES. DIONYSUS PRODUCTIONS. THE PROJECT VERITAS.

Contact:

EricElder@povpictures.net Christian@DionysusProductions.net.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyVLDCPtVQw&feature=player_embedded#%21}:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyVLDCPtVQw&feature=player_embedded#%21

###:{===:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

:pal blog features alan keyes **Christian Hartsock**, 24, is a director, screenwriter, producer and political columnist and activist. He earned his B.A. in Film and Video Production from Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara and currently produces, directs, and writes films including the music video for Guns 'N Roses' "Sorry," as well as the conservative rap music video[Victicrat](https://youtu.be/vyVLDCPtVQw&feature=player_embedded#%21)Victicrat and the short film Sycophant which he wrote and directed, as well as the award-winning feature film The Lives of Better Men which he produced.

Hartsock directed the undercover investigation video Teachers Unions Gone Wild which exposed sleaze and corruption in the New Jersey Education Association, earning the accolades ofGovernor Chris Christie, video 404] producedB-roll for James O'Keefe's and Hannah Giles' investigation videos that brought down ACORN, exposed anti-Americanism at the UN Climate Summit in Cancun [petiton http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=TzZ_Zcp4PwY ; CFACT: hard to tells b/c of bad audio, but seems to restrict US GDP /by 6% over ten years if refuse to comply w/ kyoto] and continues to work on investigative journalism videos. He's traveled to Iraq with Move America Forward to document the Iraq war and was profiled in CNN's documentaryRight on the Edge a documentary about young conservative activists hosted by Abbie Boudreau. He currently writes for several news and commentary websites, including Big Government and Big Journalism, and is Editor-in-Chief of Political Vanguard.

His commentary has been discussed on Fox News'Red Eye w/ Greg Gutfeld, and has landed him as a guest on several TV and radio talk shows over the years. He was born in Oakland, California in 1986 and currently resides in Los Angeles. Christian@DionysusProductions.net}:

---

tancredo blog;

New O’Keefe Video: Union Bosses Admit Taxpayer-Funded Green Jobs Are “Bullshit”…

lie: claim they have gotten grants (what's with the wigs?)  logic: guy complains 270 page applic turned down, yet other claim is that $ given to anyone for anything (note light bulb swap bad, black ppl) VJ

==

All 4 men were welcomed as rock stars at last week's CPAC.

===

Activist James O'Keefe was among four people arrested Monday, Jan.… (Ghanbari/AP )

ACORN prankster, James O'Keefe, arrested for incident at Senator Mary Landrieu's office

WASHINGTON - The ACORN gotcha guy got popped by the FBI Tuesday on charges of bugging a Democratic senator's office phones.

James O'Keefe became a darling of the right and a favorite of Fox News' Glenn Beck last year for undercover videos he made of ACORN activists giving him tax advice on running an underage call girl ring.

On Monday, O'Keefe and three pals were nabbed in the offices of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) in a New Orleans federal building, where he was recording buddies fiddling with her phones, the FBI charged.

The men were arrested by U.S. marshals for "interfering with the office's telephone system," after they asked to gain access to Landrieu's phone switch closet.

Each faces a maximum of 10years in prison and $250,000 in fines for "entering federal property under false pretenses for the purpose of committing a felony," federal prosecutors said.

Besides O'Keefe, Stan Dai, Joseph Basel and Robert Flanagan - son of the top federal prosecutor in Shreveport, La., - were apprehended for "falsely and fraudulently representing that they were employees of a telephone company," said an FBI affidavit filed in federal court.

Basel and Flanagan were dressed in denim with reflective vests, hardhats, tool belts and lights in Landrieu's office, FBI Agent Steven Rayes said.

O'Keefe and Dai "aided and abetted" the other men "in the execution of the plan," he said.

As the bogus hardhats tried to bug an office phone, O'Keefe raised a cell phone "in his hand so as to record Flanagan and Basel," the FBI said. "Neither individual is a telephone repair man."

O'Keefe, Dai and Basel were freed last night on $10,000 bond. O'Keefe said "veritas," the Latin word for truth, as he walked out. Landrieu declined comment.

===

As Media Matters' Eric Hananoki noted, O'Keefe's three alleged accomplices -- Joseph Basel, Robert Flanagan, and Stan Dai -- are right-wing activists as well. Basel was the founder of a conservative campus publication at the University of Minnesota-Morris, which, like the campus publication started by O'Keefe at Rutgers University, received funding from the conservative Leadership Institute's "Balance in Media" grant. Flanagan, the son of acting U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Louisiana William Flanagan, reportedly works at the conservative Pelican Institute in New Orleans, just half a block from Landrieu's office. Dai received $5,000 from the right-wing Phillips Foundation's Ronald Reagan Future Leaders Scholarship Program. Additionally, during his time as a campus conservative, Dai reportedly co-wrote "a satirical work entitled The Penis Monologues, apparently a takeoff on the Vagina Monologues."

==

Part I: My Time as an Accomplice to Convicted Criminal James O’keefe

she was sued by o?  retaliated against info request

http://nadianaffe.com/part-i-my-time-as-an-accomplice-to-convicted-criminal-james-okeefe-2/

===

study showed voter more likely to be hit by lightning than comit fraud

----

:{James O'Keefe, the right-wing prankster who became famous for a doctored video that led to the downfall of ACORN, recently coordinated a stunt to obtain ballots in the New Hampshire primary using the names of dead people.

His goal was to prove that strict voter ID laws are necessary. However, what he and his associates did was illegal:}:

:{Hamline University law professor David Schultz told TPM that there’s “no doubt” that O’Keefe’s investigators violated the law.

“In either case, if they were intentionally going in and trying to fraudulently obtain a ballot, they violated the law,” Schultz said. “So right off the bat, what they did violated the law.”}:

O'Keefe and his co-conspirators were also incredibly insensitive:

Activist filmmaker James O’Keefe secretly recorded video showing his operative using Roger Groux’s name and address to obtain a Republican ballot at Manchester polls Tuesday. The U.S. Navy veteran died Dec. 31 at an assisted living home. His family held funeral services Monday, his widow said. “Oh my God, I know what he would say, ‘Call the cops, call the police,’ ” Rachel Groux said.

James O'Keefe has made a living using lies to ruin the lives of others. Now he should be investigated for a repulsive, open-and-shut case of voter fraud.

===

http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2010/05/james_okeefe_and_friends_plead.html

James O'Keefe, as leader of the group and famous for posing as a pimp in ACORN office videos, received three years of probation, a fine of $1,500 and 100 hours of community service. [st bernard parish jail

Magistrate Judge Daniel Knowles III

----

Lila Rose is a conservative activist and anti-abortion videographer whose work is promoted by Andrew Breitbart. Her goals are to undermine organizations that provide legal abortions and de-fund Planned Parenthood. She is president of the anti-abortion group Live Action. Rose likened herself to Martin Luther King, Jr. in a CNN documentary called "Right on the Edge." At the November, 2009 Value Voters Summit, she said that as long as abortions are legal, they should be "done in the public square," thus disgusting people into action. And then "we might hear angels singing as we ponder the glory of conception." [1][2][3]

Contents[hide]

Colleague of James O'Keefe

Lila Rose is a colleague of conservative activist James O'Keefe. As a UCLA freshman in autumn of 2006, she and O'Keefe came up with the idea of infiltrating clinics. Rose and O'Keefe, both told the Los Angeles Times that they were inspired by the work of Mark Crutcher, a Texas antiabortion activist who in 2002 taped fake calls to hundreds of Planned Parenthood clinics around the country featuring women posing as pregnant minors.[4]

In 2006 Rose has carried out undercover "sting" visits at Planned Parenthood clinics in Los Angeles, Indianapolis, Bloomington, Tucson, Phoenix and Memphis. She makes hidden camera videos as she and a friend pose as abortion-seeking young teens who have been impregnated by older men. Rose's videos are then edited down to about boiled five minutes, and are enhanced with portentous music and fast cuts to heighten the drama. Rose them posts the videos on her website, LiveAction.org, and on YouTube.[5]

Sourcewatch resources

----

summary of ploys:

http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/james-okeefe-andrew-breitbart-videos

----

It took days for someone to factcheck the NPR "sting"—and then the job fell to Glenn Beck's (!!) site.

Whom do you believe? The head of Planned Parenthood or a James O'Keefe-inspired provocateur promoting a new stunt?

Our summer race war continues...

mojo dirty tricks coming:  http://www.motherjones.com/special-reports/2011/04/fact-free-nation

Pimps, Lies, and Videotapes

Inside Andrew Breitbart's and James O'Keefe's right-wing video fantasy factory.

—By Dave Gilson

| Thu Mar. 31, 201

Ever since ACORN was taken down bya bad pimp costume and a hidden camera, right-wing media mogul Andrew Breitbart and provocateur James O'Keefe have discovered that by the time their work is exposed asdisingenuously edited hit jobs, the damage is done, and their brand has been boosted. As Breitbarttold the AP, "I'm committed to the destruction of the old media guard. And it's a very good business model." Read the editors' note, "Why Do We Keep Falling for

O'Keefe's Smear Jobs?" here. Below, their stings to date.

Community organizers helping an outrageously dressed pimp with "child prostitution, human trafficking and tax evasion."O'Keefe didn’t wear a pimp costume in ACORN offices; ACORN later cleared of criminal wrongdoing.Posted videos and gave them to Fox News;took credit: "I'm the guy that brought down ACORN."YesYesACORN lost federal funds, went bankrupt.
Attempted "probe" of the senator’s phones to see if she was ignoring calls about Obamacare.

:{Video seized whenFBI arrested O'Keefe (PDF) for impersonating a phone-

company worker.}:

Disavowed any connection, butadmitted O'Keefe was on his payroll at the time.YesNoO'Keefe sentenced to 3 years probation.
Falsified timesheets"costing taxpayers an estimated $10,000,000."Full video exposedsloppiness, not massive corruption.Posted videos.YesNoNone
Black USDA officialboasting of racism at an NAACP event.True, pro-racial- harmony messageof Sherrod's speech.Posted video one week after NAACP criticized tea party’s racial politics.NoYesSherrod fired andnow suing Breitbart.
O'Keefe tries to lure Boudreau on a yachtfor a "counter-seduction satire."Plan failed when female colleague of O'Keefe warned Boudreau.CalledO'Keefe’s plan "patently gross and offensive."YesNoNone
PP staffers helping pimp with child sex trafficking.PP staffers alerted the Feds to impostor.Promoted videos by Lila Rose, an O'Keefe protégé.NoNoOne PP staffer fired; no charges against PP.
NPR fundraisers caught wooing Muslim donors, slagging tea partiers.NPR exec says he's a disaffected GOPer and quotes others like him.Didn't post video, butpraised O'Keefe’s tactics.YesNoTwo NPR executives axed, NPR federal funding in jeopardy.
O'Keefe cronies get ballots by posing as recently deceased voters, showing "the integrity of the elections process is severely comprised."Oops—asking for a ballot using a false name is a crime, even if you don't cast a vote.Not involved, butdefended O'Keefe on Twitter.YesNoProsecutors could pursue state and federal voter fraud charges.

---

http://motherjones.com/media/2011/03/james-okeefe-npr-sting-mohammed-nabbous

Why Do We Keep Falling For O'Keefe's Smear Jobs?

It took days for someone to factcheck the NPR "sting"—and then the job fell to Glenn Beck's (!!) site.

By Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery | Mon Mar. 28, 2011

This is the Editors' note from our upcoming issue on political lies and smears. See a handy chart of some of the latest**here** [1].

To the list of journalism's greatest disgraces, let us now add James O'Keefe. O'Keefe calls himself an investigative reporter, though as far as we can tell the only group of journalists he has anything in common with are habitual fabricators like Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, and Janet Cooke.

But that's not the scandal we're talking about. The real scandal is that—even though by the time he posted a "sting" [2] of a top NPR fundraiser, O'Keefe was notorious for creating deceptive video smear jobs (ACORN? Hello?)—the media repeated the allegations uncritically. Let's review.

O'Keefe's "scoop" debuted March 8 on the conservative *Daily Caller* [3]. Edited down from a 2-hour conversation, the 12-minute clip purports to show NPR head fundraiser Ron Schiller wooing fake prospective donors who claimed to be part of a group with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. To curry favor, Schiller slags tea partiers, calling them xenophobic and racist; he also says NPR could get by without federal funding.

Republicans in Congress were already gearing up to defund NPR, but even that timing doesn't seem to have raised red flags with the media. The story was breathlessly repeated by such mainstream reporters as Ben Smith of *Politico* [4], Dave Weigel of *Slate* [5], James Poniewozik of *Time* [6], and many others. Did they mention that O'Keefe had doctored tapes before? Sometimes. Did that cause them to hold off before passing on his sizzle reel? No.

Within 36 hours, NPR had dumped both Ron Schiller and its successful CEO, Vivian Schiller (no relation). Twenty-two NPR journalists, from Robert Siegel to Nina Totenberg, signed a letter expressing outrage[7]at the "appalling" comments. Twenty-two journalists assumed that a tape made by a known tape-doctorer accurately represented the commentsof their co-worker. Scott Simon ofWeekend Editionpiled on,tweeting[8], "Conduct of NPR execs is disgusting. They dishonor a name built by great journalists."

It wasn't until March 10 that an article on Glenn Beck's (!!) site [9], theBlaze, reviewed the full tape [10] (which O'Keefe had posted online—guessing, correctly, that reporters wouldn't bother to watch it) and found massive deceptive editing. Schiller, it turned out, prefaced his comments by saying he was proud of having been raised a Republican; in saying tea partiers were racist, he was paraphrasing other GOPers; a laughing "That's what they said?" referring to a restaurant was moved to suggest that he was making light of the fake group's commitment to sharia.

By the time the Blaze's critique made its way around the internet, though, half the press corps—including many media critics—was headed to the SXSW convention in Austin, and the other half was busy with disasters in Japan and uprisings in the Middle East. Weigel and Smith posted detailed mea [11] culpas [12] (Smith later said he'd been "slipshod"); Poniewozik followed up [13], as did *USA Today* [14] and The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan [15], but otherwise the major media failed to correct the record until after the defunding vote.*

Why was this? Simple: A good lie is by definition a hot story—crafted and timed to hit an urgent issue at just the right moment—and in a 24/7 news cycle, that presents a compelling incentive to reporters: "Let's be brutally honest," Weigel told NPR [16] when it finally got around to forensics six days later. "The rush is to get traffic and to get the people of your organization booked on shows to talk about it. [That] leads you to not do the rigor and fact-checking that you do in other situations." And by the time you do, everyone's moved on.

Now let's contrast the O'Keefe saga with the story of another "citizen journalist" with a video camera: Mohammed "Mo" Nabbous [17], a 28-year-old engineer in Benghazi, Libya. In February, Mo joined the uprising against Muammar Qaddafi [18]; but instead of taking up weapons, he grabbed his cellphone and started broadcasting. Day after day, he live-streamed [19] everything from phone interviews to footage he'd gathered around town, becoming a key resource for many of thother [20] journalists [17] covering [21] the rebellion. Watching him was a visceral experience—this smart, funny, Oxford-accented guy who looked like he hadn't slept in two months, pointing his camera at burning power plants [22]. Like O'Keefe's videos, Mo's work was "underground," but there the similarity ends: Mo didn't conceal what he was doing, despite the obvious risks. His reporting was uncut, unvarnished, and unfiltered by anything except his own anger and hope, and it was clear watching him work that he wanted the truth, wherever that took him.

On March 19, the day after Qaddafi had declared a cease-fire, Mo heard explosions. People said tanks were advancing on Benghazi. But Mo didn't want to just pass that along; he went out to report [23]. He recorded himself as he rode around on the back of a pickup—you can hear [24] minute after minute of the thud of artillery shells, the crack of machine guns, Mo's rapid-fire voice in English and Arabic. Then, suddenly, silence.

Mo's widow [25], who is expecting their first child, released the tape a few hours later.

That's journalism. The other stuff is hackery.

*On March 22,New York Timesmedia columnist David Carr detailed [26] the flaws in the initial reports. Yet as recently as March 25,Timeseditor Bill Keller, in an essay [27] devoted entirely to factchecking (and scolding the rest of the media for prioritizing speed over accuracy), characterized the incident as one where O’Keefe (who's not actually in the video) posed as a donor to "entrap a foolish NPR executive into disclosing his scorn for Republicans and the Tea Party."

Source URL: http://www.motherjones.com/media/2011/03/james-okeefe-npr-sting-mohammed-nabbous

:{Links:

[1] http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/james-okeefe-andrew-breitbart-videos

[2] http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/03/npr-james-okeefe

[3] http://dailycaller.com/2011/03/08/npr-executives-caught-on-tape-bashing-conservatives-and-tea-party-touting-liberals/

[4] http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0311/Undercover_video_and_fundraising.html?showall

[5] http://www.slate.com/BLOGS/blogs/weigel/archive/2011/03/08/james-o-keefe-versus-npr.aspx

[6] http://tunedin.blogs.time.com/2011/03/08/npr-exec-pranked-calls-tea-party-racist/

[7] http://www.mediaite.com/online/npr-journalists-send-open-letter-stating-theyre-appalled-by-sting-video-content/

[8] http://twitter.com/#!/nprscottsimon/status/46000156230946816

[9] http://www.theblaze.com/stories/does-raw-video-of-npr-expose-reveal-questionable-editing-tactics/

[10] http://www.theprojectveritas.org/nprjudge

[11] http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0311/Aggregation_and_trust_in_the_NPR_sting.html

[12] http://www.slate.com/BLOGS/blogs/weigel/archive/2011/03/11/the-npr-stin-s-racist-tea-party-comment-was-taken-out-of-context.aspx

[13] http://tunedin.blogs.time.com/2011/03/13/the-twisty-bent-truth-of-the-npr-sting-video/

[14] http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20110317/video17_st.art.htm

[15] http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2011/03/putting-the-msm-to-shame.html

[16] http://www.npr.org/2011/03/14/134543668/Key-Elements-Of-NPRs-Gotcha-Video-Misleading

[17] http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/03/23/134770586/remembering-mo-nabbous-the-face-of-libyan-citizen-journalism

[18] http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/02/whats-happening-libya-explained

[19] http://www.livestream.com/libya17feb

[20] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lh8C3CT9u_s

[21] http://www.twitter.com/acarvin

[22] http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2011/s3167970.htm

[23] http://www.livestream.com/libya17feb/video?clipId=flv_bf24ebcf-b375-4d5b-aa6a-318fc8c746fc

[24] http://www.livestream.com/libya17feb/video?clipId=pla_413c69cd-9914-493e-a77d-7e22c7c019c8&utm_source=lslibrary&utm_medium=ui-thumb

[25] http://www.livestream.com/libya17feb/video?clipId=pla_9745ec21-c64d-440f-abe7-a412e7db456d

[26] http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/rerunning-the-james-okeefe-npr-tape/

[27] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/magazine/mag-27lede-t.html?_r=2&ref=magazine}:

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see also erik o'keefe:

The top two board directors at the Sam Adams Alliance include two figures with deep ties to Koch-funded programs: Eric O’Keefe, who previously served in Koch’s Institute for Humane Studies and the Club For Growth; and Joseph Lehman, a former communications VP at Koch’s Cato Institute.

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When James O’Keefe applied for a grant to fund a conservative newspaper at Rutgers University,he appealed to people likeSarah Longwell. As the senior program officer at the Collegiate Network, she toured campuses across America to help conservative and libertarian students start newspapers or keep their publications running. She “read basically every conservative college paper,” and got to know the sort of people attracted to the unpaid work of right-leaning campus muckraking.

“You always knew when you met a James O’Keefe,” Longwell told TWI. “When I watch the television, and watch him say things like ‘the truth will set you free,’ I think: there’s a certain type of person who’s so obsessed with being in-your-face contrarian, and being famous for it, that he does it without thinking of the consequences. I certainly met people like him in other places.”

Few conservative activists went on to achieve the fame O’Keefe did for the 2009 sting he pulled with fellow activist Hannah Giles, posing as a pimp and prostitute inside ACORN offices, and secretly taping the advice they received. In the week since O’Keefe and three colleagues were arrested for apparently tampering with phones in the New Orleans office of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), national reporters have trained their eyes on organizations like the Collegiate Network and the Leadership Institute. The CN also gave a grant to the Patriot (George Washington University) and The Counterweight (University of Minnesota-Morris), where O’Keefe’s accomplices Stan Dai and Joseph Basel, respectively, had worked in college. The Leadership Institute employed O’Keefe for a year to train conservative activists; while there, he formed a friendship with Ben Wetmore, another veteran campus conservative who put up the four activists at his home before the Landrieu escapade. But any attempt to make them the faces of conservative college journalism, argued Longwell, would be off-base.

“From what he’s said and what he’s doing, O’Keefe strikes me as an ideologue,” said Longwell. “To use him to define conservative campus journalism is silly.”

Longwell has gained some perspective on this. In 2005, she left the Intercollegiate Studies Institute–the umbrella organization that runs CN–for Berman and Company, a free-market public relations firm in Washington that aggravates liberals with dogged, smart-alecky campaigns against their causes. Also joining Berman was Justin Wilson, once the editor of CN’s paper at the University of Michigan, then another program director at CN. Both later worked with Bret Jacobson, formerly the editor of the CN’s paper at the University of Oregon. (Before she came to CN, Longwell worked at a CN paper at Kenyon College.) In the years since, all three of them helped out with a punchy campaign against the Employee Free Choice Act–legislation that would make it easier for workers to form unions–at Berman’s Center on Union Facts. That campaign included ads that portrayed union organizers as thugs and undercover videos–conducted with more subtlety than O’Keefe, who would pose in costume–that captured union strategists shifting their strategy. One measure of how successful Berman and Company was at frustrating Democrats came when the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) angrily ripped up one of the firm’s anti-EFCA newspaper ads in front of a cheering crowd of union workers.

According to activists who spoke with TWI, the experience of campus conservatives who went on to Berman is more representative of the movement’s investment in college journalism than the trials of James O’Keefe, Stan Dai, Joseph Basel and Ben Wetmore. It’s the sort of work that the three latter activists were doing until last week, using their training and connections to become players in the intelligence industry or in conservative activism. For the Leadership Institute, the Collegiate Network, and the National Journalism Center run by Young Americans for Freedom–just three of the conservative training organizations that have operated for more than a generation–the Landrieu debacle was a distraction from a project that had been going quite well. Conservative activists and journalists who’ve come out of those training programs have had a larger, but quieter, impact than O’Keefe. (Disclosure: I edited a CN paper, The Northwestern Chronicle, from 2002 to 2004, and I held a CN fellowship at USA Today from 2004 through 2005.) They’re well-funded–ISI, CN’s parent organization received, $8.3 million in contributions in 2009–and while they don’t release the names of donors, their trustees include American Spectator publisher Al Regnery (ISI), Heritage Foundation president Ed Fuelner (ISI), and GOP strategist Frank Donatelli (LI).

“Every two years or so, somebody writes a story about how conservatives on college campuses have suddenly discovered journalism,” said John J. Miller, an editor at National Review who came there from the same conservative UM paper as Berman’s Justin Wilson, and who hires summer interns from the CN roster. “Still, if you tookpeople under the age of 40 or 45, right-of-center journalists–however you want to categorize them–a lot of them came from these conservative campus newspapers.”

While O’Keefe’s experience with the Leadership Institute has received more attention than his CN grant–and more than the internship Hannah Giles had at the National Journalism Center–the path from campus conservative journalism to D.C. influence is reliable. Before Marc Thiessen wrote speeches for George W. Bush, he was editor-in-chief of the Vassar Spectator. Before the Chamber of Commerce’s James Gelfand was tripped up for an email asking if it was possible to fund a study that would discredit health care reform, he was an editor at the Northwestern Chronicle. They place yearlong fellows at Roll Call, The Hill, The Weekly Standard, The American Spectator, and USA Today. Last year, the CN’s program expanded to the Raleigh News & Observer in North Carolina. John McCormack scored a Collegiate Network internship with Miller on the strength of his work with the GW Patriot–the same paper that produced Stan Dai.From there he got the CN fellowship at The Weekly Standard, and was hired full-time after his fellowship ended. In October 2009 and January 2010, heshifted the momentum of elections in New York’s 23rd congressional district and in Massachusetts by hounding candidates who were blowing off his questions, prompting them to overreact–and suffer from the ugly headlines that resulted.

This doesn’t take much money. The Leadership Institute’s contribution to college papers consists of Balance in Media Grants–once $500, recently raised to $750–to offset the cost of the first issue of a new publication. The Collegiate Network gives out annual grants up to several thousand dollars based on a number of factors, including frequency and quality of publications, and pays stipends for its media fellowships. Media organizations who hire CN fellows are pleased by the results, and not bothered by the O’Keefe story.

“We’ve been quite happy with our CN fellows over the years,” said John Siniff, executive forum editor at USA Today. “Does the O’Keefe story change the way I think about interns from the CN? No.”

In the months after O’Keefe’s ACORN story, he was embraced by the conservative journalism network. He gave a short, well-received speech to the annual Collegiate Network conference, held last year in San Antonio. The Leadership Institute trumpeted O’Keefe’s experience with the group. Since the Landrieu debacle, the praise has mellowed but not disappeared.

“There was a fairly universal celebration that he gave ACORN a black eye,” said Steven Sutton, who manages the college journalism program for LI. “I don’t think it marks a milestone or launch date — we’re not going to be having James O’Keefe Day dinners to mark the day that he busted ACORN.”

“This kind of ‘stunt’ journalism requires skill, like an acrobat,” said Dinesh D’Souza, the conservative author whose work at the Dartmouth Review in the early 1980s set the tone for decades of conservative campus journalism. “It’s pretty easy to fall off the ropes if you’re stupid about it. The ACORN story ‘worked,’ because the masquerade proved a point about ACORN, but trying to tap a senator’s phones–well, there’s a point where you are breaking the law, and no one is above the law.”

Among conservatives, there’s a consensus that the work of campus journalists, and the connections that the network can give them, won’t be touched by O’Keefe’s scandal. Berman’s David Martosko–who attended Dartmouth with D’Souza, but did not work for the Review–told TWI that campus conservative papers continue to produce smart “contrarians” with exactly the reporting skills and sense of humor that Berman needs.

“For every James O’Keefe,” said Sarah Longwell, “there are 50 serious journalists coming out of these programs.”

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http://mediamatters.org/blog/201001270043

http://mediamatters.org/blog/200912150025

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Breitbart confirms he was duped by O'Keefe and the ACORN pimp hoax

March 02, 2010 5:40 am ET

It turns out that Andrew Breitbart didn't actually know what was on the ACORN tapes when he helped launch them on his website last year, and used the videos to fuel his oddly personal crusade against the low-income advocacy organization.

That's right -- Breitbart didn't know what was on the tapes. Take a few seconds to let the implications of that confession sink in, and what it means to Breitbart's already dented credibility.

Recall that for months Breitbart personally vouched for the ACORN videos, braying loudly that they could not be ignored and that they represented the unvarnished truth. Breitbart claimed he had told "the truth" every step of the way about the controversial ACORN clips and bragged that "[t]hroughout the ACORN story I applied my conscience to the material."

But now it turns out that Breitbart was fooled by the ACORN pimp hoax and mistakenly assumed, after watching deceptively edited clips from his protégé James O'Keefe, that O'Keefe strolled into ACORN offices wearing the outlandish pimp outfit.

Now Breitbart, the chief promoter of the ACORN sting, claims he "didn't know" the truth about the tapes. Although he's quick to insist it doesn't really matter anyway.

And yes, that sound you hear is Breitbart throwing O'Keefe under the bus. Because it's O'Keefe who Breitbart now blames for the "discrepancy" regarding the pimp hoax. It's O'Keefe, who Breitbart once touted as a should-be Pulitzer Prize winner, who created the false impression that he walked into ACORN offices last summer dressed as a garish pimp.

In a video interview posted Monday at Crooks and Liars, Stark Reports, as well as The Brad Blog, Breitbart, filmed by blogger Mike Stark at the recent CPAC convention, claims he did not know the facts about O'Keefe's pimp outfit. (See video below.)

Essentially, Breitbart claims he was duped like everyone else who saw the ACORN clips created by O'Keefe. He was duped because at the outset, the misleading clips contain cut-away shots filmed outdoors, which feature O'Keefe decked out in the cane-fur-sunglasses pimp costume. (Breitbart deceptively refers to the dressed-as-pimp section as the "title sequence" of the videos, but it's really much more than that.)

It appears that many viewers just assumed O'Keefe wore the get-up while he surreptitiously filmed the ACORN workers who ignited a scandal when they gave O'Keefe and his pretend prostitute girlfriend, Hannah Giles, tax advice on how to run a brothel.

The dressed-as-a-pimp storyline was one Breitbart, O'Keefe, and others eagerly pushed last fall. And it was one the press quickly embraced. (In truth, O'Keefe was often dressed rather conservatively -- slacks and dress shirt -- when he talked to ACORN staffers, and he often presented himself as a law school student and an aspiring politician trying to rescue his prostitute girlfriend from her abusive pimp.) The outlandish costume was used as a prop to both mislead viewers, and to make ACORN staffers look like idiots for not being able to spot the obvious ruse.

But it was all a hoax. And for weeks now, ever since the trick was highlighted by blogger Brad Friedman, Breitbart has been wrestling with the glaring contradiction and struggling to explain his own role in the hoax. He's been straining to explain why, for instance, in a September 21 column in The Washington Times, Breitbart specifically claimed O'Keefe had been "dressed as a pimp" while receiving tax advice from ACORN workers.

That claim was categorically false.

He's been laboring to explain why he never sought a single correction last year when an avalanche of news outlets erroneously reported O'Keefe was dressed as a pimp inside ACORN offices.

And he's been struggling to explain why, in light of the pimp hoax, he refuses to release all of the unedited ACORN tapes so we can see what other discrepancies might pop up.

At least now, thanks to Stark, we finally have Breitbart's unequivocal admission: It was all O'Keefe's fault.

From the Stark interview emphasis added; full transcript [here]:

Hello to anyone that thinks that I was misleading. I did not know that there was a discrepancy between the title sequence -- I didn't think it was significant. I saw the videos. I read the transcripts to make sure that there was continuity, and my only mistake -- and I've admitted it to Brad, I've admitted it, now that I now know about it -- is that there is a title sequence and it doesn't reflect what he was wearing when he was in there. But he still represented himself as a pimp.

In the interview, Breitbart also stressed that because O'Keefe is an "independent film producer," Breitbart couldn't "tell him what to put on these things." And to make his point clear, when Stark pressed further about the hoax, Breitbart responded, "Your problem is with James."

Breitbart may have tried to shift the blame, but the admission was a devastating one. After all, he's the guy who won't stop bragging about how he's going to reinvent online journalism, and how he and his conservative activists are going to shame the liberal media with relentless fact-checking. Yet it turns out that for the biggest story of his career, Breitbart didn't even know what was on the ACORN tapes.

Not only did Breitbart clearly fail Journalism 101 in this case, but the way he's refused to publicly accept responsibility for the blunder represents another body blow to his credibility. To date, Breitbart has made no effort to correct the record on his site, which helped launch the ACORN sting. Which means that, to date, Breitbart's sycophantic readers have not been told that, oh, by the way, that whole dressed-as-a-pimp thing was bogus.

With that in mind, what journalist would take seriously the next undercover video sting Breitbart might sponsor, when we find out that for the all-important ACORN caper he didn't even know what was on the tapes until observers pointed out a glaring discrepancy?

Meanwhile, should we believe Breitbart's pimp spin? Tough to say. It probably represents his only way out of this mess. If Breitbart actually confessed that he knew the pimp costume story was a fake, and that not only did he do nothing to try to stop the misinformation last year but actively helped to spread the hoax, then I think his credibility would be permanently demolished. At that point even mainstream journalists, who tend to turn a blind eye to Breitbart's mendacity, would have to acknowledge he is nothing more than a partisan propagandist.

So, searching for a face-saving move, it appears Breitbart has opted for Plan B: Blame the young "independent film producer" O'Keefe, who brought the videos to Breitbart, complete with the misleading pimp costumes shots already embedded. (Does Breitbart really expect people to believe that he never had a single conversation with O'Keefe about the pimp outfit prior to the release of the videos?)

The problem with Breitbart's alibi (i.e. it's O'Keefe's fault!) is that it means Breitbart has copped to the fact that he didn't know what was on the tapes that he relentlessly hyped and used as a weapon in his oddly unhinged attack on ACORN, an underfunded and somewhat adrift nonprofit that advocates for poor people. (In one disturbed dispatch from a pro-ACORN rally last year, Breitbart attacked the attendees as "common street thugs, the dregs of society.")

His new song and dance (literally -- see the 6:40 mark in the video below) is that none of this matters because it's irrelevant whether O'Keefe was dressed flamboyantly inside the ACORN offices. It's true, as I've stated many times, that the costume question does not negate what was captured on the ACORN videos. But the hoax certainly does matter in terms of the larger ACORN attack and how the press embraced it. Breitbart knows it, and that's why he's been so slow to clear up the confusion. (And it's why he seemed so eager last year to spread the confusion.)

As the blogger Digby recently explained:

But the less than obvious reason this is a big deal is that the pimp and ho costumes were a send-up of over-the-top racial stereotypes that both reinforced some very ugly notions about the African American community, but more importantly, made these ACORN workers look as though they were so dumb they shouldn't be allowed to cross the street, much less handle tax dollars. And this was done for a reason.

The pimp hoax is not some footnote that can just be dismissed. The glaring blunder goes to the heart of Breitbart's credibility as a wannabe journalist. The lie was absolutely central to the rollout of last year's ACORN attack campaign. And now, six months later, Breitbart claims he didn't know the first thing about the hoax because, truth be told, he didn't even know what was on the ACORN tapes.

...

http://mediamatters.org/columns/201003020001

http://crooksandliars.com/john-amato/andrew-breitbarts-nixonian-okeefe-ratfk

O'Keefe and his crew are only following in the footsteps of the worst of the worst. They are funded by a right wing outfit called The Leadership Institute.

Founded in 1979 by veteran Republican activist Morton Blackwell, the Leadership Institute has worked with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Karl Rove and Grover Norquist. The group raked in $6.6 million in 2008, according to its most recent publicly available IRS filings, which doesn’t list donors.

“What we teach is to use creative and imaginative ways to make your points, to reveal what we think is political correctness run amuck, liberal hypocrisy and double standards” on left-leaning college campuses, said Sutton, who supervised O’Keefe at the institute until O’Keefe was asked to leave because his investigative work could interfere with the Institute’s Internal Revenue Service standing...read on

Poor James is ordered to stay at mommy and daddy's house to keep him out of trouble.

James O'Keefe, the 25-year-old conservative filmmaker who was arrested this week in connection with a plot to tamper with phone lines in Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu's New Orleans office, is out of jail on $10,000 bond, Talking Points Memo reports. The judge ordered O'Keefe to live with his parents until a preliminary hearing set for Feb. 13.

And notice thehigh powered lawyer O'Keefe immediately received. He's backed by big conservative money.

Michael Madigan, O'Keefe's lawyer, said Wednesday that his client was not trying to wiretap or interfere with Landrieu's phones, but he would not explain why O'Keefe was there. He also would not say whether O'Keefe was working for someone or was on his own.

"The truth will come out," said Madigan, a Washington lawyer who represented Sen. Howard Baker, the Republican who famously asked during the Watergate investigation, "What did the President know and when did he know it?"

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2010/02/03/james_okeefe_white_nationalists

James O'Keefe's race problem

A photo of the righty stuntman at a white-nationalist confab illustrates a career marked by racial resentment

By Max Blumenthal

James O'Keefe, photographed at a white nationalist conference by One People's Project.

This story has been corrected since it was originally published.

(This article has been corrected since publication.)

Many of the conservatives who gleefully promoted James O’Keefe’s past political stunts are feigning shock at his arrest on charges that he and three associates planned to tamper with Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu's phone lines. Once upon a time, right-wing pundits hailed the 25-year-old O’Keefe as a creative genius and model of journalistic ethics. Andrew Breitbart, who has paid O’Keefe, called him one of the all-time “great journalists” and said he deserved a Pulitzer for his undercover ACORN video. Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly declared he should have earned a “congressional medal.”

His right-wing admirers don't seem to mind that O’Keefe's short but storied career has been defined by a series of political stunts shot through with racial resentment. Now an activist organization that monitors hate groups has produced a photo of O'Keefe at a 2006 conference on "Race and Conservatism" that featured leading white nationalists. The photo, first published Jan. 30  on the Web site of the anti-racism groupOne People's Project, shows O’Keefe at the gathering, which was so controversial even the ultra-rightLeadership Institute, which employed O'Keefe at the time, withdrew its backing. O'Keefe's fellow young conservative provocateurMarcus Epstein organized the event, which gave anti-Semites, professional racists and proponents of Aryanism an opportunity to share their grievances and plans to make inroads in the GOP.

One People's Project covered the event at the time, sending a freelance photographer to document the gathering. Project director Daryle Jenkins told O'Keefe manned a literature table  filled with tracts from the white supremacist right, including two pseudo-academic publications that have called blacks and Latinos genetically inferior to whites:American Renaissanceandthe Occidental Quarterly.  The leading speaker was Jared Taylor,founder of the white nationalist group American Renaissance. "We can say for certain that James O'Keefe was at the 2006 meeting with Jared Taylor. He has absolutely no way of denying that," Jenkins said. O'Keefe's attorney did not respond to a request for comment on his client's role in the conference.

[Subsequent to publication, freelance photographer Isis told Salon she saw O'Keefe helping with the event and believed he staffed the literature table, but her only photograph of O'Keefe was cropped so that the literature table isn't evident. "He was helping Marcus Epstein in the execution of the event," the photographer recalls. "O’Keefe was involved the same way you would be involved if you went to a party and you put out the cups and stocked the cooler.”]

O'Keefe's racial issues can be seen in many of his prior stunts The notorious ACORN videos highlighted images of himself dressed as a pimp, deceptively edited through hidden camera footage as he baited African-American office workers into making statements that could be perceived as incriminating. There were also lesser-known but equally inflammatory  spectacles like the “affirmative action bake sale” O’Keefe and his conservative comrades held when they were students at Rutgers University. During the event, O’Keefe stood at a table in the center of campus offering baked goods at reduced prices to Latinos and African-Americans while whites were forced to pay exorbitant amounts. (Native Americans, he announced, would eat free.)

By O’Keefe’s own account, his racial troubles became acute when he entered the multicultural atmosphere of Rutgers University’s dormitory system. In an online diary that has since been scrubbed from the Web (but not before being captured on Daily Kos), he wrote that he was forced to live on an all-black dormitory floor after refusing to live with the gay roommate he was initially assigned. O’Keefe claimed his next roommate was “an Indian midget ... who smelled like shit.” The roommate left, however, and was replaced by “a greek kid.” The new roommate complained to a residential administrator that O’Keefe had called his neighbors “niggers,” prompting the school to expel him from the dorm. He rejected the accusation as a “complete lie,” writing, “I was lead out of the room crying and screaming at him and my situation, no friends, no one one [sic] to talk to, forced to go in front of a black man, Dean Tolbert, to defend myself and help explain that I did not call anyone any names.”

The following year, despite this record, O’Keefe secured a dream job in the conservative movement, employed by the Leadership Institute, a Northern Virginia-based outfit that serves as the movement’s most prolific youth training operation. There, O’Keefe met Marcus Epstein, a fellow ideologue who as editor of a conservative publication at the College of William and Mary assailed Martin Luther King Jr. for “philandering and plagiarism” and challenged his patriotism and Christianity.

In August 2006 Epstein planned an event that would wed his extreme views on race with his ambitions. Epstein invited white nationalist  Jared Taylor  and homophobic white-grievance peddler John Derbyshire of the National Review to speak at the Leadership Institute’s Northern Virginia headquarters, at a mock symposium called “Race and Conservatism.”

According to a post on the white supremacist Web site Stormfront, Taylor and Derbyshire debated "the role of race in policy decisions and the racial future of the Republican party."

When the Southern Poverty Law Center denounced Taylor’s participation in the event, sparking damaging publicity for the Institute, Epstein shifted it across the street, where he played host under the auspices of a “traditionalist” group he founded called the Robert A. Taft Club. O’Keefe joined him after the last-minute move. A speaker from the right-wing black front group Project 21, led by white conservative David Almasi, was added at the last minute.

According to One People's Project, which dispatched an undercover reporter to the event, about 40 people attended the event, including several white supremacists. They included Michael Hart, a Jewish astrophysicist and advocate of racially partitioning the U.S., who once clashed with David Duke at a conference over the Ku Klux Klan leader's anti-Semitism.

The event’s headline speaker, Jared Taylor, is the publisher of one of the white supremacist movement’s foremost journals, American Renaissance, which seeks to apply an academic gloss to the racialist screeds contained on its pages. According to a report on the conference published in Taylor's magazine, Taylor argued that a taboo against discussing the alleged criminal behavior and lower intelligence of blacks and Latinos twisted political discourse, and he advocated a strong white nationalism to counter it. Derbyshire denounced “this whole rickety apparatus of affirmative action, discrimination lawsuits, corporate shakedowns, profiling protests and 'speech codes.'” But the National Review editor expressed doubt that a sufficiently large white nationalist movement could be mustered to do much about it.

Epstein and O'Keefe moved on from the "Race and Conservatism" conference to better things.After graduating from the Leadership Institute,Epsteinheld jobs as executive director of both former Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo’s Team America PAC and Pat Buchanan’s American Cause. He also started a group called Youth for Western Civilization that dedicated itself to “defending the West on campus.”An essay featured on the group’s Web sitecomplaining that “largely Jewish intellectual elites have utterly transformed American social and political discourse” suggested that Epstein’s outfit was only his latest attempt to push white nationalism and anti-Semitism into the conservative mainstream.

Epstein’s career unraveled in June 2009, when a violent racial assault he committed two years earlier was disclosed. According to a court affidavit, Epstein had karate-chopped a random African-American woman in the face and called her a “nigger” during a drunken late-night romp bar-hopping on Washington’s M Street in 2007, leading to his arrest by an off-duty Secret Service agent. He signed a plea bargain requiring him to attend alcohol rehabilitation courses and donate $1,000 to the United Negro College Fund as a token of his contrition.

Meanwhile, O’Keefe lost his job at the Leadership Institute in 2007 after a prank call he made to an Ohio-based Planned Parenthood clinic. During the call, O’Keefe offered a donation to the clinic on the condition that it would be earmarked to pay for aborting African-American fetuses. “Because there's definitely way too many black people in Ohio,” O’Keefe remarked to the receptionist. “So, I'm just trying to do my part.” Leadership Institute founder Morton Blackwell said O'Keefe's stunts went beyond the right-wing group's standards. “He wanted to do sting operations that would affect legislation; he made some calls which have been covered in the news media to Planned Parenthood,"Blackwell told the New York Times. "That was beyond the scope of what we had hired him to do. We are an educational organization. We are not an activist organization.” Blackwell told O'Keefe he had to choose between his job and his activism, "and he said he was committed to the activism," according to the Times.

O’Keefe’s termination by the Leadership Institute hardly ended his career as a conservative activist. Right-wing online publicist Andrew Breitbart, hearing of the merry prankster’s exploits, hired him to carry out the ACORN operation that would make him famous. Since his arrest, however, some of O’Keefe’s former associates are scrambling to save face. "I am shocked by the reports of this behavior,” declared O’Keefe’s collaborator on the ACORN operation, Hannah Giles. (Giles had tarted up as a prostitute for the stunt.)

O’Keefe has now hired a defense attorney and is waging a high publicity battle against charges that could land him in prison for nearly a year. Some of his old allies, like Breitbart, remain in his corner. Fox News' Sean Hannity hosted O'Keefe for a sympathetic sitdown Feb. 1, where the young right-winger played victim, claiming he was being persecuted by "flat-out slandering" and "journalistic malpractice."

unrelated? maybe not by blood, but

Eric O'Keefe is chairman and CEO of the Sam Adams Alliance.

Under his leadership, the Sam Adams Alliance (SAM) has established some of the most active and respected organizations in the freedom movement. Most recently, SAM set up American Majority to train potential candidates and campaign organizers and the Franklin Center, which helps train and place investigative journalists in non-profit organizations. The alliance also launched Judgepedia, Ballotpedia, and Sunshine Review, Wikipedia-style websites which have had more than 19 million page views for their 128,000 pages of politically important information. To help Americans understand and support free-market-based principles and policies, SAM will continue to raise awareness for the cause of liberty and to build capacity in marketing and public relations for like-minded organizations.

Eric also works closely with grassroots advocates such as Americans for Prosperity and with the State Policy Network to promote transparency and accountability in state and local governments. He serves on the board of directors of the Institute for Humane Studies, the Center for Competitive Politics, and Wisconsin Club for Growth.

He authored the book Who Rules America, which won praise from Milton Friedman, and hosts a new podcast series, Engaging Democracy.

When not promoting political reform, Eric is a private investor residing in rural Wisconsin with his wife Leslie Graves.

wiki:

Eric O'Keefe is the Chairman and CEO of the Sam Adams Alliance. O'Keefe also serves on the Board of Directors of the Institute for Humane Studies, the Center for Competitive Politics and Wisconsin Club for Growth. Before working for the Alliance, O'Keefe was the President of Americans for Limited Terms from 1996 to 2000. In 2002, Americans for Limited Terms changed its name to Americans for Limited Government. O'Keefe served on its board until 2007.[14]

Crooks and Liars

Tuesday June 5, 2012 04:00 pm

James O'Keefe's Best Friends Network

By karoli

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James O'Keefe has some high-rolling donors. I always wondered who was behind his bogus efforts to smear people with edited video, and now I have a better idea.

Lately, the right wing blogosphere has been eating each other alive while desperately trying to smear a couple of left wing bloggers for reasons I don't fully understand. That story is one that reads like a bad spy novel, and not worth trying to sort out. But James O'Keefe's ongoing difficulties with women, and especially women he hires? That's worth looking at more carefully.

Just to refresh memories, O'Keefe hatched a couple of "projects" that were intended to smear journalists. One was his "To Catch a Journalist" media trap game, and the other was his incredibly stupid effort to entrap CNN reporter Abbie Boudreau by "seducing" her. The full plan, which is even worse than originally reported, is here.

One thing that O'Keefe demonstrates over and over again is that he should be nowhere near women. He seems to be prone to sexual and sexist behavior while around them. For these two plans, he recruited two different women. The first, who was supposed to be a part of the Boudreau scam, was Izzy (Isabel) Santa, who is the one who stopped the ridiculous scenario from continuing by tipping Boudreau off to what O'Keefe had planned for her. In October, 2010 Santa's attorney demanded that Project Veritas pay off her contract. Subsequent to that, a settlement agreement was drafted where Project Veritas agreed to pay Santa $20,000 as a final settlement and agreement between them. An unsigned copy of that settlement agreement is posted online, and I don't know whether it was the final version or not.

Here's what I do know. Part of that agreement was to hold harmless all parties affected. The list of affected parties is in the image above, and includes the following people: Francisco Gonzalez, Greg Walker, Colin Sharky and Maureen Wagner as members of the board, former and past. Consultants, donors and fundraisers to Project Veritas include Kate Doner, Eric O'Keefe, and Denis Calabrese. Who are these people who consulted, donated or fundraised for James O'Keefe?

Kate Doner:

Sourcewatch:

Doner Fundraising established by Kate Doner in 2003 in Austin Texas, is a fundraising and event services company "that partners with issue based non-profits, coalitions, corporations, and professional associations" and Republican candidates.

Although listed on the site of the State Policy Network and its current newsletter as its event planning consultant, there is no website corresponding to the domain. Her colleague, Elizabeth James, who lists her phone number as the same as Doner Fundraising, has an email address affiliated with Quorum Public Affairs, another Austin strategic public affairs company helping businesses to influence goverment and regulatory policies.

[...]

A biographical note states that "Doner received her Bachelor’s of Arts from Hillsdale College in Michigan with a double degree in Political Science and History. She is a native of Michigan, has lived in Texas since 1993."

She served as Director of Finance for the Texas Public Policy Foundation in 2003.

:{[...]

She managed the Austin fundraising for Texas Representative Joe Nixon in his race for the Texas Senate in 2005. Nixon of Houston chaired the Texas House Civil Practices Committee and was described by Texans for Lawsuit Reform in 2003, in The Advocate as "our one true friend" there and a courageous lawyer." In a news release, Nixon described Doner as "known throughout the state as an Austin fundraising powerhouse....Her client list reads like the who's who of Texas' best known Republican and conservative causes."}:

Doner's comments on tort reform appeared in the Winter 2006 issue of James Madison Institute.

Her former husband, John Doner operates John Doner & Associates. His Austin-based firm provides marketing services and consulting for political campaigns, political action committees, grassroots initiatives, and associations since 1989.

Denis Calabrese

Denis Calabrese is one of the founding members of the lobbying firm Patriot Group, a board member of the Sam Adams Alliance, and affiliated with American Majority. He was also Dick Armey's Chief of Staff. That would be former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, who is now Chairman of Freedomworks.

Calabrese is also President of the Arnold Foundation, a non-profit organization founded by billionaire Enron trader and hedge fund manager John Arnold and his wife Laura. The Arnold Foundation is dedicated to funding education deforms around the country.

Eric O'Keefe

Eric O'Keefe is Chairman and CEO of the Sam Adams Alliance and sits on the board of the Wisconsin Club for Growth, Institute for Humane Studies, Center for Competitive Politics, and the Health Care Compact. All of these are Koch-related and/or funded entities. O'Keefe also is connected to Joe Ricketts and Houston building billionaire Leo Linbeck III.

This is how pissant liars like O'Keefe get any traction at all. They get some funding from billionaires whose single focus is on taking over the whole damn country, work with a compliant corporate media to amplify without any actual verification what O'Keefe does, and so he gets to keep doing it over and over and over.

I want to extend a particular thanks to Nadia Naffe for her contributions to my research for this post. She is in the process of being slandered viciously by the right wing blogosphere and twitterati because she dared to call James O'Keefe out for his effort to smear Professor Charles Seife and it appears, Jay Rosen. She writes:

Patrick Frey [Patterico] may have believed that posting my Social Security Number and medical records online to his blog, in retaliation, would intimidate and stop me from telling the truth about O’keefe, chill my First Amendment rights and dissuade me from coming forward to report a crime committed in his jurisdiction. Though, what he has accomplished is precisely the opposite.

These two civil servants, both deputy district attorney’s in Los Angles County, in the past were able to bully and harass private individuals, with impunity. But their patent on intimidation and retribution expired when they came to me. The Frey’s are the poster children for the type of rampant corruption Carmen Trutanich, Alan Jackson and Danette Myers have each spoken out against.

This is also what they do. When they're afraid of being exposed, they just chew up and try to destroy any person who might dare to tell the truth about them. Whatever Nadia Naffe's story is, she posted actual filings and pleadings online which confirm the story she's telling about James O'Keefe, and it's not pretty.

Courage, Nadia.

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Patterico’s Prattling Puppets

byStranded WindFollow

   Email 4 Comments / 4 New

   I’ve been covering the activities of John Patrick Frey aka @Patterico for a while now. This guy has been deeply involved in Weinergate, either running the actual operation, or at the very least clearly visible in public leading the charge on muddying the waters and attempting to intimidate anyone who wants to get to the bottom of what really happened

   This sort of thing would draw the eye no matter who was involved given that the target was a U.S. Congressman.  Frey, a Deputy District Attorney in Los Angeles County, continued to push the Reid sock puppet family long after they’d been roundly debunked. This smacks of cover up; someone in his position ought to be used to sorting out complex cases. He’s either utterly incompetent to do his job as a Deputy D.A. or he is complicit in the Weinergate scheme

  Since I’ve taken up reporting on this I’ve had all sorts of curious customers poking around in my digital shadow and today one of them might have just slipped a bit …

  First, I had to give away my big 2,600 follower Twitter account. Again. This happens every time I get into a tussle – gotta disappear myself until the heat is off. @NealRauhauser still comes to another account that lands on UberSocial in my Blackberry. A few dozen trusted sets of hands and eyes keep the wheels turning while I am “away”, with a couple of them running my big account.  I get weird follower requests, take this one from @wittier, for example. This is some guy named Ken Danieli, I am told, and I’m uncertain what his role is in the overall scheme, but there he is, wanting to be buddies.

  I got a burst of enthusiasm over my Facebook presence, but this one was most comical. Why is James O’Keefe’s video producer guy wanting to be my friend? Do they really not get there are a bunch of people reading Google Alerts on them on a daily basis? I guess not …

   They were talking about how I was involved in the Sony hack (NOT!) and I actually got a rather sad, battered Sony security guy nosing around my LinkedIn profile. We talked a bit and I sent him away with a “call me if I can help”. As regular readers will recall, I’m A Hacker, but I’m an old hacker, and we have a natural career path into security work if we survive youthful enthusiasm without any serious marks.

   Oh, and we’ve got some socks here, too. Specifically The Scyphers Murder and plkimin turned up after the fact, only talking in my diaries, and only then when my diaries are Patterico focused. That’s about all I need to see … how about you? Oh, and my latest doppelganger on Twitter is quite clever with an extra L where they think it won’t be noticed

    I’ve been pondering who the two local socks might be. The universe of real people is pretty small. John Patrick Frey himself. Seth L. Allen of South Easton, MA, who was found out after he bothered one of the Velvet Revolution guys last year. Maybe it’s Mike Stack aka @goatsred but he hardly seems swift enough for the level of writing the socks here display, and he seems a bit bewildered by the happenings. I am prepared to believe he and the rest of Born Free Crew were victimized by …

     The only one I can’t put a real name to: @dwp6776, the mysterious “Dan Wolfe” that knew so much about Weiner. Lee Stranahan got an IP on this guy in Arizona and that jibes with my information – that he’s employed at the Bayside Café in Lake Havasu, AZ. I wasn’t going to put that out, but after what was revealed today I guess I’m OK with people having a more accurate fix than a 32,768 block of IP addresses centered around Phoenix

    My money is on Wolfe being behind the @PeterPavel1 troll, which I paddled in Patterico’s Personal Pipsqueak. It’s interesting how this little tidbit leaked. Someone watches @ronbryn and provides me with a daily write up of any interesting happenings. @dwp6776 had permitted him to follow, but Ron announced he was going to stop due to all the hackers he saw Wolfe following.

   So they’re desperate for some way to get me off them, and they’re not smart enough or scary enough to chase me away on their own, so the @PeterPavel1 troll resorts to talking to the various hacking superpowers: right wing anti-jihadist @th3j35t3r, anarcho-syndicalist @AnonymousIRC, and anarchist @AnonymouSabu. They’ve struck out swinging, failing to interest any of these groups.

  And Wolfe makes sense as the one doing this – taking up a persona, slipping into an existing group on Twitter, attempting to fit in, and then steering them toward a certain goal. The very same thing he did with Born Free Crew.

   So that’s a possible explanation. If you have the skill to see purposeful distractions as they’re presented, the mental filter needed to ignore the noise they put out, and the patience to just stand around and wait for people to make mistakes, sooner or later those who can’t shut up will reveal everything you wanted to know

   This is an incredibly dangerous situation for them.

   Instead of having the initiative in the action, a small, soft target like a troubled Congressman, and an ideologically friendly online discussion group like Born Free Crew to help, the only houses on the block they have left to try are: a right wing collective that does almost nothing but international work, an aggressive anarchist group that just yanked NATO’s tail, and an anarcho-syndicalist group that would be diametrically opposed to everything Frey and those around him represent.

   One of those groups will incinerate them on principle, one will disembowel them just to hear the screams, and the one that might be inclined to help is probably not going to do so for several reasons.

   This isn’t over, not by a long shot. ACORN is in ruins, a popular Democratic Congressman’s career is over, and another rat from the same nest that brought forth Patterico is gnawing on the Medicaid strand of our tattered safety net. The principles of karma tell us that bad behavior begets bad results.

    And you can almost feel those consequences blowing in the wind …

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blog;

I hope you won’t be offended by the foul language in our latest investigation because **every American should watch this video RIGHT NOW**.

I’m sure you’ll be as outraged as I was to learn that New York State and the U.S. Department of Energy have been WASTING your tax dollars on fake “Green Jobs” for union workers – to the tune of $112 million.

How do I know? A union boss told me.

**Click here to watch him LAUGH about using your tax dollars to dig ditches and fill them in again!**

I wish I was exaggerating, but I’m not.

Project Veritas investigators recently asked several top officials at the Laborers’ International Union (LIUNA) to help us secure funding for a fake company that literally does nothing but dig holes and then put the dirt back.

And guess what? THEY LOVED THE IDEA!

**They even bragged about doing the same thing at their own job sites!**

“It almost is exactly the same as where we were with Green Jobs, Green New York,” said LIUNA Director John Hutchings. “Between us, a lot of it is bullsh–.”

His partner Anthony Tocci explained, “You just wanna get the money. We can figure out the other stuff.”

**Click here to see what else they said**.

This is some of the most flagrant waste, fraud and corruption I’ve ever seen, and we’ve exposed it on a scale that will shock you — $112 million for Green Jobs, Green New York alone!

But even though these fake-work boondoggles are funded with your taxes, no one in Washington seems to care where the money goes.

:{Maybe that’s because our investigators were also told:

“We’re good with [Senator Kirsten] Gillibrand and [Senator Chuck] Schumer…they’ll support it.”}:

No wonder these union bosses are getting away with fraud. They have friends in some pretty high places!

Is there anything these people won’t do?

One thing’s for sure, they won’t stop on their own. That’s why we need to get informed and fight back.

**You can start by watching this APPALLING new footage and then forwarding it to your friends and family so they can see the ugly facts for themselves.**

This footage isn’t pretty, but it’s our job to dig up the truth, no matter how deep it’s buried. Thanks for everything you do.

:{**Click here to watch the video**

}:

Report: James O'Keefe To Pay $100K Settlement To Former ACORN Employee

Blog››› March 7, 2013 4:39 PM EST ››› SIMON MALOY

According to court documents obtained by Wonkette, conservative activist James O'Keefe has agreed to a $100,000 settlement in a lawsuit filed against him by Juan Carlos Vera, a former employee of ACORN. Vera filed the suit against O'Keefe in 2010, alleging O'Keefe had illegally taped their conversation at an ACORN office in California as part of his fraudulent "exposé" of the community activist group.

Vera was one of the ACORN employees portrayed in O'Keefe's videos as offering assistance in setting up a nonexistent child prostitution ring. After his encounter with O'Keefe, Vera contacted the police to report "possible human smuggling," unaware that he had been duped. Vera claims he lost his job as a result of O'Keefe's deception after the conservative's video of their encounter was posted on a Breitbart website.

According to the settlement documents obtained by Wonkette, O'Keefe has agreed to "pay Vera $100,000.00," and that "as part of this settlement O'Keefe states that at the time of the publication of the video of Juan Carlos Vera he was unaware of Vera's claims to have notified a police officer of the incident. O'Keefe regrets any pain suffered by Mr. Vera or his family."

After the ACORN prostitution hoax fell apart, O'Keefe and his Project Veritas group released a series of heavily edited undercover sting videos attempting to document voter fraud, most of which collapsed under scrutiny, sometimes spectacularly so.

UPDATE:

In a post at Salon, Brad Friedman reports that O'Keefe's ACORN video partner, Republican activist Hannah Giles, has agreed to pay Vera $50,000.

It makes one wonder whether Media Matters' Eric Boehlert was a target of O'Keefe's grand plan.

Via Ryan Grim at the Huffington Post, a story of a bogus Verizon representative asking some very weird questions. Evidently this "Verizon employee" stopped by Boehlert's house to take a customer satisfaction survey. Verizon confirms they do not send people door to door for customer satisfaction surveys, however. After asking some fairly routine questions, it started to get weird.

"So he gets to the last questions, and he's really reading intently off of his clipboard, and he says something about making the kind of salary I do, working from home, something something about the 99 percenters," Boehlert said.

The man claiming to be a Verizon representative finally asked his question. "After he mentioned my salary and that I work from home, all the bells went off, and this is not who this guy says he is.Therefore, I kind of lost track of the exact wording of the question, but it definitely was like very accusatory of me and I'm a hypocrite and how do I have this supposedly cushy job while I'm writing about real workers and the people of the 99 percent," said Boehlert.

"So there was this pause, and I said, 'You work for Verizon?' And he just sort of looks back at me and [says], 'Will you answer the question? Will you answer the question?' And I said, 'Can I see your Verizon ID?' And he wouldn't produce any Verizon ID, and I think he asked me another time to answer the question. And basically I just said, 'I'm done so you can leave now.'"

My interaction with Eric Boehlert has been limited to Twitter, but my take on him is that he is not easily fooled, intimidated, or otherwise pushed around. And he wasn't here, either.

Boehlert decided to follow him to obtain his license plate number. By now he had realized that the man was likely pulling a political stunt, and James O'Keefe's notorious "To Catch a Journalist" project came to mind as a possibility.

"The only sort of comical part was he forget which way he was supposed to run in case I started following. He ended up sort of in the road, and he sort of turned left and then right," said Boehlert. "The last I saw him he was in a full sprint down my street running away from my house."

The police and Verizon were called. The only thing missing from this story is James O'Keefe's emphatic denial. There doesn't appear to be anything like that on the record, though Andrew Breitbart has categorically denied any involvement in this particular stunt.

In response to an instant message asking if he was responsible for the fake Verizon representative, Breitbart said no.

So what gives, James O'Keefe? Don't you think that as the director of an organization subsidized with taxpayer funds, you should step up and tell us whether you targeted Boehlert or not? A simple yes or no will do.

by Steve MyersPublished Oct. 27, 2011 12:57 pmUpdated Oct. 28, 2011 8:50 am

:{:{Project Veritas}:

In thesecond installmentof his “To Catch a Journalist” series, James O’Keefe has produced a surreptitiously recorded, heavily edited video starring NYU professors Clay Shirky and Jay Rosen. In the video Shirky likens NPR’s program sponsorships to advertising and discusses news coverage of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, Occupy Wall Street and Michele Bachmann.O’Keefe claims the video showsShirky and Rosen discussing “the New York Times’ strategy to support Occupy Wall Street, Obama’s 2008 election and their place within the ‘chardonnay swilling’ so-called media elite.” O’Keefe calls Shirky a New York Times consultant, but Eileen Murphy, vice president of corporate communications for The New York Times, says that’s not true. “We have looked into it and I can tell you he is not now and has never been a consultant to The New York Times,” she says. Rosen has only a bit part in which he follows up on Shirky’s statement that the people in the room are media elites by saying, “We are the 1 percent.” Other than a student referring to something that Times media reporter Brian Stelter said, no one from the Times is in the video.}:

If you’re familiar with O’Keefe’s work and Shirky’s expansive talks, you know you can’t rely on a collage of 30-second clips to get the true meaning of Shirky’s comments. (O’Keefe says in the video that the full transcript is on his site, but if it’s there I can’t find it; I asked him on Twitter where it is.) For instance, O’Keefe claims the video shows the Times’ unwillingness to cover Bachmann, but Shirky says in the video that the Times was compelled to cover her campaign because the Iowa straw poll was considered important. When Shirky talks about Occupy Wall Street coverage, it’s impossible to know if he’s just commenting on the coverage as an outsider or — as O’Keefe claims — he’s discussing the Times’ strategy to help the protesters. (If the Times surreptitiously supported the protests by not covering them, I think the debate over liberal media bias looks like a Möbius strip: Whatever side you start on, you end up in the same place.) Rosen tweeted that he’d respond to the video later Thursday.

Update: Jay Rosen explains how someone posing as a prospective grad student taped a class and asked him how to get a tape of a tea party gathering to the Times.

Reaction: NPR’s David Folkenflik: “So far looks an awful lot like ‘to catch a J school prof.’ ” ||

Related: What James O’Keefe knows about media (and you should too) ||

Earlier: Huffington Post’s Sam Stein first target of O’Keefe’s ‘To Catch a Journalist’ | James O’Keefe to New York Times reporter: ‘How can I be sure you’ll be objective and accurate?’

James O’Keefe Target Jay Rosen Seems ‘To Catch A Journalist’ Of His Own: James O’Keefe

by Tommy Christopher | 1:49 pm, October 28th, 2011

:{On Thursday, conservative undercover journalistJames O’Keefereleased thesecond installmentof his “To Catch A Journalist” series, a takeoff on Dateline NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” sting aimed at discrediting mainstream journalists. His first swing, atSam Stein,missed badly, and his second attempt, aimed at NYU Prof.Jay RosenandClay Shirky, brings the count to 2 and 0. Prof. Rosen, however,responded to O’Keefe’sattack with some revealing information about O’Keefe’s “investigation.”

The second ”To Catch A Journalist” video, released yesterday, features hidden-cam clips of a classroom discussion by NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen and new media expert Clay Shirky, and although it contains lots of buzzy right-wing watchwords (like “The New York Times,” or “elites”), even out of context, the cumulative effect is of a fairly ordinary classroom discussion. It’s like an upskirt photo of someone in snowpants:}:

link deleted

The video is so baffling, I emailed O’Keefe yesterday to find out what he thought he had “caught” Rosen and Shirky doing. He didn’t respond to that question, but from the video, it appears that he thinks the “We are the 1%” bite is the money quote. (I also pointed out that he had published Prof. Rosen’s phone number in the video, and it’s still there today. Nice.) Rosen explains the easy-to-infercontext of that quote:

When Shirky says “we are the most elite…” and I follow it up with “we’re the one percent!” the discussion was about news consumption: journalism professors and students are at the extreme end in attention to news and willingness to pay for it. But you can feel O’Keefe salivating over those words as he splices them in. The implication he wants: we are your overlords!

Inhis response last night, Professor Rosen echoed that criticism, saying “there’s not much to say because it’s so incoherent, context-less and, frankly, boring. As Erik Wemple of the Washington Postput it: ‘Just a couple of professors prattling on in not-so-fascinating ways about media and politics.’”

What Rosen does reveal, though, is that when O’Keefe called him to get comments on some quotes from the class, Rosen was able to discern who taped the class: a prospective student, pseudonymously dubbed “Lucas,” who was a guest in the class that day. As always, it turns out the devil isin the details that didn’t make it into O’Keefe’s video:

“Lucas” had taped us, surreptitiously. Then he asked to meet with me. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was part of the sting. He said he wanted to become a political journalist: did I have any advice? I gave him several career paths he could follow. He asked me if being a politics major and a journalism minor would be a handicap. I said no. Then he let me in on something.

He said he had a tape of a Tea Party gathering in which some ugly and extreme (the implication was racist) things were said. He said it was gruesome stuff. He wanted to know how he could get it to the media. To the New York Times. I said the New York Times wouldn’t be interested in something like that, and that he might try to contact Max Blumenthal of the Nation. He asked if I had any other advice for him. I said find a niche and start a blog. I gave him the examples of Ezra Klein, Dave Weigel and Nate Silver to show him that it was possible. I was trying to inspire him! “Lucas” thanked me and left. He had a strange smile on his face.

It’s understandable that O’Keefe would want to justify the $80 he spent on a hidden cam, and the time invested by his operative, but not only is this product embarrassing, it also manages to undercut O’Keefe’s credibility even more than it already has been. In the second part of our interview, O’Keefe defended a similar omission, but this is magnitudes more egregious. The pity is, he probably would have gotten more play if he had made “Lib Journo Prof Does The Honest Thing” his lede.

I asked O’Keefe if he planned on releasing the footage of Prof. Rosen’s meeting with the Project Veritas operative, and why he hadn’t done so. His response was mystifying:

Please follow up with Jay Rosen about the contested info regarding Clay Shirky and The New York Times.  Jay Rosen, my trusted source, didn’t comment there.

I would talk to Professor Jay Rosen, my trusted source, to make sure he’s comfortable with the New York Times’s characterization of Shirky’s relationship with the NYT.

Not to get into the weeds, but in the video, O’Keefe identifies Shirky as someone who “has done consulting work for The New York Times,” whichShirky and the paper dispute. I responded, “Okay, but what about what I asked you? Are you going to release that footage?”

As yet, O’Keefe hasn’t responded.

=

Lefty journalism professor tries to discredit the Tea Party by passing along sensational footage to his buddies at the Times!!!

:{:{Oct.}: 

28}:

Yesterday I was the target of a “sting” operation by right wing trickster James O’Keefe. I will tell you what happened.

But first, here is the product of that sting, a real culture war artifact: To Catch a Journalist: New York Times, Jay Rosen, Clay Shirky.http://pressthink.org/2011/10/lefty-journalism-professor-tries-to-discredit-the-tea-party-by-passing-along-sensational-footage-to-his-buddies-at-the-times/#p0

video delhttp://pressthink.org/2011/10/lefty-journalism-professor-tries-to-discredit-the-tea-party-by-passing-along-sensational-footage-to-his-buddies-at-the-times/#p1

It started with a request from a staff person at NYU to allow a prospective graduate student named “Lucas” to sit in on my class on October 17. This is something that happens 8-10 times a semester. Students want to know what they can expect if they come to study at NYU. I said yes because I always say yes. The class he wanted to observe is called “Digital Thinking.” That day I had scheduled a guest speaker: my colleague Clay Shirky. The students had read all of Shirky’s major writings about the transformation of journalism in the digital age and they were eager to ask him questions.http://pressthink.org/2011/10/lefty-journalism-professor-tries-to-discredit-the-tea-party-by-passing-along-sensational-footage-to-his-buddies-at-the-times/#p2

When I got to class, Lucas was already there. I welcomed him, introduced him to the class, and asked my students to be nice to him because he was thinking of coming to study at NYU. About 30 minutes later Clay showed up and we did what college professors do thousands of times a day at universities everywhere.  We tell stories with ideas inside them and share how we think. We answer students’ questions and get them to share how they think. We try to complicate their picture of the world and inspire them to inquire further. This is the work of education. And this is what Clay and I did.http://pressthink.org/2011/10/lefty-journalism-professor-tries-to-discredit-the-tea-party-by-passing-along-sensational-footage-to-his-buddies-at-the-times/#p3

The next day I got a note from “Lucas.”  It said:http://pressthink.org/2011/10/lefty-journalism-professor-tries-to-discredit-the-tea-party-by-passing-along-sensational-footage-to-his-buddies-at-the-times/#p4

Dear Professor Rosen,

Thank you very much for the opportunity to sit in on your class. It was a treat to learn from Clay Shirky. I am leaving town on Friday. I was wondering if we could meet this week to discuss NYU, concentrations and a piece I am working on about Occupy Wall Street. Let me know what days and times work for you. I am pretty flexible.

Cordially,

I met with him two days later in my office. I will tell you what happened there in a moment.http://pressthink.org/2011/10/lefty-journalism-professor-tries-to-discredit-the-tea-party-by-passing-along-sensational-footage-to-his-buddies-at-the-times/#p5

Six days after that, on Oct. 26, the phone rang in my office. It was James O’Keefe. He said he wanted me to comment on something or other. I said there must be a context to this call, so what’s the context? And he began to read me quotes from the class session with Clay Shirky. It took me a few minutes to recognize that, yes, these were things that were said in class, so he obviously had a recording. Once I realized what he was up to I laughed at the absurdity of it and told him, “James, do whatever you want to do.”http://pressthink.org/2011/10/lefty-journalism-professor-tries-to-discredit-the-tea-party-by-passing-along-sensational-footage-to-his-buddies-at-the-times/#p6

At first I was confused about how the tape got made. I asked each of my students if he or she had taped the class. They each said no. I believed them. Then one student remembered we had a guest that day and it all fell into place.http://pressthink.org/2011/10/lefty-journalism-professor-tries-to-discredit-the-tea-party-by-passing-along-sensational-footage-to-his-buddies-at-the-times/#p7

“Lucas” had taped us, surreptitiously. Then he asked to meet with me. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was part of the sting. He said he wanted to become a political journalist: did I have any advice? I gave him several career paths he could follow. He asked me if being a politics major and a journalism minor would be a handicap. I said no. Then he let me in on something.http://pressthink.org/2011/10/lefty-journalism-professor-tries-to-discredit-the-tea-party-by-passing-along-sensational-footage-to-his-buddies-at-the-times/#p8

He said he had a tape of a Tea Party gathering in which some ugly and extreme (the implication was racist) things were said. He said it was gruesome stuff. He wanted to know how he could get it to the media. To the New York Times. I said the New York Times wouldn’t be interested in something like that, and that he might try to contact Max Blumenthal of the Nation. He asked if I had any other advice for him. I said find a niche and start a blog. I gave him the examples of Ezra Klein, Dave Weigel and Nate Silver to show him that it was possible. I was trying to inspire him! “Lucas” thanked me and left. He had a strange smile on his face.http://pressthink.org/2011/10/lefty-journalism-professor-tries-to-discredit-the-tea-party-by-passing-along-sensational-footage-to-his-buddies-at-the-times/#p9

I now realize he was scamming me and almost certainly taping me. The intended story line, worked out in advance, was lefty journalism professor jumps at the chance to assist with the discrediting of the Tea Party by passing along sensational footage to his buddies at the Times. ”Lucas” was there to get me to say the words that, when diced and spliced, would sound like that. But it didn’t work. I told him the Times wouldn’t be interested. So no portion of that tape appears in O’Keefe’s video.http://pressthink.org/2011/10/lefty-journalism-professor-tries-to-discredit-the-tea-party-by-passing-along-sensational-footage-to-his-buddies-at-the-times/#p10

You can see the similarity between this plot and the sting O’Keefe ran on NPR fundraiser Ron Schiller. Schiller was invited to compare notes with O’Keefe’s seemingly sympathetic operatives on how racist the Tea Party was.http://pressthink.org/2011/10/lefty-journalism-professor-tries-to-discredit-the-tea-party-by-passing-along-sensational-footage-to-his-buddies-at-the-times/#p11

About the tape O’Keefe mashed together from Clay Shirky’s words, and a few of my own, there’s not much to say because it’s so incoherent, context-less and, frankly, boring. As Erik Wemple of the Washington Post put it: “Just a couple of professors prattling on in not-so-fascinating ways about media and politics.” (For a different view, see Human Events: “exactly the sort of conversation that the most aggressive conservative critics of liberal media bias have nightmares about.”)http://pressthink.org/2011/10/lefty-journalism-professor-tries-to-discredit-the-tea-party-by-passing-along-sensational-footage-to-his-buddies-at-the-times/#p12

A student asked Shirky why the early coverage of Occupy Wall Street was meager and condescending. His answer was to the student and in a way to the protestors themselves: “If you want Occupy Wall Street to succeed, you want them not to get press coverage in the beginning.” O’Keefe turns that into Shirky revealing “the New York Times‘ strategy to support Occupy Wall Street.” The way the tape is edited, the “you” in “you want them” sounds like it refers to Times journalists, and so not covering Occupy Wall Street is really a secret plan at the Times to support the protests.http://pressthink.org/2011/10/lefty-journalism-professor-tries-to-discredit-the-tea-party-by-passing-along-sensational-footage-to-his-buddies-at-the-times/#p13

When Shirky says “we are the most elite…” and I follow it up with “we’re the one percent!” the discussion was about news consumption: journalism professors and students are at the extreme end in attention to news and willingness to pay for it. But you can feel O’Keefe salivating over those words as he splices them in. The implication he wants: we are your overlords!http://pressthink.org/2011/10/lefty-journalism-professor-tries-to-discredit-the-tea-party-by-passing-along-sensational-footage-to-his-buddies-at-the-times/#p14

Those are two examples, but why go on? If you see some scandal in the tape… good luck to you. What reasonable people will see is a lurid mess, which has meaning only within the taken-for-granted world of right wing culture war.http://pressthink.org/2011/10/lefty-journalism-professor-tries-to-discredit-the-tea-party-by-passing-along-sensational-footage-to-his-buddies-at-the-times/#p15

Occasionally I will hear someone exasperated at his tactics describe O’Keefe as a kind of terrorist. This is not wise and it’s not true. He doesn’t use violence; he’s an “entrapment journalist,” as Steve Myers of Poynter put it. But having been targeted, I can see one thing in his methods that is akin to terrorism.http://pressthink.org/2011/10/lefty-journalism-professor-tries-to-discredit-the-tea-party-by-passing-along-sensational-footage-to-his-buddies-at-the-times/#p16

As I said, when someone asks to sit it on my class, I say “come on in.” But my students are now shocked and angry that their learning environment has been invaded by a trickster like O’Keefe. I need to prevent that from happening again. But the only way I can do so is by closing my classroom to all outsiders, or by looking into the background, motivations and character of potential visitors, which is creepy and offensive. O’Keefe has struck at a pedagogical strength–the openness of my classroom–and changed it into a weakness. In that precise sense, and no other, he is like a terrorist.http://pressthink.org/2011/10/lefty-journalism-professor-tries-to-discredit-the-tea-party-by-passing-along-sensational-footage-to-his-buddies-at-the-times/#p17

You want to know what goes on in my classroom? Meet the real Clay Shirky. The one I had my students read. Here was their assignment.http://pressthink.org/2011/10/lefty-journalism-professor-tries-to-discredit-the-tea-party-by-passing-along-sensational-footage-to-his-buddies-at-the-times/#p18

We do not have class October 10. It’s a holiday: Columbus Day. It is alleged that he discovered America. Our next meeting will therefore be October 17. This I have designated Shirky Day. You are to absorb what Clay Shirky has to teach journalism and journalists. And so the readings are…

Keynote speech: A Group is its Own Worst Enemy (2003)

Interview with Columbia Journalism Review, Part One and Part Two. (2008)

Blog post: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable: (2009)

Blog post: Rescuing the Reporters: (2009)

Blog post: Why Small Payments Won’t Save Publishers (2009)

Essay: Not an upgrade, an upheaval (2009)

Talk at Nieman Foundation: (watch the video, please.) (2009)

Blog post: The Collapse of Complex Business Models (2010)

Blog Post: Why We Need the New News Environment to be Chaotic (2011)

YouTube: Interview with Jay Rosen (2009)

>Part One

>Part Two

>Part Three

>Part Four

>Part Five

Ted Talk: The Cognitive Surplus (2010)

Now that I think of it: I gave these links to “Lucas,” so he would get the most out of his visit. I doubt he read them. 

:{Post-script, Dec, 2011:

Actual hate mail, one of hundreds I have received in the same vein, showing the effects of the video’s editing to produce fake outrage.}:

:{John Hazelwood, 6detective4@gmail.com

to: [me]

date: Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 1:09 AM}:

I’ve just listened to a recording of you as an elitist journalist, a one percent-er if you will. What you are Rosen, is a poor excuse of a journalist and a prime example of why journalism has sunk to the pit most of you now occupy. Your comments on the tape remind me of a “jerk” who has no good explanation for themselves and can only rely on “smart ass” remarks.

Oh for the days of Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Walter Cronkite. You know, those journalist who the American people could trust. Not some snotty nose little boy who is just too full of himself.

Oh, and, Merry Christmas!!

>

===

nyt 1/30/10

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/us/politics/31landrieu.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

...The more you put yourself out there and you take those calculated risks,” he toldthe Web site CampusReform.org, which works to foster conservative activism on college campuses, “you’re actually going to get opportunities.”

Just days later, Mr. O’Keefe, 25, took his own advice, but did not get quite the opportunity he expected.

He and three other men — including a 24-year-old associate, Joseph Basel, who was interviewed alongside Mr. O’Keefe by the Web site — were arrested and charged with a federal felony, accused of seeking to tamper with the office telephone system of Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana. Two of them were impersonating repairmen in the senator’s New Orleans office and were caught after being asked for identification.

Mr. O’Keefe said Friday that the four men had been trying to determine whether Ms. Landrieu was avoiding constituent complaints about the Senate health care bill after her phone system was jammed in December. (Her office said no calls had been intentionally avoided.) On reflection, he said in a statement, “I could have used a different approach to this investigation.”

But that approach was precisely the kind that he and others have been perfecting for years, a kind of gonzo journalism or a conservative version of “Candid Camera.”

Those methods took root on college campuses in the latter half of George W. Bush’s presidency, fostered by a group of men and women in their late teens and early 20s with a taste for showmanship and a shared sense of political alienation — a sort of political reverse image of the left-wing Yippies of the 1960s. They studied leftist activism of years past as their prototype, looking to the tactics of Saul Alinsky, the Chicago community organizer who laid the framework for grass-roots activism in the ’60s, as well as those of gay rights and even Communist groups.

They held “affirmative action” bake sales with prices set based on the age and race of the buyer, posed as donors to Planned Parenthood seeking to contribute to the abortion of African-American fetuses only, and held a mock “Love Thy Prisoner” campaign to find American homes for Guantánamo inmates.

Mr. O’Keefe made his biggest national splash last year when he trained his secret camera on counselors with the liberal community group Acorn — eliciting advice on financing a brothel on videos that would threaten to become Acorn’s undoing.

He quickly became a cult hero among young conservatives who saw his work as groundbreaking and sought to emulate him.

Liberals have denounced his methods as dishonest, a form of entrapment, but national Republican leaders seized on them as revelatory, pressuring Congress into cutting Acorn’s financing.

Mr. O’Keefe produced his videos with a partner, Hannah Giles, who posed as a prostitute in them. Although he may be the most public face of this new approach, he is just one of a group of young conservatives who use political pranks and embarrassing recordings to upend what they view as overwhelming liberal biases on college campuses and in the culture at large.

The Path to New Orleans

In the incident in New Orleans, several of the group’s central players came together. They had met through a small community of conservative college newspaper editors that is fostered by advocacy organizations supported by old Republican families like the Coorses and Scaifes.

One of those arrested was Stan Dai, 24, a former editor in chief of the irreverent GW Patriot at George Washington University, where he published an anti-feminist article lampooning the play “The Vagina Monologues.” His version was called “The Penis Monologues.”

Another was Mr. Basel, 24, the co-founder of a conservative publication at the University of Minnesota, Morris, that features headlines like “Third World Countries Need Sweatshops” and “I Hate Che Guevara T-Shirts.”

The fourth was Robert Flanagan, 24, who did not know the others before roughly two weeks ago, his lawyer said, when Mr. O’Keefe gave a speech for the Pelican Institute for Public Policy, a libertarian organization in New Orleans for which Mr. Flanagan works a few hours a week. Until then, Mr. Flanagan, a star athlete and son of a federal prosecutor, had not been known by friends to be particularly provocative in his conservatism, though he had been sharply critical of Ms. Landrieu on the institute’s blog.

And then there was Ben Wetmore, 28, who was not arrested but who allowed Mr. Dai, Mr. O’Keefe and Mr. Basel to stay at his house in New Orleans this month. The authorities have not indicated that Mr. Wetmore, a Loyola law student, was connected to the incident at Ms. Landrieu’s office, but he has nonetheless played a vital role in Mr. O’Keefe’s career, as well as that of Mr. Basel and other activists.

Mr. Wetmore helped introduce many of the activists to one another and inspired them through his take on attention-grabbing tactics. His often behind-the-scenes role was detailed in a trail he left on the Internet, as well as in several interviews.

“Benjamin Wetmore: a mentor of mine; a genius,” Mr. O’Keefe said during an interview with The New York Times in September, after the Acorn videos were released. “He said, ‘Take on the politically correct crowd on campus, satirically.’ ”

Mr. O’Keefe declined several interview requests, and Mr. Wetmore responded to an e-mail message by sending photographs of Jayson Blair, a reporter for The New York Times who resigned after admitting to plagiarism and fabrication. Mr. Dai, Mr. Basel and Mr. Flanagan could not be reached for comment. (The four men arrested were freed on bail, awaiting a pretrial hearing.)

The partnership between Mr. O’Keefe and Mr. Wetmore appears to have started in earnest in 2004.

As a philosophy major at Rutgers University, Mr. O’Keefe came to believe that conservative-leaning students were being force-fed a diet of academic liberalism. As he put it at the time, they were “drowned in relativism, concepts of distributive justice and redistribution of wealth.”

He and some friends started an alternative conservative publication called The Centurion with $500 from the conservative Leadership Institute’s Balance in Media grant program, which was overseen at the time by Mr. Wetmore. The institute, founded in 1979, is based in Arlington, Va., and is best known for training campus conservatives to influence public policy.

Before joining the institute, Mr. Wetmore had established his own bona fides as a college provocateur at American University. He drew national attention after being arrested by the campus police and accused of breaking a prohibition against recording Tipper Goreduring a speech she gave there in 2002 and refusing to surrender the tape.

The arrest became a cause célèbre for First Amendment advocates and showcased what would become a standard technique of Mr. Wetmore and his cohort: taping classes, lectures and other campus events in the hopes of catching professors and others in moments of excessive political correctness or other embarrassments. He made headlines again roughly two years later when American University’s president, Benjamin Ladner, unsuccessfully tried to stop Mr. Wetmore from running the Web site BenLadner.com, which was devoted to criticizing him.

Campus pranks have a long tradition, but Mr. O’Keefe and Mr. Wetmore were “among the early users of putting multimedia content online for the conservative cause,” said Ryan Nichols, a grass-roots conservative activist and former colleague of both men at the Leadership Institute. “In that sense, they were pioneering.”

The group’s other main tactic, which Mr. O’Keefe has said was inspired by “Rules for Radicals,” Mr. Alinsky’s manifesto for left-wing organizing, was to caricature liberal political and social values by carrying them to outlandish extremes.

In the Times interview last September, Mr. O’Keefe credited Mr. Wetmore with giving him the idea for one of his most talked-about video farces, which continues to draw attention onYouTube: a campaign to rid a dining hall of Lucky Charms cereal, because it was offensive to Irish students.

In the video, Mr. O’Keefe quickly exhibited his absurdist improvisational style, telling a school official that the leprechaun on the cereal box appeared as “an Irish-American” who is “portrayed as a little green-cladded gnome or huckster.”

Making Waves

His first issue of The Centurion — with a mock New York Times front page with headlines like “Study Shows Mr. Bush Unfit for Presidency” — drew an immediate reaction, and a following.

“Everyone was like: ‘Whoa, what is this? Oh my goodness,’ ” said Gregory W. Levitsky, a friend and colleague of Mr. O’Keefe at The Centurion. Anthony Gioia, another former Rutgers student, said he joined the newspaper after seeing that first issue.

“Rutgers, like every university, is a very liberal institution, so we were a small group of friends trying to combat that atmosphere,” Mr. Gioia said. “The way we went about it was very provocative and made people take notice, and we won over a lot of people to our way of thinking.”

Mr. Gioia recalled discussions of “Rules for Radicals” and visits to the paper by Mr. Wetmore, whose motto was “Don’t complain about the media — be the media.”

But if The Centurion delighted fellow conservatives, it frequently left campus liberals flabbergasted. When it published an opinion article titled “The Inequality of Black History Month,” a student, Whitney Pennington, wrote in The Rutgers Daily Targum, “Honestly, in responding to this article, I do not even know where to begin.”

Tabitha Rice, who was in the College Democrats at Rutgers and who had numerous run-ins with Mr. O’Keefe, described him as “insufferable.”

“He always would do something that would get a rise, but he always knows how to work the system,” she said.

Around the same time, Mr. Wetmore wrote on his blog about a visit with another recipient of a Leadership Institute grant, Mr. Basel, who used the money to start his newspaper, The Counterweight.

Among Mr. Basel’s stunts was one in which he put up posters all over his campus in Minnesota that said “End Racism & Sexism Now: Kill All White Males.” The posters prompted such an outcry that he was asked to speak at a campus forum, where, according to two students, he asked why everyone could not use racial epithets the way black rappers do. Many black students walked out.

“His methods were kind of to create an uproar,” said Nate Giles, a former president of the black student union at the university. “That’s what was abrasive, not his actual points.”

After college, Mr. O’Keefe took a job with Mr. Wetmore at the Leadership Institute and began traveling the country to help students with their publications. He worked intensely, said Morton Blackwell, the institute’s founder, remaining dedicated to his own projects. But eventually the institute developed some discomfort with the approach.

“He wanted to do sting operations that would affect legislation; he made some calls which have been covered in the news media to Planned Parenthood,” Mr. Blackwell said. “That was beyond the scope of what we had hired him to do. We are an educational organization. We are not an activist organization.”

Mr. Blackwell said he offered Mr. O’Keefe the choice between pursuing activism or working for his organization, “and he said he was committed to the activism.”

In the end, Mr. O’Keefe’s Planned Parenthood campaign — in which some of the organization’s workers were recorded accepting donations from one of Mr. O’Keefe’s characters who said the money should go to abort only black fetuses — forced Planned Parenthood to apologize in multiple states, though officials also complained that some tapes were “heavily edited.”

Old Tactics, New Goals

The campaign caught the eye of Andrew Breitbart, a conservative Web publisher and a former editor of The Drudge Report. In an interview, he said he had admired the Planned Parenthood campaign but did not know who was behind it until Mr. O’Keefe approached him with the Acorn project.

Mr. Breitbart likened Mr. O’Keefe’s approach to that of Abbie Hoffman and Hunter S. Thompson. His business arrangement with Mr. O’Keefe to run the videos on his Big Government site is widely credited with giving them national exposure, and making Mr. O’Keefe a star of his movement.

By last fall, Mr. Wetmore seemed less involved in Mr. O’Keefe’s projects, apparently because he had moved to New Orleans to attend law school at Loyola University. Nonetheless, Mr. O’Keefe, Mr. Basel and Mr. Dai showed up in town a few months later.

Mr. O’Keefe had been invited to speak at a Pelican Institute luncheon on Jan. 21. The invitation had come about, said the institute’s president, Kevin Kane, because the institute had done its own investigations of Acorn, albeit of the more traditional kind.

The topic of the day was undercover video and new media, but Mr. O’Keefe made it clear to some who attended the luncheon that he had other, unspecified work to do in New Orleans.

Also at the luncheon was Mr. Flanagan, who had worked as an intern in the offices of several Republican members of Congress. He moved to New Orleans last year, putting in a few hours a week as a blogger for the Pelican Institute.

David Centofante, who was in a defense and strategic studies program with Mr. Flanagan at Missouri State University, said he received an e-mail message from Mr. Flanagan a couple of weeks ago.

“He said to me, ‘You know the guy O’Keefe who did the Acorn thing?’ ” Mr. Centofante said. “ ‘We’re working together on something kind of cool.’ ”

Things did not quite work out as planned.

Reporting was contributed by Cheryl Miller, Liz Robbins and Scott Shane.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 23, 2010

Several articles since September about the troubles of the community organizing groupAcorn referred incorrectly or imprecisely to one aspect of videotaped encounters between Acorn workers and two conservative activists that contributed to the group’s problems.

In the encounters, the activists posed as a prostitute and a pimp and discussed prostitution with the workers. But while footage shot away from the offices shows one activist, James O’Keefe, in a flamboyant pimp costume, there is no indication that he was wearing the costume while talking to the Acorn workers.

The errors occurred in articles on Sept. 16 and Sept. 19, 2009, and on Jan. 31 of this year. Because of an editing error, the mistake was repeated in an article in some copies on Saturday.

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