I came in interested. Saw that it was a Project Veritas video and...
I had to google that to work out what it was all about. HMM
Project Veritas: how fake news prize went to rightwing group beloved by Trump
James O’Keefe’s organisation specialising in media stings received donations from Trump’s foundation but was caught red-handed peddling a false story
James O’Keefe, president of Project Veritas, refused to comment about his organisation’s apparent attempt to plant a fake story in the Washington Post. Photograph: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP
At the unusually late hour of 9.04am on Monday morning, Donald Trump marked his return to Washington after Thanksgiving by announcing a big new idea. There should be a contest, he
tweeted, to determine which media outlet should be awarded the “fake news trophy” for being “most dishonest, corrupt and/or distorted in its political coverage”.
Just hours later, the first winner of the president’s new medal emerged, though the trophy holder was not quite as he had expected. Instead of CNN or one of the TV networks that Trump frequently assails, the award for scurrilous and deceitful practice went to someone much closer to home.
On Monday afternoon,
Project Veritas, the discredited rightwing attack organization run by James O’Keefe that specializes in sting operations against liberal groups and the established media, was itself thoroughly exposed. The
Washington Post turned the spotlight that O’Keefe had tried to put on the newspaper back on him by disclosing a plot to dupe its reporters into publishing an entirely false story.
The fake account was peddled by a woman named Jaime Phillips who claimed to have had an abortion when she was 15 after sexual encounters with the Republican senatorial candidate in Alabama, Roy Moore. Post reporters did their due diligence, grew suspicious of her narrative, and later watched her walking into the Project Veritas offices in New York.
They also discovered a GoFundMe page under the name of Jaime Phillips in which she said she had accepted a job in New York “to work in the conservative media movement to combat the lies and deceit of the liberal MSM”. When these matters were put to O’Keefe in a filmed encounter, he
refused to answer questions about the apparent attempt to plant a fake story on the Post presumably intended to undermine the paper’s
earlier exposé of Moore’s alleged molestation of underage girls as young as 14.
O’Keefe’s outing as a duplicitous purveyor of fake news – and an
incompetent one at that – on the same day that Trump proposed his “fake news trophy” was profoundly ironic. All the more so, given the ties between the two men.
On 13 May 2015, a month before Trump launched his presidential campaign, his charitable foundation donated $10,000 to Project Veritas. This week
ThinkProgress spotted that the foundation’s
tax disclosure form for 2015 records a second payment of the same amount to the conservative group.
By then O’Keefe had already acquired a
criminal record – he was convicted in 2010 of entering federal property under false pretences. He had been attempting to sting the then Democratic senator from Louisiana, Mary Landrieu, but for his pains was rewarded with three years’ probation and a $1,500 fine.
The underhand tactics that Project Veritas adopted in its notorious takedown of the progressive network Acorn and that it later applied to media organisations has attracted growing condemnation from unexpected quarters. In 2011 Blaze, the rightwing outlet founded by Glenn Beck, investigated O’Keefe’s treatment of National Public Radio and
concluded that the editing of a secretly filmed video seemed “designed to intentionally lie or mislead about the material being presented”.
But that didn’t stop Trump donating $20,000 to the group four years later. Nor did it prevent the then Republican presidential nominee from
citing a Project Veritas video at his final debate with Hillary Clinton in October 2016, claiming it proved that Clinton and Barack Obama had hired thugs to cause violence at his campaign rallies.
