This was powerful stuff, coming as it did from a Democratic election commissioner in New York who had obviously grown weary of the corruption he was supposed to ignore. “It’s absurd. There is a lot of fraud. Not just voter fraud, all kinds of fraud,” he sighed. “This is why I get more conservative as I get older.” If this commissioner was eager enough to share this information with a stranger at a Christmas party, imagine the info politicians have shared with friendly journalists they trusted enough to keep their mouths shut.
When we released the finished video in October 2016, the reaction was predictable. The New York Post and other conservative media reported the story. The liberal New York Daily News attacked it, and the New York Times ignored it. Completely. In the political back-and-forth that followed, the Times never once saw fit to mention Schulkin’s name.
Schulkin proved surprisingly resolute. He told the Post that Laura, bless her heart, “was like a nuisance,” one that he just tried to “placate.” Waffling a little, he allowed that he “should have said ‘potential fraud’ instead of ‘fraud,’ ” but he held his ground that strong voter ID laws were needed to curb fraud.2
Not surprisingly, in his weekly “Ask the Mayor” segment on WNYC three days later, de Blasio demanded that Schulkin resign. “That’s crazy,” de Blasio said of Schulkin’s assertions. “What he said was entirely inappropriate and unfair and absolutely the reverse of what someone should be saying on the Board of Elections. He should really step down.”3
As de Blasio saw things, the commissioner’s role was less to ensure an honest election than to generate turnout. “He’s supposed to be guaranteeing maximum voter participation and his statements and his values obviously indicate he’s not trying to do that,” railed de Blasio. “And to attack one of the things that has empowered people to participate which is IDNYC and to attack it falsely proves that he’s just not up for the role.”
In the Orwellian world of Democratic politics, an official gets taken to the woodshed not for lying, but for telling the truth, not for corrupting the electoral process, but for protecting it. To his credit, Schulkin refused to resign, saying the mayor didn’t “control” the board. Unfortunately, he underestimated the mayor’s reach.
When the terms of the five Democratic commissioners expired on December 31, the terms of the other four were renewed. Schulkin’s was not, at least not immediately.4 The reason, the Daily News insinuated in the opening sentence of an article on Schulkin’s seeming demise, was his having been “caught on tape making wild claims about voter fraud.”5 Now you would expect de Blasio to call Schulkin’s assertions “crazy.” He’s got a hide to protect. But for the Daily News to dismiss Schulkin’s claims as “wild” without a lick of investigation subverts the profession. And the Daily News is hardly unique in this regard. When alerted to the possibility of voter fraud, we often hear the media saying, “Where’s the proof?” I hear myself saying in response, “Look, damn it! That’s your job.” Happily, Schulkin somehow managed to keep his job. I hate to see people getting fired for being honest.
Former Wall Street Journal editorialist John Fund has taken voter fraud more seriously than most in the media. In 2012, he and former Federal Election Commission (FEC) member Hans von Spakovsky published Who’s Counting? How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk. Said the authors, and this I can verify from experience, “The campaign to deny the existence of voter fraud knows no bounds.”6 They cite one example after another of elected officials and unelected pundits dismissing concern about voter fraud as paranoid and probably racist to boot.
The fraud deniers have a lot to explain. Despite the unwillingness of the media and many local prosecutors to investigate, any number of actionable cases have surfaced in recent years. In 2011, for instance, a former city clerk in Troy, New York, pleaded guilty to corrupting an absentee ballot and turned in four of his colleagues guilty for the same. “Faking absentee ballots was a commonplace,” one of the defendants told authorities.7 In West Virginia, a former sheriff was convicted of producing more than one hundred fraudulent ballots. In Texas, the state attorney general has convicted more than fifty of his fellow citizens of voter fraud.8 The list is a long one, but you could drape the front of the New York Times with it and reporters would still find a way not to see.
The New York Times did not used to be so blind. In March 2001, for example, Times reporter Drummond Ayres led a story on voter fraud with this causal observation: “When it comes to American cities with a notorious history of election fraud, St. Louis can hold its own. Its political past is replete with instances in which people no longer alive got to vote, not to mention people who never lived.”9 Had Ayres written a sentence like that in 2016, his editors would have dispatched him to sensitivity camp. In the fifteen years that followed, the fraud did not go away, but honest reporting on fraud certainly did. Like most other major media, the Times had come to align its mission with the deep state’s. With a Hillary Clinton victory in 2016, that alignment would be complete. Pravda would rule, and truth would suffer the consequences.
Channeling Chicago
It doesn’t matter what the friggin’ legal and ethics people say, we need to win this motherfucker.
—Scott Foval, People for the American Way
I’m not suggesting we wait around. We need to start this shit right away.
—Bob Creamer, Democracy Partners1
The story that follows would prove to be the biggest in the history of Project Veritas. Yes, ACORN had been huge and without doubt put Veritas and me on the map. But the Democracy Partners investigation brought us a level of exposure and influence we dared not even hope for when we started the project. It has also allowed me to expand our operations from a handful of associates into something like an investigative army.
Political analysts say WikiLeaks, the Russians, and James Comey all played a role in getting Donald Trump elected the forty-fifth President of the United States of America. Those paying attention give a fair share of credit to Project Veritas. Were we as partisan as the New York Times? Not even close. Again, introducing information that a monolithic media establishment denies the American people makes us appear “partisan,” but that establishment indicted itself through its relentless suppression of contrary information.
Candidate Trump mentioned our investigation in the third and final presidential debate. On her campaign plane shortly after the first Democracy Partners story went viral, Hillary Clinton tensed up when asked by Fox News about our work. Of course, she dismissed us, but what else could she do? However reluctantly, every major news media platform from the New York Times to CBS to my old nemesis NPR had our stories front and center just weeks before the election. Some believe the campaign momentum really shifted on October 17, the day we released the first video in our “Rigging the Election” series. At least 5 million people were given a powerful incentive not to vote for the party that was corrupting the democratic process.
The breakthrough came in a small neighborhood bar in Milwaukee many months before the election. It resulted from a conversation between a Project Veritas journalist wearing a hidden camera and a political operative mouthing off. Few people had ever heard of Scott Foval before that encounter, but he was a key Democratic player, one of the top guys in Wisconsin. Soon enough he would become an internet sensation.
We had sent one of our most seasoned political journalists to Wisconsin a week before its primary in early April 2016. We assigned him the nom de guerre “Steve Packard.” A filmmaker from the San Francisco area, Steve came to my attention many years earlier after we released the first ACORN videos. In fact, he volunteered to shoot some background footage for the videos to follow.
As an undercover journalist, Steve has many virtues. First and foremost, he is smart. He knows the lingo of the left and all their little passions. Pushing thirty now, Steve looks like you’d expect a Californian filmmaker to look, cool and blon
dish, but he has the ability to “blend” almost anywhere. Before Wisconsin 2016, he had done investigations on voter fraud, common core, the Veterans Administration, and many more. When circumstances demanded, he could all but disappear into the woodwork.
We initially deployed Steve to Milwaukee to investigate suspicions of voter bribery. We had gotten wind of this from on-the-ground sources in previous elections. It was Steve’s ninth deployment to Wisconsin in five years, his most traveled state and far and away his most successful investigative venue.
The first night after Steve checked into his hotel, he touched base with us over the phone. “I always get something when I’m out here,” he told us. Seven days later, on the evening of the primary, he thought he might return home empty-handed, but then he ran into Foval, a gift who would keep on giving.
Steve had begun the week by volunteering at a community organization with the upbeat name YES—Youth Empowered in the Struggle. YES represented the youth division of a social justice operation called Voces de la Frontera. Steve and his new colleagues were trained to canvass neighborhoods for liberal politicians running in the primary, local and state.
In between activities, Steve saw a guy standing in the main Voces office futzing with his iPad. The fellow noticed Steve and said in a familiar tone, “Oh, hey man.” He apparently thought he had met Steve before. Considering Steve’s veteran status among the Wisconsin left, he may have, but Steve did not recognize Foval at this meeting. Their subsequent meeting later in the week would prove crucial.
Moments later Steve met Christine Neumann-Ortiz, a popular player in Milwaukee politics. He then accompanied a group into the bitter cold of inner-city Milwaukee to canvass. Although not quite at the level of, say, manning the line at a Chicago packinghouse, undercover work at Project Veritas can be unpleasant.
Steve’s priority was to find out which groups were doing the “knock-and-drag.” This was a practice as old as Chicago. It entailed driving through poor neighborhoods on Election Day and recruiting potential voters using whatever lures were necessary. The intel on previous elections was that knock-and-draggers were giving dragees twenty-five-dollar payments and miscellaneous swag in exchange for their votes.
On midterm Election Day in 2014, Steve had followed mysterious black vans around the city for hours hoping to record an exchange. One of his sources saw the vans being parked behind the Carpenters Union building after the polls closed. There, dozens of blue bags were unloaded from the trunks and deposited into pods large enough to hatch a new Democrat. That same night, the source followed one of these vans from the Carpenters Union all the way into Chicago. Neither the source nor Steve could be sure what was going on, but whatever it was, it appeared to be well organized. His sources had witnessed these strange machinations every election day for years. From our experience, the “Chicago way” of doing politics had pretty much become the “Democratic way.”
Over time Wisconsin became ground zero for Democratic anxiety. The very existence of union-thwarting Republican governor Scott Walker had driven the left nuts. Elected in 2010, Walker had unnerved the Democrats in 2011 by successfully passing legislation to limit the collective bargaining rights of state workers. The Democrats and their union allies promptly moved to recall Walker. In the January 2012 recall election Walker won by a bigger margin than he had in 2010, and he won again in 2014.
In the tumultuous year of 2011, Steve was on the ground in Wisconsin when fourteen Democratic state legislators fled the Capitol to deny a quorum for Walker’s budget repair bill. Where did they go? Where else? Chicago, the city where the dead go to vote. It was also the city where several generations of activists, including Barack Obama, learned the tactics of manipulation, intimidation, and fraud that have served the Democratic Party so well. In time, thanks to Steve’s effort, we would meet another community organizer from those same Chicago swamps who worked closely with Obama’s White House and was just a speed dial away from Hillary Clinton. He would have a lot to say.
Throughout primary week, Steve played the role of a young Democratic organizer. He knocked on hundreds of doors to make sure voters turned out for the presidential primary. If you had seen Steve in action, you would want to be his agent. The man can act. He infiltrated over half a dozen leftist groups, each one leading to another: YES, Voces, Occupy Wisconsin, Citizen Action, MICAH, SOPHIA, the local campaigns, and finally, on primary day, Wisconsin Jobs Now.
To this point, at least to the degree that anyone let Steve see, none of the canvassers had done anything illegal. Frustrated by his lack of useful video, Steve called us on primary day, April 5. He wanted to share his concerns and brainstorm some possible avenues of attack. We encourage our journalists to be innovative, and Steve was certainly that. During our conversation, he proposed an eleventh-hour gambit that popped into his head while we were speaking. It would prove enormously fruitful.
Although Wisconsin had made voting more accessible by extending the voting period, it recently passed one of those “racist” photo ID laws. Steve had read, or at least thought he had, that an employer-issued ID would work at the polls if it could be reinforced with a verification of residence such as a pay stub or utility bill. Steve conjured up a re-enfranchisement plan, one that offset the expected voter loss in the black community from the enforcement of the photo ID law. As Steve explained the rationale, the scheme would make sure that these precincts produced the number of votes Democrats counted on before the passage of the voter ID law—social justice with a wrinkle.
The compensatory votes would come largely from those with the most to lose in a Trump presidency—undocumented immigrants. Here is how it worked: A philanthropist friend of Steve’s would create a shell company that would hire scores of phony workers. The company would provide these “employees” with photo IDs and put their Wisconsin addresses on the stubs of their bogus paychecks. To secure those addresses, canvassers like Steve would compile a list of the abandoned apartments and houses they came across. The new employees would be activists, legal or otherwise, bused in to vote as needed.
This “surrogate voting” scheme might sound outlandish to the reader, but I sensed its potential to capture the hearts of the more imaginative Democratic operatives. I authorized Steve to run with it, and he did. Looking for the people most likely to appreciate the scheme, he worked his contacts to get in with Wisconsin Jobs Now. His contact there was an activist named Terri Williams. Among other words of wisdom, she casually acknowledged the reality of “knock-and-drag”—using that very phrase.
During that primary day, Steve rode around with the knock-and-drag crew in an Escalade. When he had the opportunity, he ran the surrogate voting scheme by a few of the crew and, although intrigued, they weren’t biting. After the polls closed, crew members invited Steve to join them at Garfield’s 502, a jazz and blues bar. As part of their training, our journalists learn that it is important to create friendly relationships with targets in order to be invited to more casual events. In settings like these, their new friends are more likely to open up, unaware, of course, that the conversation is being recorded on a button camera.
The first person Steve ran into was the guy he had seen back at the office early in the week. Here as there, the fellow was hunched over his iPad. He looked up and greeted Steve, introducing himself as Scott Foval, the deputy political director for People for the American Way, an organization founded by television producer Norman Lear in the 1980s as a challenge to the Moral Majority. John Podesta’s brother Tony was the founding president. Over the years, PFAW morphed into an activist anti-conservative action group. George Soros is a major donor, no surprise there.
Our journalist introduced himself as “Steve Packard,” a consultant for the “Breakthrough Development Group,” an all-purpose Potemkin company we had set up on the web some time back and had been nurturing ever since. Foval looked like a thousand other guys you might meet on the campaign trail, somewhat
shapeless, lightly bearded, bespectacled. If he had been to the gym in the last decade, it wasn’t obvious. He liked to talk, and Steve was prepared to listen and listen some more. That, my friends, is the essence of undercover reporting. Get in place, have a story, win friends and influence people. With Scott Foval, Steve didn’t have to do much talking.
Foval was a classic political operative of the genus Democrat—cocky, boastful, and more than a little squirrely. He and his new pal Steve commiserated about past Wisconsin elections. To push the conversation along, Steve went on an elaborate rant about voter ID, insisting that if “we” Democrats kept abiding by rules the Republicans made up, “we” were guaranteed to lose.
“I agree with you that we do have to start pulling out all the stops,” Foval affirmed. That said, he was wary about bringing in outside help.2 “There’s too much connective tissue down there,” he said.
“Down where?” Steve asked.
“Between the corridor between Chicago and here. It’s a pretty easy thing for Republicans to say, ‘Well they’re busing people in!’ ”
Foval now angrily addressed himself to some imaginary Republican, “Well you know what? We’ve been busing people in to deal with you fuckin’ assholes for fifty years and we’re not going to stop now. We’re just going to find a different way to do it.” Given Democrats’ indignant denials that any such thing was going on, or ever had gone on, this was bombshell testimony.
When Steve asked him more specifically what local Democrats had been doing for the last, say, twenty years, Foval served up an insider’s history of the organized left.
“So what happened was,” he explained, “there was a decision in the DNC to physically separate the operations of the labor unions. And that basically came under Bill Clinton. And I was at the DNC when it happened.” By “operations,” we presumed Foval meant the full range of electoral support, legal and otherwise, for which unions were historically responsible. As Foval explained later, he was particularly keen on their head-busting skills.
American Pravda Page 11
