He continued, “It was a real bloodbath. Anybody who had union affiliation within the DNC felt pressure to do something, and at the time this was when blue dogs were trying to take over.” Foval saw himself as part of the anti–blue dog, pro-union coalition. “It was a real sad situation,” he elaborated, “because [the unions] had always been there for us, but then Clinton just enacted the first big round of fights.” As a result, according to Foval at least, America lost a lot of jobs, and the Democratic Party lost a lot of union support.
“It literally took the last twenty years for them to even sit at the table together again,” Foval told Steve. Given the “bitterness,” many union people, “the ones who got fucked over back then,” found their way to the Sanders camp. Explained Foval, “They’re like, ‘I will go this far, but I will not go this far for Hillary Clinton. Fuck Hillary Clinton.’ ”
Foval threw in some more inside baseball: “And then, of course, there’s the misogyny thing there too. So that combo of things is pretty hard to overcome. And here in particular there was a real, I would say, the unions in Chicago could have done a lot more to come up and support us back in ’10, but they stayed down there, most of them. There was a decision by the National Labor Council to not send a huge army of people here for activism because it would’ve actually added to Walker’s narrative that these powerful labor bosses were running Wisconsin. And that was, I think, a mistake.”
Steve was getting an education. With a hidden camera rolling, Steve asked Foval if it was possible to conceal the fact that the Chicago people were coming in to interfere in the election.
“Well that’s the thing,” said Foval. “You can’t keep that quiet when the license plates are in the parking lot at the hotels all over town. That’s just the way it is.”
Steve believed that Foval was getting sufficiently worked up that it might be time for him to spell out his surrogate voting scheme, the one that had popped into his head earlier in the day. When Steve started to explain the idea, Foval took it and ran with it.
“You do it under the foreclosed properties,” he said, “and they don’t get it until afterwards? Wow that’s dirty, I like it.”
Steve was in.
“You take that data, and you flip it out, and you give it to people, and you have people go vote in it—that’s brilliant. I love it.” Foval loved it so much he proceeded with a tutorial not only on how to get away with it but also on how to execute the scam on a grander scale.
“You can prove conspiracy if there’s a bus. If there are cars? It’s much harder to prove. . . . If there’s enough money, you have people drive their POVs. Or, you have them drive rentals.”
I had to look up POVs. That means personally owned vehicles. I guess when you are in the business of circumventing the law, you develop your own acronyms.
“With Wisconsin license plates!” Steve added.
“Absolutely. Well, you can’t have them with Wisconsin license plates because rentals here, most of them don’t have Wisconsin license plates. But there’s this thing called Used Car Auction. The titles belong to some unknown company—company cars. Cars come from one company. The paychecks come from another. There’s no bus involved. So you can’t prove that it’s en masse. So it doesn’t tip people off.”
This guy had apparently been around the block. He had tales to tell. He was our own human slot machine vomiting out a mint’s worth of pure coinage. Steve couldn’t believe it. Foval paused at one point and asked rhetorically, “The question is, when you get caught by a reporter, does that matter?” Excellent question. Foval would learn the answer just about six months later.
Foval kept spitting out those silver dollars. “So what you do,” he said, “is you implement the plan on a much bigger scale. You implement a massive change in state legislatures and in Congress. So you aim higher in your goals, and you implement it across every Republican-held state.”
But then came the real jackpot. Without naming names, Steve also told Foval about his imaginary philanthropist friend and client. Foval was on top of this. “I know pretty closely who’s advising your client on that. I work with that same person. There is somebody who hatches these ideas to people like him on an ongoing basis.”
Now, bear in mind, there was no client. Steve made him and the whole scheme up earlier that morning. But apparently there was someone in the Democratic hierarchy who actually conceived schemes like the one Steve imagined. He definitely wanted to meet this guy.
“Who is he?” Steve asked. This is when we learned about Democracy Partners, the firm headed by Bob Creamer, a guy very high up in that hierarchy.
“So Bob Creamer comes up with a lot of these ideas. I work with Bob Creamer one-to-one all the time. I’m the white hat. Democracy Partners is kind of a dark hat. I will probably end up being a partner there at some point because our philosophy is actually the same.”
Foval had nothing but praise for Creamer. “Bob Creamer is diabolical,” gushed Foval, “and I love him for it. I have learned so much from that man over the last twenty years, I can’t even tell you. And he calls me to be his firefighter a lot of the time because there are people who in our movement will not do what it takes to get shit done.”
Obliging in ways we would not even anticipate, Foval laid out the organizational chart for us in a subsequent meeting with Steve. “The campaign pays DNC,” he told Steve. “DNC pays Democracy Partners. Democracy Partners pays the Foval Group. The Foval Group goes and executes the shit on the ground.”
Like Pulp Fiction’s Winston Wolfe, Foval was the guy who solved problems. “I’m the one they send when everything has gone to shit,” he bragged. “And so he spends a lot of time on the phone with my boss asking me to go places that I don’t wish to go. If I were not working for PFAW [People for the American Way] my pattern would be much more recognizable than in other places around the country. Every time you saw a national candidate, like either Cruz or Trump in Milwaukee, you’d be bombarded with Chicago antics.”
“In what way?” asked Steve, curious to know what exactly “Chicago antics” entailed. “What’s an example?”
Foval continued, “So one of the things we do is we stage very authentic grassroots protests right in their faces at their events. We infiltrate. And then we get it on tape. We train our people, and I work with a network of groups. We train them up on how to get themselves into a situation on tape, on camera, that we can use later.”
“So I probably know your work.”
“I know you do. Everybody does.”
This activity was called “bird-dogging,” a word with which we were about to become very familiar. Foval was letting us in on a very dark dirty secret about the campaign activities of the Democrats and Hillary Clinton, a secret about which very few people knew.
“You remember the Iowa State Fair thing where Scott Walker grabbed the sign out of the dude’s hand, and then the dude kind of gets roughed up right in front of the stage right there on camera?” Foval asked Steve.
“That was all us,” he continued. “The guy that got roughed up is my counterpart who works for Bob. We not only lent ourselves, we planted multiple people in that front area around him and in the back to make sure there wasn’t just an action that happened up front. There was also a reaction that happened out back. So the cameras, when they saw it, saw double angles of stuff like, they saw what happened up front, and they saw the reaction of people out back.”
Foval was boasting to our journalist that Democratic operatives were paying people to incite violence at Trump rallies and other Republican events. When we watched and listened to the undercover recording back at our office we were stunned. No one had reported anything about this. It was a shocking story, one that we needed to corroborate and ultimately expose. Foval wasn’t through yet.
“What I call it is ‘conflict engagement.’ Conflict engagement in the lines at Trump r
allies,” he told Steve, unwittingly killing his career. “We’re starting anarchy here. And [the mystery donor] needs to understand that we’re starting anarchy.”
Foval added, “I’m saying we have mentally ill people that we pay to do shit. Make no mistake. Over the last twenty years, I’ve paid off a few homeless guys to do some crazy stuff, and I’ve also taken them for dinner, and I’ve also made sure they had a hotel and a shower, and I put them in a program. Like, I’ve done that. But the reality is, a lot of people, especially, our union guys, a lot of union guys, they’ll do whateeeevvverrr you want. They’re rock ’n’ roll.”
Steve got back to his hotel around 1:00 a.m. totally pumped. He stayed up until 6:00 transcribing the footage. He had hit Triple 7s, all with flames, the jackpot. He could hardly believe what he was typing.
As fortuitous as it may have seemed, that meeting followed long months of planning and action. More than a year before the 2016 presidential election, the senior staff and several Project Veritas journalists met to brainstorm. The Clinton Foundation was a target we had contemplated for a long time. To sharpen our focus, we connected with Peter Schweizer, the award-winning investigative journalist who had written the controversial bestseller Clinton Cash. We hoped to capture on video what Schweizer had documented. With his help we had gamed out several scenarios to penetrate and investigate the Clinton Foundation.
The concept was fairly straightforward: we would have one of our people pose as a potentially major foreign donor to the foundation and also to the Center for American Progress. CAP is a liberal think tank and advocacy organization founded by John Podesta. The ultimate Washington insider, Podesta served as Bill Clinton’s chief of staff and as counselor to Barack Obama. In 2015, he emerged as chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Our plan was to approach both the Clinton Foundation and the Center for American Progress to see if either operation was willing to trade political access and favors in exchange for big donations. The hard part, we figured, would not be trading favors. The hard part would be getting our foot in the door.
We had a seriously good volunteer lined up to play the part of our high-dollar money man. In real life, “Michael Carlson” was a wealthy orthopedic surgeon from Atlanta. Better still, he hailed from England and had a posh British accent. As we conceived the plan, “Michael” would claim to represent several wealthy potential foreign investors. At the same time, we purchased three offshore companies. These would cast a believably ambiguous shade over our business practices and serve as a discreet conduit of funds if and when we decided to actually make a donation. We also created a number of shadow company websites and built an ironclad cover for Mr. Carlson that included a UK cell phone and a web address.
For all of our planning, we had little success. Given the election-year scrutiny, let alone a likely FBI investigation, the Clinton Foundation had tightened its controls and access. It soon became clear to us that the word had gone out to foundation staffers to be extremely careful. There would be no taking candy from strangers in 2016.
Working Our Way In
It was about this same time we were setting up our offshore companies that “Steve Packard” was discovering the wonderfully self-destructive Scott Foval in Milwaukee.
Without intending to have his family secrets broadcast—and thus the beauty of the hidden camera—Foval explained how voter fraud was not the myth the left claims it to be. We knew that. Over the years, Project Veritas has done numerous stories exposing voter fraud. Foval confirmed what we knew. Better still, he alerted us to the provocation of violence at Trump rallies and tipped his hand about his mentor, Bob Creamer of Democracy Partners, the “dark hat.”
Creamer is a long-time political organizer and strategist, and a well-connected one at that. He is married to Chicago-area congresswoman Jan Schakowsky and is very close to both the Obamas and the Clintons. According to visitor logs, Creamer made more than 340 trips to the White House during the Obama years, many of those meetings with the president in attendance.
Democracy Partners has advised just about every major player on the left side of the political arena, among them, the DNC, Nancy Pelosi, Wendy Davis, Jan Schakowsky, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Schumer, Howard Dean, Daily Kos, MoveOn.org, Media Matters, the NAACP, Planned Parenthood, the Brady Campaign, AFL-CIO, SEIU, the Bulgarian Association for Fair Elections, the Committee for Ukrainian Voters, the Democratic Party of Slovakia, as well as clients in Gaza, Hungary, Israel, Moldova, Nigeria, and Romania.
We would learn soon enough that Creamer had been contracted by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign to “assist” in the election. It would take some time, a $20,000 donation, and a ton of work before we would begin to understand what that “assistance” entailed. Eventually we discovered Creamer was personally advising Hillary Clinton, through his own admission. By October 2016, Foval had realized his dream and was working directly for Creamer. Before the campaign was through, that dream would turn nightmarish for both of them.
Shortly after Steve’s first meeting with Foval, we began to craft an alias for our new rich Democrat. The character we created was to be named “Charles Roth III.” One of our more seasoned and experienced undercover journalists was to play the role. The fellow was perfect for this investigation. A well-educated, well-spoken man in his fifties, he can talk to anyone, from a longshoreman on a dock to an heiress on a yacht. He works for us without pay. As I have discovered, the best undercover journalists are the ones whose motives are other than financial. In this case, neither “Charles Roth” nor our British overseas investor needed any money. They both did well in their careers, one as an engineer and the other as a doctor. We only paid expenses. True, “Charles Roth III” does fly first class, but how else would a guy like Roth fly? That perk helped protect his cover. A few weeks after their first meeting, Steve sent Foval an appropriately unctuous email:
Scott,
(Just to refresh we had drinks at Garfield’s 502 on election night.) Dude I owe you a huge debt of gratitude. In our Monday conference call I relayed all your advice (taking full credit—hope you don’t mind) on the “surrogate voters” project. I was predicting my senior colleagues were already ahead of us on thinking of those potential fires and coming up with ways around them, so it was a risk in the event I came off as patronizing but it turns out they hadn’t thought of ANY of it—the rental cars vs. buses, school surveillance cams, expanding to MI and IN, etc. So thanks to you, I—a junior consultant with two years experience at the firm—am getting mad respect at the office. Shit, I might even be asked to help handle the account, which would expedite a promotion overnight. So thank you thank you thank you.
Steve explained that he would love to talk to Creamer. “We seem to have similar sensibilities and ways of thinking,” he wrote and signed off: “Best, Steve Packard, Breakthrough Development Group, 323.457.5462 breakthroughdevgroup.com.”
We decided that Roth III would be a wealthy but reclusive Northern California real estate millionaire. In the way of backstory, Roth’s father emigrated from Hungary and made a fortune doing development deals in and around San Francisco. Many of these deals displaced the poor and minorities. As he grew older and wiser, this wealthy immigrant came to regret his actions and became a philanthropist, quietly helping liberal causes.
His son, Charles III, followed in the old man’s footsteps even more aggressively. He became an active donor to liberal causes and candidates, but of late had grown frustrated by the lack of results. Given the way his father displaced the poor, Charles III was particularly sensitive to the disenfranchisement of minorities by Republican voting laws. Convinced as he was “that both voter ID laws as well as a Donald Trump presidency are the death knell of the progressive movement,” Roth III was prepared to circumvent the laws that would lead to the lost votes.
Understandably, Foval wanted to talk to Roth on
the phone before he set up the meeting with Creamer. This was most likely a test to make sure our donor was the real deal. So in May 2016, Roth called Foval and pushed him to set up a meeting with Creamer. Before meeting, Creamer also wanted to talk with Roth on the phone. That call went well and led to discussion about a meeting. Creamer suggested either Washington or Chicago, but Roth pushed for Washington. Washington, you see, is a more legally friendly environment for one-person consent recordings than Chicago. Needless to say, Roth did not mention this.
The meeting took time to arrange, but in July Roth met Creamer in the lobby of a posh Washington Hotel. Roth recorded the conversation up close, but another one of our people recorded the meeting from across the room. The meeting lasted more than an hour, with Roth leading the way through the conversation. Roth promised money if he could be assured of real action in return. He wanted Creamer to spell out what form this action might take.
Creamer was cautious. He had good reason to be, having served six months in federal prison for check floating in the previous decade. As Foval later told Steve, Creamer was wary of the surrogate voter scheme, but if others were willing to execute the scheme, well, that was another thing.
Despite Creamer’s caution, the meeting with Roth went very well. Before the end of it Creamer was calling Roth “brother.” The two men agreed to meet soon, the next time over dinner and fine wine. The hook was set. About a week after the meeting, we sent Creamer a case of Pinot Noir from Oregon where our journalist—and Roth, of course—was living at the time.
Over the phone, Roth told Creamer he had a niece who was interested in politics and wanted to volunteer. He asked if Creamer knew of an operation that could use her services. That he did. Creamer got back to Roth immediately and suggested that Roth’s niece could help out at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. That seemed to me like a perfect place to get one’s feet wet.
American Pravda Page 12
