American Pravda

by James O'Keefe

  Going Deep

  We immediately asked one of our best young journalists if she were willing to be Roth’s “niece.” It was a role that Allison Maass, aka “Pizza Girl,” was literally born to play. Allison is young, pretty, soft spoken, and has the killer instincts of a mafia hitman. Her nickname comes from her diet consisting of carbs, candy, and pizza.

  Graduating a year early from college, Allison is mature beyond her years. She is stoic, focused, and organized. I am still impressed by the places she was willing to go, the roles she was willing to play, and the obstacles she was able to overcome. When Creamer called Allison to see if she were willing to go to Cleveland, she was eager and ready. By volunteering to go, she would influence not only the future of Project Veritas but also the outcome of the 2016 election.

  We spotted Allison just a year earlier fighting the good fight at the University of Minnesota, located in a state that did not necessarily welcome her brand of fight. The publication she edited, the Minnesota Republic, like all other publications at that university, got its funding through an entity called the Student Service Fees Committee (SSFC). When Allison’s publication requested funding in 2015, the SSFC decided to review past issues and settled on a 2011 issue to feed its collective sense of outrage. The cover showed an Islamic terrorist, or a facsimile thereof, burning a copy of Allison’s publication and saying in both English and Arabic, “The Minnesota Republic: Terrorists Hate It.” In the future, the SSFC promised to monitor the publication “to ensure that any material that is produced with student fee funds does not compromise the cultural harmony of the campus.”1

  Instead of rolling over as expected, Allison fought back publicly. The Drudge Report picked up her story. One of our people spotted it, and we invited Allison to come interview with us at Project Veritas. We appreciated her commitment to the First Amendment, just about the only political litmus test we have here at PV, and we certainly liked her spunk.

  During her first summer as a full-time Project Veritas employee, Allison traveled around Iowa attending campaign events for Hillary Clinton. One day she was on the way to meet a Clinton campaign organizer for coffee when I called her from the office. A Time magazine reporter had phoned us to see what we knew about a young, blonde woman trying to infiltrate the Clinton campaign in Iowa. I was convinced he was talking about Allison, but I was not about to admit it. Still, I figured, if Time knew, the Clinton campaign surely knew. I needed to give Allison the heads up before she strolled into the lion’s den unknowing.

  We instructed Allison to continue on to the office and act as if nothing was out of the ordinary. When she arrived moments later, a whole crew of campaign workers was waiting for her. One of them, the woman she was supposed to meet, Sara Sterner, promptly took her outside to have a conversation.

  “I got news from my boss that you are not allowed in any Hillary for Iowa offices or events anymore because they had reports that you’ve been to other places trying to fool staff and stuff like that,” said Sterner almost apologetically. “So unfortunately you’re not allowed in any of the offices anymore.”2

  “Me?” said Allison innocently.

  “Yeah there are reports from other events like in Cedar Rapids and stuff. Yeah, so . . .”

  “I have no idea what that is,” added Allison, keeping her cool, but there was no way to talk herself out of this.

  “Thank you,” said Sterner, wrapping up the conversation. “Sorry about that.”

  This had to be nerve rattling, but Allison stayed in character the entire time. She played ignorant of the charges and indignant that they were made. Still, despite her best efforts, Allison was banned from the Iowa campaign. I am sure these Clinton staffers congratulated themselves for their shrewdness, but in that notoriously fragmented campaign, no one apparently kept their eyes on Allison. She would strike again, the next time much deeper into the campaign and very nearly to the White House.

  Wiser for the experience, Allison undertook a project on her own. Still just twenty-one, she looked the part of a college student, and she certainly remembered how to play one. The role she chose for herself was “snowflake.” What offended this particular snowflake, Allison decided, was the United States Constitution. Before she was through she captured on video university administrators shredding a copy of the Constitution to placate her and others freely denouncing the Constitution and the country it helps guide.

  Allison had proved she was ready for the next step. It was a big one. She was to be part of our team going deep into the Hillary Clinton campaign. Getting her in the front door was surprisingly easy. Our make-believe major donor Charles Roth III paved the way with Bob Creamer for his niece, “Angela Brandt,” to walk right in the front door.

  Upon arrival at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Angela Brandt connected with Creamer’s colleague Zulema Rodriguez. “Zully” was clearly one of the top ground organizers for the Democrats in Cleveland. The idea was to upstage and embarrass the Republicans at their Cleveland convention any way they could. Rodriguez told our journalist that this was no random effort. Everything was being coordinated at the national level.

  “I just had a call with the campaign [Hillary for America] and the DNC. Every day at one o’clock,” Rodriguez volunteered.3

  “Do you work for the campaign?” asked Allison/Angela.

  “I don’t work for the actual campaign,” said Rodriguez. “I work with Bob Creamer. We’re doing a contract with the DNC. I did the Las Vegas caucus with the campaign.”

  Rodriguez told Angela about some of the “involvement” she’d had. “So B and I did the Chicago Trump event where we shut down like all the, yeah. . . .” Rodriguez was boasting that she and her colleagues were part of the violent demonstrations in March 2016 that forced Trump to cancel a large political rally in Chicago due to security concerns.

  This was a big deal when it happened. According to the New York Times, “A large group opposing Mr. Trump merrily taunted the people entering the stadium with shouts of ‘Donald Trump has got to go’ and signs caricaturing Mr. Trump as a fascist with a Hitler mustache.”4 Par for the course, the media and Trump’s Republican opposition put the onus on the Trump camp for the disruption and subsequent cancellation. Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz and Governor John Kasich held Trump responsible “for the tenor of his rallies.” Said Cruz of Trump, “He affirmatively encourages violence.”5

  The major media reported the Chicago event as a spontaneous protest. We were learning that these protests were no more “spontaneous” than those outside the Benghazi consulate four years earlier. The hand of Bob Creamer seemed to be touching a lot of things. Rodriguez was corroborating the story we had first heard from Foval.

  “Oh and then we also did the Arizona one where we shut the highway down,” Rodriguez boasted to Angela. That was March 18, just a week after Chicago, when anti-Trump protesters shut down a major highway just outside of Phoenix in an attempt to stop Trump supporters from attending a campaign rally. This too got widespread press coverage and fueled the impression that Trump was inspiring disorder. The media inevitably covered the protesters sympathetically, far more so than they had the lawful and orderly Tea Party protests during Obama’s first term.

  “Is it hard to do that?” Angela asked, referring to the highway shutdown.

  “I mean I’ve done it before,” said Rodriguez casually.

  “So you know and you’re really good at it. Cool.”

  “You have to slow down the traffic,” Rodriguez explained. “And then I insisted on us being layers deep. So when the cops towed the first rows of cars there was still, people was still there. . . . So they kept having to tow cars. And they thought this first row and then it was like the second row didn’t move and the third row didn’t move.”

  “That’s awesome,” said Angela, thinking on her feet. “I guess I never think like who started that. It’
s just a group of people but there has to be someone planning.”

  “I always have a diversion,” said Rodriguez.

  “That’s so funny. Did you plan the diversion too?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s smart.”

  “Yeah always. Always got to have it.”

  Listening to the tape confirmed our suspicions. Again, we had actual testimony from the organizer of a “spontaneous” anti-Trump protest. Here she was admitting to our journalist that she helped plan major disruptions in Arizona and Illinois, the one leading to a well-publicized cancellation of a Trump event. And Rodriguez was no rogue operator. She worked for Creamer. He had a contract with the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign. The news stories we had all read about anti-Trump protests got just about everything wrong. And almost no one outside our office understood this.

  Angela did her job well. Her goal was to gain not only information but also the confidence of her new friends, most notably Rodriquez. She would need a good reference to get her deeper into Democracy Partners’ operation. Playing her role to its ultimate end, Angela actually joined in the protest at the Cleveland convention.

  My role in this investigation was new for me. I was used to being on the front lines, wearing a hidden camera. But for better or for worse, I was now being recognized too often. Although I occasionally did fieldwork using makeup and disguises, my “pimp” days were likely numbered. During the Democracy Partners campaign, I planned strategy, directed operations, and advised the journalists in the field. This work lacked the thrill of working undercover, but Project Veritas had evolved. As eager as I was to be one of the troops on the ground, my team kept reminding me that I was now the CO. Fortunately, we had built a solid team of journalists, production people, and managers.

  After the Republican convention in mid-July, we went several weeks without hearing from Creamer. In due time, we had Charles Roth III email Creamer and ask for another DC meeting. Creamer agreed, and this time he came with a proposal in hand as to how Roth might invest his money. None of his ideas were, on the face of things, illegal. The meeting lasted two hours, and it went well enough that Creamer felt comfortable inviting Roth’s niece to come work for him as an intern.

  The following day, Creamer had Roth meet with him and Brad Woodhouse, the president of Americans United for Change (AUFC), at Woodhouse’s office. At that time, Foval served under Woodhouse as national field director. In the meeting, Woodhouse was happy to talk about a subject that Creamer had raised the day before, “Donald Ducks.” Roth recorded everything.

  According to Woodhouse, the Democrats had an operative dress as a duck and show up at Trump and Pence rallies. At each rally, the duck called on Trump to release his tax returns. Since Trump refused to release the returns, the Democrats said he was “ducking.”

  “The key here is to have the visual, the costume and sign,” said Woodhouse. “We got so much shit for that [media] blast. Reporters thought it was silly, and reporters still think it’s silly. We are not talking to reporters. We are talking to voters.”6

  “And they love it,” added Creamer.

  “I tell you,” said Roth. “That’s a pretty clever idea, though, the duck.”

  Creamer weighed in, “Originally, we were going to do Uncle Sam, ‘I want you to release your tax returns.’ I agree it’s not as good. It’s a lot easier to execute.”

  Creamer then added the kicker: “In the end it was the candidate, Hillary Clinton, the future president of the United States, who wanted ducks on the ground. So by god we would get ducks on the ground.”

  “Oh she, so it’s her. Wow!” said Roth.

  “Don’t repeat that to anybody,” Creamer cautioned.

  Of course not, Bob. Not a soul, other than the 10 million or so on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. It was yet another great revelation and further proof of how connected Creamer and his shenanigans were to the Hillary Clinton campaign. Clinton and the DNC wanted their Donald to “duck” his taxes at Trump and Pence events. The direct involvement of the Clinton campaign and the DNC with Americans United for Change in this scheme smacked of illegally coordinated campaign expenditures.

  Federal campaign law experts told us specifically, “The ducks on the ground are likely ‘public communications’ for purposes of the law. It’s political activity opposing Trump paid for by Americans United for Change funds but controlled by Clinton/her campaign.”

  This was a violation of the law. Representatives of the Clinton campaign participated in daily conference calls with Creamer, AUFC managers, and their operatives. They were talking about where to send the duck and the “duck’s message.” The Democratic National Committee participated as well. This is not hearsay. Our people witnessed these calls. Donna Brazile, head of the DNC, would say in her tell-all, Hacks, “I watched O’Keefe’s video with a sinking heart, knowing this was something we could not fight back against, not really.”

  Scott Foval told Steve about the duck campaign: “We have to clear this with DNC, with Democratic National Committee. We have to clear which message we’re going to be targeting at which event, but they can insert into multiple events, now, through the end of the election on a continual, on a daily basis, but basically do a chase.” This chase, by the way, went “all the way across the country.”

  Foval and Creamer told our people that the DNC didn’t just help place Donald Duck at protests; they were in charge of the duck. For all their indiscretion, these guys really wanted to keep this a secret. They were undone by the cleverness of our journalists and the age-old tendency of most behind-the-scenes consultants to brag about their successes. Here is Creamer explaining how the whole process worked:

  Oh, the duck. The duck has to be an Americans United for Change entity. This has to do only with the problem between Donna Brazile and ABC, which is owned by Disney, because there was a trademark issue. That’s why. It’s really silly. We originally launched this duck because Hillary Clinton wants the duck. In any case, so she really wanted this duck figure doing this stuff, so that was fine. So we put all these ducks out there and got a lot of coverage. And Trump taxes. And then ABC/Disney went crazy because our original slogan was “Donald ducks his taxes,” releasing his tax returns. They said it was a trademark issue. It’s not, but anyway, Donna Brazile had a connection with them, and she didn’t want to get sued. So we switched the ownership of the duck to Americans United for Change, and now our signs say Trump ducks releasing his tax returns. And we haven’t had any more trouble.

  We beat the Wall Street Journal to this story. In a matter-of-fact article that got little traction, the Journal reported on September 8 that the DNC had cut ties with the duck.7 Formally, this was true, but behind the scenes the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign were still running the show and breaking federal campaign coordination laws in the process. Angela would later have this confirmed by Jenna Price, an assistant press secretary at the DNC.8

  “We kind of divvy up responsibilities. So sometimes it will be, like, campaign owned. So sometimes you will see that they advised something, or they are taking credit for things,” Price told Angela. “So, like, we aren’t taking credit for the duck anymore. That’s like, random ally groups. But it’s still something that we’re involved in.”

  Price explained her strategy: “We just have to be careful about these things, and the way we talk about them, and who knows about certain things; but you guys are [careful]. I trust that it will all be fine.” It was not going to be fine.

  By this time, Angela had accepted her internship at Democracy Partners and ingratiated herself with her new coworkers. This was a closely run thing. Angela started interning at Democracy Partners on September 21, 2016, just seven weeks before the election. The office where she worked sits in the heart of the Washington power complex, no more than a couple blocks from the White House. There it offers, or claims to, “cutting edge strategie
s for progressive values.”9

  Angela’s first day at the office was an anxious one. Before entering the building, she looked in to see if she would have to pass through a metal detector, a common screening tool in post–September 11 Washington. There was none. That was good. She was wearing a wire.

  There was, however, a security desk with a sign saying, “Visitors must sign in.” That was not so good. Angela had no “Angela Brandt” identification beyond a fake college ID. She decided to brazen it out. Dressed smartly in heels, black slacks, and a button-up blouse with black buttons—all the better to conceal a button camera—she walked crisply past the security guard and smiled as if she had walked past him a thousand times before. No one stopped her. She was in.

  Unlike many people in his position, Creamer did not hit on his female staff at least as far as Angela could tell. He was patient. He seemed more a mentor than a letch. He introduced her to the staff and made her feel welcome. As nice a guy as he seemed, Creamer had already served a prison sentence for illegally floating checks. According to USA Today, he “was accused of swindling nine financial institutions of at least $2.3 million while he ran a public interest group in the 1990s.”10 And now he made his living plotting dirty tricks to use against Donald Trump. That is what Angela had come to capture. She would follow a useful Veritas rule: In the digital era, tape is cheap. In fact, there is no literal “tape,” so keep recording all the time, as long as it is legal to do so.

  Legal it was, every minute. People find it easy to talk to Angela. Creamer was no exception. At the end of the workday, he liked to unwind and tell stories out of school. She knew she was getting good stuff. Her one anxiety now, the one anxiety all of us at Project Veritas have felt at some point, was the fear of equipment failure, the fear that pearls were being dropped and she was missing them.