American Pravda

by James O'Keefe

  The life of an undercover journalist is, I repeat, not an easy one. Angela would work throughout the day and return after work alone to her Airbnb, there to review her footage and communicate with the office. Staying in character was hard enough during the workday. She did not want to jeopardize her mission by partying at night. Other journalists have lost their jobs at Project Veritas for doing that. A chance encounter with someone from her past could blow everything. In the morning she would take the Metro into the office, living the life not of a well-paid professional reporter but of an intern scraping by. Her daily movements had to reflect her assigned role. She was literally living out her character in America’s capital city much as Americans overseas did in Moscow during the Cold War.

  Angela disciplined herself to be the person Creamer thought she was. He liked that person well enough to take her with him when he visited the Democratic National Committee headquarters, a few blocks south of the Capitol. The last time operatives got caught stealthily entering the DNC headquarters, those headquarters were in the Watergate complex. Remember that kerfuffle? Having no interest in bringing comparable hell down on ourselves or the nation, we reminded all of our staff of a timeless Veritas rule: If busted, keep your mouth shut and get the hell out of Dodge. By this point, we trusted Angela to do just that.

  Never having been to the DNC offices, Angela did not know whether she would have to pass through a metal detector. This was not a question she could ask her colleagues in advance. So she prepared an evasive maneuver just in case. If she were compelled to go through screening, she would fake a phone call from her father, step outside to take it, and discreetly place her wire in her purse. That was the plan. She hoped she did not have use it.

  As she and Creamer approached the building, he, always the gentleman, opened the door for Angela. Her heart almost leapt out of her chest when she saw the metal detector, but she caught a break. The security guard saw Creamer enter behind her and waved them both on by. “It’s a lot of luck,” Angela would tell me, “a lot of maneuvering, knowing how to manipulate situations.” This was a reporter after my own heart.

  At the DNC, as at Democracy Partners, Angela did a whole lot of nothing—counting anti-Trump signs and looking for news items about Democracy Partners’ disruptive “Donald Duck” campaign—but she did her “nothing” steadily and conscientiously. Everything she did, she did for a purpose. She needed to be in the midst of the action, her camera always recording. As a fly on the wall, she was able to sit in on planning calls every day during which the DNC, the Hillary campaign, and other consultants like Creamer planned protests and events surrounding Trump rallies. She never knew when she would capture something worth sharing, even if it were just the Trump signs or a guy in a duck costume. By working her way into the target’s nerve center and staying vigilant, Angela was able to gather immeasurably more information than she could have from the outside looking in. And unlike the Watergate burglars, she did it legally.

  One day, Creamer explained to his wide-eyed intern how things worked. “At one o’clock we have our regular call,” he told her. “It’s our rapid response call. It’s about bracketing.” Creamer did not hesitate to tell Angela how “bracketing” worked.

  “It’s kind of a term of ours,” he said, now in his professorial mode. “Wherever Trump and Pence are going to be, we have events. And we have a whole team across the country that does that. Both consultants [like Foval] and people from the Democratic Party, and people from the Democratic apparatus, and people from the campaign, the Clinton campaign.” As to Creamer’s role, it was “to manage all of that.” That was the reason, he explained, for the daily phone calls, “seven days a week until the election.”

  Angela absorbed everything. In fact, she succeeded in establishing her cover almost too well. One Monday Creamer casually asked her what she was doing the next night, Tuesday. If free, he wondered if she might want to go with him to the White House for a roundtable discussion on the refugee crisis.

  The White House! OMG! Angela’s first thought was, Fuck, yeah! What intern would not jump at the chance to attend an after-hours event at the White House? If that intern were actually an undercover journalist investigating Democratic dirty tricks, this would be the invitation of a lifetime. Instinctively, Angela smiled and nodded her head.

  Almost instantly, however, her training kicked in. All of our reporters had learned they could not enter a federal building with a fake ID, let alone the White House. Angela knew all about our New Orleans misadventure. Needless to say, I drilled this story deep into our reporters’ heads. With Democrats still in control of the media and the deep state, we could not afford mistakes. “Don’t give them the opportunity to punish us,” I told our people. Angela learned the lesson well. Within seconds of being invited, her thought process switched from How do I get into the White House? to How do I get out of this invitation? It would not be easy.

  “Okay,” Angela told Creamer. “Let me just check my schedule.”

  “Great,” said Creamer. “Just send me your basic information—date of birth, social security number, city you were born in—you were born in the U.S., right?”

  “Yes, of course,” Angela laughed.

  “Okay, send me that info ASAP,” said Creamer as he walked down the hallway and disappeared into his office.

  “Sure thing,” said Angela, knowing that she could not. She also knew she needed guidance, and she wasn’t about to make a call from her office. With no time to squander, she headed across the street to Starbucks and sealed herself off in the ladies’ room. From there she called the Project Veritas office to review her options. Unable to reach my production supervisor Joe Halderman or me, she sent us an encrypted message explaining her dilemma. She then went back to her office and tried to stall for time. If pressed, she would say, “I have plans.” That wasn’t going to work. Creamer had just sent her an email: “Send me info for meeting ASAP.” In the meantime, I had sent her an email telling her to call us immediately.

  Angela rushed back to the stall in the Starbucks ladies’ room. This time, she got ahold of Joe. The best option, they decided, was to play sick. Back at the office, Angela made a show of trashing a half-eaten breakfast sandwich—couldn’t get it down. She walked back to Creamer’s office and found him on the phone. She knocked and entered.

  “Sorry,” she whispered, “should I come back?”

  Creamer put his hand over the speaker. “You need to send me that info.”

  “I will,” Angela said earnestly, “but I’m very sorry. I think I got food poisoning, and I need to leave.”

  “You’re sick,” said Creamer sympathetically. “Don’t worry about it. Go home.”

  Angela walked out of the office holding her breath and headed back to the Airbnb. She knew she would have to call in sick the next day as well. That was the day of the White House meeting. Getting sick on Monday established a more credible cover for missing Tuesday. The problem was she had to camp out in her Airbnb. She could not risk running into a coworker. It was a lonely two days, but the mission was still a go. Angela would be back on Wednesday to help save the nation. The relationship Uncle Charles had developed with Creamer was paying off in sound-bites.

  Pulling Back the Curtain

  One phrase that Angela heard over and over was “bird-dogging.” On one occasion, Angela asked Bob Creamer to define the term for her.

  “You’re trying to actually confront people,” Creamer answered. “It’s hard with Trump. It’s very hard.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the Secret Service and the way the structure is.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  “If you’re doing Pence it’s a little easier,” said Creamer. “The thing that makes the best television is of course the target, angry people. That’s great TV. Now, Trump you don’t . . . maybe you want to get people to do something in advance to cause proble
ms for him and . . . I guess these guys are the Dreamers. They’re just pros at this.”

  The “Dreamers”! Bingo!

  “What do you mean by Dreamers?” Angela asked innocently.

  “Dreamers are the category of people brought here as children, as immigrants,” said Creamer.

  Creamer did not mention that the Dreamers were brought here illegally as children. About a dozen years earlier, Democrats nationwide made the quiet decision to welcome illegal immigrants. This major turnabout went unreported. As late as 1995, Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, a black civil rights icon, reflected the Democratic position when she said, “Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave.”1 Twenty years later, a Republican who expressed the same sentiment would be branded a racist.

  Instead of deporting illegals, Democrats now focused on exploiting them, particularly their children. Obama elevated the children and young adults to “Dreamer” status, as in the American dream, and granted them a reprieve from deportation. As their first milestone on the path to citizenship, some Dreamers were serving as dirty tricksters for the Democratic Party.

  “So there’s like a specific group of Dreamers?” asked Angela.

  “Well there are organizations out there. And this guy Cesar Vargas is probably one of the . . .”

  “So, those are the guys that are the best at bird-dogging?” asked Angela.

  “Well,” answered Creamer, “this crew is spectacular at it.”

  When we checked the Podesta emails on WikiLeaks, we found references to the term “bird-dogging” to and from the major players in the Clinton campaign, campaign manager Robby Mook included.2

  This is where Cesar Vargas came into play. It was the first time we had heard the name. I kind of liked it, “Cesar Vargas.” The name had sort of a cinematic ring, like, say, “Keyser Söze,” the mysterious prince of darkness from the film The Usual Suspects. Ultimately we would get Vargas on tape too, and he had a thing or two to tell us about the ways to pull off voter fraud.

  “So the DNC doesn’t bring these people in?” Angela asked of the bird-doggers.

  “Somebody that does that kind of stuff,” said Creamer, “you don’t want them to be operatives of the DNC or of the campaigns.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s just not good optics.”

  Creamer believed the opposition or possibly the media would claim that the bird-doggers worked for the campaign. He believed bird-doggers would have “a lot more legitimacy” if they actually belonged to some Dreamer organization. I had asked Angela to get specific on this issue with Creamer and lock him down on the involvement of Hillary Clinton in all of these activities. The ever-curious Angela played her role perfectly.

  “So Hillary is aware of all the work that you guys do, I hope?” she asked.

  “Oh yeah,” said Creamer. “Yes. The campaign is fully in it.”

  “And then they tell Hillary what’s going on?”

  “I mean,” Creamer clarified. “Hillary knows through the chain of command what’s going on.”

  Angela was given access to one of Creamer’s colleagues, an operative who called himself “Aaron Black.” He described himself as “deputy rapid response director for the DNC for all things Trump on the ground.” A fortyish charter member of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the scruffily bearded Black specified that he directed the supposedly spontaneous protests at Trump and Pence events. His real name, we learned later, was Aaron Minter. I guess we were not the only ones using aliases.

  “No one is really supposed to know about me,” he told Angela.3 He took at least partial credit for shutting down the Chicago Trump rally in March. “That was us,” he boasted before qualifying his boast. “It was more [Creamer] than me, but none of this is supposed to come back to us.”

  Black’s reasoning was straightforward. “We want [the agitation] coming from people. We don’t want it to come from the party. So if we do a protest, and it’s a DNC protest, right away the press is going to say ‘partisan.’ ”

  In this campaign, the media were easily fooled because they wanted to be fooled. They chose to know no more than they had to. Black obliged them.

  “If I’m in there coordinating all the troops on the ground and sort of playing the field general, but [the activists] are the ones talking to the cameras, then it’s actually people,” said Black. “But if we send out press advisories with ‘DNC’ on them and ‘Clinton campaign,’ [the protest] doesn’t have that same effect.”

  The undercover camera had recorded evidence that the demonstrations were orchestrated. The party’s goal was to get news coverage suggesting they were spontaneous, a sign of the strong grassroots opposition to Trump. This was classic Soviet-style “agitprop,” consciously created agitation resulting in useful propaganda. As usual, the American Pravda enabled the agitprop by accepting the fiction as real. It was not. We had worked our way deep into the dark side of the Emerald City and now knew from Creamer’s own admission that the proverbial man behind the curtain was a woman.

  Counting Down

  Operatives Bob Creamer and Scott Foval were keen on our mysterious money man, Charles Roth III. They believed Roth was willing to pay for the mischief they hoped to continue right up until the election. The irony was beyond rich. They could all but smell the money Roth promised and convinced us in their eagerness that our investment would pay dividends.

  While Charles’s niece, Angela Brandt, was gathering information in Washington, Charles’s friend, Steve Packard, was continuing his conversations with Scott Foval. On one memorable occasion in Wisconsin, Foval explained the dynamics of provoking chaos.

  “If you’re there and you’re protesting and you do these actions, you will be attacked at Trump rallies,” he explained. “That’s what we know.”

  “So that’s part of the process?” asked Steve.

  “The whole point of it,” Foval answered. “We know Trump’s people will freak the fuck out. His security team will freak out. And his supporters will lose their shit.”

  Foval continued, “We are the primary mechanism as a team. Democracy Partners is the tip of the spear on that stuff.” He wasn’t through yet. He carried on as though he were a double agent and we were paying him by the word.

  “We have a clip deliverable that we have to deliver every day for our group of clients who are involved in this project,” said Foval. He mentioned several clients, including the Alliance for Retired Americans, which is part of the AFL-CIO. I suspect these retired Americans do not have a clue what their leadership is doing in their name.

  Foval continued, “And then there’s the DNC and the campaigns and Priorities [Priorities USA, Hillary’s super PAC]. Priorities are a big part of this too. The campaigns and DNC cannot go near Priorities, but I guaran-damn-tee you that the people who run the super PACs all talk to each other, and we and a few other people are the hubs of that communication.”

  “So you’re kind of like intermediaries between the super PACs and the DNC,” said Steve. “The DNC, they can’t talk to each other?”

  “We’re consultants, so we’re not the official,” responded Foval. “So those conversations can be had between consultants who are working for different parties. That’s why there’s Bob, who is the primary there, and I’m a sub to him, and I’m also a primary to AUFC separately.”

  “So there’s like a Morse code between the DNC and the super PACs?”

  “It’s less of a Morse code than it is a text conversation that never ends. It’s like that. It’s kind of like an ongoing Pony Express.”

  “Okay, so I mean that’s . . .”

  “It’s not as efficient as it could be but that’s because the law doesn’t allow it to [be]. The t
hing that we have to watch is making sure there is a double blind between the actual campaign and the actual DNC and what we’re doing. There’s a double blind there. So they can plausibly deny that they knew anything about it.”

  Foval shifted from strategic considerations to tactical ones. Good undercover that he is, Steve was all ears.

  “There’s a script of engagement,” Foval told him. “Sometimes the crazies bite, and sometimes the crazies don’t bite.” He elaborated, “They’re starting conversations in the line. Right? They’re not starting confrontations in the rally. Because once they’re inside the rally they’re under Secret Service’s control. The media will cover it no matter where it happens. The key is initiating the conflict by having leading conversations with people who are naturally psychotic. I mean, honestly, it is not hard to get some of these assholes to pop off. It is a matter of showing up, to want to get into the rally in ‘Planned Parenthood’ T-shirts or ‘Trump is a Nazi,’ you know. You can message to draw them out, and draw them to punch you.”

  Foval’s contemptuous view of Trump supporters as “psychotic” seems to be endemic on the left. He went on to boast about the extent of his network of operatives. We had no reason to disbelieve him then and still don’t.

  “So here, you have a schedule of events. We update this on an ongoing rolling basis every morning. These are all the Trump and Pence appearances. Tomorrow, for instance, we are turning out five hundred people in front of the Trump International in DC. We have to have people prepared to go wherever these events are, which means we have to have a central kind of agitator training. Now, we have a built-in group of people in New York who do this. We have a built-in group of people in DC who do this. We have a group of people in Vegas. We have a group of people in Colorado. We have a group of people in Minneapolis.”