American Pravda

by James O'Keefe

  When we heard this audio at our Project Veritas offices we quickly arranged for another one of our journalists, “Tyler,” to attend the planned protest at the Trump International on the following day. It was there that he ran into Aaron Black, Creamer’s attack dog. Black wanted to talk about Donald Ducks as well.

  “I wish I could tell you whose idea [the duck] was,” said Black.

  “That would be funny,” said Tyler.

  “It would shock you.”

  “Shock me? I’m sure nothing in American government can shock me anymore.”

  “Well, it wouldn’t shock you,” teased Black, “but it would definitely be front-page news.” Black was careful not to say who came up with the idea of Donald Ducks, but Bob Creamer had already confided to Charles Roth that the duck was Hillary’s brainchild.

  Remember Shirley Teter? She was the sixty-nine-year-old sufferer of COPD, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. According to numerous news stories at the time, she was “assaulted” at a September 2016 Trump rally in North Carolina by a Trump supporter named Richard Campbell. The media ran with her story for days with headlines such as this one from local station WLOS, “69-Year-Old Woman Allegedly Punched in Face by Trump Supporter outside NC Rally.”1

  In one of his subsequent conversations with Steve, Foval took credit for this particular bit of agitprop. “She was one of our activists, who had been trained up to bird-dog,” Foval said of Teter. “So the term ‘bird-dogging,’ you put people in the line, at the front, which means that they have to get there at six in the morning because they have to get in front at the rally. So that when Trump comes down the rope line, they’re the one asking him the question in front of the reporter, because they’re pre-placed there.”

  Undercover reporting can get at the truth in ways that conventional reporting simply cannot. We unraveled the Shirley Teter saga before the election. Only months after the election was this retraction added by WLOS, “Buncombe County court documents show the charge was dismissed through prosecutorial discretion, after consultation with the victim and review of the case. A lawyer for Richard Campbell tells News 13 that Mr. Campbell did not do anything illegal or offensive and the victim’s allegations were a hoax.”2

  Foval shared with Steve not only his strategies but also his prejudices.

  “So, I have to be really honest,” he told Steve on one occasion. “Iowa is a difficult case because it’s a fifty-fifty state, and honestly, half the state is racist as fuck.” This may come as news to Iowans, but not to Democrat activists. They know racism when they see it.

  As we counted down to November, Foval and Creamer started to get aggressive when it came to the donation they expected from Roth. “I can’t stress with you guys how badly they need that money,” Foval told Steve.

  Roth’s credibility got an unexpected boost from an unlikely source, Nancy Pelosi’s daughter, Christine, herself a Democratic strategist. As Foval related to Steve, he happened to tell Christine about Charles Roth. Pelosi claimed to know Charles and told Foval that Roth’s “boyfriend” had donated to her mother’s campaigns.

  “His boyfriend? I didn’t know Charles was gay,” Foval reportedly said to Pelosi.

  “Oh yeah, really gay.”

  Okay, here’s the irony. Our “Charles Roth” is, in real life, gay. How useful a coincidence was it that Nancy Pelosi had a major gay donor named “Charles Roth” with a boyfriend? This had to boost Foval’s confidence that our Charles Roth was a heavy hitter.

  We were not privy to the conversation, but I can imagine Foval going back to Creamer and sharing the Pelosi news about Roth, and Creamer saying, “Yea, I knew Roth was gay.” To strengthen his backstory, Roth had already told Creamer in some elaborate detail about his boyfriend in Portland. God does work in strange and mysterious ways.

  Always Be Closing

  To keep our investigation going, we made the tough decision to donate $20,000 from the Project Veritas bank account to Robert Creamer’s effort. We had determined that the potential benefits of this investigation outweighed the cost.

  “First thing, like I said, thank you for the proposal,” Roth told Creamer upon receiving a proposed plan of action. “And I’d like to get the $20,000 across to you. The second call I’m going to make here is to my money guy, and he’s going to get in touch with you and auto wire the funds to you.”1

  “Okay,” said Creamer, “we are running out of time as you know. So we need to do it quick.”

  “Also,” Roth elaborated, “there was [sic] some ideas that have been relayed to me from Steve that Scott [Foval] mentioned to him about Trump events, and I would like to talk about those events as well.”

  “Now, Trump events are fine,” Creamer responded. “I mean, frankly, I spend most of my time overseeing the Trump event rallies. I mean that’s what I do for the Clinton campaign. So that’s interesting as well.”

  From our offshore company in Belize, through a bank wire, we sent $20,000 to Americans United for Change per instructions from Creamer. Creamer was prompt in providing the necessary information. After the money changed hands, we pressed Foval and Creamer to introduce us to their vote harvester. The donation certainly greased the wheels.

  “It’s this guy, Cesar Vargas is his name. So Bob is really good friends with him and talked to him this afternoon,” Foval told Steve. We learned Vargas was a New York lawyer, the cofounder of the Dream Action Coalition, and a “Dreamer” himself. Only in the Democratic Party could an illegal alien achieve such heights without disguising his illegality. Vargas apparently had known Creamer for years.2

  After much back-and-forth with Foval, Steve was able to schedule a meeting with Vargas in New York City. Hoping to learn what, if any, fraudulent activities Vargas was orchestrating, Steve made it clear he was there to discuss voter fraud. He told Vargas that his benefactor, Charles Roth, was prepared to invest thousands to buy some votes. Steve also explained his surrogate voter plan to Vargas.

  The idea, said Steve, was “getting a bunch of people on a bus, taking them around the country. They legally can vote. So they can vote. At the same time, they’re also getting work permits under a different name, and, again, voting again on behalf of people who cannot vote.”3

  Vargas thought it too late in the 2016 cycle to pull off the surrogate plan. The future held more promise. “We can definitely work on that,” said Vargas of the 2018 midterms. From his perspective, a lot depended on who got elected.

  “If it’s Donald Trump,” said Vargas, “[the surrogate plan] even makes more sense. The issue will be more credible, and it’ll give us more opportunity to jump in there.” If Clinton were elected, “and the voter ID laws are losing, and we have much more opportunity to vote, and we have immigration reform, it’s not going to be as significant, right?” In other words, with Hillary as president, there would be an adequate supply of illegal immigrants and no ID laws to stop them from voting.

  “If we cross that bridge,” said Steve, “can I tell him that you’re the one who’s going to help us do that?”

  “Yeah, absolutely,” said Vargas. “I mean, count me in.”

  “And I assume you don’t go tell these conversations to anybody because this is technically illegal,” asked Steve.

  “No, no,” said Vargas, “absolutely, absolutely.” Not surprisingly, Vargas claims that our footage was heavily edited and that at no time did he agree to take part in voter fraud.

  Steve had done outstanding work with Foval and Vargas and indirectly with Creamer. We had one more job for him—to close the deal with Foval. The closer we got to the election, the tougher the assignment got and the tougher a taskmaster I became.

  Sometimes, I think, I can be a real pain in the ass. I don’t mean to be, but I have more experience doing undercover journalism than anyone just about anywhere. There is no textbook to which I can refer my staff, no field
manual. And as thoroughly as we prepare our people, we constantly face situations in which there is not a firm and fast precedent.

  Skilled as they are, our journalists do not always have the sense of urgency I might want them to have. They do not always say what I would want them to say. I have to remind myself they and I are exploring a brave new reportorial world. So much of what we do is improvisational that we rarely have the opportunity to talk strategy on the spot.

  As a general understanding, we try to get information out of the person with whom we are speaking without giving away the game. In this one particular case, we were trying to extract a key bit of data from the usually garrulous Scott Foval. Back in Wisconsin, he had told Steve about his conversation with Creamer in regard to Steve’s surrogate voter plan. The first “he” in the passage that follows refers to our imaginary donor, Charles Roth. “Bob” is Creamer. Here is what we recorded Scott Foval saying:

  Bob came back to me and asked me, “What is he [Roth] talking about?” I told him what we were talking about. He said, “I’m not gonna touch that with a ten-foot pole.” Now I go, “Nor should you, nor should you.” He goes, “Good, glad we’re on the same page there. However, other people can make things happen you don’t need to know about.”4

  Other people. Those were the magic words, the key to the next level of information. Guys in Foval’s line of work routinely speak in code. Their language is not easy to interpret. Creamer appeared to be telling Foval that such a project was doable, but that he, Creamer, had to keep his distance from it. That said, there were “other people” in the operation willing to execute Roth’s surrogate-voter scheme if the money was right.

  Steve did not believe Foval and Creamer were merely stringing Roth along. While Foval may have been reckless with his words, he was prudent with his time. He would not have met with Steve and his colleague unless he thought he could get more money out of Roth by coming up with a plan. The best way to sort through these possibilities was to discover who these “other people” were. We suspected one of them to be international man of mystery Cesar Vargas.

  On October 7, the phone rang in my office. It was Scott Foval calling for Steve. We were expecting the call. I yelled for Freddy, our production manager. He came in with a lav mic and a camera. Steve took the call. He and I huddled over the speakerphone on the coffee table.

  “How did things go with Cesar?” Foval asked.5

  “I really liked him,” Steve said. “So I really sold him, pushed him to Roth.” Then Steve talked about Roth and what he would like to invest in. He was trying to find out about these “other people” without being direct about it.

  “Are there any other folks who are willing to do that stuff?” he asked, “stuff” being the surrogate voter plan.

  “It’s too late to do anything but the field stuff now,” said Foval. “That’s the bottom line. We need to move. It’s too late.”

  “Scott,” said Steve, “there are folks out there who are into the civil disobedience strategies . . . like Cesar.”

  I wanted to tell Steve, “Get to the point about the other people, now.” Even though I was only feet away, I had no good way to communicate my thoughts without distracting him. I was hoping not to do that.

  “I’m more than happy to have those conversations, but we need to take care of Voces today,” said Foval, referring to Voces de la Frontera, a radical protest group. “You need to understand that. Civil disobedience? Voces has been doing that for the last seven years, since Obama has been elected. They are friends with Cesar. That’s part of the deal. They are the only people speaking the Spanish language in Wisconsin. It would provide a 7 percent swing.”

  If Hillary Clinton thought Wisconsin was already in her win column, Foval knew better. Here he was basically admitting that Voces had been engaged in civil disobedience for a long time and in a variety of ways. It was clear Foval wanted Roth’s money put into the Wisconsin operation and was trying to close Steve to get it. At the same time, Steve was trying to close Foval to get the information we needed about the “other people.”

  When undercover, our journalists are trained to never give targets a chance to say no. On the other hand, as W. C. Fields might have put it, “You can’t cheat an innocent man.” In this case, we knew Foval wasn’t innocent. We needed to draw him out. Give him what he wanted in order to keep driving toward the prize. I put the phone on mute.

  “Explain to them the civil disobedience about voting,” I whispered to Steve hurriedly. “Ask him what he meant by that. I will take care of the payment today. Tell me more about that.”

  In print, my words sound as if I were writing a telegram. At the time, I think they made sense. I took the phone off mute.

  “In terms of voting,” Steve stumbled, “in terms of enfranchising . . .”

  I quickly wrote on my MacBook in cap locks, we need suggestions on other people, and tapped on the screen almost loud enough to be heard on Foval’s end.

  “Steve, read the line,” I mouthed, “read the line, damn it.” I pointed to the massive font on my laptop. I could see the frustration in Steve’s face. He had a subject who was being evasive and a boss who was being overbearing. But we had to get Scott Foval to admit to us over encrypted messaging who specifically could help us commit voter fraud. In order to do that, we had to get him on record.

  did you get my wickr message? I typed. do you have wickr? what’s your username?

  Wickr is an instant messaging app that allows users to exchange encrypted messages that expire when either party wants them to. Foval had already admitted that Cesar Vargas was involved in civil disobedience. We needed to pursue that line of inquiry. But Foval was interested in the here and now and in Wisconsin.

  “Tell him the rubber meets the road, man,” said Foval referring to Roth. “If he really wants to do it, he needs to get his hands dirty.”

  Steve meandered as Foval explained that the campaign’s focus was GOTV—get out the vote. On my knees now, bowing up and down like a manic imam, I pleaded with Steve to get to the point. I thought, All you have to do is read the lines I am pointing to with my fingers! I could not understand why he wasn’t.

  I told you I could be a pain in the ass.

  Another of our journalists was curled up on the couch covering her face. She could not bear to see Steve flounder or me silently scream at him. She had developed a close kinship with Steve in the field. She wanted to escape the moment.

  “James, we can’t get them to say things,” she whispered to me.

  Yes and no, I thought. Our problem now was that we were not sticking to the script. We were not executing the way we needed to.

  “Civil disobedience doesn’t elect people,” said Foval as if he were dispensing some axiom for the ages.

  Yes, it does, I thought, if that disobedience takes the form of voter fraud.

  “I really don’t feel comfortable with Wickr,” added Foval.

  Ah, the irony, sucker, I thought. You are being recorded right now.

  “I don’t trust Wickr,” he continued.

  What? I wanted to laugh. Are you worried Russians will hack you on Wickr?

  “I’d prefer you just text me on my 202 number. This call is encrypted,” said Foval. He was growing wary, not for fear of being entrapped into a fraud rap but out of frustration with Steve’s ability to deliver more money now. We could hear audible sighs coming from Foval’s end of the line.

  “Look, Steve, here’s how you handle this. You call him up and you tell him to make the donation. As a senior consultant friend of yours, it’s time to tell your client he needs to do the right thing. I know he’s volatile but you need to handle him. You. Need. To. Handle. Him.” The “him,” of course, was Roth.

  I was at least satisfied that we were not blowing our cover. Scott just wanted the money.

  Come on Steve, I thought, ge
t to the damn point.

  Steve was stuttering, in part, I suspect, because I kept gesturing at the phone trying to get him to put it on mute. I needed to give him advice, but he kept speaking in circles, clarifying things that didn’t need to be clarified. I went to grab the phone from him, but he backed away.

  “I’m writing everything down so I can give him one final cri de coeur . . . so . . . I can sell him on this,” said Steve.

  Cri de coeur, I thought. What the hell is that?

  “So he . . . from what I . . . I really pushed Creamer, sold him, to my donor . . . and Roth is . . . he’s really fix . . . [laugh] . . . He seems to forget . . . fixations, about, about, the time limits of fraud before this election, saving for the midterms. Voces needs this right now, so I, I, told him he is a good ally for what Voces needs to do the thing for the midterm. So can Voces do my re-enfranchisement thing?”

  Steve sounded as if he just had a stroke. I was losing patience. I needed to meet a few objectives: make an offer for money, clarify the nature of the civil disobedience, and get suggestions on the others Foval may know. I typed out the message in big caps, got on my hands and knees like a dog, and pounded the computer screen so hard the image splattered into rainbows. In retrospect, I imagine I might have been making Steve a little nervous. You think?

  we need other suggestions on people. is there anybody else? I typed in caps large enough to be read from space.

  tell him you’ll write the damn check. i will take care of voces. tell me more about what they are currently doing on civil disobedience voting. vargas said they are doing it. what about the civil disobedience and i’ll give you the money.

  Maybe it was because I was now using multicolored fonts to get his attention, maybe it was because he just wanted to get me off his friggin’ back, but Steve snapped out of whatever stupor he was in.

  “I told him he is a good ally, possibly for, . . . so he wanted me to ask if you have any other suggestions so I can connect him with people?