“Honestly, Steve.” Foval was losing patience. We waited anxiously to see if Foval would back out of the fraud he had insinuated just moments earlier. But his impatience proved to be strategic. He was trying to close the deal with a donor.
“He needs to step up and do the right thing for Voces,” said Foval.
Steve, say you’ll write the check, I mouthed.
On the question of voter fraud, Foval seemed to be putting us off. “We can have another conversation after the election’s over,” he said. But then, just when we least expected it, Foval dropped a bombshell, “He is doing that stuff, but he’s doing it in New York.” Bingo! Cesar Vargas was doing his “stuff” in New York. At its least incriminating, that “stuff” was orchestrated civil disobedience by noncitizens.
Banned from Twitter
With our Democracy Partners work largely in the can, we decided to check out Russ Feingold’s campaign for US Senate in Wisconsin. Scott Foval’s claims of voter fraud in the state made Wisconsin worth our attention.
We infiltrated on a couple of fronts, or at least tried to. Fresh from her success in Washington, Allison drove her white pickup to Madison, hoping to find a place in a Feingold campaign field office. Using her real first name and a slight variant on her last, she told the organizers she had done phone banking in her native Minnesota for Democratic governor Mark Dayton and Senator Al Franken.
As we later learned, the campaign was wary enough by now to vet Allison and could find no record of her name as spelled. Scouting around, staffers realized she was the same young woman who attempted to infiltrate the Clinton campaign in Iowa a year earlier. When Allison reported for work on Tuesday, August 16, they were likely recording her. The following quote appeared verbatim in Time magazine: “I really like, like, women’s health, the environment, that’s something that I’m passionate about.” She also talked about workers’ rights, adding, “People in Wisconsin have to fight for stuff like that, but Scott Walker has made it just so hard for them.”
On August 17, Sarah Lindstrom, volunteer coordinator, called Allison in for a meeting, saying, “We have a fun project for you.”1 On this occasion Allison was recording the Feingold people. Lindstrom turned the interview over to Josh Orton, a senior policy advisor, and his research director. Orton took the lead. He explained that the campaign was interested in finding people who could be put on special projects, not just on phone banking. He wanted to talk to Allison about one such project. Although her interrogators strained to seem normal, Allison found the interview “weird” from the beginning, and she was right.
After claiming one of the staff went to the University of Minnesota, he asked Allison outright, “Did you work with the College Republicans?”
“No,” she answered honestly.
Orton inquired about her name, her intentions, about whether she worked for the conservative organization Campus Reform. “Is that you?”
“I don’t know what you guys are trying to do,” Allison answered, knowing her days were numbered. “If there is a problem with me being here I can leave.”
“I’m just sort of curious what you were hoping to get from coming in here and misrepresenting yourself,” Orton persisted, “because signing under a false name on a nondisclosure it seems like you’ve maybe put yourself in some legal trouble here. So I’m just sort of curious what your intent was from coming here.”
“Yeah,” said Allison, “I’m not going to be answering any questions. If you want me to leave I’ll leave. If you want me to stay I’ll stay.”
“Can you tell us if you’re working for anyone in particular?”
“Not really going to answer any questions,” Allison answered, keeping her cool.
“Are you recording us?”
“Not really going to answer any questions.”
“Okay,” said Orton, “then we are going to ask you to leave and unfortunately prohibit you from coming back to the campaign.”
“Okay, sounds good. Thank you,” said Allison, who promptly got up and left. Creepier than need be, the research director followed Angela to her truck. Angela’s Madison days were over.
So proud were the “Russ for Wisconsin” people of their detective work, they immediately went to the media. The same day on which they burned Allison, Time ran a surprisingly detailed story headlined, “Democratic Senate Campaign Catches Conservative Infiltrator.”2 It was so sufficiently detailed, in fact, that reporter Zeke Miller had to have been in touch with the Feingold campaign before Orton talked to Allison.
Miller even reached out to Project Veritas before running the article. Our spokesman Stephen Gordon was appropriately evasive. “Regarding the person you named below, Project Veritas will neither provide nor confirm the identity of any of our undercover journalists, real or imagined,” Miller quoted Gordon as saying, and that is how the article closed. It must be nice, I thought, to have Time on your speed dial.
Unbeknownst to Miller or Orton, on the very same evening the Russ for Wisconsin people were doing their end zone dance in Madison, I was infiltrating a posh Russ for Wisconsin fund-raiser in Silicon Valley. This one was fun. Wearing a wig and glasses, I looked like a young Elton John or an older Justin Bieber, nerdy enough in any case to look like I belonged.
No fool, Feingold understood that you don’t get elected senator in Wisconsin advocating gun control. “What I do is I go with the majority view of the people of the state, which is very common sense,” he told his audience. Still, when asked by my colleague what Hillary Clinton would do about the Second Amendment, Feingold said without hesitation, “Well, there might be an executive order.”
Feingold’s straddling did not play all that well with his would-be donors. One of them, Leah Russin, told me, “He wants to be elected. He is from Wisconsin. I wanted him to be stronger. Nobody needs a frickin’ handgun.”3 Even host Amy Rao was less than pleased with Feingold’s ambivalence.
***
On October 12, we released our next video installment. This one focused on Wylie Mao. One of our journalists had caught up with Mao, a Hillary campaign field organizer, at a West Palm Beach bar. The topic of conversation was sexual misconduct within the Clinton campaign, sex being much in the news with the release a few days earlier of the infamous Access Hollywood tape that captured Donald Trump talking dirty. According to Billy Bush, the NBC host with whom Trump was speaking, neither he nor Trump knew they were being recorded. Releasing it anonymously was arguably illegal. The media seemed okay with that, but they have qualms with our tapes, which are all legally one-party consent.4
“I think the bar of acceptable conduct in this campaign is pretty low,” Mao told our journalist with a laugh. “To be fired, I would have to grab Emma’s ass twice, and she would have to complain about it. I would have to sexually harass someone.”5 Apparently, a single grab is acceptable.
In the same video, we showed Trevor LaFauci, a Hillary campaign coordinator in Florida, telling a Veritas journalist posing as a campaign worker that he would not report the worker’s ripping up of three voter registration forms “as long as you don’t make a habit of it.”
In the video we produced, I juxtaposed the sound-bite of Donald Trump saying “Grab them by the pussy” and Mao saying “Grab them by the ass twice.” When our video was released, Mao deleted his Twitter account. Always opportunistic, Laura Loomer, then with Project Veritas as a communications associate, sent out a spot-on tweet aimed right at his boss: “Looks like @WylieMao deleted his Twitter. @HillaryClinton taught him well. #VoterFraud #VoterID #SexualAssault @PVeritas_Action @HFA.”6
As Saul Alinsky reminded us, “Keep the pressure on.” We kept digging. We kept tweeting, and the audience kept growing.
First we found another clip in the hours of footage where Mao admitted, “I used to make fakes in high school. This is my work.” Then, with some help from J. Christian Adams at Election
Law Center, we identified the Federal Election Commission Form 3X report of receipts and disbursements showing that Mao was paid $1,249.95 by the Democratic Executive Committee of Florida for work done around August 30. This made him a paid employee. I made a screengrab of the disbursement form and sent a tweet with a link to the screenshot: “@Wylie Mao @HillaryClinton Staffer who likes talking abt grabbing ass; #VoterFraud is paid by Democratic Executive Committee of Florida.”7
We also tweeted, “Tomorrow our hidden cameras go inside a top donor fundraiser to see what a certain Senate candidate really thinks . . .”8 Then it happened. I went to log in to my Twitter account only to discover that I was locked out. “We have determined that you have violated the Twitter Rules, so you will need to wait some time before using Twitter again,” said the Twitter administrator. At the time I checked I was told that I could reuse Twitter in eleven hours and fifty-three minutes. Maybe. The administrator added a note, saying, “You may need to complete some additional tasks to resume using Twitter.”
Additional tasks? What was Twitter expecting? I wondered. Would I need to confess my thought crimes in the public square? Do a hundred hours of community service? Name names? I suspected that some select Twitter engineers were sitting in a room somewhere making political decisions, on their own or with help, about what should be allowed on the platform. Could it be the Wylie Mao content hit too close to home? A later investigation into Twitter would seem to confirm my suspicions.
This was not my first censorship rodeo. Facebook banned my account when I crossed the Rio Grande dressed like bin Laden. At the time, I alerted David Martosko of the Daily Mail, and he sent a strongly worded inquiry to Facebook headquarters. They restored my account within ninety seconds. I had a similar experience with the Planned Parenthood videos years earlier. When Planned Parenthood sent a “cease and desist” letter threatening to have me and Lila Rose jailed for filming them breaking the law, I forwarded the letter to Bill O’Reilly. He read it on air. The harassment ended. Sunshine works.
This time I would have to leverage the power of Twitter against itself. Without Twitter, there would be nowhere else to go. “If they boot us off this platform,” I told my chief of staff, “it’s game over for us.” In July 2016, Twitter permanently banned gay conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos for “inciting targeted abuse of individuals,” in this case, black Ghostbusters star, Leslie Jones.9 Milo had three hundred thousand followers at the time. Although he had said nothing racist, some of his followers had. In an election year, that was excuse enough for Twitter.
Hoping to avoid that fate, I promptly sent out a press release to the media: “Releasing hidden camera videos on a US Senator tomorrow inside a fundraiser. Twitter is trying to block our journalism. We’re too effective—and there are bombshells coming out all week.”10 I then asked my Twitter followers to contact Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and ask him why his people had chosen to block me at such a critical moment. That they did, sending at least twenty thousand tweets to Dorsey. We also sent an email blast to tens of thousands of people with an auto-tweet option that read as follows: “@jack Censoring speech violates your mission statement. Unlock @jamesokeefeiii’s account so he can SHARE HIS IDEAS #FreeJames.”11
A strange thing started to happen throughout the Twitterverse—people were literally sending hundreds of messages to the Twitter CEO. Some samples follow:
@WeStaywithTrump Use Hashtag #FreeJames and #FreeOKeefe to spread the word of Twitter’s censoring. This is getting ridiculous. Keep fighting for the USA.12
@Rightlyaligned And @Project_Veritas twitter account has been locked down by @jack WHY?? #FREEOKEEFE #Trump #TrumpTrain #MAGA #tcot13
@Jack Why do you continue to silence those you don’t agree with? #freeokeefe14
Even Fox contributor Guy Benson chipped in: “@Seriously, why was @jamesokeefeiii’s account suspended by Twitter? #FreeOkeefe.”15 The barbarians were at the social media gates, and the public outcry was enough to prompt Twitter engineers to seek a truce—but with terms. To save face, they insisted I remove the tweet about Wylie Mao and how much he made. If I pulled that information, Twitter would give me back my platform.
For posterity’s sake, I turned the camcorder on and recorded myself deleting the tweet. As soon as I did, up popped the message, “Thank you for addressing the issue. Your account is now available for use. To prevent future lockouts or account suspension, please review the Twitter Rules and help us maintain a safe environment for everyone on Twitter.”
I am not quite sure how tweeting public information about Mao’s payouts or his comments about “grabbing ass” threatened Twitter’s “safe environment.” Kathy Griffin, for instance, had no fear tweeting out the image of her holding Trump’s decapitated head. She had been sending outrageous tweets for years without consequence, like this 2009 tweet about Sarah Palin: “Oh, Palin, ur goin down so hard, you’d better just stay in Wasilla w ur retarded baby.”16
I also thanked my followers for making Twitter back down. Then, of course, I tweeted the video of me deleting the Mao tweet with the simple message, in full caps, “I’M BACK.”17 In short, we did a full Alinsky on Twitter. Twitter’s stated mission is “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.”18 We made its executives live up to that mission statement and then used the medium they had created to advertise their hypocrisy. Although the social media giants were all in the tank for Hillary, they were being hoisted on their own empty rhetoric.
The Feingold video that Twitter hoped to block was not earth-shaking, but it revealed what we already suspected—Democrats want your guns. The savvy ones, like Feingold, know the time is not yet right to say so, at least not in public. Nearly a million people saw the Feingold video, with a disproportionate amount of those in Wisconsin. Feingold lost his bid for a Senate seat by 3 percent. Hillary lost the state by 1 percent. The video may have made a little dent. For sure, we made a bigger dent in Wisconsin a few days later when we introduced key Wisconsin political operative Scott Foval to the voters of the Badger State. And this story is still not over.
Closing Up Shop
As the 2016 election approached, we had a plan, an unusual one. We were going to burn every single one of our undercover reporters at the same time, 1:00 p.m. EDT, October 14.
This is not the norm in intelligence work. We were not using cutouts the way intelligence agents who put their lives on the line do. In the language of that community, “a cutout is a mutually trusted intermediary, method or channel of communication that facilitates the exchange of information between agents. Cutouts usually know only the source and destination of the information to be transmitted, not the identities of any other persons involved in the espionage process.”1
In our case, however, all of our journalists could be connected through one giant introductory chain: Steve Packard, our consultant, to Charles Roth, our philanthropist, to Michael Carlson, our British overseas investor, to Angela Brandt, the philanthropist’s niece. If one person gets burned, they all go up in flames—or so we thought. As things turned out, our operation turned out to be complex enough that Robert Creamer failed to make the connections.
We contacted the Sinclair Broadcast Group, a large, Republican-friendly news organization. Sinclair was historically open to the stories we had been running in various states over the last several years, most recently the Feingold fund-raising story in Wisconsin. I met with one of their executives. They listened to our plan, reviewed our footage, and signed on to broadcast our work. Unlike the major media brass, they were not in bed with the Clintons. Satisfied with our work, the execs turned the job over to Circa Media, their investigative journalism arm.
At the appointed hour on D-Day, October 14, Circa reporter Raffi Williams and his crew planned to confront Creamer on a Washington street and ask him to comment on the record about what he had told us. To remind him, Williams had plent
y of video footage to show. Incorporating Circa’s encounter with Creamer and video highlights from our material, Sinclair was to release a video package on all of its news stations across America at noon on Monday, October 17. The stations would promo the package on the Sunday night news. Although the opposition dominated the national media, this plan would allow us to subvert that control through the use of local news nationwide.
We knew exactly where Creamer would be on October 17: the Tosca Ristorante on F Street in Washington. We knew because he would be meeting with our foreign investor, Michael Carlson, the British orthopedic surgeon with the posh accent that Roth recommended. That meeting would end at 1:00 p.m. Once confronted, we expected Creamer to make his staff aware of the bust. We wanted all of our operatives out of harm’s way when he did.
On October 14, a Clinton victory seemed imminent. A Reuters headline that day read, “Clinton Leads by 7 Points as Trump Faces Grope Claims.”2 Given that likelihood, Carlson’s plan to explore purchasing access in the incoming Clinton administration seemed credible. More immediately, Carlson wanted to get Creamer to take credit for the violence at Trump rallies. In the best of all worlds, Creamer would implicate Hillary in the planning of violence as well.
Creamer had already told us it was “the future president of the United States, Hillary Clinton, that wanted ducks on the ground.” We were hoping it was she who ordered thugs on the ground as well. We had even flirted with the idea of keeping the investigation going given how well our operatives had penetrated Democracy Partners, but time was getting precious.
After some innocuous chitchat, Creamer mentioned that he had run into Charles Roth. “I arranged for him to have a tour of something at noon,” said Creamer.
“What’s he doing, tour of what?” asked Carlson disingenuously.
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