“Oh, he wanted to see Media Matters,” said Creamer, “which is an organization here. Apparently his significant other is particularly fond of, and I think was a spousal political requirement, that he . . . so he can go back and say, ‘I went by there and saw it was great.’ ”
At that very moment, thanks to Creamer’s intervention, Roth was indeed across town at Media Matters. There, on the sixth floor of that faceless glass and steel building, he was meeting with then president Bradley Beychok, a diminutive young redhead who favored orange-framed glasses. As Beychok and Roth toured the offices, Beychok discussed some hit pieces Media Matters was putting together on Donald Trump. Roth wanted to learn if Media Matters would be interested in a compromising photo of Trump from The Apprentice set that he hoped to see published.
At Media Matters, anything was possible. A month before this meeting, the founder of Media Matters and operator of Correct the Record super PAC, David Brock, had posted on Correct the Record’s website a request for damaging video or audio of Trump. As Brock noted, he was willing to “provide some compensation” for anyone who could provide useful footage.3 This move troubled even NBC. “Posting a bounty for dirt on a political opponent is highly unusual in modern politics and seems to cross a new line in the rules of war,” observed reporter Alex Seitz-Wald.4
In his conversation with Roth, Beychok showed he had the stuff to follow in the founder’s footstep, bragging about how he was able “to take [Trump’s] MVPs and put them on the sidelines.” The first notch on his belt was veteran Republican consultant Roger Stone. According to Beychok, Media Matters tracked every book appearance that Stone made. “We took everything that was crazy in his book,” he boasted, “and made sure that people knew it was sourced even in the crazy material.” To Beychok and his media allies, “crazy” was anything they disagreed with.
The Media Matters staffers parsed out Stone’s tweets by interest group and privately reached out to the networks to make sure their producers knew what groups Stone might possibly offend. “Hey,” Beychok claimed he told the networks, “are you aware you have had this guy on twelve times in the last four months and he said these three things?” Beychok succeeded in getting Stone banned even from Fox News.
While Roth moved in on Beychok, Carlson continued his discussion with Creamer back at Tosca. Creamer had a couple of inside guys who, presumably for a price, could help Carlson’s imaginary clients work out some of their problems. The first one Creamer suggested was “probably one of the best immigration lawyers in the country, for your Syrian guy.” Roth’s “Syrian guy” wanted to get out of Syria and into the United States. If anyone could make that happen, Creamer’s guy could: “And he is eager to talk to whoever, okay?”
Roth’s second overseas client had some trade issues that needed to be resolved. Creamer could take care of that as well. He had high-level lobbying friends who had worked with Speaker of the House Dick Gephardt and who were “wired up to a network of people.” Said Creamer, “They are all eager to talk to whoever you bring. So just have them be in touch.” When the conversation got around to Barack Obama, Creamer boasted, “I’ve known the president since he was a community organizer in Chicago.” He told Carlson he did a lot of work with the White House on issues such as immigration reform, the healthcare bill, and “trying to make America more like Britain when it comes to gun violence issues.”
Perhaps aware of the time crunch, Carlson did not press. As the hour wound down, he and Creamer mostly just gossiped about the Clinton campaign. At the appointed hour, he parted company with Creamer. Creamer headed down the sidewalk on F Street, looking dapper in his navy blazer, slightly buzzed from the red wine. Meanwhile, across town, after checking his watch, a disappointed Roth realized he did not have the time or opportunity to probe Beychok about the Trump photo.
At the moment Creamer headed down the street, Roth donned his shades and slipped out of Media Matters. At that same time, at the Democracy Partners office, Angela Brandt informed the secretary she was leaving and briskly walked out without explanation. There were no cutouts to protect their identities. Everyone had to get out of Dodge. No one was sure exactly what would happen next.
Curiously, our best source on what did happen was a lawsuit filed by Creamer in June 2017 against Project Veritas among others. According to the suit, as soon as Creamer and Carlson left the Tosca, a video crew from Circa Media accosted Creamer. Raffi Williams, the lead reporter, volunteered to show Creamer two video clips that we recorded of him, likely in conversation with Angela. Circa’s Raffi Williams knew to find Creamer at Tosca, the suit claims, because I had told Williams that Creamer would be there.
Later that day, Williams called Creamer and asked him to sit for an on-camera interview so he could respond to the videos. Williams apparently told Creamer that Project Veritas had provided his network with hundreds of hours of raw tape. He also told him that Sinclair agreed to syndicate four nightly news pieces on these videos beginning the following week. This was all fairly accurate.
Back at Project Veritas headquarters, we sat in the production room patiently waiting to see the outcome of how this plan played out. What we got instead was a call from Creamer’s assistant, a woman named Lauren Windsor, wanting to speak to Charles Roth. The call came into the cell phone of our executive producer, Joe Halderman. On a few occasions, Joe had played the role of Roth over the phone. This is why Windsor had his number. He picked up. Windsor told him there was an emergency involving his niece.
“I’m her uncle,” said Joe, genuinely concerned. “What is the emergency? Has she been hurt?”
Windsor hedged, “We believe she is involved in some sort of infiltration in our office.”
“Okay,” said Joe, “Like, I don’t understand.”
“I know,” said Windsor. “We don’t understand either, but she has left the building and has a security keycard to our office. We believe she was surreptitiously recording events that were taking place in the office.”
When Joe asked why she might have done this, Windsor refused to say and pressed him on whether he had seen Angela. She wanted the Democracy Partners property returned and an “explanation for these activities.” Windsor’s tone hardened. She was obviously not worried about Angela’s well-being. She was worried about the well-being of Democracy Partners.
“This an emergency for our office,” she told Joe, “and I assure you that if we find sufficient evidence that she was involved in recording any of the partners or any activity in our office illegally there will be action.”
The call astonished us. We did not think Windsor was trying to bait us. The investigation was sufficiently complex and well played that Creamer seemed to be unaware there was no “Charles Roth III.” He must have thought Roth’s niece betrayed her poor Uncle Charles.
Spiking the News
The same evening we shut down our operation, Creamer agreed to meet Circa Media’s Raffi Williams at the DC law offices of KaiserDillon. At this meeting, Creamer and his attorney viewed roughly three hours of videos that showed recordings of Creamer, other Democracy Partners staff, and Aaron Black, as well as clients of Democracy Partners and Creamer’s Strategic Consulting Group. The Sinclair people had the video. It was their call.
Sinclair was to release a trailer Sunday night, followed at noon on Monday with a video package on campaign violence. Tuesday at noon Sinclair would release the voter-fraud package. We would follow these releases, of course, with an all-out blitz on social media. All weekend we had waited to see Sinclair’s packages and promo pieces. Nothing aired. We were less worried than we should have been. On Monday October 17, at 10:00 a.m., two hours before we were scheduled to go live with the first bombshell tape, I received a call from an executive at Sinclair.1 I took the call in the production room. I was sitting with Joe, our producer, and Fredy, our editor. We were assembling the storyboard for the first video.
“So
, here’s the state of play on Sinclair’s side, and it is what it is,” the executive said. From his tone I knew the news was not going to be good.
“We weren’t able to get the approval we need to go with these stories,” he continued, “certainly not today or tomorrow from what I’ve seen.” He conceded that our journalistic work was solid, but the decision was made above his head. “It’s funny,” he added. “We have Creamer in our offices right now. We’re interviewing him.”
Maybe it was the state of shock I was in, but I didn’t think “funny” was exactly the right word choice. According to the lawsuit, Creamer and his attorney were indeed meeting that Monday morning with Sinclair’s management at Sinclair headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. In the meeting, those present reviewed additional footage—no big deal—and “Creamer’s attorney discussed legal and factual issues relating to the videos”—big deal.
I had been running around all morning getting everything ready. The takeout breakfast I had grabbed on the way in sat cold on my desk, but it was not nearly as cold as the words from our executive friend. With two hours to go before launch, Sinclair had undone our entire strategy. The video package we expected to lead with was no more. A CBS veteran, Joe had been down this road before. His news instincts kicked in. While I was on the phone with the Sinclair executive, he put his hand on my shoulder. I put the phone on mute, frustrated that Joe was interrupting my call with the executive.
“What is it?”
Joe answered softly but intensely, “So fuck ’em. Let’s just get on with producing the story.”
“I’m on the phone,” I said. “I’m finishing the conversation with Sinclair. Just give me a second.”
Joe pointed to the other journalists in the room and to the clock and to Fredy who sat in front of a large monitor furiously assembling the story in the video timeline.
“Can you give us a second?” Joe said pointedly.
Yes, I could. I gave them the go-ahead. As I walked out of the room, the entire production team at Veritas frantically scrambled to put the finishing touches on this game-changing story much the way network crews do in movies like Broadcast News or in TV series like Newsroom. I genuinely believe our team is the best in the business.
We had already assembled the relevant undercover video selections. To that we had to add my introduction and explanatory narrative. We would put the package together ourselves and meet the noon deadline we had promised our followers. In that moment, my respect for my team increased tenfold.
After a quick pep talk, I headed back into my office to hear out Sinclair’s meandering rationalization for why its execs would not run our story. At the time, they really could not tell me or would not. I have a lot of respect for the Sinclair people, still do. They ventured further than any other media company would, but they blinked and spiked our story. I needed to find out why.
Breaking Through
By 2016, social media had matured, and we had much more control over the information flow. “Flow” here is the apt word. There were multiple streams in 2016—Twitter, Reddit, 4chan, Facebook—and together they had dramatically more power than social media had just four years earlier. On October 16, the day before our breakthrough videos were to be released, I tweeted, “T minus 24 hours. The way to defeat and overcome a corrupt and complacent media . . . is to become the media.”1
Our two most powerful videos in the “Rigging the Election” series were to drop on Monday and Tuesday of that week, October 17 and 18. The first of the two focused on the orchestration of violence at Trump rallies. The second focused on voter fraud. Each made ample use of our conversations with Scott Foval, Robert Creamer, and others.
Our principal conduit remained Twitter. The temporary Twitter ban five days earlier had, as Twitter execs should have figured, the opposite effect of what they intended. Sometimes things that you think are bad turn out to be a blessing. Once the ban was lifted, I was adding 10,000 followers a day. By October 17, I had 120,000 followers. I know. Kim Kardashian has more than 50 million followers, but no one checks @JamesOKeefeIII to see what I am wearing that evening. People follow me because they want real information they are not going to get elsewhere.
If the streams had strengthened since 2012, so had the dam holding them back. It bears repeating that for the first time in the broadcast era, the major media threw its collective weight shamelessly and unapologetically behind one candidate and against another. Not a single major newspaper in America endorsed Donald Trump. The news pages at Google, Yahoo!, and AOL—and these were seen by scores of millions of people every day—unmistakably slanted their news against Trump. So did every major magazine and every broadcast network, except Fox News, and Fox was chockablock with NeverTrumpers.
As I learned that very morning, even our would-be allies in the broadcast media were afraid of coming to our aid. It had been three and a half years since I had appeared on the editorial side of Fox News and more than six years since I appeared with Eric Shawn to explain my arrest in New Orleans. I had not appeared on the news side since.
Millions of Americans sensed the reluctance of the conservative media to break news. These people were looking for a dam-buster. Andrew Breitbart had that potential, but he died unexpectedly four years prior. His news organization prospered, but it had no public face. In 2016, in fact, there was only one person in America with the charisma, the face time, and the will to hammer away at that dam. I am convinced it was that will to power, more than any other factor, that made Donald Trump the Republican nominee. Who knew what he believed in?
One thing that had not changed in the last four years was the primal Veritas rule, the rule that had guided our destiny from the beginning: “Content is king.” On October 17, we had that content, the most damning content we had ever gathered, and the most potentially consequential. Near noon—the final editing was still in process—we were going to pour that content into the existing streams and see what happened. In the meantime, I wanted to make sure our allies were still on board.
I called Joel Pollak, the senior editor-at-large for Breitbart. He was out of the office for the next few days. Out of the office? Three weeks before the election? What? Someone reminded me that Pollak was an Orthodox Jew. October 17 and 18 were Sukkot, the Feast of the Tabernacles. I tried to contact Drudge. He was offline, probably asleep. As I did with Reddit’s AMA, I held up a whiteboard with my face and the time to assure him it was me. Drudge keeps odd hours. For all of his clout, he is the most elusive dude on the planet. He responds to no one I know. His responses often come in the form of updates to his website text thirty seconds after he receives a message from you. That is how he communicates.
I called Alexander Marlow, the Breitbart editor in chief, a Berkeley grad, younger than I am. I wanted to reassure myself that no one had threatened Breitbart. No one had. Marlow was still all in, just waiting for our video. Noon was approaching. Our guys were still uploading the video.
Breitbart would help, but we had to be our own destination. My guys assured me the website could handle the anticipated traffic. I paced around. “What would really suck bad,” I said to our fully engaged communications team, “is if the electricity went out, or if there was another ISIS attack.”
Noon came. We were still not up. Our followers were chomping at the proverbial bit. One guy who posted a tweet at 12:01 was demanding we let the corruption out of the bag. Just a minute behind schedule, and our guys were bitching. “Damn!” I said. “It’s much more fun to be the underdog.”
At 12:05 we launched. At about 12:10 the website crashed. “What’s going on?” I asked the tech guys who were huddling around a computer monitor. “We’re jammed,” one said. “We’ll give you an update in thirty seconds.” I couldn’t wait that long. “I need it now,” I said. Our business model depended on having a viable site. Yes, the video was running on YouTube. In fact, it was running crazy on YouTube, about a
hundred thousand views in the first five minutes, but that ad revenue went to YouTube, not to us. Plus, YouTube was not about to solicit donations on our behalf. I was going to send a link along with a personal email to Drudge, to Rush Limbaugh, to Hannity, and Gavin McInnes. I did not want to send them a YouTube link. Fortunately, our guys quickly got it fixed. Using NotePad, they wrote the code for that page by hand, inserted the YouTube embed script, and uploaded it to the website, greatly reducing the server load.
I called our contact at Salem Radio for reassurance. Lee Habeeb, Salem’s VP of content, is one of those many guys on the right who shreds the stereotypes. An Arab American, he graduated from the University of Virginia Law School, lives in Oxford, Mississippi, and has a daughter named Reagan. Go figure. Salem, Lee told me, was solid. Its news service provides content for some twenty-two hundred affiliates across the country, all of them Christian and/or conservative.
The Federal Communications Commission, Lee explained, was always eager to shut Salem down, but the company had learned to negotiate around it. The media companies most vulnerable, I was learning, were those that were publicly owned and traded, especially those that lacked a genuine mission. With these companies, the threat of a major lawsuit, an FCC action, or even a bluff from the Department of Justice could roil the markets and cost shareholders millions. Breitbart was not publicly traded. Nor was it subject to the FCC. Plus, like its founder, Breitbart had chutzpah. It was now our go-to site. I called Marlow back.
“We’re going to send you a link. You’ll get a shitload of traffic. You still good to go? You sure?” I paced around as I spoke, the nervous energy pushing me through the day.
Marlow was sure. He would build a story around the video and, if it was as solid as promised, give the story top billing. “The internet is our friend,” I told him, “the best friend we have.” This was uncharted territory.
American Pravda Page 17
