American Pravda

by James O'Keefe

  I heard back from Gavin McInnes. McInnes was born in England to Scottish parents and grew up in Canada. Somewhat of a libertarian bad boy and provocateur, he had cofounded VICE with Shane Smith and embraced the nickname “the godfather of hipsterdom.” The Gavin I know is a reckless, comic, creative genius with conservative tendencies and an incapacity to sugarcoat.

  When I first met Gavin a few years prior, he told me in the way of either a compliment or encouragement, “We need journalists with balls.” It was probably both. “You’re on a quest for truth in the age of media obfuscation,” he would tell me when I needed to hear it and make me laugh at things I knew I shouldn’t laugh at—like his own wicked self-description as “Wilford Brimley with AIDS.”

  Gavin had me on as a guest of his radio show just before noon. Now he had seen the video, and he was tweeting about it: “Biggest scoop of the election so far.”2 It was fitting such a moment occurred with him.

  Laura came up with the idea of taking some of the more damning quotes out of the first “Rigging” video and embedding them in their own individual tweets. There were some good ones. I favored Scott Foval’s anthemic, “It doesn’t matter what the friggin’ legal and ethics people say, we need to win this motherfucker.” The tweet quickly received six thousand retweets in the first few minutes. I had never seen such traffic. Yeah, we were chopping the video up, but I remembered what Andrew Breitbart told me: “I don’t care if they cannibalize content. It needs to get out there.”

  The actual video was about sixteen minutes long, or about fourteen minutes longer than most Americans were willing to watch anything online. A good thirty-second sound-bite could reach millions that the long-form video would not. The strategy worked better than we had planned. The retweets were burning up the internet.

  Since the first tweet worked so well, we embedded another quote from Foval: “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. Honestly, it is not hard to get some of these assholes to pop off.”

  This one netted seven thousand retweets, five thousand likes. The story was getting out! You could feel the energy on the tweet deck. All of this was happening days after Twitter executives decided to ban me, then reinstate me. We felt suddenly unstoppable. “Now we’re in business,” I told Laura. “Keep going. Awesome.”

  I heard back from a top executive at Sinclair. His tone was icy cold.

  “We’re not running it,” he said of the video package. “You should go forward with your plans for publishing it. We’re just not prepared to move forward at this point.”

  “You’re not prepared what?” I was trying to make sense out of what we were being told.

  “To move forward at this point.”

  “Is there a reason why?” I asked. I pushed the mute button while the executive struggled to come up with a plausible answer.

  “It sounds like a gun is pointed at his head,” said one of our guys during the pause. Metaphorically speaking, a gun was pointed at Sinclair’s head. Robert Creamer’s attorney was holding it.

  I needed some good news. I checked Drudge. We weren’t up yet. Drudge was probably still sleeping. I turned on Rush. He wasn’t talking about us either.

  About 1:18, a little crack appeared in the dam. Donald Trump Jr. retweeted the video. So did popular conservative commentator Michelle Malkin. We were getting fifty tweets a second now. I posted our stream on one side of the computer screen and Kim Kardashian’s on the other. We were outpacing her. This was historic. At about 1:30, Sean Hannity’s people called. They wanted us on his radio show. Only Rush Limbaugh has more listeners.

  Laura and I went over our talking points before the show began. One question we entertained was whether I should ask Sean on air why Fox News seemed to be blocking me. By the time I got on, we had not yet come to a conclusion. I took the call in my office. Sean had seen the video. He was impressed. He said on air that this was our “best work to date” and described me as someone who is “doing what the old media used to do.” Before the segment was over, I encouraged him—nicely—to get us on the air. He mentioned the lawyers and made no promises.

  I was beginning to feel like Al Pacino’s character Lowell Bergman in The Insider. I pulled the relevant clip up on my monitor and watched it while being recorded. I explained to the Project Veritas staff the similarities between our mission and Bergman’s. “Staff, it’s what you do right now that will matter for the future of journalism.”

  I played the clip to remind us of the risks we ran: “And Jeffrey Wigand, who’s out on a limb, does he go on television and tell the truth?” says Pacino as Bergman to the suits at CBS. “Yes. Is it newsworthy? Yes. Are we gonna air it? Of course not. Why? Because he’s not telling the truth? No. Because he is telling the truth. That’s why we’re not going to air it. And the more truth he tells, the worse it gets!”

  We tweeted the clip out with my commentary. The pace was picking up. I called Marlow back at Breitbart. “This is the best thing you’ve given us in years,” he told me. “It’s an absolute monster.” We were breaking Breitbart’s traffic record even without a link to Drudge.

  This was truly remarkable. Years earlier, when we released the story about obtaining Attorney General Eric Holder’s ballot, Breitbart’s Steve Bannon told me nothing much happened without a Drudge link. “The strategy is basically to get it on Drudge,” he confided. As political writer Mark Halperin observed with some accuracy, “Matt Drudge rules our world.”3

  Drudge was still silent. So was Rush Limbaugh. His three hours passed without a mention. “If not today, he will talk about it tomorrow,” I assured Laura. But it was now 3 p.m. The dam still held. I tried to remind myself that the story had only been alive for three hours, but in this era, three hours passed like three years.

  Just ten days earlier, when the Washington Post released the Trump/Billy Bush tape, the tape became the number-one story in the world within one hour. I believe the content of the “Rigging” videos was more relevant, possibly even more incriminating, but our media streams led to a dam. The Post stream led to an open sea.

  The Post, which helped create the dam, was indirectly involved in its most spectacular breach. The opening of this breach can be traced back to 1994 when reporter Michael Isikoff left the Post after a flare-up with his editors. The Washington Times reported Isikoff’s departure in a story headlined “Post Sex Story about Clinton Gets the Spike.”4 The sex story in question involved allegations made by Paula Jones in Arkansas that Bill Clinton, when governor, had exposed himself to her. Although Isikoff insists he left the Post for more complex reasons than the Times headline might suggest, the Jones story was at the heart of it.

  After leaving the Post, Isikoff went to work for Newsweek magazine, which was owned by the Post. In January 1998, history repeated itself and then some. Isikoff was about to break the story on Clinton’s seamy Oval Office affair with intern Monica Lewinsky when his editors, depending on whom you believe, either delayed it or spiked it.5 Unfortunately for Newsweek, the media landscape had shifted dramatically between 1994 and 1998. In 1994, only one in nine American households had internet access. By 1998 that number had tripled, and all major media had an online presence.6

  Then, too, in 1994 Matt Drudge was an unknown twenty-seven-year-old working as a manager at a CBS Studios gift shop in Los Angeles. Concerned about Matt’s lack of direction, his liberal father bought him a computer. A born aggregator of other people’s news, Drudge began sending out emails regarding gossip he had gleaned at CBS. He soon turned to politics, and in January 1998, the Drudge Report hit paydirt when someone gave Drudge Isikoff’s suppressed Newsweek story on Lewinsky. It was too hot, too powerful, too sexy for the dam to contain. The story made Matt Drudge, and he never slowed down. During the 2016 campaign, Drudge was getting as many as 1.5 billion page views a month.
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  Not surprisingly, the same publications that suppressed stories about Clinton’s accusers, allegedly for lack of corroboration, had no qualms about giving Trump’s accusers front-page coverage. The first of these women went public on October 13, just four days before our launch. She claimed that Trump groped her thirty-seven years earlier on an airliner. There were no witnesses, no video, no evidence. Who cared? Within hours, she received more major media attention than I had in my entire career. For all the power of the social media, we were still very much the David facing the major media Goliath.

  What made resistance even fiercer is that we were implicating Goliath in the story we were trying to break. Foval and the others incited violence at the Trump rallies for one reason only: the media would report the story the way the provocateurs wanted it reported. “When they’re outside the rally, the media will cover it no matter where it happens,” Scott Foval relayed conspiratorially to our undercover reporter in the first clip. No major media reporter would bother probing the roots of the violence, and no editor anywhere would want it known that Foval counted on this. America’s newsrooms were content with the story the way it had been told and sold. Our reporting would only subvert that narrative.

  Knowing all this only made me jumpy. I contacted everyone I could contact, worked on the next day’s voter-fraud videos, and monitored the social media. As the afternoon wore on, the dam showed little sign of cracking. My staff and I debated the wisdom of directing our social media followers to pound Fox News and demand they have me on. “Don’t burn this bridge yet,” one of my guys implored me.

  We decided to burn it anyhow. With nowhere else to turn, and much too dependent on social media accounts that could be suspended at any moment, we asked our followers to contact the Fox hosts and encourage them. It was time for them to shed their fears of Hillary and do the right thing.

  I had our cameraman film me at my desk. Looking straight into the lens, I implored our citizen audience to “tweet at the anchors at places like Fox News, @BretBaier, @MegynKelly, @OReillyFactor, @SeanHannity. Tweet this video at them with the hashtag ‘#Veritas.’ ” While our folks got busy on this, I did a quick radio interview with Simon Conway, a British radio host working out of Iowa’s monster WHO Radio. “The people of the country are pissed, and they have nowhere to go,” I told him, pacing while I talked. “You are seeing the collision of two monumental forces.” By this time, I could hear the anxiety in my own voice.

  More bad news. I had been scheduled to appear on Stuart Varney’s show on Fox Business. His people called and canceled. No reason given. We had been assured earlier that Fox Business played by different rules than Fox News—apparently not. Then some good news. James Golden called. A stocky black fellow who sports a variety of dashing chapeaus, Golden could show up at a CPAC convention and not merit a second look. Even if he introduced himself, few would take heed. If, however, Golden used his nom de radio during that introduction, everyone would want a piece of “Bo Snerdley.” The head producer for The Rush Limbaugh Show, Golden may be the most influential gatekeeper in the media.

  “James,” I sighed, “Fox News just booked me and canceled me.”

  “Un-fucking-real,” said Golden.

  “The video is everywhere,” I told him. “It’s got to break somewhere, I don’t know where.”

  Golden had some ideas, good ones. We proceeded to talk media strategy for nearly half an hour. He shared all his contact information, major and minor. That info was priceless. And yes, he promised, Rush would indeed talk about the videos tomorrow. Okay. We were making progress.

  As frustrating as the day was, I would be lying if I said I didn’t love the action. In ten years, I had never had a day quite like this. After a while, we all got kind of silly, including, apparently, Fox News. Several of our monitors had the channel on in the background.

  “Look at this,” one of our people said.

  Here we were, three weeks before the most critical election in anyone’s memory, and Fox was showing a segment called “Corgi vs. the Stairs.” This clip was lifted from the Instagram account “CobeetheCorgi.” The video showed a puppy trying and failing to get up the first step in a flight of stairs. This was immediately followed by a segment called “Feline Fun” in which two cats were playing patty-cake in slow motion. They were pretty good at it actually.

  The irony was palpable. These segments had less to do with journalism and more to do with business, efficiency, and economics, or as Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman put it, “a matter of cost.” Wrote the authors, “Taking information from sources that may be presumed credible reduces investigative expense, whereas material from sources that are not prima facie credible, or that will elicit criticism and threats, requires careful checking and costly research.”7 In short, CobeetheCorgi was a more economically useful source than Project Veritas.

  “Film the television, Get me in front of those cats playing patty-cake,” I told our guys. They did, and we embedded it in a tweet that read, “Greg Gutfeld, why are you showing cats playing patty-cake instead of airing our bombshell report”?8

  “Shame them all!” said Laura for the ages.

  Our followers sent thousands of tweets targeting these hosts, anchors, and producers. We needed all the help we could get. On the same day, on the same afternoon, as our “Rigging” videos were becoming the most trafficked video on YouTube, these corporate mainstream media outlets were refusing to air the story. Other than Fox News, they were not even considering running them.

  CNN’s Jake Tapper tweeted at 2:53, “Trump Slams election ‘rigged,’ offers no evidence.”9

  “Here’s Part 1 of the evidence,” I tweeted back to Tapper with a link to our “violence” video.10

  “Shame on them,” repeated Laura, my one-woman Greek chorus.

  Our tweets and posts kept contradicting a blithely complicit media. We were winning a war of words, but victory was bittersweet, sweet because it was just, bitter because the media had yet to acknowledge our attack, let alone their defeat.

  Our strategy of tweeting at the Fox anchors was getting under their skin. Brit Hume tweeted at 6:42, “James O’Keefe is beefing his latest video not being played on News Outlets. That’s because it needs to be checked out before being aired.”11 One of our followers fired back, “That’s never stopped you before Brit.”

  “The hell it hasn’t,” responded an irritated Hume. “Buddy you have no idea. Stuff pours in over the transom here all the time. It has to be checked out.”12

  “For the record,” I tweeted back at Hume, “I reached out to Fox News reporters a week ago willing to have them take a look at everything. I’m waiting for a call back.”13

  I tweeted Bret Baier, “Bret, what happened? The videos were going to air on multiple programs and @FoxNews canceled last minute. Why?”14

  “We are still investigating all elements of it and will update tomorrow,” Baier responded. “Thanks.”15

  “I’m having so much fun,” I enthused, and it was getting better. I knew in my heart the second-day video with Foval saying “We’ve been busing people in to deal with you fuckin’ assholes for fifty years” was so damning it might force reporters to cover it just so they could look in the mirror the next morning.

  Things were picking up. Mark Levin’s people called. They wanted me on his national radio show. Now. I was ready to go. Levin introduced me as a “brave young man.” I think “crazy” is perhaps more accurate than “brave,” but I’ll take a compliment where I can get one.

  “I’ve got a smoking-gun video of how they incite violence at Trump rallies,” I told Levin. “The grassroots are on fire, and I am trying to get this out on the major media.” He was all ears and fully supportive. There were no major cracks in the dam yet, but the pressure was building.

  Day had already turned to night, but our sky was brightening. Twitter could no longer ignore the traf
fic we were generating and finally listed us as “trending.” Up to that point, “Power Rangers” was trending with eight thousand tweets, but we had ten times that number and were not trending yet. Better still, Drudge had woken up, and there we were. In bright red. I hugged Stephen Gordon. “We’re doing it,” I said. “We’re doing it.”

  Before leaving for the night, I cut an up-to-date intro for part two of our series. This part on voter fraud was as powerful as the one on inciting violence. We were punching through. I could feel it, and I felt the overwhelming need to share that feeling. “You guys are watching history being made,” I told the production crew. They knew that without being told.

  That evening, Sean Hannity stepped up to the plate in a major way. He had his staff call Americans United for Change. He learned that Foval had been fired. For us, this was huge. Foval’s termination was inarguably news. At 8:05 p.m., I followed up with Hume. “Brit,” I tweeted, “now that they’ve fired the operative for inducing violence, you’re safe to report the fact he’s fired. It’s real.”16

  To their credit, Fox News anchors were talking about whether they were going to air the story. CNN was still mute, even on social media. Charlie Kirk, executive director of Turning Point USA, pointed out on Twitter that night, “Zero tweets from @CNN on the bombshell @JamesOKeefeIII story. Censorship. They want Clinton to win.”17

  The guy who gave Foval the axe was his boss at Americans United for Change, Brad Woodhouse. Unbeknownst to Woodhouse, he would soon be featured in one of our videos accepting a $20,000 donation from overseas. Woodhouse’s statement on Foval read in part, “[We] have always operated according to the highest ethical and legal standards.” To us this sounded like a punch line to a joke, knowing as we did Foval’s memorable declaration, “It doesn’t matter what the friggin’ legal and ethics people say, we need to win this motherfucker.”

  Then came a breakthrough. Overriding the lawyers at Fox News, as he would later tell me, Sean Hannity was showing our video on his TV show. Radio was great, but video was our game. To see is to experience on a much more visceral level than to hear. To keep the suits happy, Hannity threw in qualifiers such as “if true” and the like, but he punched the most significant hole in the dam to date.