After much back-and-forth, our case was assigned to Chief Judge Patti Saris. The setting was the federal courthouse in Boston. The building is impressive in a monstrous kind of way. It has a huge glass front that faces out over the Boston waterfront with spectacular views from the hallways outside of courtrooms. It looked awfully damn expensive to build.
Klein, a First Amendment advocate based in Virginia, was exactly the lawyer we needed to complement our attorney, Benjamin Barr. Klein’s free-speech work spanned the nation in cases big and small, from successfully challenging a yard sign ordinance in Wyoming to helping overturn the unconstitutional money-laundering conviction of former majority leader Tom DeLay in Texas. Klein viewed his work with us as cutting edge and took our case seriously.
Judge Saris, under her big mop of dark hair, looked like the kind of woman who would feel at home in seventeenth-century Boston. A Boston native and a federal judge for nearly twenty-five years, she would have to rule between our dueling motions. The AG’s office wanted to dismiss our case. We wanted an injunction against the Massachusetts law.
From the outset, Saris gave the state’s attorney, Ryan Ferch, a hard time. She questioned what PVA would have to do to get standing in the court. Perhaps, she said with a bit of a bite, PVA might draw up an affidavit saying, “I plan to use this news story and I plan to use this technique, and I am afraid?”
Ferch protested, “Journalism doesn’t give you a right to do journalism in any way and in any manner that they so choose.” Ferch’s interpretation of the law was as bizarre as his grammar.
“Have you seen these people?” Saris countered. “I mean, they do this. I mean, this is not just some—they’re pretty prominent in doing this.” In reading this again, my heart swells. That was the nicest thing a judge had ever said about our work. Saris got it. She recognized that we did our work carefully and methodically and had the successes to show for it. We were “prominent” in our field. Hell, we just about invented it.
History showed that there would be no shortage of worthwhile investigatory targets in the commonwealth. Massachusetts was effectively dominated by a single political party and had a justice system so politically tinged that it let at least one elected official abandon a young woman to drown and walk away unscathed.
If that was not enough, Billy Bulger presided over the Massachusetts senate during many of the same years his hit man brother Whitey presided over the commonwealth’s most lethal crime family. These were not the kind of public officials who welcomed a free flow of information. Left to their own devices, they would never roll out a red carpet for Veritas or any kind of undercover news-gatherer. “The irony is that the most corrupt states have these two-party consent laws,” I told a legal publication at the time. On reflection, I am not sure “irony” was the right word.
After putting Ferch in his place, Saris turned to Klein. He explained how our suit was intended not just for our benefit but for the benefit of “anyone within the commonwealth who seeks to record secretly.” Klein also addressed the impracticality of us submitting an affidavit to get approval for a sting in advance. News-gathering depends on serendipity, he told Saris. He shared with her how our Democracy Partners project—“10 million hits on YouTube between two videos”—got off the ground.
“That all began with a happenstance meeting in a bar in Wisconsin with a guy rambling to his heart’s content to the point where everybody around could hear him, and the PVA reporter was wearing a hidden recording device,” said Klein. “So this idea that PVA can lay out this game plan strikes me as just asking far too much.”
In Massachusetts, Klein continued, we would be prevented from doing this. If, to comply with the law, we told our subjects, “By the way, I’m recording this,” they would never open up to our journalists. Then Klein neatly summed up the rationale for our modus operandi.
“I think that those claims,” he told Saris of the boasts by Foval and others, “had they been written down, had they been recorded in any other form, would simply have been plausibly deniable and in fact incredible. There is a power to video, and audio in particular. There is a power to having truth; hence, the name Project Veritas.” Yes, exactly! This guy understood us.
When asked to sum up his position, Klein asserted once more, “Here we have an unequivocal ban on PVA’s activities.” That ban, he argued, should not be allowed to stand. In fact, he used the word “Kafkaesque”—one of my favorites—to describe how the current statute has been used to suppress free speech in Massachusetts. Kafkaesque or not, Judge Saris eventually decided the state law would stand and denied our injunction.
Project Veritas’s history shows the importance of undercover recording in exposing public corruption. Saris’s ruling assured that public corruption was safe from such exposure in Massachusetts.
The appeal in our case will not likely be heard in the immediate future. If need be, we will take the case to the Supreme Court. Happily, with some small help from Project Veritas, that court is more friendly to the Constitution than it might have been otherwise.
Freezing the “Anti-Fascist” Fascists
The first stirrings of the umbrella coalition known as “DisruptJ20” are a bit sketchy, but it is said to have come together in July 2016. The purpose of the organization was implicit in its name: disrupt the events of January 20, most notably the inauguration of the new president. Not surprisingly, the group lurked well off stage until after Donald Trump was elected, at which point it emerged from the wings to become downright fashionable.
DisruptJ20 went public with its intentions on November 11, Veteran’s Day, three days after the election. “The idea,” said self-described “glam anarchist” Legba Carrefour, was “to undermine Trump’s presidency from the get-go. There has been a lot of talk of peaceful transition of power as being a core element in a democracy and we want to reject that entirely and really undermine the peaceful transition.”1 Had a group made a similar declaration upon the election of Barack Obama every newsroom in America would have shuddered with outrage. DisruptJ20 stirred no such emotion.
The various police agencies—the FBI, Secret Service, DC municipal police—paid more attention than the media, but their ability to infiltrate groups such as this one was limited by the age, the visibility, and the general squareness of their respective agents. At one meeting, a so-called “Action Camp” staged at American University in Washington, a Veritas undercover spotted a couple of guys standing in the rear corner who might as well have been wearing “Blue Lives Matter” T-shirts. For one, they were the wrong age, late thirties. The protesters tended to be in their twenties or in their sixties, a generation meld that spoke to forty years of complacency between Nixon and Trump. Then, too, these guys dressed wrong—jeans, Merrell boots, flannel shirts with light pullovers. If they needed one more giveaway, it was their hastily grown beards.
One of the Disrupt organizers, Colin Dunn, a sober, thirtyish fellow with sandy hair and a respectable haircut, scoped these guys out within minutes. As soon as he made them, he walked right over to where they were standing, spoke to them for no more than fifteen seconds, and escorted them out of the room. They did not come back.
Our people fit the protester profile much better. When we started getting tips about the various actions DisruptJ20 was planning, we mobilized. I was particularly concerned about their rumored plans to shut down the wonderfully named DeploraBall. It was to be held at the National Press Club on the eve of the inauguration, and I expected to be there.
Infiltrating a group like DisruptJ20 is both harder and easier than it might seem. It is easier because our undercovers are typically young and well versed in the protest subculture. Plus, they usually don’t have much of a paper trail, more literally a cyber trail. It is harder for the same reason—they don’t have much of a cyber trail, which throws up red flags on background checks. They all, of course, establish a social media presence under t
heir assumed names—“Tyler Marshall,” say, or “Adam Stevens.” The presence includes Twitter, Facebook, and email at the least, but those who cared to check would see just how superficial the presence was. The question the DisruptJ20 leaders had to ask themselves was, how could a person be active in the protest community without a history? On top of that, our u/c’s left no Google crumbs leading anywhere. In the spy world, the wealth of social media outlets makes the absence of accounts all the more glaring.
It is not hard to create a web presence for a fake organization—we have created a few ourselves—but to create a credible online “legend” for an undercover with a new alias is a challenge. As a result, going undercover requires elaborate subterfuge. It also requires that the u/c appear confident enough to temper the suspicions of fellow protesters. In any case, he or she has to tread very carefully.
There is a quote often attributed to legendary Louisiana governor Huey Long that goes, “When Fascism comes to America, it will be called anti-Fascism!” Long could have predicted the names of the groups that rallied under the DisruptJ20 banner—Refuse Fascism, Smash Racism, DC Anti-Fascist Coalition, etc. For the record, “anti-fascism” as a movement has a long and distinctive pedigree. In the mid-to late 1930s, the Soviet propaganda arm, the Comintern, sought to coalesce various left-wing groups and parties worldwide. Since many of them were reluctant to be labeled “communist,” Soviet propagandists used the term “anti-fascist” to unite them in a broader “Popular Front.” The apparent goal in the 1930s was to stop Hitler. The apparent goal in 2017 was to stop Trump. The larger goal in both cases was to advance the progressive imperium. On a more personal level, activists then and now gained an identity and a sense of belonging.
In 1939, the Soviets and Nazis made life emotionally difficult for anti-fascists when they threw in together to divvy up Poland. If, however, the liberals with conscience were taken aback, the serious leftists kept pushing forward. The hardcore understood the Popular Front to be a propaganda fraud from the beginning. The hardcore radicals our reporters met were using Trump the way the Soviets used Hitler, namely to rally support for their progressive/anarchist agenda. As their conversations revealed, they resembled Hitler’s Brown Shirts much more closely than did the Trump supporters they tiresomely called “Nazis.”
After our people had attended some preliminary meetings around the country, we decided that a good place to make new friends would be at the anti-Trump protest at the early December 2016 Army-Navy game held in Baltimore. President-elect Trump was scheduled to attend. Four of our young male journalists attended, including “Adam” and “Tyler.” They met up with their fellow hundred or so protesters at McKeldin Square in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor on an overcast morning. There, they mingled. This was a good, open environment at which no one could screen them. From McKeldin Square they and their new pals marched down a busy Pratt Street to the M&T Bank Stadium, chanting along the way such welcoming slogans as, “No hate. No fear. Immigrants are welcome here” and “We reject the president-elect.” Once at the stadium, they marched around several times, still chanting, still mingling.
As a newly formed coalition, DisruptJ20 signed up many participants new to the organizers and new to each other. To pull off their planned actions on January 20, organizers needed bodies, the more the merrier. This need left the door open to our u/c’s, a number of whom were able to find their way into one or more of the coalition groups. In less than two months, they attended scores of meetings from coast to coast, shot tons of video, and recorded several key phone conversations. Time was obviously a factor here. We had to learn what kind of disruptions the Disrupt people planned and, ideally, to prevent any disruptions we could.
Through the contacts made at the Army-Navy march, the guys wangled an invite to a mass meeting the following day called a “spokescouncil”—anarchist talk for a council of representatives from the various radical subgroups. The meeting was held at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, a “welcoming, progressive, multicultural faith community.” According to its literature, St. Stephen’s provides space for “events that benefit our community.” DisruptJ20 was using that space to subvert the inauguration of the new president, violently if need be. How that would “benefit the community” was not clear, but looking at the church’s website, I had trouble imagining any progressive cause this “center of liturgical experimentation” would not embrace.
Three of our journalists attended the spokescouncil meeting. All that was asked of them was their email. They estimated at least a hundred or more people in attendance, virtually all of them white and millennial with a few old peaceniks thrown in to season the mix. Anarchy was in the air, not just in the speech-making but in the running of the show. Like so many of these events, organizers jostled with each other to assert power and establish agendas. Speakers talked about the need to shut down DC during the inauguration, but at this stage it was mostly just talk.
“Tyler,” a twenty-four-year-old southerner, arranged a meeting with a rough-edged organizer named Samantha Miller. They met one-on-one in a DC bar a few days after the spokescouncil meeting. At this meeting Tyler floated the idea that he had a rich relative who might want to invest in DisruptJ20’s activities. This struck Miller as sufficiently unusual that Tyler chose not to pursue the angle, but it likely left Miller a little suspicious.
A week after the spokescouncil meeting, Tyler was invited to a small meeting with three members of the DC Anti-Fascist Coalition at, of all places, the legendary Ping Pong Comet Pizza, the alleged—with all emphasis on “alleged”—mothership of the District’s left-wing pedophile ring. Two weeks earlier, a young nutjob from North Carolina came to the restaurant armed with an AR-15. He told friends he was “going to raid a pedo ring, possibly sacrificing the lives of a few for the lives of many.”2 He fired off a few rounds, but fortunately he did not shoot anyone. The activists held the meeting there with Tyler in solidarity with the owners.
Tyler was the first to arrive. “Scott Green” soon followed. They spoke mostly about music while they waited for the others. Green’s real name, we learned later, was Scott Charney, a “foreign policy expert,” or so his LinkedIn page would have one believe. Lean and bespectacled, Charney had let his hair grow in the not-too-distant past, presumably to look less like a wonk and more like an anarchist.
Charney could not match Luke Kuhn, the next to arrive, for authentic derangement. Wild-eyed and wild-haired, Kuhn reminded me of the Scorpio Killer that Clint Eastwood hunts down in Dirty Harry. Colin Dunn joined as well. The three of them crowded into a small booth with Tyler.
With a football game blaring behind them, the activists were able to speak in normal tones. Casual diners had no reason to suspect anything amiss unless, of course, they happened to overhear Kuhn’s gems such as, “We do not recognize the city government. If you try to close us down, we will look for your house, and we will burn it,” or “We will physically fight the police if they try to steal one of our places. We will go to war, and you will lose.”3
One subject of conversation was how best to disrupt the DeploraBall, which was to be held at the eleven-story National Press Club building in the center of Washington. The plan that seemed most feasible involved butyric acid, a highly disruptive kind of stink bomb.
Said Kuhn, “All you got to do is pull the pin, press the plunger, and the whole thing discharges.”
“If you get it into the HVAC system, it will get into the whole building,” said Dunn.
“The best possible location to get to it is the air intake grille of the entire HVAC,” added Kuhn, who sounded like he had done this before.
“You want to case the place?” asked Charney.
“I can do that,” Dunn volunteered.
“Yeah, if you had a pint of butyric acid, I don’t care how big the building is, it’s closing,” said Kuhn.
“And this stuff is very efficient. It’s very, ver
y smelly, lasts a long time, and a little goes a long way,” enthused Charney.
Rarely, I suspect, has a federal crime with a potential five-year prison sentence attached to it been discussed so blithely. These budding anti-fascists would later say they were just leading our reporters on. I don’t believe them, and neither did law enforcement. They just felt so snug in the broad embrace of the Popular Front circa 2017 that they carried on with seeming impunity. The conversation then turned to the sprinkler system.
“I’m trying to think through how to get all the sprinklers to go off at once. There’s usually a piece of like fusible metal or a piece of glass with liquid in it that will blow,” said Dunn. “I need to research and make sure that we can actually get them all triggered if we trigger one.” He then conjured up an “added benefit.” Said he, “Everybody is going to walk outside in the freezing cold.”
Disrupting the Disruption
Tyler soaked all the plans in and recorded the conversation on his button camera. A few days later, he left DC for a scheduled Christmas vacation with his family. He had, however, made an impression. People would remember him. At a subsequent meeting held at a private home in the Columbia Heights neighborhood near St. Stephen’s, Adam listened in awe as activists talked about Tyler. They were anticipating Tyler’s return from vacation. They had already integrated him into their plans.
The private home in question was the nesting place for the so-called “Love + Solidarity Collective.” According to its literature, the collective hosts an “open space discussion group” where issues—presumably like shutting down the inauguration—are discussed “in a welcoming and respectful way.” One of the organizers our journalists met at the collective was a black homeless advocate named Eric Sheptock. Sheptock recommended rounding up his charges, “the poor and homeless,” and enlisting them in the planned actions. This did not surprise me. As mentioned earlier, the Democracy Partners people had used the homeless to provoke violence in the Trump protests. The homeless have served the left as props or pawns since they were first exploited in the Reagan ’80s.
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