American Pravda

by James O'Keefe

  After the first of the year, the spokescouncil meetings picked up. There were as many as three a week, and the planning was getting more specific. The actions the organizers conceived were many and bold. The unifying word for these actions seemed to be “clusterfuck.” Said Carrefour at one meeting, for instance, “We are also doing a series of clusterfuck blockades, where we are going to try to blockade all the major ingress points in the city.”1 International Workers of the World frontman, Dylan Petrohilos, was even more definitive. “Our goal is to continue to help shut down the city at like, mid-inauguration, a giant clusterfuck that day,” he told his troops, adding later, “So be prepared to help make the inauguration a giant clusterfuck.”

  Professional activist “Patrick,” last name unknown, preferred “fucking shitshow.” He elaborated, “Throw them all under the bus. Just fuck it up. I like the idea of the goal being they have to pull the inauguration inside.” Patrick and “comrade” Aaron Cantu had been roaming the country for the six months following the Republican National Convention, almost assuredly on someone else’s dime. They spent three of those months at the Standing Rock pipeline protest in North Dakota.

  These organizers were not just speaking in general. They had been making some very specific plans. On an undercover audio recording at one of the January spokescouncil sessions, we picked up Carrefour explaining how he intended to use a literal chain to secure cars on the DC Metro and basically “shut down the line.”

  “So, we figured out this, the trains pull up,” said Carrefour. “One person is going to lock one end of a chain to an edge, and on the other end of the chain the end of the car, so on and so forth.”2 If all went as planned, within fifteen minutes he and his cohorts could tie up “every single line in the city.” Better still, their work could only be undone with a bolt cutter. His plan included shutting down major bridges and highway access points as well as shutting down the DC Metro. So confident was he in the popularity of his cause he did not think these actions “arrestable.”

  If these guys weren’t so potentially dangerous, their branding of the opposition as “Nazis” would be amusing. “Generally speaking, Nazis will only actually attack people if they have, if they strongly outnumber them, because Nazis are essentially cowards,” said Smash Racism DC cofounder Mike Isaacson at an Action Camp held at American University. For Isaacson, “Nazi” was a synonym for “Trump supporter.” Apparently, he had seen enough of these Nazis in action to feel comfortable stereotyping them, “generally speaking” that is. When asked how best to respond to a Nazi provocation, Isaacson said solemnly, “I would say that’s where you do the throat punching.”3

  Speaking in an open classroom, Isaacson showed no apparent unease advising his charges on how best to injure their political opponents. His comfort level may have derived from the fact that he had mastered the radical look—lean with a trim beard, glasses, and fashionably disheveled hair. Several of the organizers, in fact, had mastered that same neo-Lenin look.

  Isaacson was apparently in on the plan to shut down the Metro. “That is going to require some teamwork, probably a rehearsal maybe,” he told a Veritas u/c in a recorded phone conversation. The organizers needed “bodies” to pull the plan off. “If you are willing to be those people,” he told our reporter, “we are definitely down to have you.”

  Given the organizers’ inclination toward things illegal, they were more alert to infiltration than many with whom we have met over the years. In fact, one of our best u/c’s, Allison Maass, got stung. As we’ve already seen, this was not her first time. In our line of work, getting burned is an occupational hazard—not a question of if, but when. Allison had been mining an entirely different protest vein than Tyler or Adam, but her success in stinging Democracy Partners left her vulnerable.

  The moment of confrontation was pretty harrowing.4 She had set up a meeting at a Washington, DC, restaurant with Ryan Clayton, the president of America Takes Action, an organization whose “top priority is resisting the Trump regime, every day and every step of the way.”

  Clayton was more than merely suspicious. Knowing who Allison was, he tried to lure her into saying that her apocryphal wealthy friend—she tried that gambit, too—was willing to fund specific illegal activities. Allison danced around the question. “Like I said,” she told Clayton, “we’re not the idea people. So, I don’t think I’m . . . we’re not going to suggest anything.” Unaware that she had been made, Allison tried to get Clayton to state his intentions. “So is there a line for you?” she asked. “Or are you willing to go all in?”

  Unable to get Allison to incriminate herself, Clayton got tough. “Please keep your hands where we can see them,” he told her abruptly. At this point, Allison did what she had been trained to do. “I’m going to be leaving,” she said, but as she tried to exit the restaurant she was confronted by a young woman named Lauren Windsor. This was the same woman who called looking for Charles Roth when his niece, Allison/Angela Brandt, skipped out of the Democracy Partners office.

  “You work for James O’Keefe, right?” said Windsor. “Have you been to the rape barn too? Are you hooking up with him? Is he your boyfriend? Is James your boyfriend?”

  Those who read my book Breakthrough know about the half-assed sting that led to the nonsensical “rape barn” story and my unlikely emergence as a sexual predator. Although the accusation was dismissed in every which way, including judicially, the left never lets go. For Clayton, badgering the opposition with unfounded sexual allegations is part of his MO. In 2011, for instance, he hounded the late Andrew Breitbart at a public meeting with a fully fabricated charge, “Have you ever slept with a prostitute, a male one, have you?”5

  For twenty minutes, Clayton, Windsor, and their comrades pursued Allison down the Washington streets, cameras at the ready, taunting her every step of the way. “Is it like good when you go home for the holidays?” said Clayton. “You’re like, ‘Hey mom and dad, I work for an alleged sex molester?’ Is that like fun?”

  When Allison hailed a cab, Clayton tried to climb in behind her. “Do not get in this taxi,” she told him. Even then he kept up his snarky banter. “Do you think it’s a Christian thing to do? To lie about who you are?” Allison kept her cool, admitted nothing, and fled the scene.

  About the same time as the Allison bust, a Veritas u/c working under the name “Max Hunt” learned at a Love + Solidarity meeting that the organizers were suspicious of at least two people. The challenge for Max was to figure out whether the people under suspicion were actually other Veritas u/c’s or maybe even him and the u/c working with him, Marissa.

  “We don’t know if they are cops or right-wing traitors,” said the one J20 planner of the two under suspicion.

  “What?” said Max, “are they like protesters?”

  “They are people that have been coming to meetings and stuff,” said the planner. “To learn shit.”6

  “Oh,” said Marissa, taken aback. She did not like what she was hearing.

  “They’ve been on the spokescouncil,” said the planner.

  “They both kind of had this story about a rich relative that wants to donate a lot of money. But they won’t tell us how much.” To our people, this sounded very much like Tyler and Tara. Marissa let out a little gasp as if this were the strangest thing she had ever heard.

  “Yeah, it’s really weird,” said the organizer.

  “That is fishy,” added Max.

  “Super fishy,” said the organizer, adding with a laugh, “Oh, I really wish that I had a rich relative. I wish that part.”

  Our people here had to walk a fine line. They could act surprised, but they could not elaborate, not embellish, not excuse, not throw suspicion elsewhere. Mostly, they just had to observe and absorb and, as soon as possible, let HQ know that Tyler and Tara were in trouble.

  Upon learning he was under suspicion, Tyler had to proceed cautiously. Ther
e was a real calculus involved. His best bet was to beef up his and Tara’s bona fides to allay suspicions, but if he couldn’t, he had to extricate Tara and himself. If he did so too abruptly, the organizers might suspect they had been tipped off. And if the organizers came to that conclusion, they might suspect Max and Marissa as the ones who did the tipping.

  As should be obvious by now, these kind of spy games get complicated very quickly. They require intuition, foresight, and a fair amount of nerve. To help our reporters, we established an encrypted chat system that allowed them to communicate with HQ in something close to real time. Understandably, they felt the need to temper their instincts with counsel from more experienced voices. If a seasoned operator was telling them something did not feel right, they would be more confident in their suspicion that the plan had gone astray.

  Back at headquarters, we were figuring out how to proceed with those u/c’s who, if not entirely “burned,” had certainly provoked suspicion. We asked ourselves whether we could keep them in play and, if so, how. For sure, they would need a well-rehearsed emergency cover story they could deploy if pressured, such as “Soros hired us to see how easily the protest movement could be infiltrated” or “We’re just making a documentary.” What they could not say was that they were working with James O’Keefe.

  After consulting with me, Tyler scheduled a meeting with Colin Dunn. He chose an ice-cream shop for its many windows. Before going in, however, he had Adam drive him by the shop slowly to see what was what. They got an eyeful. Dunn was sitting at one booth. Charney was sitting in a booth behind him. And off to the side was this large older fellow with a Santa Claus beard. Tyler had seen him before. He was some sort of enforcer. It looked for all the world like a setup. Adam, a former high school defensive end, was just as big as Santa, but this was a confrontation Tyler saw no use provoking. They just drove on by. Tyler called Dunn later to say his car had broken down on the way to the meeting, but he knew his u/c days were over, at least on this project.

  As the inauguration approached, we had gathered a ton of material disturbing enough to warrant sharing it with the authorities. Aware as we were of the planned and potentially dangerous disruptions, especially on the Metro, we could not stay silent. Our attorney Ben Barr set up a meeting in Washington with the FBI for January 13. Tyler, Adam, and Max went with him. In the past, our engagement with law enforcement has not always been congenial, but these guys were an exception. There were four of them, three FBI and one DC Metro, all casually dressed. They had done a fair share of undercover work as well, but we had the goods, the video, and they greeted us like brothers-in-arms.

  Three days later on January 16, we went public with our first finished video. This one focused on Tyler’s meeting at the Comet Ping Pong. Immediately after its debut, DisruptJ20’s Lacy MaCauley hit back with a press release. In it, she claimed DisruptJ20 had outed four of our journalists, including Tyler. She insisted that the activists chose Comet Ping Pong as a meeting site for “humorous” reasons. Knowing Tyler was not who he said he was, they planned the meeting to give him “false information about what they felt was the most humorous red herring available: a false plot to use stink bombs at an event called the DeploraBall.”7

  On January 17, we launched the second video, this one featuring Carrefour’s plan to chain the trains. These were charges serious enough and detailed enough that even the more slanderous of the progressive blogs checked the impulse to mock us. The major media held back as well.

  By the end of the day January 17, U.S. News and World Report, among other media, was reporting that DisruptJ20 had “dramatically scaled back plans” to disrupt the inauguration. Said Carrefour with a straight face, “By virtue of us making those claims, it whips people up into the kind of panic that accidentally ends up causing the chaos we want.”8 This strategy, he insisted, was intentional. He allegedly used Project Veritas to leak the plans to cause the commotion. I didn’t buy that hogwash for a minute. Neither did law enforcement.

  On January 19, the DC Metro Police arrested Scott Charney for his role in planning the disruption of the DeploraBall. As the Washington Times reported, “Police relied on the video turned over to investigators.”9 In a fitting bit of irony, Charney was arraigned on the charges in DC Superior Court just as Trump was being inaugurated president. In time, Paul “Luke” Kuhn and Colin Dunn were arrested as well.

  In the most shocking development of all, on January 25 the Washington Post ran a favorable article on our efforts to infiltrate the protest and prevent potential violence. “A D.C. police spokesman has confirmed,” wrote the Post’s Peter Hermann, “that a secret video recording made Dec. 18 by one of O’Keefe’s operatives led to the arrest of one man and foiled an alleged plot to spread acid at the DeploraBall for Trump supporters at the National Press Club.”10

  “I’ve spent years trying to fight the mainstream media that doesn’t view me as a journalist,” Hermann quoted me as saying, “This is the first time that a video we shot has led to an arrest. It legitimizes what we’re doing. It’s a new era for us.”

  If not a new era, it may at least be the end of the old one. To quote one sentence from this front-page story, “The arrest validates [Project Veritas] and its controversial methods.”

  Backtracking in Wisconsin

  Anyone who watched our “Rigging the Election” videos in October 2016 knew at least one thing: some of the most damning footage was recorded in Wisconsin and highlighted Wisconsin-specific problems with voter fraud. Organizer Scott Foval proved particularly eloquent in discussing ways to move illegal voters in and out of the state. Foval’s scheming cost him his job, but it will not likely cost him his freedom. One reason why is that local district attorneys and state attorney generals, Democrat or Republican, are reluctant to investigate voter fraud, Republicans for fear of being called “racist,” Democrats for fear of costing their party votes.

  That said, given the millions of people who saw our videos in October, Republican attorney general Brad Schimel felt compelled to respond. The same week they were released, Schimel acknowledged he was aware of their contents. Understandably, he believed they showed “apparent violations of the law.” Schimel’s spokesman went on to say that the AG’s office was “evaluating and reviewing available options to address the serious questions these videos raise.”1 That only made sense. On October 31, two weeks after our first video aired, we sent Schimel’s office our raw tapes as well as a transcript of the relevant portions. Things went south for us from there.

  The media got curious when no public action was taken. In response to an open records request by the Wisconsin Journal Sentinel, the AG’s office released a memo on April 25 written in January by Ryan Korte, the head of Schimel’s criminal investigation division. “Based on all the available facts,” Korte wrote, “I do not believe there is any basis to conclude the videos demonstrate or suggest violations of Wisconsin criminal laws.”2 It was one thing not to charge Foval with a crime for what he claimed to have done, but Korte took it a step further. He questioned the reliability of the videos. He claimed the recordings were “suspect” because edited sequences began in the middle of conversations. He even questioned the location of where the conversation with Foval took place. “The recording is not clear,” he wrote, “whether the conversation occurred in Wisconsin which would be necessary for any potential venue.”

  The recording took place inside of Garfield’s 502, a Milwaukee bar. With five minutes of phone calls and Googling, Korte could have verified the location. In fact, any two-bit investigator worth his or her salt could have glanced around the room in which the video was shot and deduced the identity of this well-known Milwaukee watering hole. Trust me, there would have been no confusion if this had been a standard homicide investigation, but our case was radioactive, and Korte was unwilling to get burned.

  His gamesmanship did not surprise me. I have become all too familiar with the way prosecut
ors work the media, whether it be the New Orleans prosecutors leaking false information about the Landrieu case or the Brooklyn district attorney claiming our ACORN videos were “selectively edited” or California attorney general Jerry Brown burying the fact that California ACORN had engaged in “highly inappropriate behavior.” As described earlier, these “criticisms” are inevitably hyperbolic and usually evidence free.

  For the media and the Democrats, getting the Korte report was like finding a pony under their tree on Christmas Day. They loved the new angle.3 They could forget what their lying eyes told them about Foval and turn a Democratic scandal into a Republican one. “Today’s news makes it clear that Attorney General Brad Schimel is either woefully incompetent of the laws he is supposed to enforce or he intentionally used his office for politics,” said state Democratic Party spokesman Brandon Weathersby. “This is beyond partisan politics,” claimed Scot Ross, executive director of the liberal group One Wisconsin Now, “this is abuse of power by Schimel.” According to Ross, Schimel suppressed evidence that would have proved his original assertion of potential criminal violations to be “false.”

  When the Associated Press called my office, no doubt for a “comment” about how these officials were “cleared” of wrongdoing, I knew I had to push back immediately. Two days after the release of the Korte report, on the morning of April 27, we posted a video in response. It reminded viewers what Foval had said and explained how we had cooperated with the AG’s office.