Project Veritas

The Koch Brothers and Robert Mercer Bankrolled Right-Wing Firm Project Veritas ObserverBy   December 4, 2017 “Through Gravitas Maximus LLC—Mercer’s investment shell for Breitbart that once had the same Long Island address as Renaissance Technologies—the Republican funneled $25,000 to the organization. Mercer announced his plans to resign as co-CEO of Renaissance Technologies following Buzzfeed’s report linking his investments in Breitbart and Milo [Yiannopoulos] Inc. with white supremacists. Meanwhile, Internal Revenue Service documents uncovered by the Washington Post indicate that Koch-affiliated organization Donors Trust poured $1.7 million to Project Veritas last year alone…Before Project Veritas’ sting was revealed by the Post, the Mercer-funded outlet Breitbart sent two reporters to Alabama to discredit Moore’s accusers…Though the John Birch Society’s fringe libertarianism has long overshadowed every Koch-funded institution (from Americans for Prosperity’s grassroots squabbling to the harrowed halls of George Mason’s Mercatus Center), the ideology now chokes the political landscape. Strangled by oligarchy, the American people gasp for air, only to be greeted by Project Veritas’ James O’Keefe masquerading as a paramedic.”

Donors Trust– Koch Network FundsProject Veritas

Trump Campaign 2020

Inside the Project Veritas Plan to Steal the Election | The New Republic James O’Keefe’s group is part of a sprawling campaign to delegitimize mail-in balloting in the fall—a campaign being led by the White House. O’Keefe’s May 2020 guest list was going to include “Donald Trump Jr., Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and his activist wife Ginni were all invited, as were several of O’Keefe’s most generous conservative donors, including Texas shale oil billionaire George Bishop and Bullpen Capital founder Paul Martino…For well over a year, Project Veritas has been secretly producing undercover stings designed to undermine the integrity of absentee and mail-in ballot counts—an endeavor codenamed “Diamond Dog,” according to documents we have obtained. Diamond Dog began as only one facet of Project Veritas’s 2020 rat-fucking strategy, but with the onset of the pandemic, which has made in-person voting a dicey proposition, it has since become one of the group’s top-line action items…be Cognex Corporation founder Robert Shillman, a devoted funder of Islamophobic causes who was also one of O’Keefe’s would-be wedding guests. (Shillman ended up pledging to donate $50,000 to the group.) The slate of investigations in the “Dr. Bob” pitch included schemes to procure evidence of “illegal aliens voting,” mail-in ballot tampering at “nursing homes,” and “the sale of absentee ballots and voter profiles on the ‘Dark Web.’…In Texas, Project Veritas has also coordinated in secret with a local Republican operative named Aaron Harris, codenamed “Dragon,” currently chief of staff to Republican congressman Lance Gooden. In turn, through the activist group he founded, Direct Action Texas, Harris has helped Project Veritas covertly strategize with a staffer working for the office of the state’s Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton. Paxton is leading the state’s “election integrity initiative,” one of many Republican efforts nationwide to suppress the vote under the guise of rooting out the nearly non-existent threat of voter fraud…a 69-year-old Florida resident, a registered Republican named Joseph Vancheri notifies O’Keefe of his soon-to-be status as a poll worker in Broward County, likely for undercover Election Day snooping on Project Veritas’s behalf. A first-generation immigrant himself, Vancheri has nevertheless long harbored hardline views on immigration that echo his anxieties over the potential for illicit enfranchisement of foreigners.  In another slide, Project Veritas boasts of receiving a tip from a former broadcast meteorologist named Arch Kennedy, who found it suspicious that 300 people were all registered to vote at the address for Emory University’s Emory Muslim Student Association in Atlanta…In 2017, Arch organized one of the anti-Muslim group ACT! For America’s 28 nationwide “March Against Sharia” rallies. Held in Atlanta’s Piedmont Park, it was a sparsely attended affair but still managed to include Republican Georgia State Senator Michael Williams, then mounting a doomed primary campaign for governor. Aaron Harris, a son of white evangelical missionaries who picked up Portuguese while growing up in Brazil and went on to become fluent in Spanish, has been relentlessly stoking paranoia over mail-in ballots since his first failed foray as a paid political consultant in 2014. Despite a sizable war chest from Dallas hotel magnate and Tea Party financier Monty Bennett, Harris’s candidates in the 2015 local election for the Tarrant Regional Water District lost. He quickly became fixated on the idea that thousands of forged mail-in ballot applications had been responsible for their defeat.”

ABC News suspends correspondent David Wright after comments about Trump coverage, socialism, in Project Veritas sting Washington Post Paul Farhi February 26, 2020 “Project Veritas’s founder, James O’Keefe, teased the release of the video on Twitter on Tuesday with the hashtag #ExposeABC. He tweeted that his group “will expose ABC News’ agenda to mislead voters and push their own narratives” and said in response to the upcoming release that ABC News had suspended “the correspondent involved.” He didn’t identify Wright or provide details.”

Antifa–Project Veritas pushes fake news during BLM protests. For ex: Project Veritas Infiltrates Antifa, Says ‘Outside funding’ Could Be Involved  June 4, 2020

Google-In efforts to redirect blame for 2016 election interference onto Google, GAI released internal emails from Google “whistleblower” Zachary Vorhies on AUGUST 14, 2019

An Ex-Google Employee Turned ‘Whistleblower’ and QAnon Fan Made ‘Plandemic’ Go Viral Vice Zach Vorhies leaked documents to the right-wing group Project Veritas, then became a committed anti-vaxxer and promoter of QAnon. In an April video, he laid out his plan to promote ‘Plandemic.’ By Anna Merlan May 14, 2020.

Matthew Tyrmand,Project Veritas board, “thirty-five-year-old Polish-American investor who is an informal adviser to Poland’s right-wing nationalist government as well as a contributing writer at Breitbart, the conservative news site. As street protests have sprung up in Poland, Tyrmand has repeatedly suggested online that Soros is stoking the unrest. On the Web site of the Polonia Institute, a nonprofit that promotes Polish culture, he wrote that the “recent protest movement” was “rumored to be funded by George Soros’s Open Society Foundations” in order to “undermine and destabilize the new government.” The New Yorker

“Brian Fallon, the communications director for the Clinton campaign, says, “Project Veritas has been repeatedly caught trying to commit fraud, falsify identities, and break campaign-finance law. It is not surprising, given that their founder has already been convicted for efforts like this.” The New Yorker

Wikipedia “Project Veritas is an American non-profit organization founded in 2010 by James O’Keefe. Its stated mission is “to investigate and expose corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud, and other misconduct in both public and private institutions in order to achieve a more ethical and transparent society.”[1] The group’s productions have been criticized as misleading, fabricated or taken out of context.[2][3] O’Keefe and Project Veritas were in one case ordered to pay $100,000 damages for defamation.[4][5][6] O’Keefe has been barred from fundraising for Project Veritas in Florida and other states because of his federal criminal record for entering a federal building under fraudulent pretenses.[7] Much of the funding for Project Veritas comes from anonymous donations through Donors Trust, a conservative and libertarian American nonprofit donor-advised fund, which according to its promotional materials, says that it will “keep your charitable giving private, especially gifts funding sensitive or controversial issues.”[8]“

3.^ James O’Keefe Shoots at The Washington Post and Misses. National Review McLaughlin, Dan (November 28, 2017 “In today’s big media news, gonzo video journalist James O’Keefe had yet another of his undercover sting operations blow up in his face. The Washington Post caught O’Keefe and his Veritas Project trying to scam the paper into running a false sexual abuse allegation against Roy Moore:”

Florida bars Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe from fundraising due to criminal conviction. The Washington Post  Boburg, Shawn December 8, 2017 “Amateurish spies like James O’Keefe III attempt to sway the 2016 campaign.”

Post reporter confronts woman who made false accusations against Roy Moore Washington Post November 27, 2017 | 11:37 AM EDT
Reporter Stephanie McCrummen of The Washington Post, left, interviews Jaime Phillips at a Greek restaurant in Alexandria, Va., on Wednesday.

Sting of Myself Amateurish spies like James O’Keefe III attempt to sway the 2016 campaign. The New Yorker By May 20, 2016 “As Dana Geraghty recalls it, March 16th was a “rather quiet Wednesday.” That afternoon, she was in her cubicle at the Open Society Foundations, on West Fifty-seventh Street, where she helps oversee the nonprofit group’s pro-democracy programs in Eurasia.

“Hey, Dana,” a voice began. The caller sounded to her like an older American male. “My name is, uh, Victor Kesh. I’m a Hungarian-American who represents a, uh, foundation . . . that would like to get involved with you and aid what you do in fighting for, um, European values.” He asked Geraghty for the name of someone he could talk to “about supporting you guys and coördinating with you on some of your efforts.” Requesting a callback, he left a phone number with a 914 area code—Westchester County.

“She heard a click, a pause, and then a second male voice. The person who had introduced himself as Kesh said, “Don’t say anything . . . before I hang up the phone.” She continued to listen, and the man’s voice suddenly took on a more commanding tone. The caller had failed to hang up, and Kesh, unaware that he was still being recorded, seemed to be conducting a meeting about how to perpetrate an elaborate sting on Soros. “What needs to happen,” he said, is for “someone other than me to make a hundred phone calls like that”—to Soros, to his employees, and to the Democracy Alliance, a club of wealthy liberal political donors that Soros helped to found, which is expected to play a large role in financing this year’s campaigns. Kesh described sending into the Soros offices an “undercover” agent who could “talk the talk” with Open Society executives. Kesh’s goal wasn’t fully spelled out on the recording, but the gist was that an operative posing as a potential donor could penetrate Soros’s operation and make secret videos that exposed embarrassing activities. Soros, he assured the others, has “thousands of organizations” on the left in league with him. Kesh said that the name of his project was Discover the Networks.

“In January, 2010, the F.B.I. arrested O’Keefe and three accomplices, two of whom had disguised themselves as telephone repairmen in order to enter the New Orleans office of Mary Landrieu, then a Democratic senator for Louisiana. (O’Keefe says he had hoped to disprove Landrieu’s claim that her phone lines were too clogged to answer the many angry calls coming from Tea Party activists.) O’Keefe was sentenced to three years of probation and a hundred hours of community service; he also paid a fifteen-hundred-dollar fine.

“Many O’Keefe operations, however, have fallen flat, including his repeated efforts to prove that voter-identity fraud is pervasive. “It seems like most of the fraud O’Keefe uncovers he commits himself,” Richard Hasen, a professor of election law at the University of California, Irvine, says. A sting aimed at Hillary Clinton last year was considered especially feeble. Veritas operatives persuaded a staffer at a rally to accept a Canadian citizen’s money in exchange for a Hillary T-shirt—a petty violation of the ban on foreign political contributions. Brian Fallon, the communications director for the Clinton campaign, says, “Project Veritas has been repeatedly caught trying to commit fraud, falsify identities, and break campaign-finance law. It is not surprising, given that their founder has already been convicted for efforts like this.”

“O’Keefe’s unseemly tactics have increasingly caused other conservatives, including Glenn Beck, to distance themselves from him. But the 2016 campaign cycle appears to be reinvigorating the political art form that Richard Nixon’s operative Donald Segretti infamously called “ratfucking.”

“O’Keefe declined to tell me why he had targeted George Soros. But Matthew Tyrmand, a recent addition to the Project Veritas board, has publicly declared his fierce opposition to Soros. Tyrmand is a thirty-five-year-old Polish-American investor who is an informal adviser to Poland’s right-wing nationalist government as well as a contributing writer at Breitbart, the conservative news site. As street protests have sprung up in Poland, Tyrmand has repeatedly suggested online that Soros is stoking the unrest. On the Web site of the Polonia Institute, a nonprofit that promotes Polish culture, he wrote that the “recent protest movement” was “rumored to be funded by George Soros’s Open Society Foundations” in order to “undermine and destabilize the new government.”

“Tyrmand deflected numerous requests for an interview. When I finally reached him by phone, he said that he was too busy to talk. He was in France, on his way to the Cannes Film Festival for the première of “Clinton Cash,” a film adaptation of a scathing 2015 book by Peter Schweizer, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, which accuses the Clintons of enriching themselves by giving speeches to dubious sponsors. The film, along with other independently financed attacks on the Clintons, will significantly help Trump’s campaign by reducing its need to spend money on oppo research.

“The first time I asked O’Keefe who Victor Kesh was, he declined to comment on what he called “investigations, real or imagined.” But, after learning that he had been caught on tape trying to infiltrate Soros’s group, he tried to put the best face on it. On May 11th, he, Tyrmand, and a cameraman showed up in the lobby of the Open Society Foundations, saying that they were conducting a serious investigation.

“O’Keefe portrays himself as a rigorous journalist who is dedicated to furthering “a more ethical and transparent society.” He refuses, however, to be transparent about who is funding him. According to tax records obtained by PRWatch.org, an investigative watchdog group run by the Center for Media and Democracy, in recent years hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to Project Veritas have come through a fund in Alexandria, Virginia, called Donors Trust, which specializes in hiding the money trails of conservative philanthropists. In its promotional materials, Donors Trust says that it will “keep your charitable giving private, especially gifts funding sensitive or controversial issues.” The records obtained by PRWatch.org also show that one donor, a conservative political activist in Wisconsin, contributed fifty thousand dollars just before Project Veritas undertook a sting of one of his political enemies—a state senator.”

A Google whistleblower has gone public with claims of election manipulation and political bias, according to investigative journalism group Project Veritas, which posted a trove of over 950 documents provided by Google insider Zachary Vorhies, who says he has come forward because he “saw something dark and nefarious going on with the company and I realized that they were going to not only tamper with the elections, but use that tampering with the elections to essentially overthrow the United States.”

Google “Machine Learning Fairness” Whistleblower Goes Public, says: “burden lifted off of my soul” GAI-AUGUST 14, 2019

(San Francisco) A Google insider who anonymously leaked internal documents to Project Veritas made the decision to go public in an on-the-record video interview.

Project Veritas has released yet another report about tech giant Google, this time a Google insider named Zachary Vorhies has gone public with claims that Google planned to tamper with U.S. elections. Vorhies turned over a trove of documents to Project Veritas and has reportedly given over 950 documents to the Department of Justice’s Antitrust division.

Andrew Breitbart and James O’Keefe Ruined Him, and Now He Gets $100,000.  The Atlantic.Friedersdorf, Conor March 8, 2013 “Juan Carlos Vera worked at an ACORN office in San Diego. One day, O’Keefe and Hannah Giles walked in with a hidden video camera and pretended to be a pimp and prostitute as part of a sting meant to prove that some of ACORN’s employees were depraved leftists. They asked Vera for help smuggling underage girls across the Mexican border so that they could work in a brothel. Confronted with what appeared to be a sex-trafficking plot, you’d hope that someone in Vera’s position would play along, get as much information as possible, and call the police. And guess what? That’s exactly what Vera did.

“Unbeknownst to O’Keefe or Giles, he called his cousin, a police officer, shortly after they left his office. Perhaps you know what happened next. Internet entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart published the ACORN hidden videos, which exposed some actual instances of bad behavior at the organization, but also turned out to be egregiously misleading to the millions who watched them. This is true of a lot of the ACORN videos.
But the San Diego ACORN video was particularly misleading. O’Keefe produced, and Breitbart published and publicized, videos that made an innocent man look as if he was complicit in a would-be plot to traffic underage girls across the border. They didn’t do this on purpose. Still, it happened. And it cost the guy his job:”When last I wrote about this story in 2010, long after all the facts had come to light, there was no correction appended to the story. And look at the page today: The original story is still up with no correction, no clarification, no editor’s note — nothing. Long ago I confronted O’Keefe on Twitter about Vera. Back when he was alive I confronted Andrew Breitbart about the man too.”

Elements of NPR Gotcha Video Taken out of Context NPR March 14, 2011. Folkenflik, David