Who is James O'Keefe?

James O'Keefe has described himself as an investigative journalist and a filmmaker. Whatever he calls himself, he is not an investigative journalist. O'Keefe is nothing more than another right-wing political operative, hack and a dirty trickster in a long line of them stretching back to Donald Segretti of Watergate fame. He and his hired operatives attempt to bait their targets into making incriminating and/or embarrassing statements while secretly videotaping them. Their heavy-handed attack pieces focus mostly on liberal entities they can stereotype, like welfare recipients trying to "scam" the system or illegal immigrants.

This right-wing grifter spent considerable effort working to undermine the 2020 election on behalf of the Grand Kahuna of grifters

Diamond Dog

We did not focus on this in the above information about PV's election meddling. With the onset of the pandemic, in-person voting became a dicey proposition, making mail-in ballots more important to the 2020 election. Enter Project Veritas, this time with a direct line to the narrative being spun from Donald Trump's White House, with Tweets like the election should be delayed because universal mail-in voting will result in "the greatest Rigged Election in history!"

In short, the entire point of this operation was "literally to get Trump reelected," according to a source close to Project Veritas. Yes, for the most part, PV is a comic book of incompetence, but that's enough in today's world to make it a very dangerous operation. In 2019, their misinformation war chest rose to $13.44 million, coming from high rollers in the Republican Party.

All of the details on Diamond Dog can be found here in this report by The New Republic.

Destroying ACORN 

In spite of all PV's miscues, O'Keefe did have one success, and that was the destruction of ACORN (Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now). This group helped out low-income families by providing economic advice, lobbying, and voter-registration drives. Right off the bat, you have to know that it was not popular with the GOP, particularly 2008 candidate John McCain who was convinced that (wait for it) ACORN existed merely to steal elections from the rightful winners, otherwise known as Republicans. Sound familiar? This paranoia has been around for a very long time.

Details on this takedown are hard to find, but we do have some references. Basically, O'Keefe and an associate, Hannah Giles posed as a pimp and a prostitute who visited ACORN trying to get information about how to get free medical care for prostitutes coming into the country, as well as how to avoid taxes. Some low-level ACORN employees gave them advice. The resulting videos were a national sensation and made the rounds of the right-wing media outlets. 

In fact, O'Keefe's questions were vague, the videos were highly edited and the responses from ACORN employees were edited together to achieve the intended goal. At the beginning of one video O'Keefe is shown dressed like a pimp you'd see in the movies. That was edited into the video to make the ACORN employees look clueless. He never actually wore that absurd get-up into the ACORN offices.

In spite of the fact that PV's sting was clearly a hit job, the employees in the video who responded inappropriately were fired, and a resulting report showed no wrongdoing or misuse of funds by the organization itself, a GOP-controlled legislature defunded ACORN, and it went into bankruptcy in 2010.

The only kernel of truth in all of this smear job is that low-income families do not vote Republican, and the Project Veritas hit job came after a successful ACORN voter-registration drive.

Infiltration

Infiltrating progressive groups is another big agenda item for Project Veritas. The New York Times reported in 2020 that Erik Prince, the former head of Blackwater Worldwide and a security consultant with close ties to Donald Trump, recruited former veteran spies for undercover operations infiltrating progressive groups under the direction of Project Veritas.

A former MI-6 agent infiltrated the Michigan office of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the country's largest teachers' unions, and copied files as well as recorded conversations.

The same infiltrator would also go undercover in the congressional campaign of now-Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va). When the campaign discovered what was going on, the agent was fired.

Members of Project Veritas, including James O'Keefe himself, were invited to Eric Prince's family ranch in Wyoming for training in 2017. O'Keefe posted photos of the training on Instagram. Prince wanted to teach PV's members various intelligence tactics, such as how to recruit sources and how to conduct clandestine recordings.

According to O'Keefe, Donald Trump tried to recruit him to get into Columbia University and get Barack Obama's sealed college records. O'Keefe further stated that Trump "suspected Obama had presented himself as a foreign student on application materials to ease his way into New York's Columbia University, maybe even Harvard too, and perhaps picked up a few scholarships along the way."

O'Keefe said that he turned Trump down, saying it was not in their line of work and the considered themselves to be journalists. That's rich. They're not even close, and their history proves that such operations are indeed in their line of work.