America’s “Next Great Intelligence Agency” Founder Target of Criminal Probe

The Westchester, New York County District Attorney’s office has confirmed they are running a criminal investigation into financial irregularities by the founder and former CEO of Project Veritas.

James O’Keefe initially became famous for releasing videos of encounters with a national community organizing group, including one set in San Diego. 

The story he told the world was that, accompanied by Hanna Giles, posing as a prostitute, he pretended to be seeking advice from a non-profit for a business involving underage girls in the sex trade. 

He’d run this cosplay in seven other cities using hidden cameras, looking for damning footage, or at least something capable of being edited to make it look worse.

Their aim was to take down the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), an association of community organizing groups advocating on behalf of lower income Americans.

ACORN was a remarkably effective effort, running voter registration and Get Out The Vote campaigns, protesting local government policies, and organizing tenant unions. The group was funded by charitable donations and contracts for on=the-ground service to various agencies.

Release of heavily edited videos was used to launch Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment website, designed to be a portal for conservative reporting and commentary.  Fox News jumped on the bandwagon, accusing the “liberal media” of ignoring the story. 

Here’s snip from O’Keefe’s Breitbart story: (I don’t link to liars)

• With 70 miles of stunning beaches and picture-perfect weather all year round, having fun during the summer in San Diego doesn’t require a lot of money.

• The city combines old-fashioned Mexican charm with a modern edge. In a city where the sun is always shining, it’s the perfect place to get away for a bit of relaxation or stimulation.

• If you’re looking for trendy boutique hotels, an exploding culinary scene, or visiting the local ACORN to get your underage prostitutes smuggled across the Mexican border, you’re in the right place.

O’Keefe added lead-in segments, dressed up in his vision of what a pimp looked like wearing a fur coat, top hat, sunglasses, and wielding a cane. The aim of the costuming was to convince the public that he had dressed that way when visiting the ACORN offices.

The “investigation” was chock full of heavily edited footage, misrepresentations, and flat out lies. O’Keefe was actually dressed in a dress shirt and tie, and told people he was a law student and/or a candidate for congress. 

The ACORN employee caught on camera saying the most incriminating things actually reported the incident to police. After an investigation by the State Attorney General’s office vindicated the employee, he filed suit, eventually collecting $50,000 from Hanna Giles and $100,000 from O’Keefe.

Other investigations noted that, while the videographers took advantage of the organizational chaos in ACORN, the group was not culpable for things suggested in the video.

All the vindications were too late to save the organization, which lost its government contracts and foundation funding.  Nine months after the big reveal on Breitbart, the group shuttered its offices and declared bankruptcy. 

Here’s snip from my 2013 reporting at the San Diego Free Press:

• None-the-less, Fox News keeps telling right-wingers that ACORN still exists, only now it’s mutated and renamed itself. A quick Google search brings up a half dozen reports on that network purporting to blame ACORN for being behind the Occupy protests, organizing homeowners to protest foreclosures and initiating worker rebellions at New York fast food restaurants.

The myth of ACORN reverberated for years afterward. Years after the initial release of the video, a common belief among right wing activists was that the group had stolen the 2012 election for Obama. Legislation passed by congress routinely contained wording prohibiting funds from reaching ACORN.

Project Veritas became a darling of the right.  

A New York Times investigation in 2021 uncovered right wing efforts using Project Veritas alumni for a political spying operation:

• By the end of 2018, Mr. Seddon secured funding from the Wyoming heiress, Susan Gore, according to people familiar with her role. He recruited several former operatives from the conservative group Project Veritas, where he had worked previously, to set up the political infiltration operation in the West.

• Project Veritas has a history of using operatives with fake names to target liberal organizations and make secret recordings to embarrass them.

• The endeavor in the West appears to have had two primary goals: penetrate local and eventually national Democratic political circles for long-term intelligence gathering, and collect dirt on moderate Republicans that could be used against them in the internecine party battles being waged by Mr. Trump and his allies.

Earlier this year, CNN reported:

• Federal prosecutors are investigating conservative-backed efforts in Wyoming to infiltrate the Democratic National Committee ahead of the 2020 election, according to people familiar with the matter.

• Prosecutors have subpoenaed Richard Seddon, a former British intelligence official, and Susan Gore, a Republican donor and heiress to the Gore-Tex fortune, as part of the investigation, the people said.

• The investigation appears to stem from a 2021 New York Times article that, citing interviews and documents, detailed “an undercover operation by conservatives to infiltrate progressive groups, political campaigns, and the offices of Democratic as well as moderate Republican elected officials during the 2020 election cycle.”

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In February of this year Veritas founder James O’Keefe left the group, following accusations of scamming donors for his personal benefit. In May, the group filed a civil complaint in federal court accusing their former CEO of violating his financial duties.

The Nation has a detailed report of all troubles surrounding O’Keefe and Veritas. Here’s a money quote:

• In the years since, O’Keefe has made a name for himself by attempting to unearth further supposed malfeasance by liberal activists, politicians, and institutions—as well as by his perceived foes in the establishment media and Big Tech. Multiple people caught up in O’Keefe’s investigations have lost their livelihoods in the frequently incoherent and often inaccurate publicity maelstroms that have followed the typical Project Veritas exposé: nonprofit workers, Obamacare navigators, NPR executives, public school teachers, and news media employees among them.

• In October 2021, a federal judge finally stated the obvious about O’Keefe’s latter day Nixonian dirty tricksters, declaring that it was acceptable for litigants to refer to Project Veritas in open court as a “political spying operation.”

• Though O’Keefe himself once betrayed his ambitions to make Veritas “the next great intelligence agency,” Veritas’s supposed charitable mission, as detailed annually in its nonprofit filings to the IRS, has consistently been to “investigate and expose corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud, and other misconduct in both public and private institutions.” Better late than never: The group has finally uncovered all the above at the top of its own organization.

In recent days, word has seeped out via social media that nearly all of Project Veritas’s staff have been laid off.

There are lawsuits on top of lawsuits with multiple investigations in progress. I can see no way out as its founder and the organization circle around the drain.

Karma, baby.

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Friday Snippets Saved from the Editing Room Floor

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Officials Investigate Threats Against Trump Grand Jurors in Georgia via the New York Times

• On Truth Social, the social media platform founded by Mr. Trump — who has himself lashed out at prosecutors, judges and private citizens who have sued him — many users reposted the names. In one response to a list of several jurors, a user urged others to make them “infamous” and to “make sure they can’t walk down the street.”

• Media Matters, a liberal nonprofit that monitors conservative media organizations, collected other messages posted on one online board that included threats of violence against the jurors and called the list of their names and addresses a “hit list.”

• The New York Times viewed writings on nearly a dozen channels of the messaging app Telegram, where the jurors’ information was being shared. In many of those channels, claims were made regarding the race or religious background of the jurors based on their names or their politics. Several people shared posts from one apparent grand juror who supported Democrats in the past.

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An Ever-Smaller Board on which to play the human game Via Bill McKibben at The Crucial Years. 

• It’s important—in this year that has seen global warming come fully to life—to describe accurately what’s happening on our planet. And one key thing is: the number of places humans can safely live is now shrinking. Fast. The size of the board on which we can play the great game of human civilization is getting smaller.

• Yellowknife this week, and Maui, and Tenerife in the Canary Islands, and Kelowna, a beautiful city in British Columbia’s Okanagan country. The pictures from each looked more or less the same: walls of orange flame and billows of black smoke. In each case many of the people hardest hit were indigenous; in each case fear and sadness and anger and above all uncertainty. What would be left? When might we return? Could we build back?

• The story of human civilization has been steady expansion. Out of Africa into the surrounding continents. Out along the river corridors and ocean coasts as trade grew. Into new territory as we cut down forests or filled in swamps. But that steady expansion has now turned into a contraction. There are places it’s getting harder and harder to live, because it burns or floods. Or because the threat of fire and water is enough to drive up the price of insurance past the point where people can afford it.

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California probes 'pharmacy deserts' in Kroger's Albertsons deal-sources  Via Reuters

• The California attorney general's office is probing whether Kroger's (KR.N) $24.6 billion plan to buy rival grocer Albertsons (ACI.N) will make it harder for people in poorer parts of cities or rural areas to buy medicines, according to two people familiar with the review.

• Food deserts, which are better known, are often working class areas of cities or small towns where people have few options to buy healthy foods like fresh foods or vegetables. Areas can face the same issue with pharmacy access.

• Research from the University of Southern California in 2021 found one in three neighborhoods in 30 populous U.S. cities were "pharmacy deserts."

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Too good not to include:

****Lead graphic via Project Democracy