Comment: With the Bush administration having destroyed the economy, along with just about everything else, the GOP right has been beating the rhetorical war drums about ACORN. Between the lines, they are implying that the collapse of the housing market and, thus, the financial industry was produced by poor blacks and Llatinos buying homes they couldn’t afford. (Of course, it WASN’T produced by Goldman Sachs, Pimco [stay tuned for upcoming programs], Roland Arnall and the other architects of the subprime mess.)
As it happens, scapegoating ACORN–and by extension non-white minorities and their “liberal enablers”–had much of its genesis with Karl Rove’s role in firing U.S. attorney David Iglesias of New Mexico. It seems that Iglesias resisted GOP pressure to crack down on ACORN, which was registering voters.
Much of the right-wing rhetorical firestorm about ACORN derived from activist James O’Keefe’s “sting,” in which he posed as a pimp, seeking housing for “ho’s.”
James O’Keefe turns out to be a fellow-traveler of the white supremacist movement.
“Rove: a Moving Target” by Michael Issikoff;Newsweek; 2007.
New disclosures in the U.S. attorney controversy have increased the pressure on White House aide Karl Rove. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s ex-chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, testified last week that “during the run-up to the midterm elections,” the A.G. told him Rove had “complained” that David Iglesias, the U.S. attorney in New Mexico, and two other federal prosecutors, were not doing enough to prosecute voter fraud—a top GOP priority. It was shortly after that, Sampson said, that Iglesias got added to the list of U.S. attorneys to be fired. (Iglesias told NEWSWEEK he had been repeatedly pushed by New Mexico GOP officials to prosecute workers for ACORN, an activist group that was registering voters in minority neighborhoods, but he found no cases worth bringing.) Justice was also forced to correct its earlier assertion that Rove did not play “any role” in replacing the U.S. attorney in Little Rock. Sampson’s e‑mails showed he had described the replacement as “important to ... Karl.”
Senate Judiciary Committee chair Sen. Patrick Leahy warned the White House that even a Gonzales resignation would not “short-circuit” his probe, vowing to block confirmation hearings for any successor unless he gets Rove under oath. (Bush has refused to allow Rove and other White House officials to testify in public.) White House spokeswoman Dana Perino reaffirmed Bush’s “100 percent” backing of Gonzales, and the A.G. vowed to carry on.
The inquiries are only multiplying. The Office of Special Counsel has begun its own investigation into whether Iglesias’s dismissal was a violation of both the Hatch Act (which prohibits federal employees from being fired for “political” reasons) and a law that bars discrimination against military-service members, said an official, anonymous when talking about an internal matter. Justice officials have at times suggested one reason Iglesias was fired is that he spent too much time away from the office because he is in the naval reserves. The agency’s director, Scott Bloch, recently pledged “aggressive” enforcement of the law, which is increasingly important given the growing number of National Guard and military reserves called up for service in Iraq. . . .
“James O’Keefe’s Race Problem” by Max Blumenthal; Salon.com; 2/3/2010.
Many of the conservatives who gleefully promoted James O’Keefe’s past political stunts are feigning shock at his arrest on charges that he and three associates planned to tamper with Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu’s phone lines. Once upon a time, right-wing pundits hailed the 25-year-old O’Keefe as a creative genius and model of journalistic ethics. Andrew Breitbart, who has paid O’Keefe, called him one of the all-time “great journalists” and said he deserved a Pulitzer for his undercover ACORN video. Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly declared he should have earned a “congressional medal.”
His right-wing admirers don’t seem to mind that O’Keefe’s short but storied career has been defined by a series of political stunts shot through with racial resentment. Now an activist organization that monitors hate groups has produced a photo of O’Keefe at a 2006 conference on “Race and Conservatism” that featured leading white nationalists. The photo, first published Jan. 30 on the Web site of the anti-racism group One People’s Project, shows O’Keefe at the gathering, which was so controversial even the ultra-right Leadership Institute, which employed O’Keefe at the time, withdrew its backing. O’Keefe’s fellow young conservative provocateur Marcus Epstein organized the event, which gave anti-Semites, professional racists and proponents of Aryanism an opportunity to share their grievances and plans to make inroads in the GOP. . .
One People’s Project covered the event at the time, sending a freelance photographer to document the gathering. Project director Daryle Jenkins told O’Keefe manned a literature table filled with tracts from the white supremacist right, including two pseudo-academic publications that have called blacks and Latinos genetically inferior to whites: American Renaissance and the Occidental Quarterly. The leading speaker was Jared Taylor, founder of the white nationalist group American Renaissance. “We can say for certain that James O’Keefe was at the 2006 meeting with Jared Taylor. He has absolutely no way of denying that,” Jenkins said. O’Keefe’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment on his client’s role in the conference.
This again?
Mission Accomplished!
You’d think this would be a bigger deal: It turns out Erik Prince — brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and someone who played a still-underexplored role in the 2016 US election involving Saudi/UAE interference on behalf of the Trump campaign — has been recruiting ex-spies to help train Project Veritas operatives to infiltrate left-wing groups and Democratic campaigns in recent years. The spies who did this training include an ex-MI6 officer, Richard Seddon. And the targeted groups include the congressional campaign of Democratic Abigail Spanberger and the Michigan office of the American Federation of Teachers. A lawsuit against Project Veritas by the union revealed a number of internal emails detailing the spying operation.
Recall how Project Veritas is the creation of James O’Keefe, the far right fake ‘investigative journalist’ known for his ‘creatively edited’ sting videos and palling around with white supremacists. So anyone training Project Veritas figures with spying techniques was basically training a group of smear merchants with a long track record of amoral behavior. This is a group very friendly with the ‘Alt Right’ neo-Nazis that will say and do anything that operates a GOP dirty-tricks operation.
One of the figures involved with operation to spy on the teachers union was Joe Halderman. He happens to be the former CBS producer who was convicted of attempting to blackmail David Letterman for $2 million. That’s the kind of people these are.
It sounds like the spy training started during the 2016 campaign season so it’s worth keeping mind that Project Veritas figures may have been part of Erik Prince’s various operations during that campaign. It’s worth recalling how O’Keefe’s fellow far right troll Charles Johnson was coordinating with the Peter Smith’s operation to find Hillary Clinton’s emails on the Dark Web (an operation that could have been a cover to arrange for their own hack of the Democrats). Smith claims he reached out to Johnson who made a reference to a hidden network of right-wing opposition researchers. The Project Veritas figures would be precisely the kind of people we should expect Johnson to have been referring to, especially of they were getting spy training by Erik Prince’s associates. The article also notes that Trump himself donated $20,000 to Project Veritas in 2015, the year his presidential campaign started.
It’s also worth recalling how Cambridge Analytica hired a number of former MI6 officers and was characterized as “MI6 for hire”. So this would be another example of former British intelligence officers working with the US far right.
So the Education Secretary’s mercenary brother hired ex-spies to train right-wing operatives to infiltrate groups including teachers union and those operatives hail from a dirty-tricks operation with an established track record of creating fake videos and intentionally deceiving their audiences. Keep in mind that DeVos is a big critic of teachers unions. Again, you would think this would be a bigger deal. But, of course, this is the Trump era where right-wing disinformation operations and dirty-tricks are an accepted norm so this report will presumably be largely ignored as just a report on the New Normal:
“Both Project Veritas and Mr. Prince have ties to President Trump’s aides and family. Whether any Trump administration officials or advisers to the president were involved in the operations, even tacitly, is unclear. But the effort is a glimpse of a vigorous private campaign to try to undermine political groups or individuals perceived to be in opposition to Mr. Trump’s agenda.”
Was this a Trump-involved private spy operation? There’s no direct evidence of that yet, but the fact that the Trump family has deep ties to both Prince and Project Veritas and a loves dirty tricks itself would almost make it surprising if the Trumps weren’t involved:
But whether or not the Trump team was directly involved with this, it’s undoubtedly the case that the operation worked in the interest of Trump’s education secretary Betsy DeVos, a vocal critic of teachers unions:
It sounds like the spy training started in 2016 during the US presidential campaign. One of the ex-spies involved, Richard Seddon, happens to be a longtime British intelligence officer who is married to an American diplomat, Alice Seddon:
The operations to infiltrate the teachers union was in 2017. The same operative infiltrated Abigail Spanberger’s 2018 campaign. Records show Project Veritas received $8.6 million in contributions and grants in 2018 alone. It raises the question of whether or not those grants were made, in part, with these operations in mind:
Disturbing, it doesn’t sound like the operative used in these operations, Marisa Jorge, is the only person Project Veritas sent in to infiltrate the educational establishment. In one email, O’Keefe brags about how the group would be able to get “a ton more access agents inside the educational establishment”:
Other figures in the spying of the teachers union include Joe Halderman, a former television producer who tried to blackmail David Letterman for $2 million in 2010:
And these operations to spy on a teachers union and Spanberger’s campaign are just the two operations that we know about. Emails made available to the court during the discovery process of the lawsuit over the spying refer to other operations, although details of those operations were redacted by Project Veritas:
So we know there are other spying operations. We just don’t know what they involve.
But considering that the same undercover operative, Marisa Jorge, was used to both spy on the teachers union and later infiltrate Spanberger’s campaign, you have to wonder of Jorge is involved in these other operations. And that points to something that can and should be done to minimize the damage Project Veritas is capable of: make the faces of known Project Veritas operatives widely known! It’s not like there aren’t names and faces for these people. There’s an entire website, projectveritas.exposed, that is dedicated to documenting and building profiles on the people involved with Project Veritas and it turns out they have a profile on Jorge with lots of photos. And in that profile they note that before Jorge infiltrated the Michigan chapter of the American Federal of Teachers in 2017 and Abigail Spanberger’s campaign in 2018, she infiltrated the campaigns of Deborah Ross, Roy Cooper, and Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016. Both Ross and Cooper are in North Carolina, which presumably helped with the logistics of infiltrating multiple campaigns simultaneously. Oh, and she infiltrated the Democratic Socialists of America in 2018, the same year she infiltrated Spanberger’s campaign. So Jorge is someone Democrats, unions, and any other left-leaning group should be made aware of because she’s clearly some the group prefers to use. Plus, now she has that spy training.
So perhaps there should be a lot more done to spread the information on Project Veritas Exposed. They have photos and profiles on a number of different undercover operatives. Just look at the home page. Why not take those photos and make online ads on left-wing sites like DailyKos? Just like “Be on the lookout” ads. That’s probably pretty cheap and you might be able to get some of these sites to allow the ads for free or at least for cheap. It would be a public service, after all.
President Trump just issued another public rebuke against one of his top officials. This time it was FBI directory Christopher Wray, who Trump described as “disappointing”. Why? Because Wray didn’t do more to investigate Trump’s fantasy claims about vast mail-in voter fraud. Keep in mind that Wray dismissed mail-in voter fraud concerns during a congressional testimony a couple of weeks ago.
And since prepping the Republican electorate to treat a Trump loss as the sign of massive voter fraud (with the hopes of somehow forcing a victory through non-democratic means) has now become the core reelection strategy of the Trump campaign, it’s worth noting one of the recent voter fraud revelations. They weren’t revelations about actual voter fraud. Instead, the revelations are about how a new ‘voter fraud’ story recently pumped out by Project Veritas and promoted by Donald Trump Jr. and the right-wing media ecosystem are hoax garbage. As both of the following articles make clear, the allegations in the Project Veritas video are either allegations of wrongdoing about things that aren’t actually illegal or selectively edited videos taken out of context. So this was a typical Project Veritas release.
The first excerpt below, we learn that Project Veritas and the right-wing media ecosystem had been hyping the release of its voter fraud video for weeks, with an announced release date of September 28. But the video ended up being release a day earlier, just hours after the story hit about Trump’s paying almost nothing in income taxes for years. The right-wing social media ecosystem rapidly promoted the Project Veritas story and soon it was trending on twitter and competing with the tax returns story. It was a media move reminiscent to the 2016 release of hacked emails in October by Wikileaks just hours after the release of infamous Hollywood Access Trump tapes.
The early release of the video ahead of the heavily publicized release date but just hours after the embarrassing Trump tax return story was one of the data points that suggested the video was released in a coordinated manner. But there was more direct evidence that Project Veritas was coordinating directly with the White House. It turns out Donald Trump Jr. uploaded his own copy of the Project Veritas video seven minutes after James O’Keefe uploaded the official video to Twitter. But Trump Jr’s version of the video didn’t contain the “from James O’Keefe” label that O’Keefe’s had. In addition, Trump Jr. uploaded the video to Facebook 10 minutes before O’Keefe placed his own version there. The Trump White House is denying there was any coordination.
Now, in the second article excerpt below, we learn that one of the men featured in the video is not only asserting that the footage of him was footage taken completely out of context and deceptively edited, but also that a man working for Project Veritas offer him $10,000 to make of the voter fraud claims. Project Veritas videos have always been joke tripe but now that the Trump White House is going to be relying on claims from groups like Project Veritas to spark a civil war if he loses the election this joke tripe has taken on a deadly new level of seriousness. Also recall how O’Keefe has been working with Erik Prince to get mercenary spy training for his operatives and that O’Keefe bragged that Project Veritas will be “the next great intelligence agency”, so Project Veritas should really be considered a paramilitary organization at this point.
Ok, first, here’s the NY Times piece on how researchers have identified the right-wing social media network that was hyping the Project Veritas story well in advance of the video release and then all suddenly pushed the story to the top of the social media trending content when the video was released a day in advance, hours after the Trump-taxes story:
““It’s a great example of what a coordinated disinformation campaign looks like: pre-seeding the ground and then simultaneously hitting from a bunch of different accounts at once,” Mr. Stamos said.”
A coordinated disinformation campaign that included a coordinated hype-phase and then boost to ensure it’s tending when it’s finally released. It’s the kind of campaign that obviously requires behind the scenes coordination with a number of different actors so it should come as no surprise that the Trump White House was one those behind the scenes actors. It should also come as no surprise that the Trump White House is implausibly denying these claims:
And what allegations there are in the video are either allegations of something not necessarily illegal or allegations of things that are definitely illegal but are alleged only from unnamed people whose faces are not shown:
And since videos of this nature — with anonymous sources making claims — can obviously be hoaxed and since Project Veritas has a long track record of hoaxes and deceptively edited videos, we have to ask if any of the anonymous people making these claims were paid or just actors? And, sure enough, we got our answer: Liban Osman — one of the people featured prominently in the video allegedly engaged in illegal ballot harvesting — is not only making claims about wildly deceptive editing of the videos he’s in but he’s also claiming he was offered $10,000 by a community activist working for Project Veritas to make the claims. That’s was we learned a few days ago in a local Twin Cities report on Fox 9.
Osman’s brother, Jamal Osman, also just ran for election this year and is the newly elected Ward 6 Minneapolis City Councilman. The community activist who allegedly made the bribe, Omar Jamal, told Osman, “‘Why are you defending Ilhan Omar?’...’They (Project Veritas) are not after you or your brother. Why are you defending her?’’”
Osman also asserts that the clip of video where he appears to be illegally harvesting ballots for Ilhan Omar is a deceptively edited compilation of two videos. One video of Osman in a car picking up ballots is from July. Osman believes it was late July, but the Project Veritas video claims it was from early July. This is an important distinction because court rulings allowed for more than three ballots to be picked up by volunteers — known as “ballot harvesting” — starting from July 28 to September 4 of this year. This is one reason it’s unclear if what the video is showing is illegal at all.
But then the video goes on to suggest that Osman was being paid by Omar’s campaign to engage in illegal ballot harvesting by playing video of Osman saying, “Money is everything. It’s the key to this world.” Osman says this video was actually taken in August and was directed at the opponents of his brother in the Ward 6 special election.
So how did Project Veritas get Osman’s videos? He uploaded them to SnapChat. So it appears that Project Veritas took two separate SnapChat videos that Osman uploaded while he was engaged in legal ballot harvesting, one from late July and one from August, then spliced them together and claimed it was from early July and indicating he was paid to ballot harvest. Or we could take Project Veritas at its word and assume that Osman just intentionally uploaded to SnapChat incriminating videos of himself illegally ballot harvesting for fun. Which side should we believe? Hmmm...
Note that Fox 9 got to view the raw videos that Osman is referring to and it is clear that the video posted by Project Veritas is a construct of these two videos.
And that’s not the only incident of fraud in the video. There’s also a scene that appears to showing someone receive $200 for ballots. But two sources told FOX 9 Investigators that the man receiving the money is actually a relative of Omar Jamal and the money was intended for the family of a sick relative in Somalia. So as we should have expected, we have another Project Veritas video that is a combination of exaggeration, deception, and outright fraud:
“In his first interview, Liban Osman tells the FOX 9 Investigators he was offered $10,000 by community activist Omar Jamal to say he was collecting ballots for Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.”
Is that the going rate for fake witnesses? $10,000? You have to wonder how many people have been given these kinds of offers. It’s almost amazing there haven’t been more people coming out with fake claims of all sorts of right-wing fantasies. You also have to wonder if Omar Jamal is being paid too or is he a genuine far right fellow traveler:
And note how, at this point, we are faced with a decision of whose word to believe? The word of Liban Osman or the word of the serial liars at Project Veritas? The serial liars at Project Veritas who are already demonstrably lying in this case. The Fox 9 investigators got to see the full clip of the videos provided by Osman. It’s unambiguous that Project Veritas took clips from two different days and spliced them together. This isn’t in question. Project Veritas has already been caught lying about this video:
Then there’s the footage of the man receiving $200 for ballots that was really just Omar Jamal giving money to his relative. And Jamal even admitted this later in an interview with Somali American TV:
Note in the interview for Somali American TV, Jamal claims the footage of the exchange of money was intended to be a demonstration of how such transactions are done. Which, of course, it not at all how it was portrayed by Project Veritas.
And as the article notes, despite this video being discredited almost immediately, President Trump was touting this story at one of his COVID super-spread campaign in Minnesota just shortly before he was officially announced as being infected:
It’s in keeping with the theme that’s emerged around Project Veritas: no matter how many times they’ve been discredited as serial liars they continue to be treated as a credible source by the conservative media and the GOP. Because of course. The conservative media and GOP are just as discredited. And that’s why, as of today, this discredited Project Veritas video is probably going to be one of the key pieces of ‘evidence’ the Trump administration trots out when it attempts to spark a civil war arguing the election was stolen. Which is pretty fitting if you think about it. If the US is going to fight a civil war over an avalanche of right-wing lies and disinformation as the primary ’cause’, it’s hard to think of a more fitting group to provide the necessary lies and disinformation than Project Veritas.
One of more disturbingly prevalent techniques of the far right that is increasingly being embraced by the Trumpian Right in the US is the propensity to ramp of the grievances and claims of oppression as a kind of rhetorical shield for offensive far right violence. It’s a reminder that, when the “Day X” white supremacist violent insurrection does eventually occur in America, it will be frame by the perpetrators as a last ditch defensive actions because they just had no choice, or something along those lines. It was a technique fully on display over the weekend in DC when hundreds of fascist Proud Boys — there for the ‘Stop the Steal’ rally — began roving the the streets of Washington DC, seeking out counter-protestors to brawl with, with the full knowledge that any street brawls they did create would be portrayed in the conservative media as some sort fight instigated by antifa and BLM terrorists. Groups of Proud Boys even tore BLM signs down from at least two history Black church and burned one of the signs, again, knowing full well that conservative media would likely either ignore the event entire or twist it as a sign a resistance as the radical communist terrorist BLM movement.
So given that the Proud Boys appear to be taking a lead role in creating street brawls, in part for the purpose of fuel the underlying far right’s persecution narrative and portraying ‘the Left’ as some sort of violent oppressive force in America, here’s a reminder that the Proud Boys happen to have a great deal of overlap with another prominent far right group that specializes in fabricating and fueling right-wing grievance narratives: Project Veritas. As the following New Republic piece points out, not only is Project Veritas’s founder, James O’Keefe, a longtime associate of Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnis, but Project Veritas itself has a history of higher Proud Boy members as their undercover operatives. In fact, when Project Veritas send four undercover operatives into Democratic campaigns in 2020 as part of “Project Gold Mine”, two of those four operatives were self-describe Proud Boys affiliates (one called herself a “Proud Boys’ Girl”). Those are just some of the examples of the overlap between these two groups Which is why we have to ask: how many of those hundreds of Proud Boys wondering the streets of DC looking for street fights were also members of Project Veritas:
“In 2018, Voynick was also in Indiana, posing as “Jack McCarthy,” where he shot undercover video of Jill Donnelly, wife of then-Senator Joe Donnelly, and members of Donnelly’s campaign, in which they admitted that Donnelly downplays his support for unions to appeal to conservative Indiana voters. Donnelly’s defeat that year became another sad slide in Project Veritas’s pitch deck to its wealthy benefactors. As primary season began, Voynick made his way to Iowa for the Gold Mine operation. Cassandra Spencer, the Gold Mine operative who targeted the Warren and Sanders campaigns—and, based on an internal review of Biden staffers and volunteers, shadowed one of their campaign events just before the Iowa caucuses—called herself a “Proud Boys’ Girl” and retweeted Michelle Malkin saying saying “God Bless the #ProudBoys.” That means that, of Project Veritas’s four infiltrators, at least two declared support for the group.”
That’s at least two Proud Boy operatives that were uncovered just this year. How many more are there working for O’Keefe? It’s a sadly important question. A question that will undoubted reveal more Proud Boy members given the fact that Project Veritas and the Proud Boys more or less inhabit the same political space: that of far right actors and provocateurs focused on public stunts intended to re-mainstream and legitimize white nationalism in the minds of the public. It’s a space James O’Keefe has been moving in for years as he was networking with white nationalist in college:
It’s worth recalling that O’Keefe’s friend, Kevin DeAnna, went on to play a major role in the rise of the Alt Right at the same time DeAnna was navigating supoosedly respectable conservative circles like the International Leadership Institute that ostensibly generates the next generation of conservative leaders. DeAnna also reportedly played a role in solicited resumes for the White House in 2016 after President Trump’s victory. The resumes were from members of the Alt Right.
They’re all part of the same political space. The political space dedicated to convincing white conservatives that ‘the Left’ presents some sort of diabolical mortal threat and only the white supremacists and neo-Nazis can save them. And while the Proud Boys specialize in creating and projecting violence, it’s Project Veritas that specializes in warping reality into ‘up-is-down’ narratives for conservative audiences. It’s two sides of the same fascist PsyOp. And that’s why we have to ask just how many of the fascist Proud Boys also happen to fascist Project Veritas operatives.
Given that Republican Party’s decades-long war on democracy has culminated in a party-wide push to delegitimize President Trump’s 2020 loss — and therefore delegitimize the incoming Biden administration — based on loudly trumpeted allegations of massive widespread mail-in voter fraud appear, here’s an article from back in August of this year that reveals a very interesting fun fact about this strategy: Project Veritas already had a large-scale operation focusing on delegitimizing mail-in voting up and running by the end of the summer of 2019. That’s what we learned thanks to some leaked internal Project Veritas documents about an operation dubbed Operation Diamond Dog.
And Project Veritas isn’t working on Diamond Dog on its own. The operation appears to be have been conducted in coordination with none other than Texas’s Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton. Recall how it was Paxton who recently brought the lawsuit bonkers lawsuit against four other states trying to force them to turn the election results over to Trump over charges that they illegally expanded mail-in voting. A lawsuit joined by 17 other Republican attorneys general and 126 House Republicans.
We’re also going to see that Donors Trust — the ‘charity’ used by the Koch mega-donor network for making anonymous contributions to entities, like when it gave VDARE $1.5 million to buy a real castle earlier this year — appears to have played a significant role in financing Project Veritas in 2019. Project Veritas raised more than $13 million in 2019, its largest reported revenue figure to date.
So virtually the GOP’s entire post-election strategy of proclaiming massive mail-in voter fraud — a strategy that seemingly relied on the pandemic to create a situation where mail-in voting was widely used in an emergency manner — was a strategy Project Veritas, Ken Paxton, and the right-wing mega-donors were all investing heavily in long before the pandemic ever started. The pandemic was simply the perfect amplification of that strategy:
“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-fu cking 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.”
As of August of 2020, Operation Diamond Dog had been up and running for well over a year with the expressed purpose of demonizing mail-in and absentee voting. We don’t know when exactly it started. We just know is started much earlier than the pandemic that suddenly made mail-in voting a major factor in the election. And by the end of the summer, Diamond Dog expanded with a particular focus on California and Texas:
And it’s in Texas where we find evidence of Project Veritas working directly with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, along with local Republican operative Aaron Harris, the current chief of staff to GOP congressman Lance Gooden. Harris appears to be the mediator between Paxton and Project Veritas:
Also note how one of the undercover operatives who worked on the operations in Texas, Cassandra Spencer, happens to be one of the self-described “Proud Boy” affiliates working for Project Veritas. Spencer went on to pose as a volunteer for the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren campaigns during the 2020 primaries as part of “Operation Gold Mine”:
Finally, note the role Donors Trust plays in acting as an anonymous funnel from wealthy donors affiliated with the Koch donor network. As we’ve seen, Donors Trust was literally used to help an anonymous donor grant the white nationalist VDARE Foundation $1.5 million so it could buy its own real castle in West Virginia in 2019. It’s an example of how much Donors Trust money goes to truly odious operations like Project Veritas or white nationalist castles:
You have to wonder how much more Project Veritas received in 2020, especially in this post-election period.
Similarly, we have to wonder how many more schemes Project Veritas is hatching right now in relation to Operation Diamond Dog. We can be pretty confident at least some new schemes are on the way. Just as we can be confident those schemes are probably very well financed and likely involves extensive secret the coordination with Republican officials.
There was a recent article in the New York Times that, on one level, is just another story about how deeply corrupt the contemporary conservative movement has become in the US, where gas-lighting and character assassination are routine tools in a perpetual war to re-write reality. But on another level it’s potentially a fascinating addition to our understanding of the political networks involved with the 2016 DNC hacks:
We’re now learning more about what the Project Veritas spy operation was up to during the Trump administration. Recall how we learned last year about the spy training camp that was financed by Erik Prince in 2016 to train Project Veritas operatives to go undercover and infiltration Democratic campaigns or organizations like the American Federation of Teachers. It was former MI6 agent Richard Seddon — married to state department employee Alice Seddon — who ran the training. We’re now learning about a new, particularly sleazy component of this operation. It turns out Project Veritas has been using dating apps and female undercover operatives to target FBI agents and other government officials with hidden cameras and microphones. It was ostensibly for the purpose of capturing government employees making disparaging comments about Donald Trump. But, obviously, such an operation acts as a generic blackmail operation. After all, it’s not like disparaging comments about Trump are the most controversial thing that might be captured during a sting-date. Then, in 2018, Seddon had the group actually rent on home in DC so the undercover operative could have a fake residence to maintain their fake identities.
One DC figure became a focus of the honey-pot operation: Steve Bannon’s replacement as Trump’s national security advisor, H.R. McMaster. One operative who lived at the DC honey-pot house was paid $10k to target McMaster, although the operation targeting McMaster was apparently ended after he resigned from the position in March of 2018.
The identity of who ultimately paid for this operation remains unclear, although, as the article notes, Project Veritas received millions of dollars during the Trump administration from anonymous Republican mega-donor utilizing political dark money organizations like Donors Trust. It’s part of the Project Veritas business model: as long as you have a large number of anonymous mega donors showering the group with millions of dollars, it’s effectively impossible to say who ultimately finances these individual operations. Although we can still narrow it down to Republican mega-donors.
But there are additional clues about who was behind this operation and this is where this story intersects with the larger story of 2016 DNC hacks and the still under-recognized role right-wing dirty-tricks operations played in the 2016 election: It turns out Barabara Ledeen was the person apparently acting as a middle-man figure to recruit people for the honey-pot operation. Recall how Barbara Ledeen, Newt Gingrich, Judicial Watch, and an unnamed defense contractor were running their own operation to find hacked Hillary Clinton emails that they believed were floating around the dark web. Or at least that was their cover story for what could have been an actual hacking operation. Ledeen told reporters that someone she trusted asked her to convey a message to a Project Veritas employee about targeting McMaster and that’s the extent of her involvement in the operation. And then she claimed she couldn’t remember the identity of this trust person.
So we have new reporting on what amounts to a well-financed Project Veritas DC sexual blackmail operation. Because, sure, Project Veritas could publish compromising audio and video of their targets, but they could also NOT publish the compromising info and just let the target know it exists. And this sexual blackmail operation just happens to include one of the central figures in the hacked email collection operation. A hacked email collection operation that was, in theory, just targeting Hillary Clinton but really could have been searching for the hacked emails of anyone of interest to this right-wing network. And as with compromising audio and video, it’s not like they HAVE to publish compromising emails. They could just be used for blackmail instead. That’s part of what Barbara Ledeen’s involvement in this honey-pot operation is potentially so significant: we could be looking at the contours of a much larger and more sinister right-wing blackmail operation. And don’t forget that this was all taking place before the January 2019 arrest of Jeffrey Epstein, raising the disturbing question of whether or not this operation was following a Epstein-designed sexual blackmail ring template or even involved the input of Epstein himself. These are the kinds of questions we should be asking after this report. Odds are those questions won’t really be thoroughly asked or investigated given the persistent inability of the media to fully appreciate the depth of the contemporary Republican Party’s corruption. But they really should be asked, with a sense of urgency. Because while the Project Veritas DC honey-pot house may have been shut down after McMaster resigned, there’s no indication that this network lost its interest in sexual blackmail:
“The operations against the F.B.I., run by the conservative group Project Veritas, were conducted from a large home in the Georgetown section of Washington that rented for $10,000 per month. Female undercover operatives arranged dates with the F.B.I. employees with the aim of secretly recording them making disparaging comments about Mr. Trump.”
The sleaziest ‘non-profit’ in DC just got a little sleazier. We already knew about the operation headed by Richard Seddon to train Project Veritas operatives in spycraft techniques for the purpose of infiltrating Democratic campaigns and organizations. Now we’re learning they also set up a fake DC home set up to house female Project Veritas operatives who would target FBI employees on dating apps. It was that honey-pot operation that ended up targeting Steve Bannon’s replacement as Trump’s National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster.
And yet it’s still not clear who actually ordered this honey-pot operation. All we know is that Barabara Ledeen played a role in recruiting operatives. Ledeen claims “someone she tested” contacted her to help with the plan but, oh, she just happened to forget the identity of this trusted person. Recall how Ledeen’s email-hunting operation against Hillary Clinton that was started in 2015 was reportedly done in concert with Newt Gingrich, Judicial Watch, and “an unnamed defense contractor” (Erik Prince?). Were the same people working on both operations? Was Project Veritas involved with the Ledeen/Gingrich email hunt? We don’t know, but it’s not hard to imagine the email-hunting operation morphing into a pro-Trump honey-pot operation. It’s a reflection of how little is still understood about these far right dirty tricks operations that got kicked into high-gear in the lead up to the 2016 election and were apparently never shut off:
And note how the undercover female operatives were being paid thousands of dollars for their services. That’s on top of the cost of renting the DC home. It wasn’t a cheap operation and we still don’t know who financed it. But we do know that Project Veritas received millions of dollars during the Trump administration from private donors, including $4 million from DonorsTrust in 2019. Recall how 2019 was also the year Donors Trust gave $1.5 million to the white nationalist group VDARE to finance the purchase of a castle in West Virginia near DC. 2019 was quite a year for disgusting Donors Trust donations:
Also note how this honey-pot house doesn’t appear to be the first time Project Veritas was using female operatives to secretly record and discredit male targets using dating apps. Project Veritas has apparently been doing this for years. The house was just Seddon’s idea of taking the honey-pot idea to the next level:
Finally, note how Seddon reportedly left the operation after becoming frustrated that Project Veritas wasn’t willing to engage in long-term infiltration operations. It raises the question: so when Seddon left, did he leave to start a different long-term infiltration operation? We have no idea but given the amount of money being thrown at these groups from anonymous mega-donors it’s not like Seddon would be lacking in financial sponsors:
It’s quite a tantalizing collection of revelations: Project Veritas actually set up a honey-pot house for its fake operatives targeting a still unknown number of government employees. Ostensibly with the goal of outing anti-Trump members of the ‘deep state’, but we have no idea if that’s the extent of their interest. Outing ‘anti-Trumpers in the deep state’ is a great cover story for a general political blackmail operation, after all.