Our more cynical supporters fret that some of these groups we investigate may get defunded but will just form again under some new banner. That may be true, but our objective is not to get groups defunded. Our objective is to expose wrongdoing. I list these successes to show what journalism, as activity, can accomplish. The best way for us to address the concern that our results are transitory is to produce more videos, produce them more frequently, and to encourage other citizen journalists to do the same. In the viper pit that is politics, corruption will regenerate like a snakeskin. That does not take away from the fact that our videos help facilitate the legislative and judicial process. As the Washington Post likes to tell itself, democracy dies in darkness. We agree. Without the light journalists shine, the legislative process sputters, stalls, even dies. In the words of Irish statesman John Philpot Curran, “The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.”16 That’s our job, eternal vigilance. This is the job of all of us, eternal vigilance. The solution to the problem of waste, fraud, and abuse is to press on, eternal vigilance.
How Project Veritas Confronts Its Detractors
Those familiar with our work only through the major media may not know of our accomplishments, but there are likely several things they do know, most of which are at best marginally true, and some are downright false. Mainstream journalists repeat these charges so consistently that we have taken to playing a sort of BS Media Bingo when we review what they report about our work. We check the appropriate box when each accusation appears: uses deception, selectively edits, degrades public discourse, convicted of a criminal act, sued for invasion of privacy. Keep in mind when reading these criticisms that the media are often as guilty or more guilty of the very charges they level against us.
”Project Veritas uses deception to gain access!”
Perhaps the most fundamental charge we face is that we use undercover video. “The techniques employed by O’Keefe and his associates, [journalists] say, fall far outside journalistic norms,” wrote Paul Farhi in the Washington Post a day after our videos forced the termination of two high-level operatives in the 2016 Clinton campaign.17 We hear this all the time, but using deception to get information out of people is hardly a new methodology. As you will see in a subsequent chapter, journalists have been using this technique for more than a century. Indeed, 60 Minutes built its brand using deception. Just as 60 Minutes and others have done, we act the part required to cover the subjects of our investigations. Acting the part is a means of obtaining access. With access, we can report the truth about what the subject is saying or doing when the public isn’t looking, as well as discovering who else is involved.
As we all know from our own experiences, what public figures say from the podium is often quite the opposite of what they say in private. So, too, for what they do in public versus what they do in private. No revelation there. CNN’s Alisyn Camerota once complained of this reality when she remarked about a Project Veritas sting: “Erica Garner was caught on tape not knowing she was being videotaped.” In an unwitting defense of Project Veritas, cohost Chris Cuomo replied, “Well, sometimes that’s when you’re the most honest.” Cuomo’s words would come back to haunt him, but we will see more about that in our chapter on CNN.
When the police tried to bluff George Zimmerman with the possibility that the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin had been recorded on camera, he replied, “I prayed to God that someone videotaped it.” Those most vulnerable to the honest presentation of video are those of all political stripes whose existence is rooted in hypocrisy and illogic, especially those who have been protected by the major media for so long they have neglected to protect themselves.
Here is the key distinction between the Project Veritas journalist and establishment reporters: while we use deception to gain access, we never deceive our audience. Traditional journalists who simply report what their subject tells them may not deceive the subject, but they often deceive their audience. When they tilt questions to their subject to produce a desired result, they doubly deceive their audience. Then, too, there is the traditional journalist’s technique of choosing people to interview that they assume will support their “scripted news.”
”Project Veritas ‘deceptively’ edits footage.”
In almost every case, the media find some way not to address the conversations caught on camera in the videos. If they cannot attack the facts, they attack the methodology. If they cannot attack the methodology, they attack the premise. If they cannot attack the premise, they attack the journalist. If they cannot attack the journalist, they often write off the evidence as some sort of a nutty conspiracy and ignore it.
In our experience, the media prefer to seize on some tangential detail to circumvent the focal point of these investigations. One criticism, as noted, is that we employ deception. A second is that we deceptively edit the videos we record. Without any evidence, the major media routinely call into question our editing. The first major allegation of deceptive editing came at the beginning of my career during the ACORN investigation. Some will remember that ACORN was a powerful, well-funded community-organizing cartel that engaged in any number of illegal and unethical activities from shaking down businesses to stealing votes. Worse, ACORN did it largely on the public dime. Indeed, there were reportedly billions set aside for ACORN in Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus program.18
My partner in the ACORN project, Hannah Giles, had been made aware of the organization’s dark heart and signed on to help me expose it. By this time I had already formulated what would become Project Veritas’s operating philosophy: Content is king. Without strong content, nothing else matters.
I sometimes describe Project Veritas’s style as one-third intelligence operation, one-third investigative reporting, and one-third Borat. For those who may not remember, Borat was a 2006 quasi-documentary starring Sacha Baron Cohen as Borat, a fictitious journalist from Kazakhstan. Borat wanders across America having oddball encounters with people who think he’s for real. This movie is better seen than explained, but those who have viewed it will know why I reference it. In the early days of Project Veritas, especially in the ACORN videos, we skewed Borat. We have largely moved away from our Borat stage, but we embrace our roots proudly.
I first experimented with this style in a sting I had done with the help of formidable pro-life activist Lila Rose, then an eighteen-year-old freshman at UCLA. A little too bold for our own good perhaps, Lila and I took on Planned Parenthood. Lila posed as a fifteen-year-old with me trailing along as her twenty-three-year-old boyfriend. Our goal was to see if the Planned Parenthood office in Los Angeles would offer a fifteen-year-old an illegal abortion and ignore its mandatory reporting duties on a likely statutory rape. The answer was unequivocally “yes.”
Our content was strong and undeniable. Without the video, however, Planned Parenthood would have simply denied any such encounter. As we have seen since, its executives now deny even the most undeniable video evidence. “Who are you going to believe, us or your lying eyes?” they might as well have said.
In the Borat spirit, I shot some B-roll with me as the rogue boyfriend, edited it all into an MTV-style video, and posted it on YouTube. Planned Parenthood was not at all ready for a guerilla-style assault from young America. Neither were the media. We were supposed to be on their side of the culture war. Dislodged from its safe space, Planned Parenthood overreacted and sent Lila a threatening letter. That letter found its way to Bill O’Reilly. He asked Lila to be on The O’Reilly Factor and showed clips from the video on air.19 Helped by its playful hipness, this video went viral. Just a year out of college with few resources and no useful connections, I found myself on the ground floor of a brand-new medium, looking up and learning as I went.
The ACORN project was a major educational experience. It thrust me fully into the limelight before I was prepared to deal with it. For our establishing shots, I dressed as a garishly ov
er-the-top pimp, and Hannah dressed as a prostitute. We visited six local ACORN offices across the country and asked the operatives if they would help us find housing for our stable of underage Central American sex slaves. In every case but one, they happily obliged us.20
The ACORN project had a generous dose of Borat about it. My pimp costume and Hannah Giles’s casually sexy walk attracted a much broader audience than the average political video could. Always quick with the right metaphor, my friend and mentor Breitbart called our exposé “the Abu Ghraib of the Great Society.”21 It was something everyone could understand and be repelled by. Yes, our video bumper was a bit flashy, but the networks use fancy graphics to grab viewers’ attention all the time. The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart said about our videos, “It probably cost CNN that much just to turn on their Hologram machine,”22 and the holograph has no news function beyond creating eye candy for the viewer.
Advising me on the distribution of the resulting videos was Breitbart, a multitasking media marvel. Expecting national ACORN to either deny the content of our first video outright or insist that the corruption at a specific office was an anomaly, he schooled me in the way to release the videos—one at a time. ACORN did exactly as Andrew predicted after the release of our Baltimore video. Once its executives dismissed the video as a one-off, we started dropping the others: Washington, Brooklyn, San Bernardino, Los Angeles. Still not sure what to make of us, the New York Times summed up the results of our efforts as follows:
After the activists’ videos came to light and swiftly became fodder for 24-hour cable news coverage, private donations from foundations to Acorn all but evaporated and the federal government quickly distanced itself from the group. The Census Bureau ended its partnership with the organization for this year’s census, the Internal Revenue Service dropped Acorn from its Voluntary Income Tax Assistance program, and Congress voted to cut off all grants to the group.23
This was not bad for beginners. Given ACORN’s powerful alliances, I dare say that many major media outlets have never had this big a score. We had embarrassed ACORN to be sure, but, more problematically for the statists, we embarrassed the dominant media. The media should have exposed this cabal years earlier. Instead, they nurtured it. Their reaction to our efforts ran from uneasy to hostile.
Again, to avoid addressing the conversations caught on camera in the videos, the media charged us with deceptive editing. For our opening sequence, Hannah and I dressed more flamboyantly than we did in our office visits. This was a useful strategy. For instance, the New York Post so loved the pimp-prostitute imagery that its editors put us on their front page.
The media, however, rejected much of what we undeniably captured because I dressed as a pimp only in the video bumper. The unedited video, protested New York magazine, “shows that [O’Keefe] not only did not dress that way at the ACORN offices, he never even claimed to be a pimp.”24 This was a common refrain. The fact that I openly discussed importing underage sex slaves was, in the media’s eyes, negated by the fact that I did not introduce myself as a “pimp.” Does pimp protocol require the wearing of a chinchilla-fur coat?
To briefly double back on the charge of our “deceptive editing,” the media have cited a press release from then California attorney general Jerry Brown. After a cursory investigation of our charges, Brown wrote, “The evidence illustrates that things are not always as partisan zealots portray them through highly selective editing of reality. Sometimes a fuller truth is found on the cutting room floor.”25
By referring to us as “partisan zealots,” Brown was projecting his own partisanship into what should have been an objective investigation. He did not reference a single specific deceptive edit in his report. Instead, he used the word “edit” as though selective editing was something other than the norm in all video journalism.
Buried in the report was the admission that the ACORN employees were up to no good: “A few ACORN members exhibited terrible judgment and highly inappropriate behavior in videotapes obtained in the investigation.” In fact, Jerry Brown admitted in a footnote the real reason why the ACORN employees were cleared of lawbreaking: “Because O’Keefe and Giles’s criminal plans were themselves a ruse, one cannot be criminally complicit in those plans.”
In other words, because I was only playing a pimp in the video, there could not be a criminal conspiracy. But that legal reasoning was deceptively edited out of mainstream media coverage. Mainstream journalists also ignored Brown’s admission that the ACORN employees actually said what they appeared to say in our video. Once inside the ACORN offices, we explained exactly what we hoped to accomplish. There were no editing tricks needed to establish the willingness of the ACORN workers to enable our proposed sex trafficking. It was the content of our videos that killed ACORN.
President Obama could not deny the verité of our visuals. “What I saw on that video was certainly inappropriate and deserves to be investigated,” said an embarrassed Obama.26 Yes, I think instructing a faux pimp on how to shelter his underage, illegal alien sex slaves would seem “inappropriate” to most sane human beings. When we exposed how ACORN worked and what its operatives thought, said, and did, the organization collapsed.
For years, the major media let this group inflict its cultural rot on America with impunity before our raw video shook the zeitgeist. The two of us, goofy as we must have seemed, showed how complacent, ideologically complicit, and downright corrupt American journalism had become. To his credit, the public editor of the New York Times, Clark Hoyt, came to our defense. He challenged the widely held media position that the story would “fall apart over the issue of what O’Keefe wore.” Said Hoyt, “If O’Keefe did not dress as a pimp, he clearly presented himself as one: a fellow trying to set up a woman—sometimes along with under-age girls—in a house where they would work as prostitutes.” In fact, the costume switch was the one and only bit of “deceptive” editing we practiced. Hoyt acknowledged as much. After a thorough review, he argued that the video’s “most damning words match the transcripts and the audio, and do not seem out of context.”27
Let me share one more example of the deceptive-editing accusation. In 2011, we created a website for a fictitious Muslim group and asked for a meeting with NPR brass to discuss a possible donation. As is our custom, we secretly videotaped a meeting with the executives over lunch. I cite this case because all the parties involved were sophisticated people with access to high-power attorneys.
We recorded the executives calling Tea Party members “xenophobic” and “seriously racist” in a conversation that veered from patronizing to scornful.28 After we posted the videos, the NPR CEO and the NPR Foundation senior vice president were forced to resign. Writing about the sting in the Washington Post, establishment Republican Michael Gerson severely criticized our journalism. This wasn’t unusual. Ever since I launched Project Veritas, our critics have accused us of selective editing or deceptive editing—or, in Gerson’s case, “selective and deceptive” editing.29
The three questions I continually raise are:
Why do people keep getting fired or defunded or forced to resign if everyone believes the editing to be deceptive and the story fake?
When was the last time a major media outlet aired any video that had not first been edited?
When have the major media ever posted their raw footage for all to see?
We posted the unedited video online. If NPR brass felt their employees did not say what they appeared to be saying, why accept their resignations? Besides, the executives who quit were people of means. If they felt they had been wronged, they could have sued NPR or Project Veritas or both. They did not.
The National Review’s Mona Charen took the time to watch the two hours of raw tape. “Contra Michael Gerson,” she wrote, “James O’Keefe’s editing of the Ron Shiller NPR video was not ‘selective and deceptive.’ ”30 What editing is not selective? All articles are written, selectively s
o. And if we could actually open up reporters’ notebooks and their drafts on Microsoft Word, we would find that the information they receive and relay from their sources, especially the anonymous ones, is not always accurate, sometimes not even close; or, for that matter, not even used (aka, selectively edited out completely) because it did not fit their story. So if the major media will not believe any evidence from citizen journalists unless it is on video and unedited, why, I continue to wonder, do they not hold themselves to the same standard? Using their standard for citizen journalists, why should anyone believe anything the mainstream media produce?
Charen understood. “Some of what I saw,” she wrote, “was even worse than the bits included in the edited version—such as the oleaginous Ms. Liley earnestly comparing American treatment of Muslims with our treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II.” Few in the media are willing to do what Charen did: watch two hours of raw tape. They would rather just repeat what others have said before them.
Likewise, few in the media are willing to hold themselves to the same standards they hold us. George Zimmerman sued NBC over a racially inflammatory editing job that cost a few low-level people their careers. Members of the Virginia Citizens Defense League are suing former NBC superstar Katie Couric over a bit of editing so conspicuously deceptive it will likely cost Katie Couric her career. Closer to home, CNN’s Alisyn Camerota fronted a selectively edited panel discussion in which one of the participants cited Project Veritas.31 As with the Couric case, leaked audio from a person in the room showed just how flagrantly CNN cut out the fellow’s detailed testimony about vote fraud he was aware of in New Hampshire. More on this later.
”James O’Keefe is a ‘convicted criminal.’”
Another accusation thrown at Project Veritas with shocking consistency is that I am a “convicted criminal.” In fact, I was convicted on a misdemeanor charge by an incredibly corrupt judicial system in New Orleans. Here is how it went down. In 2010, three of my colleagues and I attempted an ill-planned sting at Senator Mary Landrieu’s office in the Hale Boggs federal building. Our goal had been to simply test the truth of Landrieu’s claim that callers could not get through to her office to protest the impending Obamacare bill because the lines were busy.
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