During the week of October 17, 2016, they did just that. The technique they employ is often called “crowdsourcing,” that is, encouraging a bunch of unrelated people to solve a problem. On the day we dropped the first “Rigging” video, the redditors crowdsourced the heck out of it. They developed news stories, added to existing stories, and verified each other’s posts.
Take the case, for instance, of Zulema Rodriguez, a seemingly minor figure in our “Rigging the Election” video released on October 17. On one occasion, as I’ve mentioned, we captured her saying, “So [Aaron Black] and I did the Chicago Trump event where we shut down like all the, yeah. . . .” On another occasion Rodriguez says, “We also did the Arizona one where we shut the highway down.”15
When we put this video together, we did not know for sure whether Rodriguez had done as she claimed or was simply boasting about doing it. Our redditor friends decided to answer this question for us. No sooner did we post the first video than the leads came pouring in. The first really good one came from user NotWTFAdvisor. He found news footage of Rodriguez apparently faking an illness during the Arizona highway protest on March 19. In the video you can clearly see guys from the local fire department putting her on a stretcher and taking her away in an ambulance. You can also see her car being towed off the highway.
“Let’s find the public records,” NotWTFAdvisor encouraged his colleagues, and they responded.16
Trumpfan75 went into Zulema’s Facebook page and found a photo posted that same day. He compared the jewelry. “It’s definitely her, folks!” he said. User Rex-Super-Universum found proof she was actually called Zulema Rodriguez and worked with the Center for Community Change, “the site in charge of writing the Trump Duck article.” Rex was referring to an article in the Huffington Post that featured a photo of a duck and gave the photo credit to “Zulema Rodriguez.”17
WeTheMediaNow identified Zulema’s California license plate. It was a rental car. He called the towing company but hit a wall trying to trace the rental back to the Clinton campaign. That information could not be released. FrootAVator found earlier video footage of Rodriguez sitting in her car pretending to be blocked. “I’ll move my car . . . if you move [arrest] them!” she told the police as though she were not part of the “them.”18
The redditors kept digging. They learned that Rodriguez collaborated with “Trump Ducks” in Miami, that she was reimbursed for $1,108.97 by MoveOn.org on May 24, that she was given an airline ticket worth $830.95 by Stand Up for Ohio PAC on May 19, that she was paid $17,500 by that same PAC on June 10, a PAC that received $63,750 from MoveOn.org in June.19
Another redditor, 2moreEyez, plowed into the WikiLeaks documents and found an email from Democracy Partners honcho Robert Creamer to DNC communications director Luis Miranda reminding him of a “Trump Rapid Response/Bracketing Call—Today-Tues-May17–1PM Eastern.”20 This was two days before the Arizona protest. 2moreEyez reminded his colleagues that in part one of “Rigging the Election” at 10:59–11:04 Rodriguez says, “I just had a call with the campaign and the DNC. Every day at one o’clock.”21 She was not just bragging. She knew whereof she spoke.
“Dang, our people are like Colombo,” said DescendingLion. “Jesus you guys are amazing researchers,” added Deplorabetty. “I think the FBI is obsolete at this point,” said Americascicero. “Crowdsourced investigation is getting scary good.”22
The major media underestimate the ability of social media users to correct bad information from their own side. In the Rodriguez case, for instance, one redditor thought he spotted her at the Chicago Trump protest. NotWTFAdvisor corrected him. “False alarm,” he said. “This is someone else—check the teeth.”23 The teeth! If the right side of the internet has profited more from this phenomenon than the left, it is for the simple reason that folks on the right have no more than one newsroom doing the work for them.
Meanwhile HaroldStassenGhost came up with another WikiLeaks confirmation. This was a May 10 email from Eric Walker to Miranda regarding “action in front of RNC on Thursday morning for Trump/Ryan meeting.” He had “discussed with Creamer et al. today” and was sharing their plans. These included a demonstration, “a separate action in front of the NRSC,” and the distribution of signs to the rent-a-mob, his favorite being, “Donald Trump: Dangerous, Divisive, Disgraceful.”24
Then came the bombshell. PepeTheRacistFrog—his name an ironic taunt aimed at the thought police—found proof that the Hillary Clinton campaign had Rodriguez on the payroll. This was huge! He posted the relevant spreadsheet from the Federal Election Commission website and said, “Going rate for a rioter: $1,610.24 and a free phone. To the top!”25
“The date she was paid & had a phone was 2/29. 11 days later Trump’s rally was cancelled in Chicago,” added a fellow redditor. “She clearly admitted she was part of the trump rally violence / shutdown in Chicago. Hillary directly paid her on 2/29, to protest & cause a disturbance on 3/11. Pedes, get this to the top. Weaponized autism at its finest. LOCK HER UP!”26
The Rodriguez angle alone should have made for a major news story. Here was a woman provably on the Hillary Clinton campaign payroll caught on camera helping stage a highway shutdown and then later caught bragging about it. Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller was one of the very few publications to run with it. The article was headlined, “Activist Who Took Credit for Violent Chicago Protests Was on Hillary’s Payroll.”27 Said user Colorado-living to Pepe, “They copied your work almost verbatim and took credit for it. At least it’s out there.”28
On October 18, WaterBuffalo—where do they come up with these names?—posted the White House visitor log. We had seen this and talked about it, but as one redditor observed, “People need to SEE it too. They need the visual confirmation, the illustration of how this extends all the way to the top.” Another chimed in, “The first entry on the whitehouse list just posted shows Cramer [sic] going to see POTUS at the Residence. Tell me that’s a low-level anybody. (It’s not.)” He definitely was not. Said ImWithHEarse, “I’m loving this. Presidential campaign turns into community hacktivism turns into getting regular folks into becoming lethal computer forensicators.”29
I was loving this too. My staff and I were checking these updates in real time. They were not just advancing our story. They were keeping us entertained and reminding us we represented one very creative community of forensicators and hacktivists. These were the nameless, faceless counterrevolutionaries who were helping Project Veritas crack the dam and flood the countryside with real information. Genuinely moved, I sent out as many tweets as I could. As expected, the traffic on every tweet was two or three times what it had been just days prior. More than once, I found myself posting, “Look what the good people at @reddit just found!” And I meant every word of it. “Credit 1, Sean Hannity. Credit 2, Subreddit, The_Donald.”30
Going Viral in Vegas
About 6:00 a.m. on Wednesday, October 19, I was riding in an Uber on the way to Newark Airport when I heard New York radio host Frank Morano talking about our videos. In the last few days we had received scores of requests for me to speak on the air, and it pained me to turn so many down. These stations were hungry for content. Wanting to oblige, I texted Frank and—bingo—I was on the air. The Uber driver turned the radio off and listened in. He had heard stranger things I am sure.
I was hoping to sleep on the flight to Vegas. I had very little of it in the previous few days, but I was still too wired. CNN anchor Erin Burnett was sitting behind me. I did not speak to her, but I did speak to the Norwegian reporter sitting next to me. He knew who I was and asked if he could interview me. Later he emailed me, “Hi James, good meeting you on the plane today. The story is being read very well on our website now—thanks for the interview!”
While I was winging westward, the New York Times published an article on our efforts. They even took a screengrab of the YouTube video during the moment Scott Foval said, “If you’r
e there and you’re protesting and you do these actions, you will be attacked at Trump rallies. That’s what we want.” This was certainly a success, getting covered by the New York Times in a relatively fair article. That said, the headline—“Right-Wing Video Suggests D.N.C. Contractors Schemed to Incite Chaos at Donald Trump Rallies”1—was more of the pigeonholing we had gotten used to. They could call us “right wing” if they liked, but unless exposing political corruption was now a “right-wing” phenomenon, there was nothing ideological about the video in question. The Times used that descriptive to alert its readers not to take us seriously. The article was laced with qualifiers. Our videos were “creatively edited.” They only “appeared to show” Creamer and Foval plotting violence. O’Keefe “considers” his investigators “to be journalists” and, the sine qua non, “He has also had legal problems of his own.”
Most of the article was dedicated to denials of wrongdoing. DNC chairwoman Donna Brazile described Scott Foval as a “temporary regional subcontractor,” one who does not “represent the values that the committee holds dear.” What is more, she added, “We do not believe, or have any evidence to suggest, that the activities articulated in the video actually occurred.” Creamer agreed. He assured Times readers that “none of the schemes described in the conversations ever took place” and dismissed Foval’s comments as “unprofessional and careless hypothetical conversations.” Never took place? Trump had to cancel the Chicago rally, Zulema and pals tied up the Arizona highways for miles, and Shirley Teter made headlines for appearing to get punched out by a Trump supporter in North Carolina. As for himself, Creamer “was stepping away from the campaign to avoid being a distraction.”
Following the denials, the Times turned back to me, reminding its readers that I pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges in New Orleans six years earlier and had paid $100,000 to settle an ACORN lawsuit in California. What the Times did not do is what the redditors did—see if the actions boasted about actually occurred. Forced to cover the story by the termination of Foval and Creamer, the Times used the occasion to discredit Project Veritas and our efforts. Nevertheless, half a page in the New York Times wasn’t bad.
That same morning, October 19, Anderson Cooper was in Las Vegas, leading a panel discussion on the videos.2 Cooper led off by reminding the audience of my “less than stellar reputation for accuracy.” He did not provide examples. He then introduced CNN reporter Drew Griffin, the same guy who grudgingly called me in my office the day before. Griffin referred to me as a “discredited conservative activist” so casually you’d think it was my job title.
After claiming I had “zero credibility,” CNN political contributor Maria Cardona showed her own credibility to be less than zero. “He is the one who did the doctored videos of Planned Parenthood, which were completely false. He is a criminal, right?” No, Maria, not exactly. Although I had done a Planned Parenthood video years earlier, she was referring to a recent series done by activist David Daleiden. The videos were not “doctored,” and if they were “completely false,” how do you explain that tray of baby parts the Planned Parenthood clinician sorts through so casually in video five?3 Cardona had no need to explain. Nor did Griffin or Cooper. CNN had never showed the videos.
On that same October 19, Adam Raymond of New York magazine wrote an article headlined, “James O’Keefe’s Latest Videos Cost Two Dem Operatives Their Jobs.” Again, these two high-level players were not forced out because of our selective editing. They were forced out because of what they had said and done. Raymond must have known this. The headline indicates the same.
In virtually every sting we have done, of course, the culpable party claims that what he said was taken out of context or somehow distorted. Cesar Vargas, one of the stars of our “Rigging” series, did just that. “Given O’Keefe’s history of selective editing,” wrote Raymond uncritically, “Vargas’s claim should probably be taken seriously.”4 No matter how many heads roll because of our journalism, no matter how many funding sources dry up, no matter how many laws are changed, no matter how many arrests are made, the media never weary of this accusation.
Meanwhile, back at the White House, a Fox reporter asked Obama spokesman Josh Earnest a useful question. He wanted to know how it was that a convicted felon who had just been sacked by the DNC for campaign mischief had managed to visit Obama’s White House 340 times, 45 of which were with Obama himself.
Earnest knew these were legitimate numbers. They had come from the White House logs. Rather than answer the question, Earnest chose the well-trodden media path of attacking Project Veritas. “I’ve been asked about the videos that have come from this outlet in the past,” Earnest snickered, “and each time I’ve tried to urge people to take those reports not at face value and not just with a grain of salt, but with a whole package of salt.”5 As was normative during the Obama years, no other reporter followed up on a tough question from Fox.
After arriving in Vegas, I tried to sleep at the hotel but could not manage it there either. By the time we arrived at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas campus for the third and final presidential debate, I felt as if I were spacing out. Sitting there before the debate started and looking around at the various anchors in the booths above us, I had this weird sensation that they were talking about Project Veritas. I thought maybe it was just sleep deprivation, but the closer I looked, the clearer it became that they actually were talking about us. I could see the “Rigging” videos playing on their monitors. I decided to scan the shows on my iPhone.
I was able to pick up the conversation between Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook and CNN’s Jake Tapper. To his credit, Tapper was asking some tough questions. To his discredit, Mook was giving nonsense answers. Yes, of course, Mook told Tapper, the actions described in the video were “unacceptable,” and he was prepared to speak out against them. What he also wanted to speak out against was my implication “that people’s votes won’t really be counted and that the system is fraudulent.” Where did Mook get that? On our videos, the only ones who implied the system was fraudulent were Scott Foval and his pals.
Mook concluded, “Republican secretaries of state are the ones coming out condemning the things Donald Trump and James O’Keefe are saying.” I tweeted from my seat, “#RobbyMook excuses #VoterFraud & attacks me. He’s literally a professional excuse maker.” I added, “You’re witnessing history in the making. The power of citizen journalism and social media is greater than the firewalls at the MSM #debate.”6
While I waited for the debate to begin, I read an article by Dave Weigel that had just gone up on the Washington Post website. Weigel did little more in the article than parse, Bill Clinton–style, Scott Foval’s use of the word “it.” Weigel conceded that Foval did seem “to be mentioning the idea of fraudulent voters,”7 but since some of the edited clips were not “100 percent clear” on what “it” meant, the videos could be safely ignored. In a subsequent tweet about “the B.S. Project Veritas video,” he made his contempt clear.
“Did the higher ups at @washingtonpost tell you to bury/spin this, @daveweigel?”8 I tweeted back.
“Now, if you end up proving that Obama had dozens of meetings on how to steal elections, I will shine your Pulitzer,”9 Weigel replied.
If any single quote summed up the state of the current media, that was it. The Washington Post has a $500 million annual budget.10 That is at least one hundred times greater than ours. In his article, Weigel claimed that “years of investigations” have shown in-person voter fraud to be insignificant, but I am hard pressed to recall a single serious investigation by the Post or any major media outlet. Back in the day, Chicago Tribune reporters had no trouble finding tons of it. The fraudsters were still at it. The journalists weren’t.
“Shouldn’t this be YOUR job at the @washingtonpost to expose?” I responded. “I’d never accept a bs Pulitzer from such a corrupt media.”11 To make the job easier for Weigel, we posted the log of
Foval’s White House visits. I did not expect him to follow up. Voter fraud is not a story Weigel and his fellow travelers want to explore.
I’ll admit it. I watched the debate itself with a different expectation than the rest of the audience. They cared about how their candidate would perform. I cared about whether Donald Trump would mention our videos. He did not disappoint. After a few false starts, Trump seized an unlikely question about his sexual behavior to weigh in on dirty Clinton campaign tricks in general.
“I believe it was her campaign that [recruited his female accusers],” said Trump of Hillary, “just like if you look at what came out today on the clips where I was wondering what happened with my rally in Chicago and other rallies where we had such violence. She’s the one and Obama that caused the violence. They hired people. They paid them $1,500, and they’re on tape saying be violent, cause fights, do bad things.”12 Trump segued back to the female accusers and then returned to the “criminal act” captured in our videos. Said Trump, “They’re telling people to go out and start fistfights and start violence—and I’ll tell you what. In particular, in Chicago, people were hurt and people could have been killed in that riot. And that’s now all on tape started by her.”
I was sure that at that very moment the Project Veritas staff and all those who helped spread our message cheered loudly. “One small step for Veritas,” I tweeted, “one giant leap for citizen journalism.”13
When the debate was finished, Gentry Beach, the Trump staffer who invited me, escorted me to the red-carpet area where the media were gathered. This whole experience overwhelmed me. I felt sort of like The Hunger Games’ Katniss Everdeen must have in her first visit to the crazed, decadent Capitol.
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