I went back outside and recorded what journalists call a “stand-up.” Speaking into a mike, I showed the “ballot” and explained to the camera why the transaction I had just recorded was illegal. The law is clear: no election officer, when giving instructions, should “seek to persuade any such voter to vote any particular ticket or any particular candidate.” Sarah had boldly ignored the law. Matt, one of our undercover journalists, had gone in with me and gotten even more explicit instructions from another poll worker. “Yeah, yeah, vote for Hillary,” she told Matt. “Vote for Hillary?” Matt asked. “We’re not supposed to tell you who to vote for,” she said with a wink. “Vote for Hillary?” Matt asked again. “Yes,” she affirmed.1
To get more footage I went back inside and there ran into an enraged Sarah. She sensed she had been stung and was coming after me. This was not a place I wanted to hang around. North Philly has a history. On Election Day 2008, two members of the New Black Panther Party stood guard outside a polling station and threatened voters. One of the two men carried a nightstick. Both wore paramilitary gear and shouted racial slurs. “You are about to be ruled by the black man, cracker!” one of them yelled at a would-be white voter.2 There was nothing subtle about this. The bullying was captured on video and witnessed by veteran civil rights workers. They had never seen intimidation quite so flagrant.
This was serious business. The Justice Department had more than enough evidence to file a lawsuit. Just weeks before Barack Obama was to be inaugurated as president, its attorneys charged the New Black Panther Party and three of its members with violating the 1965 Voting Rights Act. When the accused failed to respond, the DOJ fully expected to win the suit by default and mete out punishment accordingly. That did not happen. In May 2009, the newly appointed brass in the Department of Justice overruled the six career attorneys who managed the investigation and let the suit drop. The New Black Panthers walked away unpunished, and the media chose not to ask Obama why.
Emboldened by the media silence, Obama took to questioning the very existence of voter fraud. At a White House press conference three weeks before the 2016 election, he insisted that “instances of significant voter fraud are not to be found.”3 Significant? Sounds like something of a hedge, no? Days later at a Miami rally for Hillary Clinton, he upped the absurdity level. “You are much likelier to be struck by lightning,” he told a cheering crowd, “than have somebody next to you commit voter fraud.”4 The media happily joined in the mockery.
From our experience on the ground, we at Project Veritas knew better. In many localities we had been finding fraud—or the possibility of it—everywhere we looked, and no city offered a more target-rich environment than Philadelphia. The 2012 election offered ample evidence to anyone who cared to know. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, not exactly an alt-right publication, fifty-nine voting divisions failed to register a single vote for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, not one. The total count from these divisions was an astonishing 19,605 votes for Obama to 0 for Romney.5
Think about this for a second. By best estimates, Romney received 6 percent of the black vote nationwide. For argument’s sake, let’s assume he got only half that number in Philadelphia. Even with that handicap, if only twenty-three people had voted in those divisions, the odds would have favored Romney getting at least one vote. With nearly twenty thousand people going to the polls, Romney would have had a better chance of getting struck by lightning while being eaten by a shark than striking out with every single voter.
Having teased with the numbers, the Inquirer skipped the probability theories and moved directly into the defensive crouch that had become reflexive during the Obama years. “These are the kind of numbers that send Republicans into paroxysms of voter-fraud angst,” jibed the trio of Inquirer reporters who covered the story. Assuring the reader that there was “little hard evidence” of fraud, they implied that the real problem was Republican paranoia.
By 2016, the major media and their well-funded allies in the blogosphere had gone all in for Hillary Clinton. They weren’t even faking objectivity anymore. Although they professed confidence in the outcome of the election, I sensed a desperate edge to their reporting and a crude sharpness to their attacks, and all of this was coming to a head on Election Day.
The evening before the election, I was talking with Stephen Gordon, Laura Loomer, and some people close to Veritas we had flown in from around the country to help with media. When going out to cover the potential for voter fraud, it’s a safe bet to know you will come back with video content, but it is very difficult to predict exactly what you will get. They wanted a theme for the next day that would stick no matter what our journalists came back with.
We toyed with a couple of ideas and then went back to one we started during the primaries: #VeritasIsEverywhere. Around 6:30 p.m. I tweeted: “WARNING: If you don’t want to become a viral YouTube sensation tomorrow, don’t commit any #VoterFraud!!! VeritasIsEverywhere.”6 A supporter tweeted back, “Everyone has cell phones with cameras. #VeritasIsEverywhere should be a movement! You see something, report it.”7 While the hashtag had been used sparingly before, a new minor movement was born then and there.
Gio slowed down after putting a few blocks between us and the polling station. Ahead of us we chanced upon an old van whose back window was marked with the kind of crude, paste-on letters you might buy at your local Dollar General. The words were in Spanish. Happily, Gio was fluent. Although born in the United States, he spent a good part of his childhood in Guatemala. I had hired him during the summer to help me paint my sailboat. Just eighteen at the time, he proved to be such a good worker I asked him to join us at Project Veritas. With his studded earring and wiry good looks—in the movie version, a young James Franco—Gio fit no one’s stereotype of a right-wing activist. In fact, almost no one at Project Veritas fits that stereotype. Our median age is about twenty-five, and our politics are all over the place.
The key word on the van in front of us was “Iglesia,” meaning “church.” I could have probably figured that out, but it was good to have verification. What struck Gio as odd was that there was no designation of which church. It was simply “Iglesia.” Suspicious, we followed the van for a while and discovered that the driver was taking people to the polls. It looked like a classic knock-and-drag.
I shot a video of the van and posted the footage along with my commentary on Twitter. “So we’re behind this bus, which is like a pastor bus busing people around to polls in Philadelphia, and we’re going to be releasing video today showing some people doing some improper things—busing people around, maybe they shouldn’t be doing it? Stay tuned . . . [We’re] all over the country undercover on Election Day, and we’re going to be busting the whole thing open.”8
From past research we knew, too, that these vans did not always stop at one polling place. In one of the more notorious recent incidents, a New York State grand jury uncovered a voting conspiracy in Brooklyn that had persisted for at least fourteen years. One witness told the grand jury how he bused a crew of eight people from one polling station to another, each member of the crew voting at least twenty times in a given day. On the Election Day in question, this was one of twenty such crews in Brooklyn alone.9
No sooner had I posted my tweet about the pastor bus than the attack dogs in the alternative progressive media came back snarling. What follows are some sample headlines:
Slate: “James O’Keefe Stalks Van of Voters, Alleges Fraud, Is Himself Possibly Breaking Law.”10
Salon: “James O’Keefe is spending Election Day following vans around Philadelphia. Not a single ‘pastor bus’ in the city of Philadelphia is safe from the snoops over at Project Veritas.”11
TPM: “James O’Keefe Spends Election Day Stalking Vans of Voters around Philly.”12
RawStory: “James O’Keefe Films Himself Committing Voter Intimidation by Stalking a Church Van Bringing People to Polls.”13
Protected by a major media that nurtures them, these left-leaning outlets do not get half the critical attention of their less privileged right-leaning equivalents. That said, they have resources and connections I can only envy. For instance, Microsoft helped launch Slate twenty years ago, and eight years later the Washington Post Company bought Slate and remains involved to this day.
According to Jeremy Stahl, who posted his Slate article at 1:28 p.m. on election day—two hours after my tweet—I had a lengthy history of unfounded voter fraud accusations, a history I took to a “creepier level, stalking potential voters and bragging about it.” In this brief time window, Stahl had tracked down a law professor from California who assured Slate’s readers that the “shady James O’Keefe” was the real problem. “It is legal to give people free transportation to vote,” said the professor. “It is illegal to hassle people for voting. Once again, O’Keefe’s efforts to find election crimes may be creating them.” Stahl concluded his piece with a patronizing touch of millennial snark, “Nice work, James.”14
None of these publications asked the most basic of questions: although it is obviously legal to give free transportation to would-be voters, is it legal for a pastor to give free transportation? According to the IRS code then in play, 501(c)3 organizations—and that includes churches—cannot “participate in, or intervene in, any political campaign on behalf of/in opposition to any candidate for public office.” In short, pastors and church staff should not be using church resources to engage in political campaigns.
The dominant media profess to believe this. Consider this unremarkable opening sentence from an approving 2012 CNN article: “Americans United for the Separation of Church and State has sent a letter to the Internal Revenue Service accusing Pastor Robert Jeffress of violating the law when he posted his endorsement of presidential hopeful Rick Perry on the First Baptist Church of Dallas website.”15 A 2014 Washington Post article carried this alarming headline, again about conservative preachers, “Political Pastors Openly Defying IRS Rules on Candidate Endorsements.”16 More recently, the Americans United for Separation of Church and State urged its friends in Washington, “As 2016 Presidential Campaign Gets Under Way, IRS Should Act to Enforce Non-Profit ‘No-Politicking’ Rule.”17
It is not at all unfair to say that the thrust to separate church and state has come almost exclusively from the left. Lyndon Johnson was responsible for the IRS provision in question. Donald Trump has since annulled it. Given this fact, one would think progressive politicos and their media allies would appreciate our efforts to warn America about potential violations of the IRS codes by the Iglesia van. They apparently did not.
As we knew and the media should have, there is nothing nonpartisan about these pastor buses. On that same day, November 8, we posted a video assembled from undercover footage that Project Veritas journalists had recorded in Gary, Indiana. Posing as political consultants, they met with a Reverend Marlon Mack, pastor of Gary’s nicely named Sweet Home Baptist Church. Mack proved forthcoming and more than a little boastful. That first meeting led to a second meeting with the Reverend Mack and a crony, the Reverend Marion Johnson, to discuss plans for Election Day. It took very little prompting to get them to open up.
“The thing is,” bragged Johnson, “if we get our people to the polls, they know who to vote for. It’s not going to be, ‘Oh who do I vote for?’ Because we’re going to tell them who to vote for.”18
“I say I’m voting for Hillary Clinton. And that’s automatically telling our congregation to vote for Hillary Clinton,” Johnson continued. “And you see all these vans rolling to the polls with the name of the church and the pastor’s name on the side. And they know that the pastor’s providing that. They know who they’re voting for.” Added Mack, “I mean literally, we can have twenty vans roll up.” There was no nuance to their boasts. They said what they said, and after the video was posted, they did not try to deny it.
Inner-city pastors of all shades have been intimidating voters in Democratic-controlled cities for years. Personally, I had trouble with the IRS code that prevented church involvement in politics, but the left has supported that measure. At least they did in theory. In reality, the left-leaning media have chosen not to notice when pastors drive busloads of voters to the polls to elect Democrats. In reality, they openly embrace the wholesale vote harvesting, legal and otherwise, that undermines democracy in America’s cities. In reality, they delight in smearing organizations like Project Veritas whose reporting protects the integrity of the electoral process.
People talk about an “echo chamber,” but in the era of Obama, “power chamber” made more sense. Obama called voter fraud a myth and hinted that those who exposed it had racist motives. The major media amplified the message throughout the progressive imperium. Their colonial outposts in local and alternative media, here and abroad, sharpened the edge of the message and struck out at the opposition. Finally, the faceless minions in social media channeled the power of the White House and America’s newsroom and savaged those who challenge that power, especially on Twitter. I was called a “piece of shit,” a “little bitch,” and was asked to crawl back under my rock any number of times.
I get this a lot. The thinking is that since I did not go to a journalism school and did not work in a major newsroom, I have no business venturing into the public arena. The Twitter trolls would rather I rejoin my fellow vermin, including the soon to be humiliated Donald Trump, under whichever rock we emerged from. In the early afternoon of November 8, they were feeling the power, certain they had at least four more years to abuse it. They were so sure that they called in outside muscle to serve up the vengeance that was their due. “Thanks for everyone who tweeted us this,” the ACLU said about my “Iglesia” post. “Please contact @LawyersComm if you see voter intimidation.”19
As they became more and more excited, the trolls were tweeting furiously enough to get my name trending on Twitter. It was less of an honor than it used to be. Not too long ago “trending” meant you were among the top ten news stories of the hour. That gauge, however, was too objective, especially in an election year. A reliable cog in the progressive power machine, Twitter now admits that the number of tweets “is just one of the factors the algorithm looks at when ranking and determining trends.”20 Whatever the algorithm was on November 8, Twitter allowed me to trend. The trolls were quick to remind me that my critics were driving that trend.
I had no time to fret about these petty snipes or the future of the nation. I had to get the “Sarah” video edited and posted that afternoon while it still had legs, and I had to get back to New York for what I believed was a private election watch party. New York and Philadelphia are only a hundred miles apart, but on the New Jersey Turnpike, on a late weekday afternoon, only God knows how long that could take.
I was driving now. Gio was sitting in the front seat producing the video on a laptop. He had gotten better journalism training in the last four months than a student at the vaunted Columbia Journalism School would get in four years. Hell, he had gotten a better education in this single day. Even before he fell in with us, Gio had no interest in college. From what I have seen of the tyranny of political correctness on college campuses, I could hardly blame Gio for keeping his distance.
Making History
Happily, we made it through the Lincoln Tunnel without losing too much time. I drove uptown to an Equinox gym, turned the car back over to Gio, and headed down to the showers to clean up and change into something presentable. Gio came back to pick me up and drove me crosstown to the Hilton. I got there about 6:30 and took the escalator up to the ballroom.
Damn! This wasn’t some private watch party. The room was huge, no yuuuuge. Young people in red “Make America Great Again” caps wandered about excitedly. Older people in business attire milled around nervously. A large screen in the center of the stage was tuned to Fox News. Rows of American and state flags grac
ed the stage to the left. The stage to the right had a single microphone. This was the real show. Win or lose, history would be made here in just a few hours.
I stood wide-eyed at the entrance. I did not know quite what to do. I did not have a pass. Hell, I did not even know about the event until a few hours earlier. Then a Trump surrogate, Josh Whitehouse, spotted me.
I met Josh in Vermont about a year earlier when no one thought Trump had a prayer. After a Trump stump speech, his only one in Vermont, Josh escorted me backstage. This is where Trump called me “wild man.” At the ballroom entrance, I told Josh my predicament. I didn’t have a VIP pass. I didn’t have any pass for that matter. I wasn’t sure whether I needed a security clearance. I wasn’t even sure if I should be standing where I was. He looked at me as if I had three eyes. He reached down, grabbed a VIP pass, and scratched out the name that was on it.
“You’re James O’Keefe,” he said. I nodded. He wrote my name on the pass and handed it to me.
“James,” he said, “You won the election for us. You can stand wherever the fuck you want.”
Crazily optimistic, I thought, and something of an overstatement about my role perhaps, but I’ll take it. I wandered in. The room was colorful but smaller than I would have imagined, the right size, I supposed, for a “moral” victory, much smaller to be sure than the hall at the Javits Center where excited crowds waited eagerly to see glass ceilings shattered. I made my way through the anxious mass of rabble-rousers, red cap–wearing late-stage adolescents, and outsiders of a thousand different stripes. They all looked surprised to be there and happy despite their trepidations. The exuberance was tangible.
“Mr. O’Keefe,” said a young guy approaching me, “I went to Rutgers too. Mind if I get a picture?”
American Pravda Page 22