You know what I miss? That conservative squirrel. He should have gotten a Fox show.
Prepare to recoil in horror at the results of the latest conservative video "sting," as crack scandal-maker James O'Keefe and his
Project Veritas films his undercover agent
giving Clinton campaign swag to a Canadian. Oh, Hillary is in it big-time for this one. This may be the thing that brings the whole campaign—
Wait, what?
According to O'Keefe, the reporter simply happened to be near a woman from Montreal who encountered a problem when trying to buy some trinkets.
"She's Canadian and so we can't take it," says Molly Barker, the director of marketing for the campaign.
And so begins our journey into the land of intrigue and crappy camera footage, but it requires some below-the-fold explanation.
A Canadian woman was at a Hillary Clinton event and wanted to buy a campaign souvenir. There is a problem with this, as the Clinton campaign staffers correctly identified, because one of the few remaining campaign laws our Supreme Court have left standing is the rule against visiting tourists buying campaign souvenirs. It would count as making a contribution to a campaign, and non-Americans are not allowed to do that—not even Canadians, who are widely regarded as honorary Americans anyway. So the Clinton staffers had to turn the poor woman down, leaving her swag-less, until the crack undercover agent from Project Verytense leaped into action with a plan to, um, buy it for her.
"Canadians can't buy them, but Americans can buy it for them?" asks the journalist.
"Not technically," says Barker. "You would just be making the donation."
So the "journalist"—and the Washington Post needs to have an editor's meeting on this one, because there's no way in hell a James O'Keefe flunky counts as a "journalist" by even the most charitable definition of the word—bought the Clinton campaign swag themselves. Then turned around and sold it to the Canadian woman at the sticker price (what, no markup?), which you could argue was the kindest thing anyone associated with James O'Keefe has ever done for anyone, and hurried back to their underground lair to release the groundbreaking video of them doing that thing.
Daniel Pollack, the director of communications at Project Veritas, argued that the on-camera swag exchange was part of a Clinton scandal continuum, comparable to the stories about foreign businessmen donating to Bill Clinton's foundation and expecting something from Hillary Clinton's state department.
And the video was released with boasts from O'Keefe that his team is "
sort of like SEAL Team 6", because dear God does this wanker has a high opinion of himself, and congratulations all around for finally bringing the evil Hillary Clinton down.
There are only a few problems with this. The first is that if any law was broken, it was (stop me if you've heard this one before) broken by the O'Keefe group, for money laundering. You know, the thing that landed fellow conservative Dinesh D'Souza in the pokey. The second is that all comparisons to bin Laden and the Navy Seals aside, buying a campaign t-shirt for a Canadian friend has never been considered an illegal action in the first place, because our government is not, in fact, made up of hyper-pedantic bastards with absolutely nothing better to do. If it was, yet another Project BerryToss operative would be wearing an ankle bracelet right now.
Reached Monday night, the Clinton campaign said that PVA had simply misunderstood the law. While it prevents foreign nationals from laundering direct campaign donations, it has never been used to go after someone for giving swag to a foreign friend.
So to recap, the staffers at the Clinton campaign event followed the law exactly, disappointing a Canadian tourist, but then Project Vegetable filmed their own operative (technically) trying to break the law afterwards despite the Clinton staffers doing everything right because
take that, Hillary and generally confusing the hell out of everyone as to just what the hell they might be going on about because when you've gotten to to the point of proving that an opposing political campaign is so squeaky-clean that
Canadian tourist swag scandal is the only thing you can even attempt to cobble together to make them look bad you probably should have just stayed home and watched old Scooby Doo reruns all day.
You know, we've been through a lot, these past years. We've got Rep. Trey Gowdy donning a fake mustache and leaking fake stories to the press on a weekly basis—I think at one point he was tasked with investigating Benghazi!, but at this point the investigation has sort of drifted into whether State Department officials have been laughing at Trey Gowdy behind his back. We've got a goodly portion of Texas conservatives convinced that Jade Helm Took Them Over. Donald Effing Trump is running for president and is cleaning house on the Republican side based almost entirely on a theory that the Mexican government is sending us their rapists. Having James O'Keefe's crack team of operatives buy a Canadian some Hillary-branded campaign swag is not, in the grand scheme of things, a very good entry in the conservative conspiracy genre with or without the Blair Witch camerawork.
Stay tuned for the next effort, though, when O'Keefe will don a Hillary Clinton mask and attempt to give ethnic-looking people Hillary-branded keychain fobs. No, I don't know what that would "prove" either, but I do know O'Keefe would compare himself to the troops landing at Normandy when describing it afterwards.