The New York Times has a piece up about an uncovered linkage between Blackwater founder Erik Prince (also the brother of Secretary of Education Betsy De Vos) and James O’Keefe. The two have apparently teamed up to infiltrate teachers’ unions and liberal groups.
The linkage has come to light as the result of discovery in a lawsuit by AFT Michigan, a teachers’ union, against Project Veritas, the reprehensible operation run by convicted criminal James O’Keefe.
AFT Michigan sued Project Veritas in federal court, alleging trespassing, eavesdropping and other offenses. The teachers’ union is asking for more than $3 million in damages, accusing the group of being a “vigilante organization which claims to be dedicated to exposing corruption. It is, instead, an entity dedicated to a specific political agenda.”
Project Veritas has said its activities are legal and protected by the First Amendment, and the case is scheduled to go to trial in the fall.
Emails produced during the discovery phase of the lawsuit reveal that Erik Prince joined forces with O’Keefe and had supplied a former British Intelligence officer, Richard Seddon, to help train Project Veritas operatives.
Mr. Seddon regularly updated Mr. O’Keefe about the operation against the Michigan teachers’ union, according to internal Project Veritas emails, where the language of the group’s leaders is marbled with spy jargon.
They used a code name — LibertyU — for their operative inside the organization, Marisa Jorge, who graduated from Liberty University in Virginia, one of the nation’s largest Christian colleges. Mr. Seddon wrote that Ms. Jorge “copied a great many documents from the file room,” and Mr. O’Keefe bragged that the group would be able to get “a ton more access agents inside the educational establishment.”
Marisa Jorge had also attempted to infiltrate the campaign of Abigail Spanberger, then a former C.I.A. officer who successfully sought election to the House of Representatives from a Congressional District in Virginia during the Blue Wave of 2018. The Spanberger campaign fired Marisa Jorge after discovering her true nature.
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.
O’Keefe declined to answer questions about his relationships with Messrs. Prince and Seddon. He claimed that Project Veritas is a “proud independent news organization.”
(O’Keefe, by the way, is apparently getting married soon, and Donald Trump, Jr. is listed as an invited guest. However, it looks like the web page for the impending nuptials is down.)
In reading this story and doing a little further investigation, I found this web site: Project Veritas Exposed. It looks like a good resource about O’Keefe and his allies.
How both James O’Keefe and Erik Prince are not behind bars is something that I cannot understand. O’Keefe is allegedly under investigation by the Justice Department over whether he lied to a Congressional committee examining Russian interference in the 2016 election, and for possible violations of arms- export laws. In 2019, the House Intelligence Committee made a criminal referral to the Justice Department about Erik Prince, saying he lied about the circumstances of his meeting with a Russian banker in the Seychelles in January 2017. O’Keefe and three pals of his were caught red-handed trying to bug a district office of former Senator Mary Landrieu, while posing as telephone repairmen. O’Keefe copped a plea and did not do any time.