James O’Keefe was caught this week attempting to trap the Washington Post with a fake story that was intended to cast doubt on women who dared speak up about their abuse by Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore. It’s not the first time one of O’Keefe’s capers went badly wrong. His 2010 invasion of Senator Mary Landrieu's office earned him three years probation. In 2016, O’Keefe accidentally left a voicemail to the group he was trying to sting, explaining his entire plot. And there was another incident in 2010 in which O’Keefe attempted to set up a sex-dungeon in an isolated place and lure a CNN reporter into a compromising situation where he planned to “hit on her all the time”—because that’s exactly what you would expect from a conservative group.
In fact, even O’Keefe’s one famous “success” only worked because people hadn’t yet caught on to how willing he was to lie and use extensive edits to create a story out of thin air. Once they did, he ended up paying one of the ACORN workers whose words he’d rearranged $100,000. The organization itself was cleared of all charges.
But it was all good for O’Keefe. Despite not having a single real “sting” to his name, Republicans loved the idea so much they’ve rewarded his horribly misnamed Project Veritas with plenty of “how the hell is that a charitable contribution” each year, including some sweet dollars from Donald Trump. It’s been a rich enough pipeline for O’Keefe to award himself a $100,000 raise in just the last year, taking his salary over $300,000 for … nothing at all.
And Republicans aren’t letting a little thing like lack of any factual basis get in the way of using O’Keefe’s videos in a federal trial.
A Justice Department prosecutor pursuing felony convictions for six of the hundreds of individuals arrested during President Donald Trump’s inauguration successfully introduced to a jury on Tuesday a video of a protest planning meeting that was secretly recorded by a controversial organization run by conservative activist James O’Keefe.
What does this mean? Not just that this administration is willing to use anything against those it sees as enemies, but also that the free press isn’t the only part of the First Amendment that’s under attack.
The video entered into court shows a large organizing meeting of activists in advance of a protest march for Trump’s inauguration—the so-called “J20” gathering. A handful of people at the meeting were later involved in property damage. Even those few don’t seem to have actually done the damage, just somehow “supported” the damage. But Session’s Justice Department is arguing that everyone involved should be held responsible.
A total of 187 defendants, including the six currently on trial, have pending felony charges, with prosecutors alleging they were part of a conspiracy that resulted in extensive property damage and should therefore be held responsible for the actions of the other individuals they were arrested with. So far, prosecutors have not alleged that any of the six defendants on trial individually caused any destruction but instead argued that they enabled those who did.
Included in this group are several journalists and photographers who were there to follow events. They’ve also been charged with felonies for being in the same room as protesters.
Team Trump doesn’t seem exactly proud of the source of this video.
The government maintained on Tuesday that the video provided by Project Veritas wasn’t deceptively edited. But Assistant U.S. Attorney Jennifer Kerkhoff initially tried to keep Project Veritas’ name out of the court record, referring to it only as a “third party provider” and objecting when one of the defense attorneys was about to name the organization.
Though the Sessions employees in charge of the case denied the video had been edited, they had actually edited it themselves to obscure the source. The Justice Department lawyers paired the video with a witness who used the terms “Black Bloc” and “Antifa” in describing the meeting, even though the organizers didn’t use that identification themselves.
The first thing that comes up on a Google search for “Antifa” is a wave of images and stories about willful, organized violence, attorney Sara Kropf noted — and the court did not include questions about juror attitudes toward the group in its selection process.
This case is important in part because it includes a tape submitted as evidence by a group that has been consistently shown to selectively edit video and audio to generate the story they want. But it’s even more important because it would act to change the balance for protests.
If hundreds of people, including journalists, can be found guilty of felonies because a handful of people they met were connected to violence second-hand—with the violence limited to the level of throwing rocks—it could have a huge dampening effect on future protests.