Behind the Bastards - Part One: James O'Keefe: The Patron Saint of News Grifters

Episode Date: September 3, 2019

In Episode 82, Robert is joined by Jack O’Brien to discuss news grifters.Footnotes:1. ACORN sting 'pimp' is N.J. man who attended Rutgers University2. James O’Keefe: Portrait Of An Activist As A Campus Gadfly3. The Leadership Institute: The Group That Helped Launch The Conservative Careers Of Two Alleged Phone Tamperers4. Abortion foe goes undercover5. What the NYT Magazine Doesn't Say About James O'Keefe6. Now defunct, group that secretly filmed Texas lawmakers ordered to turn over financial records7. Hannah Giles, No Nellie Bly8. The Twisty, Bent Truth of the NPR-Sting Video9. The Power of James O’Keefe10. How Erik Prince Used the Rise of Trump to Make an Improbable Comeback11. Googler Caught in James O’Keefe Sting: Project Veritas ‘Selectively Edited’ My Words12. This is not how I expected Monday to go!13. James O’Keefe’s Google ‘Whistleblower’ Loves QAnon, Accused ‘Zionists’ of Running the Government14. Project Veritas and ‘whistle-blower’ published bullshit ‘data-leak’ to dox Google employees Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new

podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever

you get your podcasts. What's grifting my mainstream media infrastructure? I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. And every week I also try an introduction that is, you know, some variant of on topic. This week was more on topic than the others because I'm trying to look extra good in front of my boss, the inimitable Jack O'Brien. Inimitable. So don't try to imitate me. Yeah, I only use that phrase to describe you and Jamie, I think. Oh, so I appreciate that. That is incredibly high praise. I'm thrilled to be back, Robert. I've been listening to your show quite a bit lately. The series that you explained as though it were like you slacking off

where you read your audiobook to Katie and Cody was especially good. Thank you. Yeah, good work. Thank you for not firing me for throwing dangerous items around the recording room. Yeah, we've got to talk about that, but we'll wait until this is the talk about how good it is. Yep. Could they be harder and sharper objects? Yes, I've used company funds to buy throwing knives, which I think I'm going to hybridize with a case of pariet and see how that works. Hey, you're a guy who's into weapons. Are throwing stars a thing that would ever be dangerous? I mean, yeah, there's sharp things that you can throw at people. I would say in the grand scheme of things that you can buy in America to hurt people with, they're pretty low on the list.

That is a very grand scheme. Yeah. All right. Well, good to know. I guess the ones that I've used in my life have all been toy throwing stars and they don't have much weight to them, but I'd imagine the actually weaponized throwing stars have a little bit more heft. Yeah. And you know what's scarier than the throwing stars? And I think it's like kind of maybe close. I don't know enough about the history of throwing stars, but like cow trips are what kind of scare me, which are essentially like jacks, like the toy, but like heavier duty and more dangerous. And there's some people that have built like drone rigs that you can just dump hundreds of these on like a street corner and

just really tear up people's feet or vehicle tires. Oh, you put them in an explosive? No, you don't even have to. You could just drop them on the ground and you have a bunch of then suddenly people have to clear all of these sharp dangerous objects off of a street. And it's like you could, you know, in like a civil unrest situation and a protest and like war in an urban environment. It's a force multiplier. That concerns me more than throwing stars, which I think should be mandatory. I know in my household they are. My three-year-old and my one-year-old are both well versed in the throwing star arts. Yeah, we were talking before this episode about your dislike of eyes, so that scans.

Yes, yeah, exactly. Most parents are like, watch out or you'll put your eye out. And I'm like, you'll put your eye out and that's what we're after, son. That is the goal. I'm a good parent. Speaking of people who are good at things, today we're talking about the patron saint of what I call news grifters. A little fella you may have heard of named James O'Keefe. What do you know about Jimmy Keefe with James? What was Jimmy saying the other day? Jimmy was saying the funniest thing. No, uh, James O'Keefe is a, he wants to be a journalist, I think. Yeah, that would be fair. Right, and he like does stunts and he got acorn shut down for a thing that, I don't know,

doesn't seem great, doesn't seem like it was totally fair to me. But I'm sure you'll tell me about that maybe. Yeah, I suspect like what you've just laid out is kind of what most people going into this are going to know about James O'Keefe. And that's a fair enough sort of like broad picture of the guy. But today, as we do on this show, we are going to get deep into the nitty gritty. So yeah, let's start at the beginning. James Edward O'Keefe the third, which is a speaking of things you want to throw throwing stars at that name would be one throw that name across the room. He was born in Bergen County, New Jersey on June 28th, 1984. His father James O'Keefe the second was an engineer and his mother Deborah was a physical therapist. James was the oldest

of two children. His father had a difficult time getting along in the business world and eventually left corporate life behind to become a landlord. He spent much of his career buying, restoring and renting out old houses. So O'Keefe James O'Keefe's upbringing was described by his father as conservative, but not rigidly so. He helped his dad out rebuilding homes, but during school he leaned distinctly more towards the arts than jockey endeavors. His favorite classes were theater and art and he loved to write from an early age. He came to hate construction work with his father and frequently daydreamed about performing on Broadway. Oh, so he's like a blocked creative. He's a yeah, yeah, once it wanted to be an artist and then didn't have the

well. Yeah, his dad kept yelling, no, you got to hammer more nails into walls. J-O-3. Yeah, J-O-3. Also a contemporary in a number of ways of our mutual friend Daniel O'Brien, which we're about to get to here. Yeah, I heard that they had a lot of schoolyard battles and they said this town isn't big enough for two O last named people like the two of us. J-O-3. Yeah, rap battles. That was actually all chronic old in the documentary Eight Mile, which is about Daniel O'Brien. Yeah. Now, when he entered New Jersey's Westwood High School, James O'Keefe pursued his passions, starring in musicals and learning modern dance. He was an avid boy scout and eventually reached the rank of eagle scout. But in spite of his dreams of success on

the stage, James took a different route when it came time for college. He enrolled in Rutgers University as a philosophy major. I'm a philosophy major, so I always feel a little, I don't know, bad when philosophy majors end up being shit humans, but it happens. Yeah, it's one of those things. This is one of the first things I don't understand about James O'Keefe. He has these dreams. It's not weird for someone to have dreams of making it in the arts and then picking a more practical, what is traditionally considered a practical major in college. It's weird to be like, no, my dreams of theater are silly. I'm going to become a philosophy major. What was the job he was angling for? Yeah, wanting to be a philosophy professor, maybe.

If you're going to go for something where it's clearly more about the learning than about setting yourself up for a specific career path, why not go into theater? I don't know. Either way, philosophy is a fine degree program. I bet you don't see too many great people who I would agree with whose backgrounds are Boy Scouts and philosophy major. I bet that's a gruesome twosome. Yeah, you're probably right, actually. I was going to defend the Boy Scouts, but then I remembered the last 10 years. Yeah. Maybe I won't do that. For a time, it seemed that James O'Keefe would be more or less an apolitical person, or at least that's how most write-ups of O'Keefe's biography describe him. A Politico long-form article about him, which is probably the most

detailed biography of James that I found, notes that, quote, when he first became eligible to vote in a presidential election in 2004 as a college sophomore, he stayed home, which, given the nature of that election, you could have some pretty strong beliefs and still have been like, eh, I think a lot of people were. Kerry Bush, the smackdown. I mean, that was like a WWE event, man. Kerry, what an electric personality. Yeah. The unstoppable force meets the immovable object that was really the most titanic of struggles. Yeah. Yeah. Now, O'Keefe's real political convictions do seem to have evolved less out of his childhood upbringing than his status as a habitual contrarian. When he started taking history and poli sci courses

at Rutgers, James O'Keefe found himself surrounded by professors and students with very liberal political bents. He's claimed in most interviews that he's done since that their bias against conservatives infuriated and radicalized him. He also claims that some of his professors were Marxists and even Stalinists judging by the level of truth telling a parent and the rest of his career. I have some doubts that his teachers came out to him as Stalinists with any kind of regularity, but you don't tend to meet too many of them in the wild, although it does happen. We're a pro-murder in the right circumstances. We'll support millions and millions of people being murdered. Yeah. I mean, you run into those people on Twitter, but professors. Not in the wild.

Yeah. Yeah. Not as often. O'Keefe felt drawn towards journalism while he was new in college, and he applied for and received a biweekly column at the Daily Targum, a student newspaper, while he was still a freshman. Now, the fact that this young conservative was able to get a column in his student newspaper during his freshman year might be seen as evidence that the campus culture was less biased than he presents it. Either way, I wrote for a school paper in my freshman year sophomore year of college, and I didn't get a column because they didn't do that for people. They were trying to teach you how to do actual journalism, but he gets this column. A good lesson about the world at large in that they're like, oh my god, we found a

conservative who can write, you guys. Everybody over here, give him a column. He probably learned a valuable lesson that day that he's probably not willing to admit to himself even that he learned. Yeah. That is the feeling one gets. I found a NewJersey.com article that wrote up about sort of his early political writings for the Daily Targum. It notes, quote, his political writings tended to mix two flavors, biting and lofty. One installment of his column, Feathers of Steel, railed against what O'Keeffe perceived as a campus culture stacked against conservatives. Yeah, Feathers of Steel. Brutal. Yeah, that was his, yeah. So Politico writes that his column started out as benign, but grew more aggressively conservative and anti-left over the

months of his first semester. By the end of that semester, he had been inspired to write a column titled, pompously enough, The Conservative Manifesto. He argued that Rutgers, yeah. Wow. I can't believe the entire movement left it up to a college freshman to write their manifesto, but. Yeah, it's worth noting that the only other 19-year-old manifesto writers I'm aware of shot up schools and malls. In his manifesto, O'Keeffe argued that Rutgers promoted an intellectual imbalance by not giving conservatism its fair due in lessons. Quote, as a citizen of this country, it is my right to have a balanced education. Attention is not focused on the imbalance, but rather that it's stubborn for people like me to

still remain conservative. Conservative reason is viewed as intrinsically wrong. This logic is beyond flawed. It's pathetic. Students can't defend its reason because their fundamental way of being taught is skewed. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah, so that was, that was, that's kind of the tenor of his, of his articles. It's unfair that people aren't giving the things I believe equal weight in all of the classes that I take. Right. Because every. Yeah. That, that's very, that, that whole like conservatism should be taught just as much as liberalism is very, what's it called? Relativistic, morally relativistic. Yeah. Which is one of those things they're supposed to be mad at, isn't it? They only support moral relativism when it includes

their beliefs, but not things that they, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which we'll, we'll touch on that a little bit in just a minute here. So yeah, for reasons that are still not 100% certain, O'Keeffe's column did not return for a second semester. He claimed in a Politico interview that it was simply not renewed. A Talking Points memo article I found on him suggests that he was instead fired, but the link they post as backup for that story does not work. It is unclear exactly what happened. What is clear is that in 2004, James O'Keeffe founded an alternative newspaper of his own titled or named The Centurion. The Politico article that I've referenced, which is critical of O'Keeffe, but in many ways presents a sympathetic look at the man, describes the

creation of The Centurion as the end result of a long period of intellectual soul searching by O'Keeffe after he lost his column. Dejected, he found refuge in journalism, sitting alone for hours each day in a cafeteria and reading three newspapers, The New York Times, USA Today, and Newark Star Ledger front to back. More consequentially, he discovered Rules for Radicals, the 1971 book by liberal activist Saul Alinsky, which is required reading for new hires at Project Veritas. O'Keeffe, in true Alinsky fashion, started his own alternative newspaper, The Centurion. It almost didn't get off the ground. The newspaper needed a faculty visor to receive school funds, and nobody would sponsor O'Keeffe. Finally, a history professor and free speech

absolutist James Livingston agreed on the condition he be given a column. I'm a Marxist, a Socialist, a Feminist, and a Pragmatic Postmodernist Livingston wrote in the November 2004 debut edition. So that sounds good, right? James O'Keeffe started his own, but he's willing to let this guy he very much disagrees with write a column because like, he's an open-minded dude. And even though he disagrees with this guy, he appreciates the help he receives. And he's just about free speech. That's how Politico presents the start of The Centurion. A Talking Points Memo article I found, which actually interviewed Professor Livingston, paints a very different story. After the second column, O'Keeffe started running a rejoinder right next to it or below it, he tells

us. Unhappy, Livingston complained. I thought they had violated our contract, so I said, hey, you people are conservatives. You people should believe in contracts. At that point, O'Keeffe angrily fired Livingston. By this time, they had begun to receive funding from various right-wing organizations, he says. We've reported that the Leadership Institute, which fosters the growth of conservative student media and later employed O'Keeffe, awarded The Centurion a $500 Balance in Media grant. So he was able to keep it going without Livingston's patronage. Well, he'd gotten the patronage, which is what he needed to get it off the ground with funding. So he was able to dump Livingston and Reneg on the contract that they had made. And as a reward for

kicking off the only dissenting voice on his newspaper, he received a Balance in Media award from this conservative Leadership Institute. Free speech advocate James O'Keeffe. So while he ran his propaganda magazine, O'Keeffe began to realize in 2005 that print media was not the future of journalism, which is a bold stance to have taken. Holy shit. Where do you get this intel? I don't know. Is it like a deep throat source or something? You know, I still feel like paper newsletters are going to come back. I bought a printing press the other day. I really think once this podcasting game collapses, we got to get back into the yellow journalism field. Yeah. No, we're transcribing every one of your episodes and

putting it on paper. Well, I have some hot takes about the sinking of the USS Missouri that really, so yeah, O'Keeffe started experimenting with producing video and the specific kind of video he wanted to produce was one that would let him indulge in his growing ambition as a journalist, while also exercising his buried passion for theater. In his junior year, James O'Keeffe organized a meeting with the Rutgers official where he pretended with an accomplice to be an Irish-American activist fighting against the stereotyping of his people. O'Keeffe complained that the school selling lucky charms in the cafeteria was offensive. In the end, the cereal was not removed from campus and no effort was undertaken to do so, but the official O'Keeffe taped didn't

laugh him out of the room. And the fact that he took James seriously rather than mocking him was seen by conservatives as an example of a school official being preposterously sensitive. The video gained tens of thousands of views on YouTube back at a time when the site was new enough that those numbers were impressive. O'Keeffe's partner at the time, Ben Wetmore, said this of James. His background in theater is a big part of his story. He was fearless. O'Keeffe would go on to claim to this day that Rutgers pulled lucky charms from the shelves after his stunt, even though that's not true. So this is James' first undercover deal is like, this guy doesn't, yeah. Did that mean that he got to go undercover with an Irish accent?

I'm going to guess he really hammed up the Irish accent. I mean, the last name O'Keeffe provides some backup there, but yeah. This all seems like one long excuse for him to attempt acting in a way that doesn't make his dad look a scant at him. Yeah. And where he can't be criticized for actually being bad at it because like it didn't, yeah, whatever happened when he went into that meeting was going to be a workout for what O'Keeffe wanted because like no school official, even receiving a stupid like completely inane visit from a student like this, no school official is going to be like, you're a dumb shit, like fuck off. Like get the fuck out of my office, kid. Yeah, that's just not how it works. They're going to be polite and like listen to your complaints,

even though they're silly. And like if the guy through some fluke listened to O'Keeffe and pulled Lucky Charms, then he had a huge story. But if the guy just sat there and took him seriously, he still had a story that would go viral. So like you see O'Keeffe like from this early age clearly understands the kind of developing online right wing media ecosystem at a like a pretty gut level. Right. So after he graduated in 2006, James O'Keeffe grew mildly infamous among Rutger students for refusing to leave the school. The year after he graduated in 2007, he attended a student government meeting when it became time for the members to go into a closed session to elect a new member of the student government. Every other guest in the room left as was tradition

and considered polite and decent. But O'Keeffe, who was no longer a student at the school, quote, refused to leave the room and took out a video camera video taping our attempts to have him leave the room. This person or the person who said this, yeah, claims that James refused to leave and quote, ultimately campus police had to escort him out of the building. So he's basically trying to like drum up like, look, I'm being oppressed as a conservative for being kicked out of this meeting. Even though I was like, no, dude, you don't go here anymore. Oh man, just refuses to move on in many ways. I think that's actually sadder than somebody like in their mid 20s who still shows up at frat parties with a case of natty ice. Right. Like

at least that guy's trying to get drunk. Right. And then that guy doesn't when people are like, man, maybe you should move on, take out his camera and be like, they're trying to oppress me. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, actually, that guy probably does get escorted off campus by security on a number of occasions, but it's less sad. So by 2009, James O'Keeffe had finally found a target that was not on the Rutgers campus, Planned Parenthood. He worked with Lilo Rose, a history major from UCLA with a voice that sounded like a much younger woman, a girl in fact. Lilo would call sundry Planned Parenthood offices pretending to be 13 years old and saying that she'd gotten pregnant with her 31 year old boyfriend. Now, obviously a sexual

relationship between a 13 year old and a 31 year old is illegal. It's statutory rape on behalf of the 31 year old. And legally, the person that planned parenthood on the phone was required to report the situation to CPS. During the calls Lilo Rose made, she would refuse to give her boyfriend's name on the grounds that she thought he would get in trouble. In the videos that like O'Keeffe and Lilo made, the Planned Parenthood representatives would usually like pause for a long time. And in some cases, they eventually suggested that like, basically, it seems like the Planned Parenthood representatives felt sorry for this girl. A few of them would make suggestions like maybe just don't specify the age of the person who got you pregnant, so you can

get health care. But in other cases, like they would tell her things like, you know, you should really tell your mother or like, we have to follow the law. And we actually like, we need to know the name of this person so we can report it. So basically, they uncovered a mix of things, a couple Planned Parenthood representatives who did not do what they were legally required to do and other Planned Parenthood representatives who absolutely did. In all cases, you know, those people were kind of reacting by the fact that a young girl claiming to be in crisis was coming to them for health care. Yeah, it's like baiting, baiting an animal trap with empathy. It's like, ah, these stupid humans and their empathy, let's use that to make them technically

violate a law. Yeah, that baiting an animal trap with empathy is a really good way to describe the only thing James O'Keeffe actually knows how to do. Right. Like that's his whole career. And we get actually in the episode there. There's a lot more frustrating bullshit that happens. He does it in so many ways. Yeah, yeah. But that's the basic tactic is like you bait the trap with empathy and like when people show a human reaction that violates the law technically, then you've got them. Right. And they had them and staffers got fired at Planned Parenthood. Even though no actual services were ever rendered or like seriously attempted to be rendered, this was pretty damning and like cut about a million dollars in funding out of Planned Parenthood from a couple of different

states in total. So they did a significant amount of damage to Planned Parenthood through these videos. Nice. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, Lila's partner in this endeavor. Her face underserved people seeking health care. Yeah. That's what you get for trying to help a teenager in crisis. And maybe not yet dotting all of the I's and the T's because you're worried about this person seeking a back alley abortion. Right. And it also could have been a situation where you are just kind of working with them for now because you know they need the help and planning on finding a way to get them help for the fact that they're being sexually abused later. Like it doesn't, I don't know. It just seems. And that's definitely how it seems from like the extended

conversations. Like there were some of the people were maybe trying to work with her for a little while to build up enough trust to get the information out of her. Right. Yeah. It just seems like one of those things where you can't ever have the complete picture of like what these people were planning on doing, what was going on behind the scenes of the phone call. So it's just very easy to paint a picture that makes the people look bad. Yeah, especially makes the people look bad to people who already assume these folks are monsters. Like that's a key part of the story. Yeah, they're not. Yeah. So anyway, that's James O'Keeffe's first big success. And speaking of big successes, Jack. Yeah. You know what doesn't strip hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding

from contraceptive care. Sponsors? Yep. The people who sponsor our show. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We are not industries. Unless it's coke industries, in which case they absolutely don't think it is are culpable. Yeah. Maybe coke industries, they just they're down a man. So they may not be putting out ads with as much frequency anymore. Yeah. RIP, our primary sponsor. Yes. Products. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of

science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some

I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back, and we're talking about James O'Keefe and his crusade to destroy Planned Parenthood with Lilo Rose. So as a result of their successful grift con, whatever you want to call it,

investigative journalism, Lilo secured $50,000 in funding for an anti-abortion charity. The Los Angeles Times article I found on the matter credits this escapade to O'Keefe's love of Saul Alinsky's rules for radicals. Quote, among Alinsky's most famous admonitions is one that O'Keefe said he and Rose took to heart. Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules. O'Keefe 24 said he and Rose have received criticism from some of their associates for using deception. It's a pretty complicated ethical issue, he said, but we believe there is a genocide and nobody cares, and you can use these tactics and it's justified. Rose and O'Keefe visited their first clinic UCLA's Arthur Ashe Student and Health and Wellness Center in 2006. They videotaped an employee

telling them some, quote, pretty bad things, said O'Keefe, including that the fetus is a collection of cells. That's what set us in motion. These videos, O'Keefe added, are not supposed to necessarily show people breaking laws. They're supposed to change hearts and minds. Yeah. So describing a fetus as a collection of cells was a bad thing. Was a, was a bad thing. Was a genocide. I remember when Adolf Hitler described a fetus as a collection of cells. Now that was the inciting incident of the Holocaust or of course, the first sign. Yeah. And how the Bosnian genocide launched, was launched at a Planned Parenthood in Sarajevo. Yes. Yeah. Although didn't the founder of Planned Parenthood have some really problematic... Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I think it was,

was it Margaret Sanger? Yeah. Yeah. She was a, she was a not a good person. I mean, it's one of those things, like it's the same thing. If you look back at a lot of abolitionists, they were unbelievably racist and a significant number of them just wanted all the black people to go back to Africa. Doesn't mean they were wrong in the main thing they were crusading for. It just means that like people were worse back then. Right. By and large, which doesn't, you know, excuse the bad stuff, but Planned Parenthood is not a eugenicist organization in the year of our Lord 2019. Now, this particular scam was not a pure win for James O'Keefe. At the time he'd been working for the Leadership Institute, that conservative organization that had been formed to seed the

world with right-wing grifters like James. They'd invested time into him when he was in college, and now he was traveling around the country helping them find more recruits. That's how he'd met Lila Rose. But there was fallout from the Planned Parenthood video. See, California law requires both parties to be aware of a recording. And since O'Keefe hadn't followed the law during that UCLA caper, he got slapped with a cease and desist and the original video was taken down. Now this didn't stop it from spreading, or stop the damage that was done to Planned Parenthood, but it looked bad enough that the Leadership Institute fired James O'Keefe from his cushy gig. Fortunately, James quickly found a new focus for his time and attention. A journalism student

from Florida, international university named Hannah Giles. Now Politico again paints a pretty sanitized view of Giles. It describes her as just a simple journalism major who spotted an acorn office during a jog, saw school kids waiting for a bus next to a bunch of prostitutes that were in front of the office, and became disturbed by that. Acorn is of course the association of community organizations for reform now, or at least was. As that name would suggest, they were an alliance of grassroots organizations working for greater social and economic justice. Acorn became something of a conservative bugbear in 2008, when several employees were caught filing fake voter applications during voter registration drives. Now these employees were caught and fired,

and there's no evidence that any fake people actually voted. Just that the voters were registered essentially as part of a scheme by the workers to make themselves look more effective. The offending employees were again fired, but this didn't stop a narrative from developing that Acorn had gotten Obama elected via massive voter fraud. Now in fairness to the right, there was also a scandal when Acorn's founder embezzled nearly a million dollars, so I'm not going to pretend that the organization was spotless. There were reasons to eye them. But in the wake of our first black president's election, they became a scapegoat for the refusal of certain Republicans to believe that most of America did not want to became Palin Presidency. So that's kind of the

background here. So Hannah Giles is running past the Acorn office, and she sees all this depravity around it, and she claims that it inspired her to launch a scheme. She decided to dress up like a prostitute and ask for help getting public housing so she could run a brothel. Public housing assistance was another thing that Acorn did, and it's something they received federal funds for. So if she was able to actually capture them helping her to try to do this, she'd be able to claim that Acorn was using government funds to help in prostitution. But Giles was nervous. She'd never done anything like this in her life, and she wasn't sure what would happen if she got caught. She told some of her friends about her idea, and one of them suggested that she reach out to James

O'Keeffe. It turned out that Giles sort of knew James already. A year earlier, he'd sent her an unsolicited Facebook message saying, you're pretty cute. Too bad you live in Florida. Yeah, now she hadn't been down to fuck for some reason, but she had kept up an occasional court. It didn't, it didn't work. Yeah, that line. She didn't respond, I don't need to live in Florida, which would have been probably what he was hoping for. Yeah, yeah, I think that's what he was hoping for. But she did keep up a correspondence with her, and so she had his contact information and reached out to him in June of 2009 to pitch him her idea. I'm going to quote now from Politico. When he arrived in Washington a month later to pick her up and commence the operation,

Giles came outside to meet O'Keeffe, but found him frazzled, unable to extract his credit card from a parking meter. He's definitely unique. I've not met many people like him, Giles laughs. Yeah. This is something you run into a lot with stories about O'Keeffe from his colleagues and friends. They'll repeatedly note that he has a kind of a nearly pathological inability to handle normal daily living tasks. He lived with his parents into his late 20s, which I don't want to shame, but in this particular case, again, based on the things his friends say, it seems like he never kind of learned how to be an adult. Right. Yeah. I'm just picturing him just being stuck on a parking meter, just yanking on it. Poor James. Yeah, he figured out how to grift early on

and never learned how to do his laundry. Right. That's the kind of guy we're talking about. So we'll talk a little bit more about that later because it becomes more relevant in a bit. I'm going to quote again from Politico's coverage of the acorn caper. Over the next two months, O'Keeffe and Giles visited acorn offices in eight cities. The script was the same. The pimp and prostitute would ask for housing to run a brothel, then push the line of questioning into the absurd and blatantly illegal, then wait for acorn officials to take the bait. Plenty of them did. O'Keeffe's most effective gambit, claiming he would be housing underage El Salvadoran girls. In Baltimore, an employee said he could claim them as his dependents

and get a child tax credit. In San Bernardino, California, an employee said they could categorize the brothel as a group home to stay off law enforcement's radar. In other offices, Giles was instructed on how to falsify tax forms. So O'Keeffe went live with highly edited videos showcasing this behavior, and it hit acorn like an atom bomb. Their federal funding was cut, and the bad publicity effectively killed the organization in the United States. Now, this much is beyond arguing. O'Keeffe and Giles absolutely ignited a media firestorm that wiped out the organization. But the question of how much malfeasance they actually uncovered with an acorn is very much up for debate. Politico's article takes the tack that they were

basically correct in their claims, although they exaggerated things somewhat. They cite Clark Hoyt, public editor for the New York Times, who viewed the unedited footage. Hoyt wrote, quote, The sequence of some conversations was changed. Some workers seemed concerned for Giles, when advising her to get legal help. In two cities, acorn workers called the police, but the most damning words matched the transcripts in the audio and do not seem out of context. Now, Politico notes that O'Keeffe and Giles were slapped with various lawsuits, and that James had to settle for $100,000 with one San Diego employee who was fired for his remarks on camera, even though he'd called the police after the group left the office. But yeah, Politico's

coverage of the controversy basically fits to a trend within centrist and liberal media of writing about O'Keeffe. They go out of their way to be fair to him and usually wind up deciding to validate, or at least partly validate, what he's reported on. Now, that's not the only. So we keep coming back to Politico describing him. And if you like Politico explicitly, like their mission statement is we want to be the ESPN of politics, right? Yeah, I think that's basically the goal. And so that that idea, that mission statement, is premised on the idea that politics is a contest with two equal sides. And yes, so yeah, that I don't know that that's just it's that centrist bias that ends up having a right-wing

bias because it forces them to give the right, the benefit of the doubt in all cases so that like they are seen as a legitimate foil. That's exactly what keeps happening and particularly happened to O'Keeffe in his early career. And the Politico article, I do need to keep quoting because it's got some of the best background on O'Keeffe's early life and personality that you're going to run into. But it is it's very much contains this problem. Now in a little bit of fairness to Politico, they're not the only people who report that way. The New York Times magazine also published a big piece on O'Keeffe a few years back, and they all they do the same thing Politico did. Their writers have chaffets glosses over very

important facts. And I'm going to quote now from a write up in the Atlantic that criticizes both pieces. Quote, the mortal sin that O'Keeffe commits in the acorn videos is misleading the audience. His videos are presented to the public in less than honest ways that go beyond normal selectivity. Instead of quoting a former New York Times public editor who wrote two columns about the acorn controversy as his expert source, chaffets should have consulted the report from the California Attorney General's office. The staffers who wrote it interviewed everyone involved saw all the raw video footage and issued a lengthy accounting with detailed descriptions of the misleading edits O'Keeffe made. Now one of those misleading edits was mentioned briefly in the

Politico article. It's the story of Juan Carlos Vera, an employee at Acorn San Diego office and the guy who successfully sued James for a hundred thousand dollars. Quote, in the acorn videos it appears that Vera is willing to be an accomplice in the made up smuggling plot. O'Keeffe may well have thought so at the time. According to the California Attorney General's investigation, however, Vera did not know what to make of the parrot first. Tried to elicit as much information as possible from them so that he could contact law enforcement and called his cousin a police officer as soon as they left. Phone records confirmed the call to his cousin and Vera was soon directed to a San Diego police officer who specializes in human smuggling. He spoke to

that police officer too. As Vera was cooperating with police, the acorn sting videos began to appear, portraying him as a willing child smuggler. He was fired from acorn during the PR fallout and has since filed a lawsuit against O'Keeffe and Chiles. And this gets to the core of the issues around O'Keeffe. He'd absolutely found some evidence of bad behavior in acorn, but it wasn't nearly enough to confirm his preconceived notions about systemic abuses in the organization, so he lied to present that image. And even when he didn't lie, he exhibited terrible journalistic practices. When you do something like this, when you get an undercover recording of someone that seems to show them breaking the law in this way, once you've gotten the recording,

the next thing you do if you're a real journalist is you confront them and the organization with the evidence. And if O'Keeffe had done that before going public, then they would have been able to say, no, actually, he was just trying to get information. Here's the evidence that he followed the law and was actually trying to stop this. But James didn't do that because he's not a real journalist. Because the truth isn't on his side as much as he wants it to be. And also, because he's a failed actor, theater kid who wasn't he like dressed in a like shitty Halloween pimp costume? No, that's a lie. So he dressed when he went to acorn, actually with Hannah or with Giles, he was dressed in a suit. He did pretend to be a pimp, but he was dressed in a like a

normal person suit. But when he showed up in media appearances on Fox News and the like, he wore a flamboyant pimp costume and he claimed that that's what he'd been wearing when he walked into acorn's offices. But that was just a lie. Got it. Yeah, because he's a liar. Yeah. Yeah. He's a liar who wishes he had been good at theater and could dress up for a living. Yeah. Yeah. So obviously, in spite of the rampant journalistic malpractice that this is evidence of, this whole scam, you know, launched James O'Keeffe into the stratosphere of the conservative media. He was suddenly one of the most popular people on the right. And, you know, it made his career. Now, O'Keeffe told Politico that all this attention made him deeply uncomfortable

because he was a, quote, lifelong introvert. But when Politico interviewed Hannah Giles, she had different recollections, quote, he ate it up. I actually became pretty repulsed and disgusted by the conservative movement. I saw a lot of hypocrisy. They thought because I exposed acorn that I must be some right wing fangirl, but I dropped off. I stopped going. James couldn't stop. So that makes Hannah seem like maybe a decent person who just got caught up in this. Yeah. I should point out that the Politico article did not go into any detail about who Hannah Giles is. But Hannah is a news grifter as well. Up until 2017, she was the front woman for the American Phoenix Foundation, an organization aimed at doing the same sort of shady undercover

journalism that O'Keeffe engages in. They accrued 800 hours of recordings of Texas state legislators in the hopes of finding some dirt, yet failed to get anything meaningful. Then they were sued after several of their top donors complained that the APF had not informed them that its whole purpose was to secretly record lawmakers. I should also note that Hannah's dad is Doug Giles, a conservative pundit who writes columns for the website Town Hall with titles like WWJD, Who Would Jesus Torture? That article takes the angle that actually torture is awesome. He also has a major penchant for writing lurid articles about black on white crime. So again, Hannah Giles is not as Politico presented her. However, the fact that she has dissociated herself from James O'Keeffe in the

present day ought to be evidence of the fact that he has fallen from grace. So let's talk about how that happened. In January of 2010, James O'Keeffe decided to go after Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. The apparent larger plan was to stop the Affordable Care Act from passing in Congress, and it's unclear how they plan to do that. But one of O'Keeffe's colleagues at the time claims that he made a spur-of-the-moment decision to prank Senator Landrieu instead. The Tea Party years who lived in her district had complained that she was blocking their calls. So O'Keeffe hatched a plan to see if that was true by having his men dress up as telephone repairmen. None of them actually brought tools to the office, and they were busted immediately.

O'Keeffe and his men were charged with entering a federal building under false pretences, jailed and convicted. He spent three years under probation. Yeah, he is a convicted criminal. Here's what Politico wrote about this in 2018. What O'Keeffe does not regret is the sting itself. He says the entire episode being jailed, having a judge discard video footage that could have exonerated them in the three years probation, enlightened him to the corrupt regime we all live under. Corrupt regime where a humble journalist isn't allowed to pretend to be a telephone repairman and enter an office under false pretences. I thought that's how all journalism was conducted,

isn't it? To be entirely fair, some very important undercover journalism has been carried out by journalists who lied about who they were in order to enter and be able to record things like factory farms and other criminal endeavors and stuff. That absolutely good journalism has been done by people who have entered situations under false pretences. So I don't want to claim that's never been justified in the history of journalism, just that O'Keeffe didn't have any sort of clear... He wanted to see if she was blocking his calls, so he... He wanted to see if she was... Yeah, if he was blocking Tea Party year's calls.

That's the best way to figure that out. Yeah, so it does seem that O'Keeffe didn't learn anything from the punishment he received for that. Later in 2010, CNN correspondent Abby Boudreau reached out to James O'Keeffe to interview him. Now by this point he created the non-profit organization Project Veritas, which is dedicated to carrying out more of the kind of skull-duggery he'd enacted upon Acorn. The success of the Acorn project had flushed Project Veritas with donor cash, and James and his new team were eager to spend it. So rather than just giving an interview like a normal person, he decided to use Abby Boudreau's visit as an excuse to take down the fake news CNN.

He and his team hatched a scheme to usher Boudreau onto a boat and into the presence of James O'Keeffe, who would be waiting below decks with a hidden camera. Planning documents obtained by CNN stated that James would be surrounded by, quote, a condom jar, dildos, posters, paintings of naked women, and fuzzy handcuffs. That sounds like real journalism. His plan was to lure a CNN reporter to interview him around a bunch of like dildos. Yeah, he wanted to lure her onto a boat where he would be waiting with sex gear, presumably to try and seduce her or something, or at least just make her look awkward and bad in a video. So his plan to uncover the mainstream media's bias was to sexually harass somebody

who was a member of the mainstream media. Yeah, and who was trying to do her job and let him talk about his beliefs and his activities. Oh, Jesus Christ. Yeah, it's pretty gross. I've understood what his plot was up to this point in all his grifts, but that was very confusing. You run into this with O'Keeffe. His grifts are a mix of like, oh, okay, well, maybe I think that's unethical, but I see why you went after that person or tried that. And then in shit like this, where it's like, what the fuck was the best case scenario here? Right. Yeah, I feel like you sexually assault a woman. Yeah, he's not good at taking down the mainstream media. Like, that's where he gets in trouble because he's like, his idea of how you do journalism is so dumb

that he just assumes that those are the rules everybody's playing by. Yeah, he's actually taken the opposite lesson out of Saul Alinsky's rules for radicals. Alinsky says, make the essentially like make the people you're fighting play by their own rules. But he assumes the media plays by the rules he plays by. Yeah, it's like, no, we're like, that's not how things work. Make your opponents play by the rules of a 1930s Warner Brothers cartoon. I feel like that's those are the rules he plays by. Yes, yes. We're going to talk more about this scheme and some schemes that make this look downright well planned. But you know what is really well planned, Jack? Oh man, I can't even begin to imagine. It's the products and services that support this show.

Yeah, they are. They're the most well planned. They are very credible planning. Products. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives

a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991. And that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Oh, Jesus. Where did we go? We went to the place that all podcasters go in during ads at the Dark Void, where we spend most of our time. Suspend animation. Yep. Most listeners don't really realize the horrible price we pay for the wonder of being able

to cast pods. I have a question for you. Sure. My last name is O'Brien. And that's because I am a bat. My ancestors were followers of a king named Brian Baru. So we were, you know, of Brian, O'Brien. Yeah. And Keith is weed crystals. Yeah. So do you think his ancestors were stoners? And if so, shouldn't he be cooler? They were followers of Chief Keith. Yeah, that's what I thought. Yeah. So shouldn't he be cooler? You would think so. But you know, even stoner kings need brutal exploitative enforcers. And that's what the O'Keefe clan has historically done. Got it. Okay. Yeah, it's tragic. But if you do, I will tell listeners, if you scrape a pipe against his skin, you will get a full bowl of dank crystals. So

that's true. Give it a shot. If you, if you would counter James O'Keefe in the wild. Chief that Keith. Yeah. Chief that Keith. So we're talking about James's attempt to lure a female journalist into a sex boat for unclear reasons that do not seem to meet the definition of journalism. I, you know, I'm not an expert on what, I never went to J school, but I don't think this is journalism. Yeah. That's, that's what they teach. The Atlantic further writes of this incident, quote, O'Keefe later claimed he didn't approve of such props. In any case, once he got her down there alone, he planned to make her uncomfortable by attempting to seduce her. Then he'd somehow humiliate Boudreaux and embarrass CNN by releasing footage of the bizarre incident.

It was averted at the last minute when a female member of O'Keefe's team became uncomfortable with the plan and tipped off the reporter to what was intended. So it is nice to note that people with souls occasionally do work with James O'Keefe in this case. But I was assuming she like became uncomfortable and raised the, raised a like logical point of view with him. No, she like had to, she was like, well, there's no way I'm convincing him that this is a just banana fuck idea. Like we should, I have to like just blow it up. Yeah. And that is made very clear by later things we're going to talk about. You don't question James O'Keefe when you work for him. I really do suspect that this woman's only option to stop this horror from happening was to like go to the

journalist and say, you're actually in danger. Right. Has he ever tried to seduce Bill Clinton by dressing up and like putting lipstick on and like the way bugs bunny, like girl bugs bunny is used to seduce? You know, I would actually respect him if he tried to do that. That would be legitimately funny. Wouldn't it still would not be journalism, but would be very funny. But it seems like it's in the same universe, the same logic. I think the difference is that Bill Clinton is a powerful person who would be able to strike back at him. And he thought that Abby wouldn't that like CNN was stronger under the bus the way everyone throws people under the bus who O'Keefe goes after. Yeah. And I don't think O'Keefe, O'Keefe never punches up really. Got it. Yeah.

He tends to punch people that he knows don't won't really be able to defend themselves in a meaningful way. Nice. So he's a hero. Yeah. So he's a hero. Yeah. Like all of our heroes. We remember when Superman who is famous for beating up and murdering people weaker than him. Yeah. That's why he's a hero. Batman who actually that is what Batman is. Yeah. He's a bit like Batman. By 2010, James O'Keefe was firmly under the wing of a fellow named Andrew Breitbart, who was a right-wing journalist and founder of Breitbart.com and also a massive cocaine addict, which I state because it's funny, not because it's any mark against him. You know, you're not a bad person, just because you like cocaine. Right. Although Andrew Breitbart was a bad person.

Now, Andrew was a major force in publicizing O'Keefe's early work and legitimizing him in conservative media. But even he had to partly disavow James O'Keefe after this incident, saying, quote, from what I've read about this script, though not executed, it is patently gross and offensive. It's not his detractors to whom he owes this public airing. It's to his legion of supporters, which I would argue that maybe the person James Oden, an apology to the most was Abby Boudreau. Right. But yeah. Nope, just his conservative followers. Just his conservative. No, fuck Abby Boudreau for her unethical crime of trying to interview him and treat him like a serious person. Right. How dare she? So over the next several years,

James O'Keefe would carry out numerous other schemes. Most of them were complete flops like his attempt to seduce Boudreau. Others were more successful, like project Veritas' expose of bias at NPR. The basic story is that in 2011, several project Veritas employees pretending to be Muslim activists managed to wangle a meeting with the CEO of NPR, Ron Schiller. The edited version of the video made it look as if Schiller was expressing a dismissive disgust with conservatives and includes a clip of him saying that liberals might be more educated, fair and balanced than conservatives. But like every project Veritas video, it's selectively edited out context. In the full version of the clip immediately after saying that, Ron Schiller had added that he used to be a Republican

and was proud of his past as a Republican. The edited video includes clips of Schiller saying that the Republican Party has been hijacked by the Tea Party and made it look as if he called Tea Partyers racist. But the full video makes it clear that Schiller was in fact not describing his own views, but talking about the way several of his wealthy Republican friends thought about the Tea Party. So again, it's completely cutting out the context. By the way, all those things that he's being accused of saying are accurate. Yeah. Sure. Despite the deceptive editing, Ron Schiller was forced to resign from his post at NPR. But James O'Keefe suffered some blowback too. When it was discovered how dishonest the editing had been, Glenn Beck, who'd been a major

backer of James O'Keefe, blew up on him and disavowed him. Over the next near decade, most of James O'Keefe's successes have followed this basic pattern. He puts out a video purporting to show something damning. It provokes a backlash, which brings a conservative rage mob down on James' target. Damage is done, and then it's later revealed that large portions of what Project Veritas claimed were lies or distortions. James had a string of notable successes in the 2012 election. One of his reporters managed to push Senator Patrick Moran into joking about forging documents to vote in the name of dead people. Moran resigned as a result of Project Veritas' coverage. O'Keefe also caused a sensation in the right-wing media when he and several of his

reporters were able to get the ballots of other people in states with no voter ID laws. No one actually voted with fraudulent ballots, but Project Veritas succeeded in getting a couple of Democratic staffers to say things that they later had to resign over. All of these schemes had the same problem as every James O'Keefe operation, but they were undoubtedly effective at pushing a narrative in the right-wing media. Now, the fact that so many of his schemes do damage has kept Project Veritas and O'Keefe very well funded. In 2017, the year before that Politico article was published, he raised more than $7 million. In January of 2018, he's turned his sites to Twitter to release an undercover investigation of the site's purported bias

against conservatives. According to Politico, quote, the substance was intriguing if not explosive. One former employee touted the practice of shadow banning accounts based on ideological content, while a higher-ranking current official admitted that employees perused the erotic images exchanged by users. And yet the mere fact that O'Keefe's outfit had infiltrated the social media giant was cause for celebration on the right. So nothing O'Keefe found was evidence of systemic bias against conservatives, but that didn't actually matter. Project Veritas' reporting fueled the almost religious belief among the American right that they're being persecuted by someone. Right. Yeah. Now, as you'd expect, James has had more misses than hits over the years.

Most of these misses disappear quickly and without much fanfare. But in the fall of 2017, he and his team suffered a particularly delightful fuck-up. A Project Veritas undercover reporter, Jamie Phillips, reached out to the Washington Post and claimed falsely that Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore had statutorily raped her as a teenager and then forced her to have an abortion. The goal of this lie was to discredit all the other women who'd reached out about Moore's tendency to assault teenage girls. But Jamie Phillips forgot to clean up her digital footprint well enough before going to the Washington Post. And the Post's reporters, being actual journalists, did some basic googling and found a GoFundMe campaign she'd set up to raise money to help

her move to New York and, quote, work in the conservative media movement to combat the lies and deceit of the liberal MSM. MSM. Yeah. Yeah. They're bad at this. The Post subsequently published several articles about what a bunch of bullshitty bullshitters James O'Keefe and his band of reporters were. O'Keefe lashed back at the Washington Post in public, publishing a video titled Breaking Undercover Video Exposes Washington Post's Hidden Agenda. All they actually had was a recording of a Post reporter admitting that articles about President Trump got lots of readers, which is not exactly damning. Wow. Yeah, that's basically what they get is, yeah. They caught him saying that objectively true thing that is. Yeah. Okay. Yes, they caught the Post admitting

that the President of the United States was a popular topic for their political articles. Wasn't there also like a thing where they were like videotaping each other, like doing a, I'm videotaping you, I'm videotaping you, like a standoff thing? I don't think a standoff occurred, but they both purported to have the goods on the other. Only one of them actually got anything, which was the Post, because again, all the Post, yeah, it was frustrating. And it looked bad for James O'Keefe. It was something he was legitimately unable to spin. According to Politico, quote, he took it hard. Friends described the New Jersey native as manically driven and extremely sensitive to criticism. And several said the botched Post job was the lowest they'd seen him,

lower even than his 2010 incarceration following the failed attempt to discover telephonic misdeeds in the Louisiana office of then Senator Mary Landrieu. So like lowest being, this is the saddest we've ever seen him feel. Yeah. Yeah. He was down in the dumps. Yeah, he was changed. I didn't succeed in making women complaining about their sexual assault at the hands of an adult when they were children look incredible by lying. Boohoo, poor me. Yeah. That's what his lowest point is, is his failure to discredit victims of sexual assault. What do you think? Sorry, you mentioned that they make $7 million, or they get $7 million, so their budget is like $7 million a year? Yeah. Yeah. And O'Keefe reportedly get somewhere,

at least in 2017, he was getting around $300,000 a year as a salary. Oh, well, that's fair. I mean. Yeah. I learned. I mean, look at what he's done. But like we've run editorial institutions before, like there's no, how is he spending that much money on nothing? They have a lot of failures, and they have a very expensive office. Wow. I mean, like it is one of those things where it's like if I had $70,000 in funding a year for journalism, I could do seven or eight trips to places like Syria in a year and put out stuff. I don't know where they spend this money, but that's my general issue with so much of these media. It's like, what do you use that fucking money for? Yeah. They're just trying to hammer the reality into the truth that they want

to exist. And it's just not working. And they pay themselves like kings to do it. I mean, the problem is it does work. It just isn't journalism. Right. But it's really frustrating to me because like one of the stories that came out this year that like obviously didn't get any play is that a great French foreign correspondent who'd done a lot of great conflict journalism killed himself this year because he couldn't get work and couldn't do the job that he loved doing anymore. And like across the world, a lot of really good foreign correspondents and conflict journalists have like quit or gone into PR or like moved stateside and had to stop doing the job they love to do some sort of, you know, essentially less valuable work because there's

just no money in it. Meanwhile, James O'Keeffe has $7 million to attempt to sexually assault CNN reporters. Yeah. Yeah, it's frustrating. I mean, it's how it seems to be how how the country works. Yeah. Yeah. Quote, the post debacle also might have marked a point of no return in Keeffe's relationship with the media. A self described journalist, O'Keeffe looks in the mirror and sees a muck raker in the mold of Upton Sinclair or Nelly Bly taking bold unconventional steps to expose what no mainstream reporter ever could. And he's apparently obsessed with with good undercover journalism, like the bathrooms in Project Veritas are covered with like news, like headlines and stuff from like a century's worth of great undercover exposés of

like, you know, shit like Upton Sinclair's work and whatnot. So he really does seem to have a deep love of that kind of journalism, but no idea of what made the people who were actually good at it and actually doing good using those tactics good. Right. Yeah. Yeah. In a related note, James O'Keeffe is also a big fan of frequent bastards pod side character, Alex Jones. He's been on Info Wars a number of times and Info Wars regularly has people who have been Project Veritas interview subjects on as guests. When Politico pressed James O'Keeffe about this, he insisted, I'm not going to say a negative word about Alex Jones. This was because in O'Keeffe's words, the rules of engagement are different when you're an insurgent. We are insurgents who have an existential

threat against us by the government, the system, which seeks to shut us down and a complacent and corrupt media. In that world, we retain the right as Veritas to hold the side accountable that won't hold itself accountable. And we consider Alex Jones an ally in that fight. O'Keeffe's significant impact on American politics and the millions of dollars he's received to fund his operations have led to a consequent explosion in his ego. In that Politico interview, he describes Project Veritas as one third CIA, one third James Bond and one third Mike Wallace. Yeah, that's frustrating to hear. He goes out of his way to make a good impression on interviewers and in his Fox appearances, but it's also clear to observers and backed up by

former employees that James O'Keeffe is a monstrous dick and a nightmare to work with. Quote from Politico, During my time with O'Keeffe and his fresh faced posse, I never once witnessed any of them challenge him. O'Keeffe is known to be brutal on his employees. They are by and large a collection of young yes men. So that's cool. Yeah. Yeah. And I think all men after the one woman he hired exposed his scheme to again, sexually harassed a journalist. Now James views himself as a real reporter, a trailblazing muckraker in the mold of Upton Sinclair. He's furious that mainstream reporters have not recognized his brilliance. This desire has been stymied by the fact that in some ways, James O'Keeffe is a very, very dumb

man. I mentioned. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad you just came out and kind of said it. Yeah, we're about to give the best evidence of that even better evidence than not being able to work a parking meter. Like because so he was picking her up at the train station. So that suggests that she was, you know, in there waiting for him and then like had to leave and find him outside just stuck there and unable to operate the parking meter. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She might have gotten where she was going faster if she just taken the bus. Right. So yeah. In 2016, James O'Keeffe attempted to take down George Soros. On March 16th, he and some colleagues placed a call to Oh, it's even better than you're thinking it's going to be. On March 16th, he and some colleagues

placed a call to Dana Garotti of the Open Society Foundation. She didn't pick up so they left her a voicemail, a seven minute voicemail. I'm going to quote from her. Yeah. I remember this. I'm going to quote from the New Yorkers coverage now quote. Hey, Dana, a voice began. The caller sounded to her like an older American male. My name is Victor Keshe. I'm a Hungarian. I'm a Hungarian. Victor Keshe. Yeah. Keshe. Yeah. Keshe. That's it. Keshe. I'm a Hungarian American who represents a foundation that would like to get involved with you and aid what you do in fighting for European values. He asked Garotti for the name of someone he could talk to about supporting you guys and coordinating with you or on some of your efforts, requesting a call back. He left a phone number

with a 914 area code Westchester County. She heard a click of pause and then a second male voice. The person who had introduced himself as Keshe said, don't say anything before I hang up the phone. And then the voicemail continued for several minutes. Keshe, who was actually O'Keeffe, could be clearly heard talking to his subordinates. What needs to happen, he said, is for someone other than me to make a hundred phone calls like that to Soros, to his employees and to the Democracy Alliance, a club of wealthy liberal political donors that Soros helped to found, which is expected to play a large role in financing this year's campaigns. Keshe described sending into the Soros offices an undercover agent who could talk the talk with

open society executives. Keshe's goal wasn't fully spelled out in the recording, but the gist was that an operative posing as a potential donor could penetrate Soros' operation and make secret videos exposing embarrassing activities. Soros, he assured the others, has thousands of organizations on the left and league with him. Keshe said that the name of the project was Discover the Networks. Again, this is all on the voicemail that he left George Soros' employee. Yeah, it continues. The money that would be offered, Keshe said. Somebody tries to interrupt him. He's like, wait, wait, wait, now. Wait, wait, don't you dare interrupt me.

I have to lay out the rest of my ingenious secret plan. It's so dumb. The money that would be offered, Keshe said, couldn't come from offshore British Virgin Island companies because Soros' people don't want to take money from a group like that. He claimed that Bill Clinton would take the suspect Keshe and Hillary Clinton would and Chelsea would. This all continued for much longer than it should have. At one point, O'Keeffe and his reporters tried to find Gerati on LinkedIn so they could check her resume and find ways to manipulate her into giving them entry into what he called the Soros Octopus. One member of the team suggested to Keshe that he knew someone who could infiltrate the Soros

Network, an English orthopedic surgeon with a real heavy British accent who was in the U.S. and was more than happy to do anything he can for us. The surgeon was sophisticated about technology and would not have any problem with the cameras. The team member said, he's a very talented guy, so I mean he'll be able to pull it off. As Keshe mapped out the covert attack, however, he had no idea that the only person he was stinging was himself. She's probably going to call me back and if she doesn't, I can create other points of entry. At that point, he, like, while still on the voicemail recording, James O'Keeffe looked up her LinkedIn page and found out that he had revealed himself to her because when you look at someone on LinkedIn while logged in

on LinkedIn, it shows them that you've looked at her profile, which he did as James O'Keeffe and also on the fucking voicemail. So she got to hear him realize that he had logged himself over while fucking himself over. Yeah, and his subordinates are the one that realize he's done this and they, like, warn him of this and it's recorded him, like, frantically logging out. Oh my god, it's so bad. What a genius. Yeah, and then the next thing I'm assuming you're going to tell me is that he then gets his foot stuck in a bucket and falls down a bunch of steps and his head lands in a trash bag. His head lands in a trash bag and then he farts for a minute and a half on camera. So yeah, it's embarrassing and James O'Keeffe is dumb,

but he's still done a lot of damage. So I don't want that, like, I don't want his incompetence to overshadow his danger. Now, I should note that the only Republican of note that Project Veritas has ever gone after was a guy named Mike Ellis, a Wisconsin state Senate president. They caught him on video talking about setting up an illegal pack, something virtually all politicians do, but most are smart enough not to talk about directly. Project Veritas was paid $50,000 to go after Ellis or at least it's presumed that he was paid this money to go after Ellis. He was paid by a guy named Eric O'Keeffe who's not related to him, but Eric is the director of the Wisconsin club for growth and he hated Ellis. So many people basically suspect that he bribed

Project Veritas to go after him. This is, again, the only meaningful case of Veritas ever going after a Republican. Most of their money comes from bribes larger than $50,000. Their major funders are people like Robert Mercer, who also poured money into Breitbart News, and Charles and David Koch, who are also major Project Veritas donors. Although I should say David Koch used to be a major Project Veritas donor. Now he is a noted dead person. Now he's with the angels. He's paying the angels to run undercover camera operations on the other angels now. That's right. Another backer of Project Veritas was Donald Trump, who put $20,000 into the group before the 2016 election and met with O'Keeffe numerous times. One additional person who helped Project Veritas out in the

2016 election was bloodthirsty mercenary and another frequent bastard pod side character, Eric Prince. Yeah, Echo Papa gets in on the story. Echo Papa. Yeah, I'm going to quote, yeah, Echo Papa, baby. I'm going to quote now from an article in The Intercept on Prince called The Complete Mercenary. In late 2015 or early 2016, Prince arranged for O'Keeffe and Project Veritas to receive training and intelligence and elicitation techniques from a retired military intelligence operative named Euripides Rubio Jr. According to a former Trump White House official who discussed the Veritas training with Rubio, the former special operative quit after several weeks of training, complaining that the Veritas group wasn't capable of learning.

Yeah, there's not a lot of detail there, but it just sounds like... These guys should not be allowed to hold loaded weapons. They are very dumb, sir. I think it was more training on how to interrogate and get people to reveal stuff based on his work as a military intel operative, but they were just dumb. All they know how to do is dress up in stupid costumes and try to carry out bad schemes. When an actual intelligence operative was like, well, let's try to train these guys, he found out that they were essentially untrainable. Just middle school Halloween costume level. Yeah, that's Project Veritas. Now, James O'Keeffe, of course, went hard after Hillary Clinton during

the campaign. Some of his schemes fell flat, like when Project Veritas connived to have an American buy a Hillary Clinton shirt from a Democratic staffer for a Canadian citizen. Project Veritas framed this as the campaign accepting illegal donations from a foreigner. They threw a press conference and the first question was, basically, are you shitting us? That's amazing when you compare that to the scandals that were coming out of the Trump campaign just falling out of them, just tumbling out by accident. Yeah, it's sad. I should note though that later in the campaign they had more significant successes. At one point they recorded two mid-level staffers with the Clinton campaign

discussing illegal tactics like vote rigging and provoking fights at rallies. The unedited versions of the videos make it clear that, at least in most cases, the men were talking about theoretical ideas, schemes for dirty tricks that someone might do rather than stuff they'd actually done, still what was in there was damning enough that both men resigned. Now, that's not nothing, but it's not the kind of thing that sways elections either. By the standards of past successful O'Keeffe schemes, 2016 was positively sad. That may have had something to do with why, in the years since the election, Project Veritas has switched its intentions almost entirely towards trying to prove the existence of anti-conservative bias in Silicon Valley.

Most of Veritas' exposés on this have been the lowest sort of O'Keeffe fare, outright lies of editing or exaggerations hyped up to hell and back. At one point they recorded Jin Jinai, head of responsible innovation at Google, talking about Google's attempts to avoid the same kind of foreign interference in the 2020 election that had happened in 2016. Veritas edited her words to make it look like she was claiming Google plan to influence the 2020 election. The video they posted was pulled from YouTube due to a privacy complaint and the fact that Veritas hadn't actually received permission to record. In a Medium post, Jin Jinai wrote about the nightmarish backlash she received after the video went live. She was on a plane when it launched and when it touched

down, quote, I turned on my phone, I received the shock of my life. I had received an enormous collection of threatening calls, voicemails, text messages and emails from people I'd never met. Someone wrote, your ideology will be shredded to pieces just moments before you get executed for treason. You were living lended time, enjoy till then. There were plenty more threats like that. I've never been so fearful. Jesus. Yeah, yeah, this is a story that will be repeated. This is kind of what happens when that right-wing rage machine touches down on people. In August 2019, James O'Keefe published a series of interviews and leaked documents from Google whistleblower, Zach Voorhees. Voorhees claimed in the video that Google's algorithm was inherently

biased. The tranche of documents he provided the back of this up utterly failed to do so. The Daily Beast writes, quote, Voorhees complains that Google doesn't surface conspiracy theory websites like Infowars in one of its new search algorithms. He insists that his information is so valuable that he is a credible fear that Google could be trying to off me. Some say that you're a hero. Some are going to say that you have extreme moral courage, O'Keefe told the former Googler in the video. I've always thought that when the time came to do the right thing in a big way, I would always be the one that stood up and did the right thing, Voorhees replied. O'Keefe's reporting failed to note that its source, Mr. Voorhees, was somewhat less than

credible. On his social media, Voorhees spread claims that the U.S. government was controlled by Zionists. He ranted about QAnon and Pizzagate and repeatedly warned that vaccines cause autism. The most objectionable claims pushed by Voorhees were his rampant and repeated anti-Semitic statements. Here's the Daily Beast again. What O'Keefe's video leaves out, though, is that his much-typed insider is not as credible as he claims. On social media, Voorhees is an avid promoter of anti-Semitic accusations that banks, the media, and the United States government are controlled by Zionists. He even alleges that Zionists killed conservative publisher and O'Keefe mentor Andrew Breitbart, who died of heart failure in 2012.

It's very simple. Either you go along with a Zionist or you end up like Andrew Breitbart, Voorhees wrote in January. In a May tweet, Voorhees accused Israel of carrying out the 9-11 attacks and encouraged Twitter users to look up 9-11 related conspiracy theory content, providing no evidence of his claims. When this story broke, James O'Keefe defended his source on Twitter by noting, not every source is a perfect angel. Good journalists know that this is true. Yes. Wow. Yeah. That's pretty bad. Yeah, it's pretty bad. It's again going back to the thing of just that they expect to be afforded equal footing as the New York Times because they're the other ideological perspective, ignoring the fact that their sources are people who are

you know, mentally not all there. Yeah. Well, it's not even, yeah, it's, it's, it's, and in like this case, I don't even, I'm going to say that like the issue isn't that he's mentally not all there. The issue is that this guy is anti-Semitic and like his claims, if you look at his other stuff, his claims that about like the Jewish run media, like what he's essentially saying to Project Veritas, he didn't mention his anti-Semitic beliefs in that interview. But if you like, look at his whole body of I guess work, so to speak, it's clear that he's alleging Google's part of this Jewish conspiracy. Right. Like that's important context to evaluate the sources legitimacy. He's doing an evaluation of the media in this case. Yeah. He is their source on how the

media works and his other prominent theories on how the media works involve the Jews. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure he doesn't pluralize it. I'm sure he just says the Jew. I think he uses Zionist more often. Right. He's from the politer end of the anti-Semitic spectrum. Right. Yeah. I could go through the documents he and Veritas released one by one and compare them to the claims made by Project Veritas, but that would be a waste of everyone's time. There's a good article on the next web titled Project Veritas and whistleblower published bullshit data leak to Doc's Google employees that tears the whole pile of nonsense apart very authoritatively. From now, I'm just going to quote from their analysis of the documents Veritas claimed were evidence of censorship.

Quote, here's the TLDR. It's almost certain that this is just everything the whistleblower could find by doing a quick search on the employee share drive for inclusion, diversity and bias. It's almost all just PowerPoint slides and papers, the kind you see at your own weekly corporate meetings. You'll find more shocking information on Google by visiting its official blog. This, in my opinion, is nothing more than Project Veritas disguising an attempt to Doc's Google employees as a leak. There are 15 documents here. They appear to be randomly selected from an email chain discussing de-prioritizing Breitbart because it spreads hate speech. Interestingly, the documents clearly show that Google is concerned about fake news.

There's even a chart saying the company trusts the Wall Street Journal the most, CNN and Fox News about the same, and the young Turks only slightly more than Infowars. Ironically, there is nothing in the censorship folder that pertains to censorship in any way, shape or form. But of course, got em! Nailed Google to the wall there by Google for supporting famously left-leaning news source, the Wall Street Journal. Of course, none of this stopped President Donald Trump from retweeting the story or using it as further evidence for his claims that conservatives are being silenced on social media. Few media organizations are better positioned for the post-truth era than Project Veritas. But it is also true that Veritas and O'Keeffe are well past

their high watermark of influence. O'Keeffe's success and the huge amount of money he's made, pretending to be an undercover reporter, have provided inspiration for a whole generation of news grifters. Most of them are not as good or as influential as he was. We might include Hannah Giles, his old partner, in that category. Another entry could be Caitlin Bennett, the Kent State gun girl, who has repeatedly failed to gather any worthwhile news by going undercover among left-wing activists at protests. But there is one man, a native of Portland, Oregon, who seems like he might truly be a worthwhile successor to James O'Keeffe. I'm talking about Andy Noe, the man crusading to have Antifa declared a domestic terrorist group. And Jack, in part two,

we're going to talk about his story. But that's the episode. We're done. All right. Yep. Y'all know Keeffe's side now? How do you feel? Yeah, I feel inspired. The fact that he could get that much accomplished with merely seven million dollars and military backing. And not knowing how to use a credit card? Right. It's a real story of an underdog. Yeah. I don't know how he does it. He's a hero. So are we doing part two now? Yeah, we're going to do part two now, but you got to plug your plugables first. I understand you cast a pod yourself, sir. I do. I cast a pod daily, week daily. It's called the Daily Zeitgeist. I do it with

one Mr. Miles Gray. You can hear me there every day of the week. And you can follow me on Twitter at Jack underscore O'Brien. Now, fun, bit of German language trivia for the listeners. Zeit means news and Geist means ghost. So you are the host of the Daily News Ghost. Yeah. Yeah. Shit. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Had I known that, I would have named our show the Daily News Ghost. There's still time, Jack. There's still time. Yeah. All right. Well, I also host a podcast. I have forgotten its name, but I'm sure listeners are aware of it. Sophie, come on. Sophie just seems like she's, you know, really overwhelmed by your inability to remember the name of that podcast. She has been over my shit for a very long time.

And that's, that's why our relationship works. Yeah. Yeah. You can find this podcast online, along with the sources for this episode on behindthebastards.com. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram and at Bastards pod. You can buy a t-shirt at T public by looking up behind the bastards. And you can buy bolt cutters from a variety of stores. Just make sure you get good quality ones. The Harbor Freight ones tend to break pretty easily. You know, super cheap bolt cutters usually aren't worth it. You're wanting to spend, you know, in the $60 to $100 range kind of minimum if you want something that's going to last. You've always said that. I've always said that. Your first interview at Cracked when we were interviewing you for the intern job. You

said that same thing. I mean, interview is a really charitable way to describe me breaking into your backyard. So thank you for that, Jack. What are you having your hands? These, these are heavy duty bolt cutters. Yeah. All right, that's the episode. Go fucking hug a cat. What would you do if the secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to let's start a coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast,

or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI

isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.