Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe spoke Wednesday on the Southern Methodist University campus in University Park, Texas, sponsored by the conservative Young Students for Freedom, a national nonprofit co-founded in the 1960s by William F. Buckley. Answering audience questions after the speech, O’Keefe was dismissive of the significance of a Post story chronicling the attempted hoax.
“I don’t have an opinion on it honestly. I can’t speak intelligently about it. The Washington Post seems to want a Nobel Prize for vetting a source correctly. Our work is sort of changing human nature and making people cautious,” he said.
Asked if having someone posing as a fake sex assault victim might be insulting to actual sex assault victims, O’Keefe said: “I have no comment on that, I’d like to move onto the next question please.” When pressed for an answer, members of the audience shouted down the reporter.
Project Veritas has used disguises and hidden cameras to uncover supposed liberal bias among journalists. In a story Monday, The Post described how a woman affiliated with the group told Post reporters Moore had impregnated her at age 15 and she had an abortion — all of which is false.
The Post was the first news media organization to report accusations that Moore sought to date teenage girls as young at 14 when he was in his 30s. The allegations have roiled the special election campaign for the Senate seat in Alabama. Moore has denied them and said the media is out to get him.
O’Keefe did not deny that his group was behind the hoax aimed at the Post, and said “our cover was blown.”
In an interview with The Associated Press, O’Keefe said the effort was part of a broader project to use deception as a means to gain access to news organizations including the Post, The New York Times, CNN and others.
“If we’re doing something on The Washington Post, it’s in the context of getting them on tape to tell the truth, and to admit either their biases or how the paper works or how honest they are,” he said.
During the speech, O’Keefe repeatedly decried the Post as corrupt. But when asked what evidence he had of the Post’s corruption, O’Keefe told AP he had no specific evidence to support the claim.
Though he has said he has no formal training as a journalist, and on Wednesday reiterated that he does not consider himself a conservative, O’Keefe helped found a conservative monthly journal called The Centurion as an undergraduate at Rutgers University. After graduating in 2006, O’Keefe was paid to set up magazines and newspapers on university campuses for the Leadership Institute, which recruits potential conservative public policy and media stars.
His nonprofit has received more than $4 million from DonorTrust, a dark money charity that supports individual — as opposed to government — solutions to societal problems, tax records showed.
In May 2010, O’Keefe and three other men pleaded guilty in federal court to a misdemeanor in a scheme in which they posed as telephone repairmen in Senator Mary L. Landrieu’s New Orleans office.
Another O’Keefe project led to the demise of Acorn, a community organizing group that O’Keefe portrayed as engaged in criminal activity via hidden camera videos. He used a hidden camera to record as he brought a young woman posing as a prostitute to the group’s offices. O’Keefe later agreed to pay $100,000 to settle a lawsuit based on the Acorn incident.
A guy with no conscience or ethics, there has to be more dirt on this dolt.
I think the group Buckley promoted in the 60s was called Young Americans for Freedom.
OK, the morning’s first cup of coffee sits unsipped in front of me so maybe I’m missing something but the way I read that, he’s mocking the Post for how easy it was to see through his employee. Which is—kind of—backwards? As I recall they had at least three holes in her story by the time she came in for that famous second interview. The whole thing calls his entire existence and purpose for being into question. But if he realized that he wouldn’t be the special snowflake that he is.
I can imagine what Buckley would have to say about someone like O’Keefe
O’Keefe would have been thrown in jail years ago had he not been a privileged little shit whose daddy had to bail him out of everything. Someone finally got the one-up on his dirty sting tactics, threw the whole thing back around on him and his true colors are finally showing. He’s a coward with zero integrity who isn’t even willing to back himself up despite a record of ruining people’s careers and good organizations when other people were honest with him (and often edited or taken wildly out of context).
This is “conservative journalism” having a light shown on it up against real journalism:
His own feet are held to the fire for just a second and all he can do is tuck his tail in-between his legs and duck out of it.