Mayer writes: "The use of deception and other subversive tactics to
undermine voter choice is as old as the American republic."
James O'Keefe III takes part in a press conference at the National Press
Club in Washington, D.C. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Sting of Myself: Amateurish Spies Like James O'Keefe III Attempt to Sway the
2016 Campaign
By Jane Mayer, The New Yorker
31 May 16
As Dana Geraghty recalls it, March 16th was a rather quiet Wednesday.
That afternoon, she was in her cubicle at the Open Society Foundations, on
West Fifty-seventh Street, where she helps oversee the nonprofit groups
pro-democracy programs in Eurasia. The Foundations are the philanthropic
creation of George Soros, the hedge-fund billionaire, who is a prominent
donor to liberal causes, including Hillary Clintons Presidential bid.
Soros, who has spent nineteen million dollars on the 2016 Presidential
campaign, is regarded with suspicion by many conservatives. National Review
has suggested that he may be fomenting protests against Donald Trump by
secretly funding what it called a rent-a-mob. Geraghty, who is
twenty-eight, had programmed her office phone to forward messages from
unfamiliar callers to her e-mail inbox. She was about to review several
messages when she noticed that one of them was extraordinarily long. Who
leaves a seven-minute voice mail? Geraghty asked herself. She clicked on
it.
Hey, Dana, a voice began. The caller sounded to her like an older American
male. My name is, uh, Victor Kesh. Im a Hungarian-American who represents
a, uh, foundation . . . that would like to get involved with you and aid
what you do in fighting for, um, European values. He asked Geraghty for the
name of someone he could talk to about supporting you guys and coördinating
with you on some of your efforts. Requesting a callback, he left a phone
number with a 914 area codeWestchester County.
She heard a click, a pause, and then a second male voice. The person who had
introduced himself as Kesh said, Dont say anything . . . before I hang up
the phone.
That piqued my interest, Geraghty recalls. Other aspects of the message
puzzled her: Who says theyre with a foundation without saying which one?
He sounded scattered. And usually people call to get funding, not to offer
it. Victor Kesh, she suspected, was someone passing as someone else.
She continued to listen, and the mans voice suddenly took on a more
commanding tone. The caller had failed to hang up, and Kesh, unaware that he
was still being recorded, seemed to be conducting a meeting about how to
perpetrate an elaborate sting on Soros. What needs to happen, he said, is
for someone other than me to make a hundred phone calls like thatto
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 years campaigns. Kesh described sending
into the Soros offices an undercover agent who could talk the talk with
Open Society executives. Keshs goal wasnt fully spelled out on the
recording, but the gist was that an operative posing as a potential donor
could penetrate Soross operation and make secret videos that exposed
embarrassing activities. Soros, he assured the others, has thousands of
organizations on the left in league with him. Kesh said that the name of
his project was Discover the Networks.
The money that would be offered, Kesh said, couldnt come from offshore
British Virgin Island companies, because Soross people dont want to take
money from a group like that. He claimed that Bill Clinton would take
suspect cash, and Hillary Clinton would, and Chelsea would.
One member of the team suggested to Kesh 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 do for us. The surgeon was sophisticated about technology
and would not have any problem with the cameras. The team member said,
Hes a very talented guy, so, I mean, hell be able to pull it off. As
Kesh mapped out the covert attack, however, he had no idea that the only
person he was stinging was himself.
The accidental recording reached farcical proportions when Kesh announced
that he was opening Geraghtys LinkedIn page on his computer. He planned to
check her résumé and leverage the information to penetrate the Soros
octopus. Kesh said, Shes probably going to call me back, and if she
doesnt I can create other points of entry. Suddenly, Kesh realized that by
opening Geraghtys LinkedIn page he had accidentally revealed his own
LinkedIn identity to her. (LinkedIn can let users see who has looked at
their pages.) Whoa! an accomplice warned. Log out! The men anxiously
reassured one another that no one checks their LinkedIn account anyway. It
was a little chilling to hear this group of men talking about me as a point
of entry, Geraghty says. Butnot to sound ageistit was clear that these
people were not used to the technology.
Geraghty forwarded the voice-mail recording to Chris Stone, the president of
the Open Society Foundations. The Watergate burglars look good compared to
these guys, Stone told me last month. These guys cant even figure out how
to use an Internet browser, let alone conduct an undercover operation. You
read the transcript and you cant help but laugh. He went on, But the
issues here arent funny. Theres some kind of dirty-tricks operation in
play against us.
In the Westchester County suburb of Mamaroneck, a street-level office has
reflective glass doors and windows that make it impossible to see inside.
This is the headquarters of James OKeefe IIIthe conservative activist who
placed the phony phone call pretending to be Victor Kesh. As he showed me
around, in late April, OKeefe, who is thirty-one, told me that he is not a
dirty trickster but an investigative journalist and a leading practitioner
of modern political warfare. Weve got this guerrilla army, and its coming
to fruition soon, he said. This is our base of operations. Waving his
hand around seven thousand square feet of empty office space, he said, This
is our NORAD. Its our field operation.
The back wall of the office, he explained, would soon be hung with an
enormous corkboard covered with maps. Affixed to each map would be a card
with the location and the assumed name of every undercover political
operative working for his nonprofit, Project Veritas. Created in 2010 as a
charity that could accept tax-deductible contributions, Project Veritas says
on its Web site that it is dedicated to exposing corruption, dishonesty,
self-dealing, waste, fraud, and other misconduct.
OKeefe graduated from Rutgers University in 2006. He says that a professor
there, David Knowlton, urged him to follow Saul Alinskys rule book, which
advised radicals to use their enemies rules against them. On St. Patricks
Day in 2005, OKeefe lampooned campus political correctness by demanding
that the dining hall ban Lucky Charms cereal. The boxs depiction of a
leprechaun, he proclaimed, perpetuated offensive stereotypes about
Irish-Americans. He videotaped a confrontation that hed had with a school
administrator and posted the footage on YouTube, launching his career as a
political stunt artist. The Lucky Charms prank remains a crowd favorite,
OKeefe told me.
In 2014, his organization became more directly involved in electoral
politics, sprouting a social welfare limb called the Project Veritas
Action Fund. Such organizations, referred to in the tax code as 501c4
groups, have proliferated since 2010, when the Supreme Courts ruling in the
Citizens United case essentially legalized unlimited corporate and
individual spending on politics. Unlike ordinary charities, 501c4 groups can
accept unlimited contributions from secret donors and spend the cash
directly on campaigns. They just need to make a plausible case that they
promote social welfare and that politics is not their primary purpose.
OKeefe says that the new group allows us to literally put someone
undercover in a campaign.
In the era of dark money, as anonymous political donations are often
described, Project Veritas has been thriving. According to its federal tax
filings, between 2013 and 2014 its budget doubled, from $1.2 million to $2.4
million. OKeefe told me that he has about a dozen undercover operations
ongoing at any given time. One of these, he said, involves someone working
for Hillary Clinton full time, as a paid staffer. This embedded
operative, he said, is employed in the campaign in the highest echelons.
(He declined to be more specific.) Every day, the operative sends video to
us over our own server. He added, Just like Hillary Clinton, we have our
own Internet server in Westchester County! He went on, We see everything.
We have thousands of hours of video. Youll see infighting, plans,
strategy. OKeefe said that he has been compiling a feature film from the
operatives footage, but wont release it until the late summer or fall,
when it will have maximum impact. In the meantime, he has posted teasers
online; several of the clips end with the words Stay tuned, Hillary, and
check your e-mail.
OKeefe promised that footage he has acquired through his various operatives
will force people to resign. He later added that he had video of top,
top, top-ranking officials discussing how and why they commit voter fraud
to sway races.
Given OKeefes track record, it would be a mistake to take his grand
statements too seriously. He first gained wide notoriety in 2009, when he
released a series of undercover videos attacking the liberal
community-organizing group ACORN. The videos had an immediate effect, but
raised serious questions about his methods and ethicsquestions that have
trailed him ever since. He secretly filmed encounters in which he and a
female colleague showed up at ACORN offices in various cities, claiming to
be a pimp and an underage prostitute who wanted advice on how to make
prostitution look like a legal business. ACORN officials appeared to oblige
them, in one instance advising them to make sure that the immigrants OKeefe
claimed he was going to prostitute actually went to school as exchange
students. After OKeefe began releasing his exposés of ACORN, the House of
Representatives voted to cut off federal funds to the group, which soon
collapsed. But an ACORN official filmed in California, who was fired because
he seemed to embrace the proposed scheme, successfully settled a lawsuit
against OKeefe for a hundred thousand dollars. He argued that he had not
consented to be videotaped, as is required in California, and that after
learning about the prostitution idea he had called the police. OKeefe
hadnt bothered to contact the employee before airing the damning footage.
In January, 2010, the F.B.I. arrested OKeefe and three accomplices, two of
whom had disguised themselves as telephone repairmen in order to enter the
New Orleans office of Mary Landrieu, then a Democratic senator for
Louisiana. (OKeefe says he had hoped to disprove Landrieus claim that her
phone lines were too clogged to answer the many angry calls coming from Tea
Party activists.) OKeefe was sentenced to three years of probation and a
hundred hours of community service; he also paid a fifteen-hundred-dollar
fine.
In 2011, OKeefe embarrassed National Public Radio when two accomplices,
pretending to represent a radical Muslim group, proposed to donate five
million dollars to the network in exchange for favorable programming about
Islam. After OKeefe released videos depicting two NPR employees chatting
with the undercover operatives about the need to put Muslim voices on the
air, and criticizing the Republican Party as not just Islamophobic but
really xenophobic, two top NPR officials, including its chief executive,
Vivian Schiller, resigned.
Many OKeefe operations, however, have fallen flat, including his repeated
efforts to prove that voter-identity fraud is pervasive. It seems like most
of the fraud OKeefe uncovers he commits himself, Richard Hasen, a
professor of election law at the University of California, Irvine, says. A
sting aimed at Hillary Clinton last year was considered especially feeble.
Veritas operatives persuaded a staffer at a rally to accept a Canadian
citizens money in exchange for a Hillary T-shirta petty violation of the
ban on foreign political contributions. Brian Fallon, the communications
director for the Clinton campaign, says, Project Veritas has been
repeatedly caught trying to commit fraud, falsify identities, and break
campaign-finance law. It is not surprising, given that their founder has
already been convicted for efforts like this.
OKeefes unseemly tactics have increasingly caused other conservatives,
including Glenn Beck, to distance themselves from him. But the 2016 campaign
cycle appears to be reinvigorating the political art form that Richard
Nixons operative Donald Segretti infamously called ratfucking.
The use of deception and other subversive tactics to undermine voter choice
is as old as the American republic. Thomas Jefferson enlisted surrogates to
publish attacks on Alexander Hamilton, who responded with anonymous
ripostes. In the eighteen-seventies, cities were infamous for using ballots
printed on multi-ply tissue paper in order to multiply candidates votes. In
1972, Segretti published a phony letter that he claimed had been written by
one of Nixons rivals, the Democratic Presidential candidate Edmund Muskie.
The letter slurred Canadians as Canucks, and the resulting furor sent
Muskies campaign into a tailspin.
With cash streaming into dark-money groups, negative campaigning is a growth
industry. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the director of the Annenberg Public
Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of Dirty
Politics (1992), told me, Dirty tricks have always been covert operations.
But more money means its more possible to cover your tracks in ways that
make it insidious. Over the years, Jamieson says, opposing campaigns have
attempted to sabotage one another by planting scandalous material, releasing
doctored photographs, and undertaking sting operations. In 2008, a citizen
journalist attended a private San Francisco fund-raiser and posted a video
of President Barack Obama making a maladroit reference to embittered
Americans who cling to guns or religion. Four years later, a bartender
working at a private fund-raiser for Mitt Romney recorded him dismissing
forty-seven per cent of the electorate as freeloaders dependent upon
government. Afterward, Romney could not shake the perception that he was
élitist.
According to Jamieson, the ability to download videos from smartphones
directly onto the Internet has normalized what used to be shadowy practices.
In the past, you were the uncredited hero who got the candidate elected,
she says. Now the brazenness of the process is such that you will admit it
and put it on your résumé!
The expected contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is likely to
be one of the nastiest in history, with putatively independent opposition
research operations fuelling both parties. Meanwhile, negative campaigns
funded by private donors and private interests are aiming at targets far
beyond conventional candidatesamong them intellectuals who have no official
role.
OKeefe declined to tell me why he had targeted George Soros. But Matthew
Tyrmand, a recent addition to the Project Veritas board, has publicly
declared his fierce opposition to Soros. Tyrmand is a thirty-five-year-old
Polish-American investor who is an informal adviser to Polands right-wing
nationalist government as well as a contributing writer at Breitbart, the
conservative news site. As street protests have sprung up in Poland, Tyrmand
has repeatedly suggested online that Soros is stoking the unrest. On the Web
site of the Polonia Institute, a nonprofit that promotes Polish culture, he
wrote that the recent protest movement was rumored to be funded by George
Soross Open Society Foundations in order to undermine and destabilize the
new government.
Tyrmand deflected numerous requests for an interview. When I finally reached
him by phone, he said that he was too busy to talk. He was in France, on his
way to the Cannes Film Festival for the première of Clinton Cash, a film
adaptation of a scathing 2015 book by Peter Schweizer, a fellow at the
Hoover Institution, which accuses the Clintons of enriching themselves by
giving speeches to dubious sponsors. The film, along with other
independently financed attacks on the Clintons, will significantly help
Trumps campaign by reducing its need to spend money on oppo research.
The first time I asked OKeefe who Victor Kesh was, he declined to comment
on what he called investigations, real or imagined. But, after learning
that he had been caught on tape trying to infiltrate Soross group, he tried
to put the best face on it. On May 11th, he, Tyrmand, and a cameraman showed
up in the lobby of the Open Society Foundations, saying that they were
conducting a serious investigation. OKeefe phoned Dana Geraghty again,
admitting that he had previously called her posing as Victor, and said
that he had some follow-up questions about whether the Foundations were as
transparent as they claim to be about the activities they fund. With the
camera rolling, OKeefe and his team stood outside the lobby and buttonholed
people, asking them if Soros was funding Polish street protests.
Laura Silber, the chief communications officer for the Open Society
Foundations, told me, We were asked if we fund the Polish oppositionwe
dont, directly or indirectly. We do support groups that advance the rule of
law and human rights, which are under threat in Poland today.
OKeefe portrays himself as a rigorous journalist who is dedicated to
furthering a more ethical and transparent society. He refuses, however, to
be transparent about who is funding him. According to tax records obtained
by PRWatch.org, an investigative watchdog group run by the Center for Media
and Democracy, in recent years hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations
to Project Veritas have come through a fund in Alexandria, Virginia, called
Donors Trust, which specializes in hiding the money trails of conservative
philanthropists. In its promotional materials, Donors Trust says that it
will keep your charitable giving private, especially gifts funding
sensitive or controversial issues. The records obtained by PRWatch.org also
show that one donor, a conservative political activist in Wisconsin,
contributed fifty thousand dollars just before Project Veritas undertook a
sting of one of his political enemiesa state senator.
OKeefe, when asked if donors to his group can pay for him to investigate
particular people or groups, answered, It depends. He will pursue a
requested target if its an idea I want to do, or if it advances our
mission. But he added, Not many people can tell me what to do, because
they dont know how we do it.
As OKeefes budget has grown, so has his ambition. I want to expand to
every state, he told me. I want to be everywhere. If uncovering the truth
requires deception, fake names, disguises, and other subterfuge, he makes no
apology. The signature OKeefe method is to try to entrap his subjects into
breaking the lawa strategy that most political operatives consider a step
too far.
He showed me a tiny video camera that had been hidden inside an Aquafina
water bottle, and others embedded in a wristwatch and in an iPod Shuffle. A
device in his shirt button, which used Bluetooth technology, could relay
live audio to his control room. He argued, What I do is the truest form of
journalism there is. We hit the record button and show people what we
found.
The political left also outsources much of its dirty work to privately
funded super PACs and dark-money groups. After the Democrats were
eviscerated in the 2010 midterm electionsthe first congressional campaigns
after the Citizens United decisionan independently funded group named
American Bridge 21st Century began supplying opposition research to
Democratic groups and candidates. The network was founded by David Brock, a
self-described former conservative hit man who became notorious in the
early nineties for having described Anita Hill as a little bit nutty and a
little bit slutty. In the aughts, Brock, who is gay, joined the Democratic
Partyin part because he found the Republican Party homophobicbringing with
him an insiders expertise in cutthroat politics. He describes American
Bridge, which employs a hundred and fifty people, as a political utility
for progressives.
The American Bridge network includes Media Matters, a watchdog operation
that identifies what it sees as distortions by the right-wing press, and
Correct the Record, a rapid-response unit that focusses on defending Hillary
Clinton. Brocks group also oversees political action committees, dark-money
nonprofit organizations, and at least fifty video trackers, who hound
Republican candidates in the hope of recording politically damaging moments.
Video trackers have been mainstays of campaigns since 2006, when a
Democratic volunteer upended George Allen, the Republican senatorial*
candidate in Virginia, by releasing a video of him uttering a racist slur.
In 2012, one of the trackers with Brocks organization captured Todd Akin, a
Missouri Republican running for the Senate, defending legitimate rape.
With American Bridges success has come funding, largely from labor unions
and wealthy liberals. One of the biggest contributors this year is George
Soroswhich may help explain why he was the object of an OKeefe sting.
After Mitt Romney lost the 2012 Presidential election, conservative
operatives concluded that they needed their own putatively independent
negative-campaign machine. Out of this partisan arms race grew America
Risingthe unofficial oppo-research affiliate of the Republican Partywhich
was founded in 2013 by Matt Rhoades, the former head of Romneys campaign.
Based in Arlington, Virginia, it diverges from Brocks network in one
crucial respect: It is a limited-liability corporation. Instead of relying
on charitable and political donations, America Rising serves as a for-profit
vender to conservative clients, who pay it to conduct customized negative
research.
Rhoades and others declined to respond to interview requests, but when I
stopped by America Risings headquarters, on May 18th, the office was filled
with young researchers bent over their laptops. The walls were decorated
with photographs of conservative icons (though Trumps portrait seemed to be
missing). An office door was covered with bulls-eye targets, and a sign
reminded staffers of the Research Checklist: Nexis, Google Alerts,
Facebook, Twitter.
Brock told me that his group had rejected the vender model. We didnt want
to be under clients thumbs, he said. If you work for them, youre
subservient. We wanted to build an independent progressive infrastructure.
Recently, some donors wanted video trackers to trail the Koch brothers, but
Brock turned them down. American Bridge does a huge amount of oppo research
on the Kochs, but Brock says he believes that tracking private citizens is
unethical. He claims that he has also rejected the use of subterfuge. Were
not in that game, he says.
By contrast, in late April the dark-money arm of Rhoadess group, America
Rising Squared, announced the creation of a negative campaign to target
leading environmentalists as well as prominent donors to environmental
causes and candidates. The campaigns initial budget was a hundred thousand
dollars, which, among other things, would cover the extensive use of video
trackers. According to the political tip sheet The Hill, the campaign would
subject environmentalists to the same level of scrutiny . . . that
opposition research firms apply to presidential candidates. America Rising
Squareds executive director, Brian Rogers, told The Hill that his group
planned to hold the Environmentalist Left accountable for their epic
hypocrisy and extreme positions which threaten Americas future prosperity.
Almost simultaneously, in early May, the organization announced the launch
of an affiliated venture, run by many of the same operatives, called
Definers Public Affairs. Definers offers to wage political-style negative
campaigns, for profit, on behalf of undisclosed private clients, including
corporations. According to its Web site, Definers will create dossiers on
opponents, monitor them from a full-service war room, and build both
grassroots alliances and a paid online presence. This raises the
possibility that undisclosed business interests are paying to choose the
targets they want Republican operatives to attack.
Soon after the campaign against environmentalists was announced, Bill
McKibben, who teaches environmental studies at Middlebury College, in
Vermont, got an alarming phone call from a librarian at Texas Tech
University, in Lubbock, who supervises a literary archive to which McKibben
had contributed his research papers. McKibben has been an outspoken activist
against the Keystone XL pipeline, and in 2008 he co-founded 350.org, a
global grassroots climate movement. For many years, he was a staff writer
for this magazine. (He is now a regular contributor to the New York Review
of Books, where he recently reviewed a book of mine.) He is a political
thinker, but not a candidate, a major political donor, or a paid campaign
operative.
The Texas librarian, Diane Warner, told McKibben that a man had shown up at
the archive and requested copies of all his papersfifty-four boxes of
documents. The man identified himself as Aaron Goss, and said that he worked
for Definers Public Affairs. Goss spent a week copying pages from McKibbens
archive. Meanwhile, as McKibben was getting ready to speak about the
environment at a church in Durham, New Hampshire, an unfamiliar man aimed a
video camera at him. The next day, a wordless two-second snippet of footage
appeared online, showing McKibben looking at the camera and then turning
away uncomfortably, to the accompaniment of the song Show Me That Smile.
The video, which was titled Bill McKibben: Ready for His Closeup, was
posted to the Twitter account of Corenews.org.
The site is another recent creation of America Rising Squared, as is an app
called Grill, which enables users to track the location of ideological
enemies, including Hillary Clinton, and lists hostile questions to ask at
public events, such as Will you drop out of the Presidential race if you
are indicted? Within days, another contentless video snippet of McKibben
popped up, this time showing him in Australia. The threat was clear:
wherever he went, his enemies would be recording him.
Who paid for a professional oppo-research team to mock an environmental
activist? The answer is secret. One could argue that the campaign isnt
substantially different from that of a corporate lobbyist, but, unlike
registered lobbyists, America Rising Squared doesnt have to file public
disclosures or pay taxes, because it purports to be a social-welfare
organization.
McKibben told me, I have no fear of debating these people on the issues,
but this is just intimidation. He added, Its bad enough to do this to
anyone who runs for office. But to do it to anyone who dares protest?
Tom Steyer, the retired hedge-fund billionaire who runs the
environmental-action group NextGen Climate and has been one of the
Democratic Partys biggest donors, is another target of America Rising
Squared. Corenews.org has featured posts calling Steyer hypocritical,
because he made a fortune investing in fossil fuels. America Rising Squared
has accused him of self-interest in supporting green energy, as he has
substantial investments in solar power. Steyer says that this is complete
and utter nonsense, because his investments are held by trusts and
structured in a way that any profits are transferred to charity. They have
to know theyre lying, Steyer said. Its completely dishonest, unethical,
and pitiful. And its creepy. He says that the anonymously funded attacks
wont stop him, but he worries that such campaigns may deter others from
engaging in activism. As he puts it, they are another reason people are
reluctant to get involved in politics.
It may be that the shock value of such exposés is diminishing. A recent
series of sting videos against Planned Parenthood, created by a group called
the Center for Medical Progress, involved deceptions so deviousincluding an
attempt by undercover operatives to buy fetal tissuethat the campaign
backfired. Pro-choice activists united in anger at the stings perpetrators,
and a Texas grand jury cleared Planned Parenthood of wrongdoing and indicted
the C.M.P. In Presidential politics, gaffes may be less damaging. As Brock
notes, In the year of Trump, people are more inured to the outrageous.
OKeefe promises that his covert documentary of the Hillary Clinton campaign
will command attention. But on May 19th he publicly conceded defeat in the
Open Society Foundations investigation. In an interview posted on Breitbart
News, he confessed that he had been forced to abandon an ambitious
undercover investigation into billionaire left-wing financier George Soros.
OKeefe acknowledged that he forgot to hang up the phone, but declined to
be more specific about the operation, saying, I dont like to reveal the
tactics of what we do. He apologized to his supporters and promised that
his many other investigations had not been compromised. Unfortunately, Im
burned on this particular investigation, he said, adding that he was very
disappointed, because he believes that the influence of billionaires such
as Soros is the most important topic undermining democracy. But he
concluded, If I wanted to be perfect, I would give up.
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James O'Keefe III takes part in a press conference at the National Press
Club in Washington, D.C. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/30/james-okeefe-accidentally-sting
s-himselfhttp://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/30/james-okeefe-accidenta
lly-stings-himself
Sting of Myself: Amateurish Spies Like James O'Keefe III Attempt to Sway the
2016 Campaign
By Jane Mayer, The New Yorker
31 May 16
s Dana Geraghty recalls it, March 16th was a rather quiet Wednesday. That
afternoon, she was in her cubicle at the Open Society Foundations, on West
Fifty-seventh Street, where she helps oversee the nonprofit groups
pro-democracy programs in Eurasia. The Foundations are the philanthropic
creation of George Soros, the hedge-fund billionaire, who is a prominent
donor to liberal causes, including Hillary Clintons Presidential bid.
Soros, who has spent nineteen million dollars on the 2016 Presidential
campaign, is regarded with suspicion by many conservatives. National Review
has suggested that he may be fomenting protests against Donald Trump by
secretly funding what it called a rent-a-mob. Geraghty, who is
twenty-eight, had programmed her office phone to forward messages from
unfamiliar callers to her e-mail inbox. She was about to review several
messages when she noticed that one of them was extraordinarily long. Who
leaves a seven-minute voice mail? Geraghty asked herself. She clicked on
it.
Hey, Dana, a voice began. The caller sounded to her like an older American
male. My name is, uh, Victor Kesh. Im a Hungarian-American who represents
a, uh, foundation . . . that would like to get involved with you and aid
what you do in fighting for, um, European values. He asked Geraghty for the
name of someone he could talk to about supporting you guys and coördinating
with you on some of your efforts. Requesting a callback, he left a phone
number with a 914 area codeWestchester County.
She heard a click, a pause, and then a second male voice. The person who had
introduced himself as Kesh said, Dont say anything . . . before I hang up
the phone.
That piqued my interest, Geraghty recalls. Other aspects of the message
puzzled her: Who says theyre with a foundation without saying which one?
He sounded scattered. And usually people call to get funding, not to offer
it. Victor Kesh, she suspected, was someone passing as someone else.
She continued to listen, and the mans voice suddenly took on a more
commanding tone. The caller had failed to hang up, and Kesh, unaware that he
was still being recorded, seemed to be conducting a meeting about how to
perpetrate an elaborate sting on Soros. What needs to happen, he said, is
for someone other than me to make a hundred phone calls like thatto
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 years campaigns. Kesh described sending
into the Soros offices an undercover agent who could talk the talk with
Open Society executives. Keshs goal wasnt fully spelled out on the
recording, but the gist was that an operative posing as a potential donor
could penetrate Soross operation and make secret videos that exposed
embarrassing activities. Soros, he assured the others, has thousands of
organizations on the left in league with him. Kesh said that the name of
his project was Discover the Networks.
The money that would be offered, Kesh said, couldnt come from offshore
British Virgin Island companies, because Soross people dont want to take
money from a group like that. He claimed that Bill Clinton would take
suspect cash, and Hillary Clinton would, and Chelsea would.
One member of the team suggested to Kesh 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 do for us. The surgeon was sophisticated about technology
and would not have any problem with the cameras. The team member said,
Hes a very talented guy, so, I mean, hell be able to pull it off. As
Kesh mapped out the covert attack, however, he had no idea that the only
person he was stinging was himself.
The accidental recording reached farcical proportions when Kesh announced
that he was opening Geraghtys LinkedIn page on his computer. He planned to
check her résumé and leverage the information to penetrate the Soros
octopus. Kesh said, Shes probably going to call me back, and if she
doesnt I can create other points of entry. Suddenly, Kesh realized that by
opening Geraghtys LinkedIn page he had accidentally revealed his own
LinkedIn identity to her. (LinkedIn can let users see who has looked at
their pages.) Whoa! an accomplice warned. Log out! The men anxiously
reassured one another that no one checks their LinkedIn account anyway. It
was a little chilling to hear this group of men talking about me as a point
of entry, Geraghty says. Butnot to sound ageistit was clear that these
people were not used to the technology.
Geraghty forwarded the voice-mail recording to Chris Stone, the president of
the Open Society Foundations. The Watergate burglars look good compared to
these guys, Stone told me last month. These guys cant even figure out how
to use an Internet browser, let alone conduct an undercover operation. You
read the transcript and you cant help but laugh. He went on, But the
issues here arent funny. Theres some kind of dirty-tricks operation in
play against us.
In the Westchester County suburb of Mamaroneck, a street-level office has
reflective glass doors and windows that make it impossible to see inside.
This is the headquarters of James OKeefe IIIthe conservative activist who
placed the phony phone call pretending to be Victor Kesh. As he showed me
around, in late April, OKeefe, who is thirty-one, told me that he is not a
dirty trickster but an investigative journalist and a leading practitioner
of modern political warfare. Weve got this guerrilla army, and its coming
to fruition soon, he said. This is our base of operations. Waving his
hand around seven thousand square feet of empty office space, he said, This
is our NORAD. Its our field operation.
The back wall of the office, he explained, would soon be hung with an
enormous corkboard covered with maps. Affixed to each map would be a card
with the location and the assumed name of every undercover political
operative working for his nonprofit, Project Veritas. Created in 2010 as a
charity that could accept tax-deductible contributions, Project Veritas says
on its Web site that it is dedicated to exposing corruption, dishonesty,
self-dealing, waste, fraud, and other misconduct.
OKeefe graduated from Rutgers University in 2006. He says that a professor
there, David Knowlton, urged him to follow Saul Alinskys rule book, which
advised radicals to use their enemies rules against them. On St. Patricks
Day in 2005, OKeefe lampooned campus political correctness by demanding
that the dining hall ban Lucky Charms cereal. The boxs depiction of a
leprechaun, he proclaimed, perpetuated offensive stereotypes about
Irish-Americans. He videotaped a confrontation that hed had with a school
administrator and posted the footage on YouTube, launching his career as a
political stunt artist. The Lucky Charms prank remains a crowd favorite,
OKeefe told me.
In 2014, his organization became more directly involved in electoral
politics, sprouting a social welfare limb called the Project Veritas
Action Fund. Such organizations, referred to in the tax code as 501c4
groups, have proliferated since 2010, when the Supreme Courts ruling in the
Citizens United case essentially legalized unlimited corporate and
individual spending on politics. Unlike ordinary charities, 501c4 groups can
accept unlimited contributions from secret donors and spend the cash
directly on campaigns. They just need to make a plausible case that they
promote social welfare and that politics is not their primary purpose.
OKeefe says that the new group allows us to literally put someone
undercover in a campaign.
In the era of dark money, as anonymous political donations are often
described, Project Veritas has been thriving. According to its federal tax
filings, between 2013 and 2014 its budget doubled, from $1.2 million to $2.4
million. OKeefe told me that he has about a dozen undercover operations
ongoing at any given time. One of these, he said, involves someone working
for Hillary Clinton full time, as a paid staffer. This embedded
operative, he said, is employed in the campaign in the highest echelons.
(He declined to be more specific.) Every day, the operative sends video to
us over our own server. He added, Just like Hillary Clinton, we have our
own Internet server in Westchester County! He went on, We see everything.
We have thousands of hours of video. Youll see infighting, plans,
strategy. OKeefe said that he has been compiling a feature film from the
operatives footage, but wont release it until the late summer or fall,
when it will have maximum impact. In the meantime, he has posted teasers
online; several of the clips end with the words Stay tuned, Hillary, and
check your e-mail.
OKeefe promised that footage he has acquired through his various operatives
will force people to resign. He later added that he had video of top,
top, top-ranking officials discussing how and why they commit voter fraud
to sway races.
Given OKeefes track record, it would be a mistake to take his grand
statements too seriously. He first gained wide notoriety in 2009, when he
released a series of undercover videos attacking the liberal
community-organizing group ACORN. The videos had an immediate effect, but
raised serious questions about his methods and ethicsquestions that have
trailed him ever since. He secretly filmed encounters in which he and a
female colleague showed up at ACORN offices in various cities, claiming to
be a pimp and an underage prostitute who wanted advice on how to make
prostitution look like a legal business. ACORN officials appeared to oblige
them, in one instance advising them to make sure that the immigrants OKeefe
claimed he was going to prostitute actually went to school as exchange
students. After OKeefe began releasing his exposés of ACORN, the House of
Representatives voted to cut off federal funds to the group, which soon
collapsed. But an ACORN official filmed in California, who was fired because
he seemed to embrace the proposed scheme, successfully settled a lawsuit
against OKeefe for a hundred thousand dollars. He argued that he had not
consented to be videotaped, as is required in California, and that after
learning about the prostitution idea he had called the police. OKeefe
hadnt bothered to contact the employee before airing the damning footage.
In January, 2010, the F.B.I. arrested OKeefe and three accomplices, two of
whom had disguised themselves as telephone repairmen in order to enter the
New Orleans office of Mary Landrieu, then a Democratic senator for
Louisiana. (OKeefe says he had hoped to disprove Landrieus claim that her
phone lines were too clogged to answer the many angry calls coming from Tea
Party activists.) OKeefe was sentenced to three years of probation and a
hundred hours of community service; he also paid a fifteen-hundred-dollar
fine.
In 2011, OKeefe embarrassed National Public Radio when two accomplices,
pretending to represent a radical Muslim group, proposed to donate five
million dollars to the network in exchange for favorable programming about
Islam. After OKeefe released videos depicting two NPR employees chatting
with the undercover operatives about the need to put Muslim voices on the
air, and criticizing the Republican Party as not just Islamophobic but
really xenophobic, two top NPR officials, including its chief executive,
Vivian Schiller, resigned.
Many OKeefe operations, however, have fallen flat, including his repeated
efforts to prove that voter-identity fraud is pervasive. It seems like most
of the fraud OKeefe uncovers he commits himself, Richard Hasen, a
professor of election law at the University of California, Irvine, says. A
sting aimed at Hillary Clinton last year was considered especially feeble.
Veritas operatives persuaded a staffer at a rally to accept a Canadian
citizens money in exchange for a Hillary T-shirta petty violation of the
ban on foreign political contributions. Brian Fallon, the communications
director for the Clinton campaign, says, Project Veritas has been
repeatedly caught trying to commit fraud, falsify identities, and break
campaign-finance law. It is not surprising, given that their founder has
already been convicted for efforts like this.
OKeefes unseemly tactics have increasingly caused other conservatives,
including Glenn Beck, to distance themselves from him. But the 2016 campaign
cycle appears to be reinvigorating the political art form that Richard
Nixons operative Donald Segretti infamously called ratfucking.
The use of deception and other subversive tactics to undermine voter choice
is as old as the American republic. Thomas Jefferson enlisted surrogates to
publish attacks on Alexander Hamilton, who responded with anonymous
ripostes. In the eighteen-seventies, cities were infamous for using ballots
printed on multi-ply tissue paper in order to multiply candidates votes. In
1972, Segretti published a phony letter that he claimed had been written by
one of Nixons rivals, the Democratic Presidential candidate Edmund Muskie.
The letter slurred Canadians as Canucks, and the resulting furor sent
Muskies campaign into a tailspin.
With cash streaming into dark-money groups, negative campaigning is a growth
industry. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the director of the Annenberg Public
Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of Dirty
Politics (1992), told me, Dirty tricks have always been covert operations.
But more money means its more possible to cover your tracks in ways that
make it insidious. Over the years, Jamieson says, opposing campaigns have
attempted to sabotage one another by planting scandalous material, releasing
doctored photographs, and undertaking sting operations. In 2008, a citizen
journalist attended a private San Francisco fund-raiser and posted a video
of President Barack Obama making a maladroit reference to embittered
Americans who cling to guns or religion. Four years later, a bartender
working at a private fund-raiser for Mitt Romney recorded him dismissing
forty-seven per cent of the electorate as freeloaders dependent upon
government. Afterward, Romney could not shake the perception that he was
élitist.
According to Jamieson, the ability to download videos from smartphones
directly onto the Internet has normalized what used to be shadowy practices.
In the past, you were the uncredited hero who got the candidate elected,
she says. Now the brazenness of the process is such that you will admit it
and put it on your résumé!
The expected contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is likely to
be one of the nastiest in history, with putatively independent opposition
research operations fuelling both parties. Meanwhile, negative campaigns
funded by private donors and private interests are aiming at targets far
beyond conventional candidatesamong them intellectuals who have no official
role.
OKeefe declined to tell me why he had targeted George Soros. But Matthew
Tyrmand, a recent addition to the Project Veritas board, has publicly
declared his fierce opposition to Soros. Tyrmand is a thirty-five-year-old
Polish-American investor who is an informal adviser to Polands right-wing
nationalist government as well as a contributing writer at Breitbart, the
conservative news site. As street protests have sprung up in Poland, Tyrmand
has repeatedly suggested online that Soros is stoking the unrest. On the Web
site of the Polonia Institute, a nonprofit that promotes Polish culture, he
wrote that the recent protest movement was rumored to be funded by George
Soross Open Society Foundations in order to undermine and destabilize the
new government.
Tyrmand deflected numerous requests for an interview. When I finally reached
him by phone, he said that he was too busy to talk. He was in France, on his
way to the Cannes Film Festival for the première of Clinton Cash, a film
adaptation of a scathing 2015 book by Peter Schweizer, a fellow at the
Hoover Institution, which accuses the Clintons of enriching themselves by
giving speeches to dubious sponsors. The film, along with other
independently financed attacks on the Clintons, will significantly help
Trumps campaign by reducing its need to spend money on oppo research.
The first time I asked OKeefe who Victor Kesh was, he declined to comment
on what he called investigations, real or imagined. But, after learning
that he had been caught on tape trying to infiltrate Soross group, he tried
to put the best face on it. On May 11th, he, Tyrmand, and a cameraman showed
up in the lobby of the Open Society Foundations, saying that they were
conducting a serious investigation. OKeefe phoned Dana Geraghty again,
admitting that he had previously called her posing as Victor, and said
that he had some follow-up questions about whether the Foundations were as
transparent as they claim to be about the activities they fund. With the
camera rolling, OKeefe and his team stood outside the lobby and buttonholed
people, asking them if Soros was funding Polish street protests.
Laura Silber, the chief communications officer for the Open Society
Foundations, told me, We were asked if we fund the Polish oppositionwe
dont, directly or indirectly. We do support groups that advance the rule of
law and human rights, which are under threat in Poland today.
OKeefe portrays himself as a rigorous journalist who is dedicated to
furthering a more ethical and transparent society. He refuses, however, to
be transparent about who is funding him. According to tax records obtained
by PRWatch.org, an investigative watchdog group run by the Center for Media
and Democracy, in recent years hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations
to Project Veritas have come through a fund in Alexandria, Virginia, called
Donors Trust, which specializes in hiding the money trails of conservative
philanthropists. In its promotional materials, Donors Trust says that it
will keep your charitable giving private, especially gifts funding
sensitive or controversial issues. The records obtained by PRWatch.org also
show that one donor, a conservative political activist in Wisconsin,
contributed fifty thousand dollars just before Project Veritas undertook a
sting of one of his political enemiesa state senator.
OKeefe, when asked if donors to his group can pay for him to investigate
particular people or groups, answered, It depends. He will pursue a
requested target if its an idea I want to do, or if it advances our
mission. But he added, Not many people can tell me what to do, because
they dont know how we do it.
As OKeefes budget has grown, so has his ambition. I want to expand to
every state, he told me. I want to be everywhere. If uncovering the truth
requires deception, fake names, disguises, and other subterfuge, he makes no
apology. The signature OKeefe method is to try to entrap his subjects into
breaking the lawa strategy that most political operatives consider a step
too far.
He showed me a tiny video camera that had been hidden inside an Aquafina
water bottle, and others embedded in a wristwatch and in an iPod Shuffle. A
device in his shirt button, which used Bluetooth technology, could relay
live audio to his control room. He argued, What I do is the truest form of
journalism there is. We hit the record button and show people what we
found.
The political left also outsources much of its dirty work to privately
funded super PACs and dark-money groups. After the Democrats were
eviscerated in the 2010 midterm electionsthe first congressional campaigns
after the Citizens United decisionan independently funded group named
American Bridge 21st Century began supplying opposition research to
Democratic groups and candidates. The network was founded by David Brock, a
self-described former conservative hit man who became notorious in the
early nineties for having described Anita Hill as a little bit nutty and a
little bit slutty. In the aughts, Brock, who is gay, joined the Democratic
Partyin part because he found the Republican Party homophobicbringing with
him an insiders expertise in cutthroat politics. He describes American
Bridge, which employs a hundred and fifty people, as a political utility
for progressives.
The American Bridge network includes Media Matters, a watchdog operation
that identifies what it sees as distortions by the right-wing press, and
Correct the Record, a rapid-response unit that focusses on defending Hillary
Clinton. Brocks group also oversees political action committees, dark-money
nonprofit organizations, and at least fifty video trackers, who hound
Republican candidates in the hope of recording politically damaging moments.
Video trackers have been mainstays of campaigns since 2006, when a
Democratic volunteer upended George Allen, the Republican senatorial*
candidate in Virginia, by releasing a video of him uttering a racist slur.
In 2012, one of the trackers with Brocks organization captured Todd Akin, a
Missouri Republican running for the Senate, defending legitimate rape.
With American Bridges success has come funding, largely from labor unions
and wealthy liberals. One of the biggest contributors this year is George
Soroswhich may help explain why he was the object of an OKeefe sting.
After Mitt Romney lost the 2012 Presidential election, conservative
operatives concluded that they needed their own putatively independent
negative-campaign machine. Out of this partisan arms race grew America
Risingthe unofficial oppo-research affiliate of the Republican Partywhich
was founded in 2013 by Matt Rhoades, the former head of Romneys campaign.
Based in Arlington, Virginia, it diverges from Brocks network in one
crucial respect: It is a limited-liability corporation. Instead of relying
on charitable and political donations, America Rising serves as a for-profit
vender to conservative clients, who pay it to conduct customized negative
research.
Rhoades and others declined to respond to interview requests, but when I
stopped by America Risings headquarters, on May 18th, the office was filled
with young researchers bent over their laptops. The walls were decorated
with photographs of conservative icons (though Trumps portrait seemed to be
missing). An office door was covered with bulls-eye targets, and a sign
reminded staffers of the Research Checklist: Nexis, Google Alerts,
Facebook, Twitter.
Brock told me that his group had rejected the vender model. We didnt want
to be under clients thumbs, he said. If you work for them, youre
subservient. We wanted to build an independent progressive infrastructure.
Recently, some donors wanted video trackers to trail the Koch brothers, but
Brock turned them down. American Bridge does a huge amount of oppo research
on the Kochs, but Brock says he believes that tracking private citizens is
unethical. He claims that he has also rejected the use of subterfuge. Were
not in that game, he says.
By contrast, in late April the dark-money arm of Rhoadess group, America
Rising Squared, announced the creation of a negative campaign to target
leading environmentalists as well as prominent donors to environmental
causes and candidates. The campaigns initial budget was a hundred thousand
dollars, which, among other things, would cover the extensive use of video
trackers. According to the political tip sheet The Hill, the campaign would
subject environmentalists to the same level of scrutiny . . . that
opposition research firms apply to presidential candidates. America Rising
Squareds executive director, Brian Rogers, told The Hill that his group
planned to hold the Environmentalist Left accountable for their epic
hypocrisy and extreme positions which threaten Americas future prosperity.
Almost simultaneously, in early May, the organization announced the launch
of an affiliated venture, run by many of the same operatives, called
Definers Public Affairs. Definers offers to wage political-style negative
campaigns, for profit, on behalf of undisclosed private clients, including
corporations. According to its Web site, Definers will create dossiers on
opponents, monitor them from a full-service war room, and build both
grassroots alliances and a paid online presence. This raises the
possibility that undisclosed business interests are paying to choose the
targets they want Republican operatives to attack.
Soon after the campaign against environmentalists was announced, Bill
McKibben, who teaches environmental studies at Middlebury College, in
Vermont, got an alarming phone call from a librarian at Texas Tech
University, in Lubbock, who supervises a literary archive to which McKibben
had contributed his research papers. McKibben has been an outspoken activist
against the Keystone XL pipeline, and in 2008 he co-founded 350.org, a
global grassroots climate movement. For many years, he was a staff writer
for this magazine. (He is now a regular contributor to the New York Review
of Books, where he recently reviewed a book of mine.) He is a political
thinker, but not a candidate, a major political donor, or a paid campaign
operative.
The Texas librarian, Diane Warner, told McKibben that a man had shown up at
the archive and requested copies of all his papersfifty-four boxes of
documents. The man identified himself as Aaron Goss, and said that he worked
for Definers Public Affairs. Goss spent a week copying pages from McKibbens
archive. Meanwhile, as McKibben was getting ready to speak about the
environment at a church in Durham, New Hampshire, an unfamiliar man aimed a
video camera at him. The next day, a wordless two-second snippet of footage
appeared online, showing McKibben looking at the camera and then turning
away uncomfortably, to the accompaniment of the song Show Me That Smile.
The video, which was titled Bill McKibben: Ready for His Closeup, was
posted to the Twitter account of Corenews.org.
The site is another recent creation of America Rising Squared, as is an app
called Grill, which enables users to track the location of ideological
enemies, including Hillary Clinton, and lists hostile questions to ask at
public events, such as Will you drop out of the Presidential race if you
are indicted? Within days, another contentless video snippet of McKibben
popped up, this time showing him in Australia. The threat was clear:
wherever he went, his enemies would be recording him.
Who paid for a professional oppo-research team to mock an environmental
activist? The answer is secret. One could argue that the campaign isnt
substantially different from that of a corporate lobbyist, but, unlike
registered lobbyists, America Rising Squared doesnt have to file public
disclosures or pay taxes, because it purports to be a social-welfare
organization.
McKibben told me, I have no fear of debating these people on the issues,
but this is just intimidation. He added, Its bad enough to do this to
anyone who runs for office. But to do it to anyone who dares protest?
Tom Steyer, the retired hedge-fund billionaire who runs the
environmental-action group NextGen Climate and has been one of the
Democratic Partys biggest donors, is another target of America Rising
Squared. Corenews.org has featured posts calling Steyer hypocritical,
because he made a fortune investing in fossil fuels. America Rising Squared
has accused him of self-interest in supporting green energy, as he has
substantial investments in solar power. Steyer says that this is complete
and utter nonsense, because his investments are held by trusts and
structured in a way that any profits are transferred to charity. They have
to know theyre lying, Steyer said. Its completely dishonest, unethical,
and pitiful. And its creepy. He says that the anonymously funded attacks
wont stop him, but he worries that such campaigns may deter others from
engaging in activism. As he puts it, they are another reason people are
reluctant to get involved in politics.
It may be that the shock value of such exposés is diminishing. A recent
series of sting videos against Planned Parenthood, created by a group called
the Center for Medical Progress, involved deceptions so deviousincluding an
attempt by undercover operatives to buy fetal tissuethat the campaign
backfired. Pro-choice activists united in anger at the stings perpetrators,
and a Texas grand jury cleared Planned Parenthood of wrongdoing and indicted
the C.M.P. In Presidential politics, gaffes may be less damaging. As Brock
notes, In the year of Trump, people are more inured to the outrageous.
OKeefe promises that his covert documentary of the Hillary Clinton campaign
will command attention. But on May 19th he publicly conceded defeat in the
Open Society Foundations investigation. In an interview posted on Breitbart
News, he confessed that he had been forced to abandon an ambitious
undercover investigation into billionaire left-wing financier George Soros.
OKeefe acknowledged that he forgot to hang up the phone, but declined to
be more specific about the operation, saying, I dont like to reveal the
tactics of what we do. He apologized to his supporters and promised that
his many other investigations had not been compromised. Unfortunately, Im
burned on this particular investigation, he said, adding that he was very
disappointed, because he believes that the influence of billionaires such
as Soros is the most important topic undermining democracy. But he
concluded, If I wanted to be perfect, I would give up.
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