More on the Washington Post – O’Keefe Story
Last night we posted about the Washington Post catching a Project Veritas operative lying to them in one of its more clumsy “sting” operations. The story gets better – a lot better. None other than DJT donated $10,000 to Veritas in 2015; in 2016, they leaked another false story about Hillary supporters supposedly paying protestors to disrupt Trump campaign events. This silly “sting” operation is yet another sorry attempt to smear anyone who opposes conservative politicians.
Even more shocking, O’Keefe’s merry band of propagandists are getting serious dollars from somebody; so far, we haven’t found the full 2016 Form 990, and the 2015 we found had the donor names redacted. However, if you look at the screen shot below, O’Keefe has scooped up over $12 million since 2012, AND he pays himself and his cronies nice hefty salaries.
More important, though, is how in the hell did a 100% partisan political organization get non-profit charitable status from the IRS? O’Keefe is a self-confessed political operative. As far as we know, he’s never done any project through Project Veritas that wasn’t racially partisan and sometimes illegal. The fact that he gets away with it while purporting to be charitable is pretty blatant.
We’ll continue to follow this story.
I do not understand why there aren’t lawsuits.
1How about wire-tapping charges? Who was Jimmy working for? Who wanted to know what the senate committee on homeland security was discussing??
Just funning has never been an excuse used by spies.
2Has the slimy prints of Koch Bros or the Mercers all over it, with a soupcon of Borscht.
What a bunch of creeps.
3@dbtexas: The major impediment to lawsuits is that the targets of slander are public figures and saying bad things about them is protected as political free speech. Refer to the “f**k trump” topic posted on this blog a week or so ago.
Also, I think it likely that most political teams would shy away from the negatives that come with pursuing a lawsuit like this. That said it seems that Veritas is pushing the limits beyond “speech” and into “action” and that might form the basis for an action.
As for who is paying for this and why would be that stupid: GWB was saved from the TNG story by exactly the dynamic that O’Keefe was trying to set up here. At a very specific point in time the story changed from GWB’s actions to type fonts and then it was over.
In a way O’Keefe is actually doing us a favor. Rather should never have fallen for it. The WaPo did not and just maybe awareness of what happened to Rather helped them keep to their discipline and O’Keefe just ended up reinforcing that exponentially.
For the guys that benefit from this $12M is chump change compared to what even a long-shot payoff would be worth.
4These are the wages of the IRS getting spun on its 501C4 inquiries. Republicans now sense impunity.
5That Robert J. Halderman is the same guy who went to prison for extortion against David Letterman.
6Adding insult to injury, not only is Project Veritas claiming nonprofit status, it’s also on Amazon Smile. You can select them to receive a percentage of your Amazon purchases.
7Does the IRS ever enforce the rule about charitable tax-free status? I know there are churches that have announced they are giving that rule the middle finger by openly endorsing political parties and candidates from the pulpit and daring the IRS to pull their tax-free status, and nothing happens to them.
8It gets better:
9https://thinkprogress.org/project-veritas-j20-trial-3a4aae97c5a0/
$300k+ for doing noting of any socially redeeming value. That wingnut welfare is nice work if you get it.
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