Cons not ready for the Big Con
by Tom Sullivan
Real activists work in community organizing, political campaigns, voter registration, call-your-congresscritter, and Get-Out-the Vote efforts, etc. Then there is conservative James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas. Anti-government militiamen play with weapons in the woods, pretending they’re Rambo. O’Keefe’s hidden-camera crews play at being undercover agents, hoping to coax real activists into doing or saying something that, with the right editing and promotion, will appear nefarious on Fox News.
Project Veritas now seems to have set its sights on the Hillary Clinton campaign, Time reports:
Hillary Clinton’s campaign offices around the country have been put on alert after at least two women approached Iowa staff under the guise of being supporters in an apparent effort to catch the campaign engaging in improper or illegal activity, a Clinton campaign official said.
The motivations of the women is not known, but their alleged techniques match those of Project Veritas, the conservative group run by James O’Keefe, which specializes in undercover stings meant to embarrass liberal groups and politicians. The group declined to comment on the Clinton campaign’s allegations. “Project Veritas does not comment on investigations, real or imagined,” said Daniel Pollack, the director of communications for the group.
But it’s pretty easy to imagine them being behind an effort to secretly film campaign staffers seeming to accept illegal donations or advocating voter registration infractions after repeated prodding. It worked against ACORN, and copycats recently used the same technique to cause Planned Parenthood grief.
A few of us were at a private party last year when an associate of O’Keefe’s sneaked in “and made a bee line to [Lisa] Graves” from the Center for Media and Democracy. Graves said the team had been stalking her at the Netroots Nation conference all day. They were promptly ejected.