We’ve all heard that the devil is “the prince of lies.” But far more evident is the party of lies, the GOP which seems to have given up any attempt to debate their ideology and instead spends all its time defaming progressives. Here I present The Tale of James O’Keefe, a revolting little termite. He was first seen destroying an effective organization, ACORN, with fraud. But let these Wonkets explain it.
James O’Keefe—the blonde bombshell who set the conservative world of hidden-camera YouTube movies ablaze—has just agreed to a $100,000 settlement to calm down the unjustly fired (and weirdly litigious about it) ACORN employee Juan Carlos Vera. According to a copy of the deal, obtained late last night by your wonkettes and viewable after the jump, O’Keefe has also agreed to ink an 11-word non-apology apology, that sources close to reality are calling “insincere” and “suuuuuuuch bullshit.”
According to the final 5-page agreement, signed by O’Keefe and his legal counsel Mike Madigan this past Tuesday, the boy detective now publicly “regrets any pain suffered by Mr. Vera or his family.” O’Keefe and his counsel have also consented to fork over the $100,000 within 30 business days of the settlement agreement’s being signed.
For the benefit of readers who are neither bitter and aggrieved former ACORN employees nor forum moderators at Democratic Underground, a short summary: ACORN was a community organizing group that became the locus of phantasmically baroque conspiracy theorizing in the build-up to the 2008 presidential election, first by the usual sad idiots, but inevitably by the seemingly rational journalists who must cover the sad idiots to pay their mortgages. ACORN attracted this negative attention, in part, because of its large and effective voter registration drives, which enfranchised record numbers of minority and low-income voters, who are demographically likely to vote for Democratic Party candidates. The sad idiots believed there was a collusion scheme between ACORN and a former employee of the group, who happened to be that year’s Democratic Presidential candidate: a ferocious IRA terrorist-sympathizer named Barrance Hussein O’Malley. In reality, ACORN’s decades-long campaigns to raise the minimum wage and their battles against predatory lenders had simply invited the animus of powerful business interests—who fund the media activities of sad idiots and rule the planet for like-minded reptilianoid pedophile Illuminatus from the 4th Dimension.
Juan Carlos Vera worked at the National City offices of ACORN in California.
In 2009, two twenty-something conservative activists, James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, hoped to expose criminal malfeasance at ACORN by filming Vera without his consent, themselves violating section 632 of the California penal code in the process. Vera sued both parties over this and the wild misrepresentation of his activities in the edited version of the undercover video, posted online. (Giles settled with Vera and his attorneys this summer.) The episode is a quintessential example of a wholly original term, which we have just coined: journalistic malpractice.
But wait! “Those goldurned trial lawyers!” literally ALL OF YOU are swearing. “James is an honest man! He’s the president of a 501(c)3 nonprofit committed to modern-day muckraking! What kinda carpetbagging shakedown is this?!?!”
Well, counterintuitively, this is a shakedown of all the delusional pensioners, mom-and-pop charitable givers and deranged millionaire philanthropists who have given to James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas and continue to donate.
Since at least the spring of 2011, Veritas has contracted its fundraising efforts to the direct-mail marketing firm American Target Marketing. (atm!!! u guyz i just realized ha.) ATM’s founder and owner Richard Art Viguerie is literally on his fourth decade running the operation as an aggressively for-profit entity; it frequently nets more than half of the money raised for its nonprofit or political clients, to cover its own opaque “operational expenditures.” Even Marvin Lieberman—who employed Viguerie as an executive director of the equally sketchy student group Young Americans for Freedom in the 1960s—has gone on the record as saying Viguerie and his firm “rape the public.” Personally, your wonkettes are sick to our little stomachs awaiting the inevitable email blast from Project Veritas screaming, “We’re Under Attack! The Tort-Happy, Bloodsucking Lawyers And Liberal Media Vultures Are After Us … AGAIN!!!! Only That Money You Were Saving To Fix The Lincoln Towncar On Cinder Blocks In Your Front Yard Can SAVE AMERICA!!!! Abortion!!!”
Still, as Vera’s attorney Gene Iredale suggested to us in a telephone interview, O’Keefe’s willingness to pay this exorbitant sum is, by itself, a tacit admission of guilt. The sum is $35,000 more than James received from Andrew Breitbart for his “life rights” based on the top-shelf (derp-derp) quality of the ACORN videos in the first place. So, a limited amount of justice has been served.
It is also illuminating to know that O’Keefe and his handlers have determined that it was worth at least $100,000 to avoid publicly losing a court case, and thus further tarnishing the James O’Keefe “folk hero” fundraising brand with a guilty verdict directly related to sloppy journalism. If you do the math, this diversion of funds could have paid for two Project Veritas “investigations” on the scale of their seemingly never-ending Voter ID project last year.
Yet, while the size of the payout is revealing of O’Keefe’s perceived further utility to the conservative movement, it also leaves many pertinent questions unanswered.
Has representing James O’Keefe been the most embarrassing case for Mike Madigan since his stint on the old Clinton Whitewater investigation with Ken Starr? Or MORE embarrassing? Can Clark Hoyt, Zev Chafets and the New York Times Magazine suck a cold bag of dicks for legitimizing O’Keefe’s ACORN videos in “the paper of record” YEARS after they were discredited? What would YOU do with a $100,000 settlement?
If we were awarded a $100,000 settlement, we’d take you people out to dinner, like, at the very least.
He settled a lawsuit against him by ACORN staff member for $100,000. This guy’s a high roller.
Juan Carlos Vera was one of the ACORN employees secretly filmed by O’Keefe and an accomplice as they pretended to ask advice on how best to hide their imaginary child prostitution ring or some such. O’Keefe edited the tape to make Vera appear to be sympathetic to their queries; unbeknownst to the tapers, however, Vera afterwards had immediately contacted police to report the possible “human smuggling.” ACORN employees in other offices also either contacted police or found their story to be so obviously ridiculous as to be an obvious scam. Nonetheless, O’Keefe’s edited, Breitbart-peddled tape made quite the splash in the media, with O’Keefe donning a “pimp” costume to conduct interviews as to how the nasty advocates for the poor were really criminal masterminds.
That the tape was faked, however, didn’t matter: Vera lost his job as a result of the tape and surrounding media hoopla. He sued O’Keefe, who Wonkette reports finally settled the case this week:
[A]s Vera’s attorney Gene Iredale suggested to us in a telephone interview, O’Keefe’s willingness to pay this exorbitant sum is, by itself, a tacit admission of guilt. The sum is $35,000 more than James received from Andrew Breitbart for his “life rights” based on the top-shelf (derp-derp) quality of the ACORN videos in the first place. So, a limited amount of justice has been served.It is also illuminating to know that O’Keefe and his handlers have determined that it was worth at least $100,000 to avoid publicly losing a court case, and thus further tarnishing the James O’Keefe “folk hero” fundraising brand with a guilty verdict directly related to sloppy journalism. If you do the math, this diversion of funds could have paid for two Project Veritas “investigations” on the scale of their seemingly never-ending Voter ID project last year.
O’Keefe will now be free to get himself arrested in other contexts while attempting to produce tapes “proving” other faked conspiracies, which counts for exactly as much “journalism” as conservatives can stand nowadays. (The other path to riches is to just cut out the middleman and have the government of Malaysia pay you outright for writing pro-Malaysian-government editorials in the press, but not every conservative can suck that teat at once.) If the news isn’t going the way you like, screw it—someone will pay you to fake some better news, right?
Note that while the tapes were proved a mere smear in short order, way back when, that hasn’t stopped actual, supposedly non-insane Republicans in our government from continuing to obsess over the supposed plots involved. The just-released House Appropriation Committee’s 2013 budget bill contains a clause demanding that ACORN, which no longer exists, receive no federal money (a fairly safe bet, what with that whole “no longer exists” thing). When it comes to fake scandals, these guys are obsessed.
Frankly, I think Vera should have held out for much, much more. As Wonkette points out, O’Keefe’s merry band of misfits gets their money by fundraising through Richard Viguerie’s direct-mail operation; I bet O’Keefe wouldn’t have much trouble raising five times that amount from gullible aficionados of fake tapes. (Did I mention what suckers these people are? I really can’t emphasize the sucker part enough. Huge.)
Ah well, save some money for O’Keefe’s other victims, I suppose. Form an orderly line, everybody. He’ll get to you in due time.
Now the little termite is busily trying to defend Rob Moore, not by showing he is innocent, that’s not his style. He is trying to defend him by dirtying up all the victims who are speaking up against him.
James O’Keefe, convicted creator of the fake sting on ACORN and fake sting on NPR, was caught by the Washington Post on Monday as he attempted to engineer a fake sting on the “liberal media.”
An unidentified woman has been telling the Washington Post a headline-worthy shocker…
In a series of interviews over two weeks, the woman shared a dramatic story about an alleged sexual relationship with Moore in 1992 that led to an abortion when she was 15. During the interviews, she repeatedly pressed Post reporters to give their opinions on the effects that her claims could have on Moore’s candidacy if she went public.
But the Washington Post didn’t run the unsubstantiated story. Reporters were put off by inconsistencies and by a quick check of her Internet history that suggested she had other motivations than sharing the truth. And then…
On Monday morning, Post reporters saw her walking into the New York offices of Project Veritas, an organization that targets the mainstream news media and left-leaning groups. The organization sets up undercover “stings” that involve using false cover stories and covert video recordings meant to expose what the group says is media bias.
O’Keefe and his Project Veritas fed the Washington Post a big, fat story that took what’s already known about Roy Moore and extended it — for the purpose of revealing that they had faked the story after it ran. Only it didn’t run. It was O’Keefe who ran.
Here is another recounting of the bug who should be squished or at least serve time.
James O’Keefe hired a woman to lie about being sexually assaulted to discredit actual victims
By Mark Sumner
Tuesday Nov 28, 2017 · 5:47 AM PST
REBLOGGED BY Daily Kos
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When you lie for a living, there’s no such thing as a failure. There’s just another chance to lie. On Monday, the Washington Post ripped the lid off James O’Keefe’s latest attempt to fool the public.
In a series of interviews over two weeks, the woman shared a dramatic story about an alleged sexual relationship with Moore in 1992 that led to an abortion when she was 15. During the interviews, she repeatedly pressed Post reporters to give their opinions on the effects that her claims could have on Moore’s candidacy if she went public.
That woman, Jaime T. Phillips, turned out to be working for O’Keefe and Project Veritas. So, just to make it extremely clear: O’Keefe hired a woman to lie about sexual assault so that he could cast doubt on women who were actually assaulted by sexual predator and Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore.
So, once again, those who thought that Republicans supporting Roy Moore was the bottom of this well were forced to break out the shovels.
But O’Keefe wasn’t done. Caught red-handed in the midst of his latest video lie, O’Keefe declared that he was was going to reveal “the truth” including video of a “confrontation” with one of the Post reporters who supposedly forced his way into the offices at O’Keefe’s Project Veritas. Only this time, it was the Washington Post who was recording everything. Including how O’Keefe himself invited the reporter to come to the office.
Davis and another Post reporter, along with two video reporters, went to the Project Veritas offices in Mamaroneck, N.Y., on Monday morning to try to determine whether the woman, Jaime T. Phillips, worked there. They watched as she walked into the office. O’Keefe, who appeared minutes later, declined to answer questions. He invited Davis back for an interview shortly after noon.
As is typical for O’Keefe, what his followers got was a highly edited version of this encounter, designed to make it look like he hadn’t been caught not only lying, but lying to aid and abet sexual assault.
You can fight both Roy Moore and James O’Keefe by donating to Doug Jones, allowing him to get the actual truth out to every voter in Alabama.
In a series of interviews with Post reporters over two weeks, Phillips shared a false story about an alleged sexual relationship in 1992 with Moore, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama. She said the relationship led to an abortion when she was 15. During the interviews, she repeatedly pressed Post reporters to give their opinions on the whether her claims could affect Moore’s candidacy if she went public.
But the Post didn’t run with this story. Instead, they checked it out. They were unable to verify any of Phillip’s claims and put off by frequent discrepancies in her story.
When Post reporters confronted her last Wednesday with inconsistencies in her story, as well as an Internet posting that raised doubts about her motivations, she insisted that she was not working with any organization that targets journalists.
And then she walked straight back to O’Keefe and Project Veritas.
The unedited version of the discussion between O’Keefe and one of the Washington Post reporters who uncovered his latest attempt to generate a Big Lie is available at the Post.
What we still don’t know: Who hired O’Keefe? We know that he pockets a hefty six-figure income from his business of generating lies. We know that right wing figures funnel that money to him under the pretense that he’s running a charitable organization.
But who hired O’Keefe to make this specific video? One where, once again: O’Keefe hired a woman to lie about sexual assault in order to protect a sexual predator by discrediting women who had actually been assaulted.
Was it Roy Moore directly? Was it Moore supporter Steve Bannon? Or was it the guy who we already know cut a check to O’Keefe in the past?
My Soapbox 
I wish there was a “vomit” button instead of a “Like” one.
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