Grifters Gonna Grift Open Thread: Project (No) Veritas JO’Ker Is At It Again

Project Veritas says the Justice Department secretly obtained personal information about its staffers during a probe into how the conservative activists got a diary purportedly belonging to President Biden’s daughter. The government declined to comment. https://t.co/dcg7M14hUy

— The Associated Press (@AP) April 14, 2022

James O’Keefe illicitly acquired a private citizen’s diary, and used it for dramatic readings in an attempt to get GOP dark-money donors to keep his grift going for a few more months. The fact that some of the people who threw money at Sydney Powell found O’Keefe too sketchy to bankroll might’ve given a brighter dude pause, but not our Jimmy. They’d probably give him a moderate sinecure at some ‘investigative channel’ think tank if he’d stop fumbling around the edges of serious crime, but apparently O’Keefe just can’t bear the idea of leaving the circus…

Exactly how Project Veritas came to acquire Ashley Biden’s diary in the fall of 2020 remains the subject of considerable debate and speculation. Ankush Khardori writes that the organization has offered the appearance, but not the reality, of transparency https://t.co/v9PkYhANkK

— New York Magazine (@NYMag) April 18, 2022

Lots of damning details here:

I did not enter with high hopes, but I was still surprised by how quickly my interview with James O’Keefe went downhill. “You’re a former prosecutor, right?” the founder of Project Veritas asked just a few minutes after we began. “Why should I have any reason to believe that you’re gonna be fair here?”

The question might have been reasonable were it not for the fact that it was Project Veritas that had reached out to me to do a story about the organization and its legal troubles. They are the subject of a federal criminal investigation into the possible theft during the 2020 election of a diary that belongs to Joe Biden’s adult daughter Ashley. The group obtained the diary that September after she left it at a home in Florida and considered running a story about its contents but ultimately did not. After Joe Biden won in November, Project Veritas gave the diary to police in Florida along with other belongings of hers that they had obtained…

As a fact-gathering exercise, the discussion turned out to be a deeply frustrating experience; O’Keefe was evasive and demonstrably unreliable. As a window into his methodology as a political and media operator — a combination of deflection, self-aggrandizement, and self-aggrievement, depending on what is most useful in the moment ­— it was an illuminating encounter if nevertheless rather annoying to endure and strangely pathetic to witness.

At one point, O’Keefe described the investigation as “the biggest and most egregious abridgment of freedom of the press in the history of the United States of America.” Later, he advised me, “You’ve never met an adversary like me, my friend.” (I told him that I did not regard him as an adversary.) He told me that he had been “incarcerated,” and when I asked him about this surprising claim, he said that he was referring to the fact that he had been restrained while his home was being raided last November. He tried to unilaterally put information off the record after disclosing it and was taken aback when I told him that I would not agree. By the time we were done — I finally had to hang up on him and his handlers after repeatedly suggesting that we cordially end the discussion — he had threatened to sue me “like all the other people I’ve sued” and repeatedly called me a “disgrace.”

Exactly how Project Veritas came to acquire Ashley Biden’s diary in the fall of 2020, during the home stretch of the presidential campaign, remains the subject of considerable debate and speculation. That is in part because the government’s investigation is ongoing, and in part because Project Veritas has offered the appearance but not the reality of transparency on the subject…

It is worth lingering over just this version of events precisely because it is Project Veritas’s own. For one thing, why would anyone ever believe that someone had “abandoned” a “diary,” particularly along with other personal effects like “an overnight bag,” “mail,” and “photographs?” The word “abandoned” is a loaded one because it implies that the owner has made a deliberate decision to relinquish her ownership interest in the property, but a diary is an object whose value depends almost entirely on the idea that it would never be abandoned — like a wallet, a purse, or a valid passport. If you happen to come across objects like these, you usually try (or at least should try) to find the owner. And if someone did want to “abandon” a diary, they would probably dispose of it by throwing it away — particularly if it contained embarrassing or salacious material — rather than just leaving it at a friend’s place.

The point seems minor, but it is potentially a legally crucial one. If the people involved believed that Biden had left the possessions behind to store them temporarily — and had not actually “abandoned” them in the sense that she no longer wanted them or intended to retrieve them — then the removal of Biden’s belongings and their transportation to New York in consultation with Project Veritas may, as the government suggested in its warrant to search O’Keefe’s home, have violated various federal criminal statutes, including: conspiracy to transport stolen property across state lines, conspiracy to possess stolen goods, and interstate transportation of stolen property. It would be important to establish what O’Keefe and others at Project Veritas knew on this point, which is likely at least part of the reason that investigators have been acquiring the group’s internal communications. The fact pattern potentially gets worse at the point at which the group, as they have put it, obtained “additional Ashley Biden belongings from the home later in September,” depending on who was involved in gathering those items.

When I asked O’Keefe what led Project Veritas to believe that Biden’s belongings had been “abandoned,” I expected him to tell me that this was the sources’ specific claim. That probably would not relieve O’Keefe or the group from criminal liability if they knew that the claim was false, but it would form the basis for a decent defense. Instead, O’Keefe refused to answer me with any specifics — claiming, incorrectly, that “you have all the facts at your disposal.” “Someone can provide information to me — a third party — and I have a First Amendment right to publish that,” he told me. “Period.”

Well, question mark. If a news organization actively participates in stealing material, neither the group nor the people involved are immune from criminal investigation or from criminal liability. Jane Kirtley, a professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota and the former executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, has expressed concerns about the government’s investigation. But, as she told me, “the First Amendment is not a get-out-of-jail free card.” As one court has put it — in a line that prosecutors prominently quoted in one of their court filings — “there is a significant legal distinction between stealing documents and disclosing documents that someone else had stolen previously.”…