CAMPAIGN 2020 Table of Contents
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PROJECT Veritas Action 2020 in revIew www.PROJECTVERITASACTION.COM INTEGRITY & DECEPTION CAMPAIGN 2020 Table of Contents James o’keefe’s Mark Kelly 1 LETTER 20 campaign John Hickenlooper #expose2020 & Lisa savage 9 political compaign overview 22 campaign cal cunningham bernie sanders & Raphael Warnock 10 campaign 23 campaign Elizabeth Warren local media 16 campaign 24 coverage jon ossoff campaign earned media 19 Amy McGrath campaign 24 coverage JAMES O’KEEFE CEO & FOUNDER, PROJECT VERITAS ACTION James O’Keefe founded Project Veritas and Project Veritas how to lie on tax and welfare forms, bury cash in a tin box Action after he had pulled off some of the most consequential underground and how to declare the underage Salvadoran fe- undercover journalism coups in a generation, so he could have males O’Keefe claimed to be trafficking into the U.S. to become an organization dedicated to reviving the craft of undercover prostitutes as his dependents. journalism. These two organizations are non-profits dedicat- Working with Andrew Breitbart, a friend and mentor to ed to investigating corruption, dishonesty, waste and fraud in O’Keefe, he and Giles unleashed one of the biggest political public institutions and the private sector. scandals on Capitol Hill since the impeachment of President The undercover journalism O’Keefe has pioneered at Project Bill Clinton, ten years prior. The series of videos from ACORN Veritas relies on the most modern digital and video technology offices around the country led to the group’s collapse, as it also infused with the legacy of the great investigative journalists of lost federal contracts with agencies, such as the Census Bureau. the past, such as Nellie Bly, Mike Wallace, Gunter Wallraff and As other reporters got involved, including The Wall Street Jour- Woodward and Bernstein. Today, O’Keefe and Project Veritas and Project Veritas Action continue to seek the same opportunities that first motivated him as a Rutgers undergraduate philosophy major. At Rutgers, he founded an independent campus newspaper called The Centurion. In 2007, O’Keefe and Lila Rose recorded Planned Parent- hood staffers ready to accept a donation from O’Keefe would only be used to abort African-America children and working with Rose, pretending to be a pregnant 15-year-old, to conceal her age, so Planned Parenthood could abort her child without reporting to the police what would be a prima facie statutory nal’s John Fund and The American Spectator’s Matthew Vadum, rape case. which led to the uncovering of more corruption. Ultimately, The ACORN Investigation the House and Senate, both controlled by Democrats, voted to O’Keefe first walked on the national stage in 2009. At the defund ACORN and President Barack Obama signed it into law. suggestion of Hannah Giles, she and O’Keefe went into offic- In the following years, O’Keefe and Project Veritas journal- es of ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations ists released investigative reports led to a reduction of federal for Reform Now, purporting to be a pimp with his prostitute. funding to National Public Radio, as well as numerous NPR Using a camera hidden in O’Keefe’s necktie, they recorded the executives being fired and or retiring. Another investigation staffers in ACORN offices around the country explain to them 3 into the private group Enroll America, led to its director getting the No. 1 trending videos in the United States. This investiga- fired and a series of congressional field hearings focused on tion exposed CNN’s anti-Trump bias and raised serious ques- fraud inside Obamacare navigator program. tions about the news organization’s credibility. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius Just days before the 2017 Presidential inauguration, O’Keefe resigned April 10, 2014, three weeks after the Government Ac- and Project Veritas reporters infiltrated the Antifa-linked Dis- countability Office documented her role in the raising money ruptJ20 movement to conduct an undercover investigation at for Enroll America in her official capacity from organizations Washington’s Comet pizzeria, where the agitators plotted how doing business with her department. to violently disrupt President-elect Donald Trump swearing in Heading into 2014 elections, O’Keefe launched investigations a planning meeting. After viewing the footage, O’Keefe turned in four key battleground states to expose the hypocrisy of Sen- it over to the FBI, the Secret Service and the capital’s Metropol- ate candidates misleading voters: Phil Bredesen, Russ Feingold, itan Police Department, which led to the arrest of Scott Char- Mark Udall and Allison Lundergan Grimes. All four Senate ney, Paul Kuhn, and Colin Dunn, charged with conspiracy to candidates lost at the ballot box. commit an assault. In 2016, Project Veritas and Project Veritas Action released The team kept up the investigative pressure in the 2018 videos exposing key Democrats not only admitting voter fraud Senate races by helping retire incumbent Democratic senators exists, but also showing how to successfully commit it on a in Missouri, North Dakota and Indiana. Undercover journalists massive scale. In New York City, Democratic Election Commis- captured one candidate admitting that she had “a bunch of sioner Alan Schulkin admitted on a hidden camera voter fraud Republican voters” at home, but the she and Obama “essential- was rampant in his city and it was allowed to flourish to the ly have the same views,” and the “people just can’t know that.” benefit of the Democratic Party. Additional videos released that As a result, his team was credited with helping maintain the year exposed consultants hired by the Democratic National conservative balance of power in the U.S. Senate. Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign con- In 2019, O’Keefe launched the Project Veritas “Be Brave. Do spired to foment violence at rallies held by candidate Donald Something” campaign. The campaign’s focus is to recruit insid- Trump’s campaign. The investigation has been credited with ers at organizations who will come forward to Project Veritas exposing the dark side of the Clinton campaign’s tactics. and choose to become vehicles of change, catalysts for citizen O’Keefe turned his attention to the mainstream media in empowerment and have the will to inspire moral courage. 2017 and the Project Veritas investigations into CNN became These groundbreaking investigations into social media giants, 4 Pinterest, Google and Facebook exposed practices, such as This social media awakening culminated with President Facebook’s “deboosting” of users, posts and comments. Donald Trump calling a July 11, 2019 “Social Media Summit” One of the insiders, a Pinterest software engineer, Eric in the White House’s East Room. In the middle of his prepared Cochran, came forward with evidence that Pinterest targeted remarks, the president caught sight of O’Keefe and saluted him posts by the pro-life organization LiveAction, led by Lila Rose. for his impact. Another revelation was when Google engineers were re- “[Gesturing at James O’Keefe] there he is, stand up please! corded revealing Google’s not so hidden agenda in “Algorithmic How good… what a great job. Somebody said he’s controversial. fairness”, news blacklists and “human raters,” once again, the He’s not controversial, he’s truthful. He’s truthful. That was a findings were so compelling that O’Keefe gave the footage to great job. That was one of many. Thank you very much.” – Pres- the Department of Justice, along with more than 950 pages of ident Trump at the White House. July 11th, 2019. leaked documents. One of O’Keefe’s most recent impactful investigations was On Capitol Hill, the investigations led to House and Senate ABC News anchor Amy Robach telling people in the studio, but hearings, where lawmakers grilled social media executives the off-camera, that her bosses at ABC News spiked her expose of contrast between the public statements and the Project Veritas pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. The “Good Morning America” an- findings. It was a direct result of these Project Veritas investi- chor told her studio crew her report would have also implicated gations, which reveals the practice of shutting down a user’s President Bill Clinton and she doubts Epstein took his own life. The Robach video was viewed and shared by tens of millions of viewers around the world as America’s mainstream media and international media outlets could not ignore this scoop. Aside from leading Project Veritas and Project Veritas Action, O’Keefe is the author of two best-selling books, Break- through: Our guerilla war to expose fraud and save democracy, published in 2013, and American Pravda: My fight for truth in the era of Fake News, published in 2018. Both books are personal and revealing works about both his experiences on the line of scrimmage of American democracy and his take on what mainstream media has become and what it should be. access to their online community without notice that the term Follow James O’Keefe “shadow banning” entered the lexicon. The success of the social media investigations forced main- stream media outlets to cover O’Keefe and Project Veritas and it led to non-mainstream media outlets to conduct their own investigations. Even social media celebrities came forward with their own experiences of being shadow banned, suspended or even deplatformed from social media communities, where they had experienced great success. 5 8 #EXPOSE2020 POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS OVERVIEW For months, undercover journalists from Project Ver- itas Action Fund (PVA) were embedded in Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. Their tireless work resulted in the debut of #Expose2020, an investigative series focused entirely on the 2020 election. The series was so devastating that multiple Sanders staffers including the Deputy Digital Director of the Sanders 2020 campaign locked down their Twitter accounts in very quick order.