A botched sting with a phony Roy Moore ‘accuser’

A botched sting with a phony Roy Moore ‘accuser’ was supposed to discredit the media. Like similar schemes, it did the opposite.

Ah "Project Veritas" a favorite among many here on ATS for their "guerilla-style" undercover videos seems to be making some headlines tonight. Surprisingly (but maybe not quite?) this hasn't yet found its way to ATS for discussion.

Apparently James O'Keefe and his buddies over at Project Veritas decided to send a fake Roy Moore accuse to the Washington Post, in an effort to...well, "expose" something?

A failed effort to dupe The Washington Post into publishing a woman’s fabricated account of underage sex with Roy Moore represents the latest entry on a list of schemes that attempted to expose fake news in the mainstream media and wound up doing the opposite.

The Post’s Shawn Boburg, Aaron C. Davis and Alice Crites reported Monday that a woman who appears to have been working for Project Veritas, the conservative activist group run by James O’Keefe, approached the newspaper with a false claim that she had an abortion at age 15 after Moore impregnated her.

Well well...The Washington Post has been around for 140 years and broke the Watergate scandal. Not surprisingly they smelled something wasn't quite right with this:

The woman who tried to fool The Post, Jaime Phillips, raised suspicions in similar ways. At times, she seemed to be trying to bait reporters into saying that publishing allegations against Moore would end his campaign. During one meeting, she positioned — and repositioned — her purse in a way that suggested the presence of a hidden camera.

We've seen time and time again that James O'Keefe and his "Project Veritas" love to do undercover filming and later "creatively edit" sentences out of context to push an agenda. We saw this with the Planned Parenthood videos, for example.

This isn't the first time, however, that far-right groups have tried to discredit journalists who don't report stories in their favor. Misinformation was spread earlier and caught by Rachel Maddow of MSNBC:

In July, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow told viewers (and fellow journalists) that “somebody for some reason appears to be shopping a fairly convincing fake NSA document that purports to directly implicate somebody from the Trump campaign in working with the Russians on their attack on the election. It is a forgery.”

There indeed seems to be a determined attack on American journalism in the United States. As Maddow said in July:

One way to stab in the heart aggressive American reporting on that subject is to lay traps for American journalists who are reporting on it, trick news organizations into reporting what appears to be evidence of what happened, and then after the fact blow that reporting up.

You then hurt the credibility of that news organization. You also cast a shadow over any similar reporting in the future, whether or not it’s true, right? Even if it’s true, you plant a permanent question, a permanent asterisk, a permanent “who knows?” as to whether that too might be false, like that other story — whether that too might be based on fake evidence.

And this type of coordinated attack on journalism in America isn't some wild conspiracy theory, there have been open calls on the far-right to do exactly what we are now seeing. Protip: If you want to attack the media, you might now want to broadcast it using the media:

In May, conservative talk show host Bill Mitchell suggested that supporters of President Trump could discredit news outlets such as The Post and New York Times by tricking them into publishing “crazy ‘leaks.’ ”



You know what we should do? Start flooding the NYTimes and WAPO tip lines with all kinds of crazy "leaks." Then laugh when they print them!

— Bill Mitchell (@mitchellvii) May 21, 2017

Well, that tweet certainly comes full circle now, doesn't it?

What's even more interesting is that the Trump campaign donated to Project Vertias, the same group that tried to setup the Washington Post. Additionally, Trump Jr. has been in constant contact with O'Keefe's outfit via Twitter for over a year now. Perhaps that angle ought to be investigated to see if there if the White House is funding disinformation and misinformation, in an attempt to discredit journalists who aren't reporting things our president likes?

Time will tell -- but this certainly has some irony to it. Instead of "uncovering MSM lies" it actually showed that the Washington Post vets its sources pretty well, and smelled something was off about this supposed Roy Moore accuser. I say kudos to WaPo for not falling for the bait and doing its diligence in vetting the source/accuser.

The rest of the story can be found here:

Washington Post

a reply to: Kettu

Thanks Kettu for posting this, I saw it but didn't have the energy to post it.

Great OP!


The point is well made that this O'keefe is really O'Creep, though a fine match for the present Distorter in Chief

Well the WP does seem to be a vortex sucking in fake news.

a reply to: Kettu

You are really stretching it to compare the WaPo of the early 70s, to the Leftist rag they have become since Bezos took it over.
So they caught one?....big deal.
Also portraying Maddow as a "journalist" with integrity is a joke.
Don't you remember this doozy?....the Al Capone's vault of Trump's tax returns?
She is an idiot that likes to think she is the smartest person in the room.

The longer Maddow went on, ever deeper into a conspiratorial thicket, the clearer it became that whatever tax returns Maddow had, they weren’t as juicy as the ones she was talking about. If she had anything that damning, she would have shared them from the start. TV is a ratings game, but an entire episode about highly damaging tax returns is just as likely to get you great ratings as milking the possibility that you have highly damaging tax returns and less likely to get you compared to Geraldo. Maddow even went so far as to hold the tax returns back until after the first commercial break, as if we were watching an episode of The Bachelor and not a matter of national importance—because we weren’t, in fact, watching a matter of national importance, just a cable news show trying to set a ratings record.

www.slate.com...

originally posted by: whywhynot
Well the WP does seem to be a vortex sucking in fake news.

The lady should have said that COMEY sent her.

Sounds like a "reverse" scam attempt.

Looks like it backfired.

O'Keefe played it just right.

WAPO screwed it up for themselves.

Makes you wonder why, the WAPO would consider the need to create a sting to cover for their Moore story?


Hmmmm... going to be an interesting week

a reply to: xuenchen

I am not so sure the story is as it seems ...." a woman who appears to have been working for Project Veritas " Was she wearing a Tshirt ...Time will tell as James will more the likely either confess or deny it .

a reply to: JacKatMtn

Sure, the WaPo "created" a fake sting. More details:

Alice Crites, a Post researcher who was looking into Phillips’s background, found a document that strongly reinforced the reporters’ suspicions: a Web page for a fundraising campaign by someone with the same name. It was on the website GoFundMe.com under the name Jaime Phillips.

Hm....and that lead to this:

“I’m moving to New York!” the May 29 appeal said. “I’ve accepted a job to work in the conservative media movement to combat the lies and deceipt of the liberal MSM. I’ll be using my skills as a researcher and fact-checker to help our movement. I was laid off from my mortgage job a few months ago and came across the opportunity to change my career path.”

And they literally saw her walking into the Project Veritas offices:

But 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.

A woman approached The Post with dramatic — and false — tale about Roy Moore. She appears to be part of undercover sting operation.

I can't force anyone to "Deny Ignorance".

That choice, is entirely up to the individual.

a reply to: Kettu

I've believed James O'Keefe and Project Veritas are controlled opposition/provocateurs for years.

Though O'Keefe described himself as a progressive radical, not a conservative, he said he targeted ACORN for the same reasons that the political right does: its massive voter registration drives that turn out poor African Americans and Latinos to cast ballots against Republicans.

Link to 2009 LA Times article

His story just never quite added up to me.

Wondering if the WAPO is trying to get ahead of what's coming? Why did the WAPO head to Project Veritas HQ?



Video was from earlier today, prior to WAPO sting?

Like I said... gonna be an interesting week

a reply to: JacKatMtn

That's one of WAPO's mistakes.

a reply to: the2ofusr1
apparently the Washington Post had her followed or just happened to see her while she was entering Project Veritas headquarters...

a reply to: JacKatMtn

That video makes me even more suspicious of O'Keefe. It's an intentional fail to make the WaPo look like they vet their information thoroughly before they report it. ha

***

ETA: Case in point...Link!

a reply to: JacKatMtn

They had suspicions about this "source" and had already linked her to Project Veritas.

So, to do their due diligence they staked out the offices and literally saw her enter the offices.

They literally confirmed she was working for O'Keefe's outfit after doing background research on her. I'm not sure how any more clear cut it can get.

It's going to take a lot more mental energy trying to contort this around to work as a pro-Moore, anti-WaPo thing.

In the end, denial of objective reality only serves to harm the conspiracy theorist community.

a reply to: Kettu

In the animal kingdom, there are several species of predators which will rarely if ever eat carrion... instead, they limit their meat intake to that which they have freshly killed. This prevents the predator from disease as there is little chance of eating diseased meat.

In the world of politics, the mist successful predators are those who never accept stories which come to them, but instead rely almost exclusively on stories they can themselves arrange, or at least those which come through verified and vetted channels. This prevents them from being caught fabricating "fake news."

In other words, this is a little interesting, but not much of an absolvement of the WaPo. It is an indication WaPo is cautious about stories which are too easy.

TheRedneck

a reply to: Kettu

I disagree with the credibility you give WAPO..

which is fine, WAPO has shown its swamp colors going back years...

I choose to hold their material as "tongue in cheek" fluff for the sheep...

YMMV

a reply to: AttitudeProblem

I didn't see any vid's or pic's ...Usually James has pretty good actors while that girl was quite shaky . Don't know it just seems off to me .

What probably tipped the WAPO off was that her name wasn't on the list of checkbook witnesses they had already compiled.