The Washington Post got lucky. After reporters there smelled something fishy about a tip from a source about former Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, they began looking skeptically into the woman’s background.
The woman claimed she was from Alabama and had been impregnated by Moore, who coerced her into having an abortion. None of that was true, but she did give her real name: Jaime Phillips. Some online sleuthing eventually connected the dots: She was a plant sent by James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas to attempt to embarrass the Post.
Previous O’Keefe infiltrators at different organizations had used fake names, and an O’Keefe operative is unlikely to make the mistake of being honest next time, which would make unraveling the scheme more difficult for the next targeted group.
So one of O’Keefe’s previous victims has a solution: an expansive dossier of 149 of O’Keefe’s known associates, meant to serve as a resource for activists, lawyers, and journalists.
“ProjectVeritas.Exposed” – a project of The Undercurrent, a political web show sponsored by American Family Voices — is made up of dozens of profiles of undercover operatives, funders, and other O’Keefe associates, with information compiled from social media and news articles, and in some cases, information from interviews conducted with targets. The Intercept was able to review the dossier ahead of its publication.
The dossier was largely assembled by Undercurrent Executive Producer Lauren Windsor, who has long battled O’Keefe online. Windsor is a partner at the firm Democracy Partners, which was infiltrated by O’Keefe last year and is currently suing him, Project Veritas, and operatives Allison Maass and Dan Sandini.
Maass posed as a progressive activist, using a cover story and falsified documents to obtain an internship with Democracy Partners. The website, displaying the profiles as a photo array, scrolls back to associates from O’Keefe’s days as a student at Rutgers University, where he started a conservative magazine called The Centurion.
The site devotes a section to Project Veritas funding as well, as the group has been sanctioned or denied a license to seek donations in Utah, Mississippi, Wisconsin, and Maine, and is at risk of losing its ability to fundraise in New York, according to the Washington Post. There’s also a Florida fundraising ban that applies specifically to O’Keefe and not the organization. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Project Veritas isn’t required to disclose donors.
O’Keefe’s many public misfires have cost his organization credibility in the mainstream press and political circles, but Windsor argues that as long as he has a link to the Trump administration, he should be considered dangerous.
“James O’Keefe has shown himself to be an agent of Donald Trump,” said Windsor. “Trump’s foundation donated $20,000 to O’Keefe in 2015, and O’Keefe proceeded to target Trump’s Democratic rivals for the presidency, embedding operatives within both the Sanders and Clinton campaigns. O’Keefe’s schemes conveniently provided ammunition for Trump talking points on voter fraud, violence at Trump rallies, and the ‘fake news’ media. This is political espionage and it’s a major threat to election integrity.”
Embedding in political campaigns is becoming a staple of O’Keefe’s election-year ratfucking. In 2016, beyond Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, O’Keefe tried to embed operatives as interns or volunteers within the Senate campaigns of Democrats Russ Feingold, Deborah Ross, and Ted Strickland. O’Keefe didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.