Not All Stings Work: On the War James O'Keefe Is Winning

© Jack Cashill
November 30, 2017 - AmericanThinker.com

In his compelling new book, Blue on Blue, Charles Campisi, chief of NYPD's Internal Affairs Bureau, tells how he was able to dramatically reform the bureau and to improve the quality of NYPD policing. 

Campisi instituted what he called "integrity tests." These were more commonly known in the NYPD as "stings." In his newly proactive NYPD, Campisi ran as many as 500 or 600 integrity tests a year in which cops had "the opportunity to do the right thing or the wrong thing." 

The key, writes Campisi, was "to make the situation seem real, so real . . . the cop in question doesn't know he's being tested."

For the past nine years, Project Veritas, the brainchild of 33-year-old James O’Keefe, has been running integrity tests on a variety of institutions that the major media have chosen to leave untested. Among the untested, at least until recently, are the major media operations themselves.

Earlier this week, the Washington Post did a spectacularly self-congratulatory end zone dance for no greater accomplishment than having passed a test. Its reporters sniffed out a Project Veritas undercover who was testing the Post’s eagerness to find still one more alleged victim to kill Roy Moore’s candidacy in Alabama.

Where Project Veritas failed in this instance was, to paraphrase Campisi, to make the situation seem so real the subject did not know he was being tested. Project Veritas has failed before. It is inevitable in this line of work. What is remarkable, however, is how often these young guerilla journalists have succeeded.

In 2009, for instance, O’Keefe and a young friend ran integrity tests on ACORN offices in six separate cities. ACORN execs celebrated upon realizing that their Philadelphia office saw through the sting. This was before they realized that their officials in Washington, Baltimore, Brooklyn, and San Bernardino had no problem advising a pimp on how to find housing for his under-aged, Central American sex slaves.

The major media had turned a blind eye to the flagrant corruption of their ACORN allies for years. As a direct result of Project Veritas’s exposure, this billion-dollar enterprise collapsed within months. When it did, the media turned on O’Keefe. He had not only brought down a useful leftist institution, but he also embarrassed the reporters who should have done that job themselves. The media have been in full vengeance mode ever since.

In August 2016, Russ Feingold’s operatives detected a young female undercover working her away inside the senate campaign in Wisconsin. The Feingold people rushed to the media, and the media traced the woman to Project Veritas. “Democratic Senate Campaign Catches Conservative Infiltrator,” shouted Time magazine.

Undeterred, this same undercover started interning at Democracy Partners in Washington a month after the Wisconsin bust. Her work there helped expose the illegal DNC dirty tricks operations, get two top Democratic operatives fired, and reverse the momentum of the presidential campaign. Some stings work. Some don’t.

In the run up to the inauguration, this same young undercover got busted again. The work of her colleagues on the same investigation, however, went undetected. “A D.C. police spokesman has confirmed,” reported the Washington Post grudgingly in January 2017, “that a secret video recording made Dec. 18 by one of O’Keefe’s operatives led to the arrest of one man and foiled an alleged plot to spread acid at the DeploraBall for Trump supporters at the National Press Club.” Two other men were also arrested as a result of the Project Veritas videos.

In this past year O’Keefe turned his attention to the media. He focused on the major media—CNN, Washington Post, New York Times--to test whether they lived up to their own stated objectives, as the Times puts it, ''to give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect, or interests involved.'' 

The media have welcomed this integrity test about as much as a corrupt cop does a visit from Internal Affairs. At every level of these news organizations, employees recognize they are making a mockery of their mission. O’Keefe and crew have been gradually and quietly accumulating these admissions.

Desiree Shoe, a senior staff editor based in London, described for a Project Veritas undercover the charade that she and her colleagues are asked to pull off on a daily basis. Like almost all of her colleagues, she is open in her disdain for President Trump.

“Trump is just an oblivious idiot,” Shoe insisted. It was not just Trump that bothered her. She considers even Vice President Mike Pence “f***ing horrible.” Shoe believes her sentiments are the norm among journalists.  

A Times staffer in New York confirmed her suspicion. “Yeah, they all hate [Trump],” he told an undercover. When asked whether this pervasive hatred affects reporting at the Times, he conceded, “They unfairly report on him.”

Aware of the stated mission of the Times, Shoe acknowledged, “Our main stories are supposed to be objective,” but as she conceded, the Times is “widely understood to be liberal-leaning.”

Compounding the problem for the Times and the other media is that they have experienced a “Trump bump.” As John Bonifield of CNN told a Project Veritas journalist, “I think there are a lot of liberal viewers who want to see Trump really get scrutinized, but I think if we had behaved that way with President Obama, I think our viewers would have been turned off. Trump is good for business right now.”

To retain their liberal viewers, the major media have to create stories that will hold the audience’s attention. This explains why Adam Entous, the National Security Reporter for the Washington Post, has hammered out more than 50 stories on potential Trump collusion with Russia, a collusion that would not be criminal even if it were true.

What does Entous have to show for his work? “Our reporting has not taken us to a place where I would be able to say with any confidence that the result of it is going to be the president being guilty of being in cahoots with the Russians,” he told a Project Veritas undercover. “There’s no evidence of that that I’ve seen so far.”

A few months back, CNN’s Van Jones told a Project Veritas undercover, “The Russia thing is just a big nothing burger.” CNN producer John Bonified elaborated, “I think the president is probably right to say, like, ‘Look you are witch-hunting me. You have no smoking gun, you have no real proof.’”

Patiently and quietly, Project Veritas journalists have been stripping the mainstream media of even the illusion of objectivity. To be taken seriously, their newsrooms need that illusion as much as a dirty cop needs his badge.

There is only one organization willing and able to blow their cover. Although the dominant media will do everything in their power to stop them, the scrappy guerilla journalists of Project Veritas are not about to quit.