Risk Management Never Been So Simplified

Operatives of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, Lagos Zonal Office, have arrested a serving military personnel, Lance Corporal Ajayi Kayode, and 26 others […]
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The National Rifle Association once ranked among the most powerful political organizations in America. Now it could face dissolution under a lawsuit filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James. In the 169-page complaint James released on Thursday, she describes years of financial and ethical misconduct by the group’s leaders, including Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre. “The NRA is fraught with fraud and abuse, which is why, today, we seek to dissolve the NRA, because no organization is above the law,” James said in a statement.The move ignites an existential legal battle for the ailing gun-rights organization that will likely take years to resolve. James’s lawsuit arrives after many years of sustained internal strife within the NRA’s ranks, which pitted LaPierre and his allies against whistleblowers and dissident members who raised concerns about patterns of improper spending. The scandal has sapped the organization’s once-vaunted political strength and drained its coffers; LaPierre reportedly claimed in January that the NRA’s legal struggles had, by that time, cost the organization at least $100 million.Gun-control groups celebrated Thursday’s announcement and the plight of their leading adversary. “Everytown has been warning regulators and the public about this corruption for years,” John Feinblatt, the president of Everytown for Gun Safety, said in a statement. “The NRA has endangered millions of lives and done unspeakable damage to our political system, and we agree with Attorney General James that dissolution and all other remedies must be on the table.” After a wave of mass shootings in 2017 and 2018, gun-control organizations began to eclipse the NRA and other gun-rights groups in political muscle and electoral success.The lawsuit is also a victory for New York’s elected officials, who have worked tirelessly to hamstring the gun-rights group. But there’s a troubling side to the tactics they’ve deployed, tempering any satisfaction that can be drawn from Thursday’s move. As I’ve noted before, there’s a certain Trumpian flair to New York’s efforts to hound a political organization with which they disagree into submission. The alleged corruption of many of the NRA’s top leaders has long demanded some form of legal scrutiny. This fact ultimately justifies James’s investigation. At the same time, New York’s proposed sanction may be disproportionate to the offense.Though Americans have become familiar with a certain amount of legal creativity in the Trump era, James’s power to target the NRA is fairly clear. The NRA is currently headquartered in the Northern Virginia suburbs outside Washington, D.C., but it maintains a significant legal presence within the state of New York, where it was originally chartered in 1871. James’s lawsuit notes that the NRA is legally domiciled in New York and subject to the state laws on charities and nonprofit organizations. Shortly after James’s announcement, D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine filed a lawsuit against the NRA Foundation, a theoretically independent nonprofit which funneled millions of dollars in donations to help keep the NRA solvent.There is also a notable recent precedent for James’s actions. In June 2018, her predecessor, Barbara Underwood, filed a lawsuit to seek the dissolution of the Donald J. Trump Foundation as part of an agreement struck with the president and three of his adult children. New York investigators found that the purported charity had effectively served as a piggy bank for the president’s personal and political interests. Trump initially responded by vowing not to dissolve the foundation; the following December, he agreed to its dissolution as part of a settlement with Underwood’s office.The NRA struck a similarly defiant note on Thursday after New York’s announcement. “This was a baseless, premeditated attack on our organization and the Second Amendment freedoms it fights to defend,” NRA President Carolyn Meadows said in a statement:You could have set your watch by it: the investigation was going to reach its crescendo as we move into the 2020 election cycle. It’s a transparent attempt to score political points and attack the leading voice in opposition to the leftist agenda. This has been a power grab by a political opportunist—a desperate move that is part of a rank political vendetta.NRA lawyers also quickly filed a lawsuit in federal court on Thursday, claiming that James had violated the organization’s First Amendment rights. The NRA accused her and the “New York Democratic Party machine” of mounting a politically motivated attack to undermine and destroy it. “James’s threatened, and actual, regulatory reprisals are a blatant and malicious retaliation campaign against the NRA and its constituents based on her disagreement with the content of their speech,” the NRA claimed in its complaint. “This wrongful conduct threatens to destabilize the NRA and chill the speech of the NRA, its members, and other constituents.”There’s a stronger case to be made, however, that the NRA’s leadership has destabilized the organization more effectively than any state official ever could. In the complaint, which draws heavily from her office’s investigation and from efforts by journalists, James describes a constant stream of unjustified cash and perks that flowed from the NRA’s coffers into the hands of favored members of its upper ranks. LaPierre, who has served as the taciturn and incendiary face of the organization for more than a decade, was the recipient and often the arbiter of this largesse. James’s complaint claims:LaPierre routinely abused his authority as Executive Vice President of the NRA to cause the NRA to improperly incur and reimburse LaPierre for expenses that were entirely for LaPierre’s personal benefit and violated NRA policy, including private jet travel for purely personal reasons; trips to the Bahamas to vacation on a yacht owned by the principal of numerous NRA vendors; use of a travel consultant for costly black car services; gifts for favored friends and vendors; lucrative consulting contracts for ex-employees and board members; and excessive security costs.Over the years, LaPierre approved hundreds of thousands of dollars in NRA-funded private flights for himself, his wife, and other family members. He sought reimbursements from the NRA for tens of thousands of dollars in Christmas gifts for friends and family from swanky East Coast department stores like Bergdorf Goodman and Neiman Marcus. He spent more than $100,000 on golf club memberships in the D.C. area for “personal and business reasons.” LaPierre often cited nebulous “security concerns” to justify some of the expenses, which apparently included an armored vehicle after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, in 2018.Others in LaPierre’s orbit also reaped the benefits of their organization’s funds. Wilson Phillips, a former NRA treasurer, drew up a contract to pay himself $30,000 a month for consulting services for the NRA after his retirement. The NRA’s current treasurer told James’s office that Phillips ultimately “never consulted for me.” An unnamed senior assistant of LaPierre routinely used the company card for inappropriate purchases, including roughly $18,000 as part of her son’s Minnesota wedding and high-end car services for herself and her family. “In August 2018, over the course of a two-week fundraising excursion in France, [she] authorized approximately $100,000 in black car expenses for two chauffeured vehicles,” the complaint claims.Some NRA officials who caught wind of the spending sprees and other scandals soon found themselves on the outside of the organization. Foremost among them is Oliver North, who briefly served as the NRA’s president in 2018 and 2019. When North started scrutinizing some of the group’s financial practices, LaPierre allegedly demanded that he stay away, sent cease-and-desist letters, and tried to use a consulting contract that LaPierre originally helped him craft against him. North eventually warned the NRA’s executive committee of a “crisis that could affect its ability to operate as a nonprofit organization,” claiming he had a “fiduciary duty” to respond. He resigned as president shortly thereafter.As a candidate for attorney general in 2018, James variously described the NRA as a “terrorist organization,” which it is not, and a “criminal enterprise.” (She suggested on Thursday that she may make a criminal referral over her findings to Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr.) Many Democratic elected officials are now hostile to the NRA but few of them are in a position to substantially harm the organization. Her remarks followed a similar campaign by Governor Andrew Cuomo, who allegedly quietly pressured insurance companies and other financial institutions in New York not to do business with the NRA as state regulators also took action.In 2018, the NRA sued Cuomo in federal court over his alleged efforts to effectively blacklist it from New York’s financial infrastructure, citing First Amendment violations. The American Civil Liberties Union, which rarely finds itself on the same side as the NRA, urged the court not to dismiss the lawsuit at the initial stage: Although public officials are free to express their opinions and may condemn viewpoints or groups they view as inimical to public welfare, they cannot abuse their regulatory authority to retaliate against disfavored advocacy organizations and to impose burdens on those organizations’ ability to conduct lawful business.When I wrote about the NRA’s battle with Cuomo two years ago, I expressed concern about the governor’s aggressive approach to the organization. Many who despise the NRA and its politics would likely find it abhorrent if the governors of Texas or Florida tried similar tactics against the ACLU or voting-rights organizations. James’s remarks don’t rise to the same level as Cuomo’s apparent bullying, of course. One can hardly complain of a “fishing expedition,” as the NRA did in its counter-lawsuit on Thursday, when the water is crystal clear and the fish are biting.Should the NRA be disbanded? I wouldn’t miss it or its shameless indifference to deaths from mass shootings or its record of stoking baseless fears about race wars or its curdled try-hard machismo. A gun-rights organization that hesitates to defend Philando Castile is also no gun-rights organization at all. But I can’t bring myself to embrace the notion that a state attorney general—any state attorney general—should be able to disband one of the nation’s most popular political organizations because its leaders misused its members’ donations. If this is the opening bid in an eventual settlement that purges the NRA’s corrupt upper ranks and leaves its ultimate fate to others, however, I would welcome it.
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AGF Malami

Nigeria’s Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Mallami (SAN), has ordered security agencies to cover up an ongoing multi-billion naira fraud in Nigeria Incentive-based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending, SaharaReporters has discovered.
SaharaReporters has done series of exclusive stories on how MD of NIRSAL, Aliyu Abduhalmeed, has been siphoning the agency’s money. 
In the last story, SaharaReporters published documents of bank accounts and bail bonds showing how the MD’s son, Imran Aliyu, was jailed for money laundering in the United Arab Emirates after his father fraudulently awarded a N2bn ICT contract to him.

AGF Malami

However, it has now been discovered that the AGF is frustrating the probe of the fraud and has ordered security agencies to stop the investigation. 
The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offences Commission, the State Security Service and Nigeria Intelligence Financial Unit are all to stop investigating the fraud within NIRSAL, the AGF instructed.

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Corruption

EXPOSED: How Managing Director Of NIRSAL, Aliyu Abdulhameed, Dismissed Olalekan Olusanya, Head Of Internal Audit To Cover Up Multi-billion Naira Fraud

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In a letter to the Inspector-General of Police, Reference Number: DPPA/NIRSAL/110/20, dated February 4, 2020 and exclusively obtained by SaharaReporters, the AGF, who wrote through the Director of Public Prosecutions, Mohammed U.E, said it was an “unhealthy competition” and “sheer waste of government resources” for agencies of government to probe financial scandal. 
The letter reads, “I am directed to inform you that we are in receipt of a petition from the Nigeria Incentive-Based Risk Sharing System For Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL) Referenced NIR/MD/GEN/TAPD/24/20/03 and dated 29th January, 2020 in respect of the above subject-matter. A copy of the petition is hereby attached. 

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BREAKING: Managing Director Of NIRSAL, Aliyu Abdulhameed, Orders DSS To Arrest Agency’s Ex-Head Of Internal Audit

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“After a careful study of the petition, we found that NIRSAL is being investigated by several agencies to wit: the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC), the State Security Service (SSS) and Nigeria Intelligence Financial Unit (NIFU) in respect of the same subject-matter which is not only an unhealthy competition among the agencies of the same Federal Government of Nigeria but a sheer waste of government resources. 
“All other agencies investigating the matter are to stay further action to allow your office total control of the investigation.”

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Corruption

EXPOSED: How Managing Director Of NIRSAL, Aliyu Abdulhameed, Diverted Almost N1bn To Bank Account Of Agency’s Head Of Finance

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DOCUMENT: Nigeria’s Attorney General, Malami, Covers Up Fraud, Orders Security Agencies To Stop Investigati… by Sahara Reporters on Scribd

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Corruption

Top Controversial Cases Taken Over By Nigeria’s Attorney General, Malami, And How They Ended

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Corruption

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The Central Bank of Nigeria has frozen the bank accounts of 38 Nigerian companies.
This is as scarcity of dollars at the parallel market during the week forced the naira down to N465 against a United States dollar.

Nigeria is presently facing one of its biggest dollar crunch in recent years with the impact hurting critical sectors of the economy.
In a circular dated September 4, Bello Hassan, CBN’s Director of Banking Supervision, asked banks to place the accounts of the 38 companies on Post-No-Debit (PND) order 
“You are hereby required to place the under listed accounts on Post-No-Debit with immediate effect and revert with the account names, numbers, currencies and balances of all accounts placed on PND.
“Note that only the listed entities should be placed on PND, all related accounts are excluded. Your response should be forwarded to the underlisted email addresses Osoladipo@cbn.gov.ng or moabeng@cbn.gov.ng,” part of the circular read.
Among the companies listed by CBN is Premier Lotto owned by Adebutu Kessington, Nigerian billionaire known as Baba Ijebu.
The move by the apex bank comes months after the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission launched an investigation into the activities of Adebutu for alleged tax fraud and economic sabotage.
According to PREMIUM TIMES, Segun, one of Adebutu’s children and other management officials of Premier Lotto were in January detained at the EFCC office in Lagos.
According to officials of the commission, the investigation was as a result of a petition submitted by Western Lotto, another betting company run by late Buruji Kashamu.
PREMIUM TIMES quoted EFCC sources as saying that they had identified N5bn revenue that should have been remitted to the Nigerian Government but was allegedly kept aside by the company.
The probe might be expanded to include other betting companies and investigate claims of sharp practices and how some firms allegedly withhold funds from winning customers.

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Stop the presses: A Trump administration program is being badly run and failing to do what it promised. It may be shocking, but it’s true; collect yourself from the floor and steel yourself to read about this unforeseeable turn of events, courtesy of a New York Times article on the administration’s bungled program to pay for the hospital bills of uninsured coronavirus patients. According to the Times, the program has not prevented uninsured Americans from receiving massive bills for their care, either because they don’t qualify for the program or because of those ever-present mistakes in hospital billing. Beyond that, many patients simply don’t know that this program even exists. But for all the real and unnecessary failures of this scheme, it bears noting that no hastily developed program of this nature would have successfully guided needy patients over the cracks in our health care system. It was destined to fail—no matter who was president.All the same, let’s be clear about Trump’s hospital repayment plan, which was awkwardly rolled out in early April: The program is terrible, cruelly managed, and poorly thought-out, on top of all the underlying problems of our health care system. As the Times noted, patients had to have Covid-19 as their “primary diagnosis” to qualify, leaving out many patients with the kinds of comorbidities that made them more likely to be hospitalized in the first place; the program also doesn’t cover the cost of treating those preexisting conditions. The American Hospital Association told the paper it estimates that up to 70 percent of uninsured patients don’t qualify because of this wrinkle. This could have been done differently, and wasn’t. But many of the biggest problems with this program were simply the inevitable consequences of our health care system, working as intended. Scratch a little at every aspect of how Trump’s program works, and it reveals yet another inefficient, cruel, or just plain stupid facet of how America provides care to its citizens. The basic fact that it was even necessary to create a program to cover uninsured people in the first place is the biggest possible indictment of our system. The fact that hospitals, in addition to patients, have to eat the cost of treating their uninsured patients was a routine problem with our system long before the need for a Covid-19 stopgap became necessary; that many hospitals have chosen to bill their patients for amounts they’ll never be able to pay is even worse. Other health care providers have even entirely shunned participation in the program, instead charging the uninsured full price for coronavirus testing. According to the Times, most of the $115 billion spent so far by the Provider Relief Fund has instead been used to replace lost revenue from the decline in patients seeking care during the pandemic, not to pay for the cost of Covid-19 treatment. Again, it does not need to be this way: In other countries, hospitals do not go out of business because not enough patients get sick. Hospitals should not need to try to attract patients the way a Denny’s attracts diners with its “Signature Slams.”The true horror of this failed Covid-19 coverage program is that all of its failures and gaps just leave the American health care system working in its normal, inept state. The frightening stories relayed by patients to the Times of their experience with this coronavirus program are exactly the kind of conversations that have happened every day for uninsured patients with other conditions for decades. One patient, whose Covid-19 bill totaled $85,000, told the paper that the hospital’s financial aid office “wanted me to go back to work, like, tomorrow, so I can start paying them.” In this case, seemingly thanks to the Times’ intervention, the hospital acknowledged the bill was sent “in error” and will be covered by the program. But what if the patient in question was one of many whose primary diagnosis wasn’t Covid-19, or who simply had an entirely different illness? If the patient had been hospitalized for a stroke instead, the government wouldn’t be there to save him, and he would be alone with his bill and a voice on the other end of the phone telling him to suck it up and get back to work. Hospitals make mistakes in billing every day, and it’s often the patients who end up paying for them. This is a natural consequence of a system with so many confusing layers and moving parts, and it was undoubtedly inevitable that this would affect uninsured Covid-19 patients, however this program was managed. There are thousands of different insurance plans, with different benefit levels, and each will pay the hospital different amounts. Large hospitals might have literally hundreds of millions of different price points for all the insurance plans they accept. For patients to receive the correct bill that only reflects the money they actually owe requires many people to do their jobs right. And even a “correct” bill might include charges that are essentially fraudulent, yet entirely legal. If mistakes are made, the patient has to understand the bill and have the knowledge, resources, and time to challenge it. And imagine having to fight over a hospital bill while recuperating from Covid-19—or any similar lingering, debilitating illness, for that matter.As an example: At the beginning of 2018, I switched insurance plans from one with a deductible to one without (and with higher premiums; I have no idea whether that decision really saved me money). When I went to the neurologist for a routine appointment, I was told I had to pay several hundred dollars on the spot, because the hospital didn’t know my benefit levels had changed and it thought I owed money for the deductible. It took weeks and several calls to the hospital and my insurance company to get the money back. If I didn’t have a credit card to put that charge on or money in my bank account to cover it—if I was like millions of Americans, in other words—I would have had little choice but to leave, and not receive the care I needed. There are undoubtedly thousands of worse instances of this every day; this is just one example of how even financially comfortable people with fancy, employer-provided insurance can get unexpectedly buffeted by this patchwork system.Being poor in America requires constant negotiation with dumb, hostile bureaucracies. You are expected to have all your documents, to never miss a piece of mail at an address you might have left or a phone call to a disconnected number. You must have everything at your disposal to fight for the benefits that the government owes you. If they make a mistake, you pay, not them—in time spent rectifying it, in debts and interest incurred, in stress and anxiety. The more money you have, the less time and effort you have to devote to these nightmarish exercises, and the more options you have to fight them. This is routine, daily, expected in America: It was never going to be any other way for the nation’s uninsured. We were never going to do anything other than let them down, pandemic or no. The failures of this program are unsurprising, not just because it was the Trump administration running it, and not just because it was poorly designed in the first place: The system to which it was haphazardly appended was already so broken and so prone to cruelty that its absorption into the larger failures of our health care system was inevitable. American health care is working as intended when it sends uninsured patients bills for the crime of surviving Covid-19; not because anyone designed our system this way on purpose, but because each tiny part of this system has been engineered to deliver profit-raking, above all else. No one has shown the will to rectify this situation yet, and in all likelihood the one good thing about Trump’s program—the way it has clearly illuminated these larger problems—will never benefit anyone. We have chosen this situation, with all the cruelty and stupidity it entails.
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What would the U.S. media say if the president of another country was threatening to hobble his nation’s postal service in hopes of suppressing ballots ahead of an election?Every once in a while, an American journalist gets this notion: to imagine how the national press would cover a particular domestic story, whether it be white nationalist violence or protests against racist policing, as if it were happening in another country. It’s a venerable and sometimes illuminating frame—a way for Americans, given to believing in their own exceptionalism, to see themselves and their country’s troubles from a different vantage.But in the postal case, and increasingly in the age of Trump, the “if it happened there” test proves of little use. It is 2020, after all, and there is no global shortage of demagogues and authoritarians making a joke of democratic processes. They stuff ballot boxes, jail opposition leaders, harass journalists, and threaten voters. They exploit all the tools at their disposal to rig an election in their favor. They increasingly welcome elections, in fact, with recent scholarship showing “that elections can actually prolong dictatorships in the longer term,” as three European political scientists put it.What they don’t do is adopt the bizarre tactic President Trump has. Neither I nor any of the political scientists and journalistic colleagues I consulted could come up with an example of a national leader trying to preemptively invalidate the upcoming election that he’s forecast to possibly lose. Generally, it’s opposition parties—some of whom may, of course, be aspiring autocrats—that attack the legitimacy of an upcoming referendum, not the guy in power. Yet that is precisely what Trump is doing with his ceaseless warbling about nonexistent voter fraud and the need, amid an unprecedented killer viral pandemic, to kill mail-in voting. “If we don’t make a deal [to fund the U.S. Postal Service], that means they don’t get the money. That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting, they just can’t have it,” he told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo last week. This is as anti-democratic as it is fantastical, akin to Arrested Development patriarch and white-collar felon George Bluth erroneously insisting that he and his wife can’t be arrested for the same crime. Even Fox News had trouble spinning Trump’s statement as anything other than an explicit desire to wreck American institutions: “Trump seeks to starve post office to limit mail-in voting,” one headline read. Before giving up the goods live and on air, he’d warned extensively all summer that November’s election—held in the country where his party controlled the federal government, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and nearly 60 percent of statehouses—would “be the greatest rigged election in history, it’ll be the greatest fraud ever perpetrated, other perhaps than what they did to my campaign [in 2016].”It is neither incorrect nor unduly crude to say here that Trump is both stupid and full of shit. There is no method or strategy here other than Trump’s radical centering of his world around himself. He pulled the preemptive “rigged election” card in 2016, too, when defeating his presidential campaign looked as easy as a chip-shot field goal. He hasn’t changed at all since then. He’s simply gone from being a terrible candidate to a terrible president, and in the process he’s decided to turn his longshot reelection into a referendum between him and America’s Constitution-based electoral system, again. The “if it happened here” test has become banal; it is always happening here now.A better question might be: Is Trump the dumbest autocrat in the world? Perhaps, but like his dullard son-in-law who’s trying to split the vote by putting a troubled rapper on the ballot, the president is playing a song in recognizable Republican chords.“Democracy requires that parties know how to lose,” the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, authors of 2019’s How Democracies Die, wrote last September in The New York Times. In the United States, this fairly describes the Democrats, the Libertarians, the Greens, and even the rightist Constitution Party. But among nations that are still largely described as liberal democracies, no political party is as hellbent on winning cynically and in perpetuity, liberal democracy be damned, as the Republican Party. There are no shortage of examples of this, from gerrymandering to financial graft to census rigging to voter suppression. “The greatest threat to our democracy today,” Zevitsky and Ziblatt wrote last September, “is a Republican Party that plays dirty to win.” But even with the power and lawbreaking gusto of the Trump family behind it, the GOP finds it exceedingly difficult to game this system entirely, in part because their recent rule has been so dishonest, so onerous, and so frankly homicidal that it’s historically unpopular—and this is maximally visible with the voting public. “To deter an autocratic ruling party from committing electoral fraud, the opposition must be endowed with a high enough number of ‘radical voters’” who “should possess an unwavering commitment to defeat the autocrat above the disagreements they might have on other issues,” Stanford political scientist Beatriz Magaloni wrote in a 2007 paper. Give Donald Trump credit: Few things might have alerted and concerned the American electorate the way he has by topping off three-and-a-half years of rump autocracy with a vocal desire to strangle the U.S. Postal Service in order to prevent the counting of mail-in ballots.As Levitsky and Ziblatt wrote, “Politicians who fail to win elections must be willing to accept defeat, go home, and get ready to play again the next day. This norm of gracious losing is essential to a healthy democracy.” Trump may be a simpering moron, but like the Republican Party, he has a genius for sore losing. The difference is that Republicans have rarely run around calling an election rigged before it took place while they tried to rig it. There was the orchestrated 2000 Brooks Brothers riot to influence Florida’s presidential vote tally, a ruthless but fruitful strategy whose vague memory animates both parties’ now familiar preparations to litigate election results. But that plot, again, was built around the traditional work of trying to rig a favorable election result, not trying to invalidate the act of voting in advance of an election.Trump—the perpetual loser who needs to feel like a winner—wants elections only to the extent that they beatify him. Last month, when he mused about postponing Election Day, something he can’t actually do, one Democratic strategist responded that Trump was trying “to jerry-rig the system to somehow spit him out as the winner.” But Trump increasingly speaks as if he sees losing as likely. Speaking to Sean Hannity in late June, the president conceded that Joe Biden was kicking his ass simply by hanging around. “He’s gonna be your president because some people don’t love me, maybe,” Trump said, almost wistfully. He’s not unrealistic, just narcissistic. The existing U.S. electoral system looks bleak for him, so he’s forcing Americans into a choice between him or the system. If he can’t win a fair election, he’ll just make a fair outcome impossible and stride into the camera frame, insisting that he alone can fix it.Trump is not merely attacking faith in American democracy; he’s attacking the very idea that democracy is an achievable and desirable mode of governance. The world’s dictatorial dirtbags, from Vladimir Putin to Kim Jong Un to Rodrigo Duterte, were savvy to this from the start of Trump’s candidacy. Like all the slightly smarter, slightly skeevier businessmen and politicos who have cleaved to Trump’s underbelly like remoras on a great white, the global autocratic class recognizes that this ill-informed, insecure simpleton is their greatest hope, the hot gale that blows open political doors for the jackboots to march through. Despite the stiff competition this year, Trump remains the world’s most incompetent authoritarian—as well as its most dangerous.
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“So, I just heard that,” the President of the United States said at a White House press conference last Thursday. The conference, like the rest of Trump’s regular press briefings, was ostensibly about the federal government’s slow and lazy response to a pandemic that is still spreading uncontrolled throughout the United States. But because that response can no longer really be said to exist as such, and because he’s never much cared, and mostly because there is a presidential election coming up, President Trump was talking about something he found more interesting instead. In this case, it was a toweringly specious column that ran on Newsweek under the headline “Some Questions for Kamala Harris About Eligibility.” The story sought to undermine the natural-born citizenship of Joe Biden’s new running mate by Raising Some Questions while carefully stopping short of answering them.As is the case with this greasy genre, this was all barely argued on the merits. Harris was born in Oakland, and based on the Fourteenth Amendment, that means there’s nothing up for debate.* But the idea was never to provide an argument on the merits or properly furnish definitive answers but, rather, to ask them in a coyly, sneering manner. Trump seemed to find all of this interesting in a very specific way. “I heard it today that she doesn’t meet the requirements,” the President said. “And, by the way, the lawyer that wrote that piece”—John Eastman, the founder of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence—“is a very highly qualified, very talented lawyer.” Trump hastened to add that where Eastman’s charges were concerned, “I have no idea if that’s right.” It quickly became clear that Trump hadn’t so much read the story as Noticed It, first asserting that the story claimed Harris hadn’t been born in the United States, which it didn’t, and then being informed by another reporter that the story actually raised (constitutionally irrelevant) questions about her parents’ legal status. “Yeah,” Trump replied, “I don’t know about it. I just heard about it. I’ll take a look.”With the exception of Trump’s “I’ll take a look” tic, which in its various syntactic guises always means “I’m going to go watch some more TV now,” all of the above is intentionally hard to know—and this is due far more to deceptive aspirational branding than to overt falsehood. Eastman’s claim is easily dismissed, but it’s unhelpfully surrounded by signifiers that have slipped wildly out of joint. The Claremont Institute has suitably fancified intellectual production values and a serious reputation‚ which helps make it seem as though its chief jurisprudential expert would indeed be a very qualified and very talented lawyer. But while Claremont “masquerades as an intellectual salon of the right,” Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern writes, “it is really just a racist fever swamp with deep connections to the conspiratorial alt-right” that has lately focused on stamping its imprimatur on whatever incoherent Trumpist revanchism needs a co-sign. And while Newsweek is a name brand that would undoubtedly impress a brain that, like Trump’s, entered energy-saver mode in 1987, it was purchased in 2013 by a shadowy group aligned with a Christian sect called The Community and shed its most qualified staffers in 2018. When company executives and a former chief executive officer pled guilty to federal money-laundering charges in February, the Southern District of New York described its ownership as “a massive fraud scheme through which a group of sophisticated criminals illegally moved tens of millions through our Manhattan marketplace by brazenly overstating the financial health of their companies.” (Newsweek’s opinion editor Joshua Hammer is a former Claremont Institute fellow.)How the blaringly worthless claim in Eastman’s column came to be discussed at all matters, too, if not quite as much as how it was discussed. The two are related: A reporter at the press conference framed the question of Harris’s citizenship status as centering around “claims circulating on social media.” For a number of immediately obvious reasons, this does not suggest careful empirical review of the historical record—or remotely sufficient merit for such a baldly racist fabrication to be raised in this setting. No matter, though; the query was lofted in the familiar chiding way that the White House press corps uses in its periodic attempts to get Trump on the record disavowing whatever titillating or toxic falsehood he’s taken to claiming. The I Just Heard/They Say formulation is a Trump tic designed to give the impression that he is both a Master Of The News and someone who is constantly being talked about by others. (He goes to it whenever the subject of conversation seems to be slipping too far from him; “He was my friend,” Trump told Fox & Friends on Monday morning in reference to his brother Robert, who died last weekend. “And I guess they say ‘best friend.’ And that’s true.”) But the presentation—the non-question and bloviating anti-answer—created a queasily familiar binary. On one hand, some reporters are trying to shame Trump into acknowledging some denied fact or repudiating some blithely proffered bit of flotsam that he’d plucked from the sludge canals of conservative media. On the other, a president is standing defiant in his murky and misinformed ignorance, insisting both upon what he heard and that no one knows for sure. When Trump gave a similarly vague response to a similarly couched question about the metastatizing online political cult QAnon, which holds that Trump is locked in a secret war with a cabal of elite satan-worshipping pedophiles, it was both similarly empty—Trump rephrased a reporter’s allusion to its spiking popularity by rephrasing it as something he also definitely knew about himself, then added “I don’t know much about the movement other than I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate”—and similarly loaded. It’s not just that this cycle of offhand umbrage and gilded bluster never goes anywhere; it’s that there’s fundamentally no real place for anything this useless to go. If a question arrives in a way that suggests he should do otherwise, Trump will absolutely give succor to the cultists, who have already committed murders and kidnappings in the name of their janky shared delusion, or humor some cheesy racist canard. It’s all just something interesting he’s passing on–about him, in case you hadn’t heard. He is an expert in it, actually. It’s not just that the truth doesn’t matter to Trump, although of course it very much does not. All presidents lie, and if few have done it quite as relentlessly or thirstily or with as much unaccountable personal dampness as Trump, he certainly didn’t invent the right to howling, self-serving falsehoods as the ultimate executive privilege. What’s still jarring even this far into his presidency, though, is how unbelievably cheap and checked-out his communication remains. In his role as president of the United States, Trump reliably holds forth with the same po-faced casualness of a lonesome boomer hoisting some confounding eagle-strewn Facebook meme onto his page to an audience of sighing nieces and cringing grandkids. Trump has always been an inveterate gossip and clout-chaser. This is just as true now when he’s president as it was when he was live-tweeting Access Hollywood episodes about Robert Pattinson’s romantic travails; forever and always, Trump just wants to be a part of the conversation. It’s only when we ponder the totality of it, the fullness of the dishonesty and strange faith and general unfalsifiable rudderlessness of this as a way of being in the world, that we begin to see the direst features of all this noisemaking. Trump was a casualty of conservative media long before he became its hero and main character; as a bigoted dunce who is both deeply cynical and bottomlessly credulous, he’s branded his ascent to power as the apex of, and grim reckoning for, conservative media’s rancid generation-spanning grift. Now, as he shitposts through his fourth year in office, Trump has achieved another apotheosis—the president whom conservative media made is governing with all the poise, foresight, and judgment of an extravagantly online relative muted long ago for crimes against the timeline. Neither abject ignorance nor personal judgment can prevent Trump from weighing in; his inability to sit any topic out is total and helpless. “Thought this was interesting,” Trump idly tells the country he governs a dozen or so times per day before forwarding along a preposterous chain email or sharing a link to some gaudily fraudulent tidbit. It is worrying enough that the president communicates with the urgency and discretion of an elderly relative who signs their text messages. It is more worrying that he is not alone.“Some people claimed a missile hit the Pentagon,” Marjorie Taylor Greene posted last week. “I now know that is not correct. The problem is our government lies to us so much to protect the Deep State, it’s hard sometimes to know what is real and what is not.” Taylor Greene was, as it happened, one of those people who claimed that thing; the debunked conspiracy that the Pentagon was struck by a missile on September 11, 2001, is one of the (very) many conspiracies that she espoused for fun and profit over many years on every available platform before she perhaps inevitably cinched the Republican nomination in Georgia’s ultra-red 14th District this month. Greene is a familiar and unbearable type of online busybody—a busted firehose that blasts piping-hot reactionary bullshit 20 hours a day. But in the way that she communicates—“some people claimed”—she is clearly both akin to, and a product of, her president. (Laura Loomer, the oafish alt-right remora who won a Republican primary in Florida’s heavily Democratic 21st this week, is an even more ridiculous case; banned from various social media platforms for her ultra-grating reactionary provocateur shtick, she seems to be running in large part to get her Twitter account back.) This same manic passivity is equally easy to find down the discourse. Francine Fosdick, an online evangelical and figure in the QAnon community, recently described her experience at a big box retail store. “They were actually taking temperatures,” she said, swiping her finger across her forehead. “Now I just heard that that is just another form of mind control in regards to what are they hitting? Right here, okay, your mind, the pineal gland, or whatever.” No one tapping out or taping their delusionary accounts of the way things really are behind the Deep State curtain is working too hard; no one feels compelled to. The collapse of shared reality across the online sector over the last decade unfolds every day in just this kind of fudgy, vagued-out language. It occurs through the steady accretion of the terrible, disturbing, utterly unfalsifiable things that some people claim or that you just heard all those things that may or may not be so but that are Worth Hearing and So Interesting—all of which occlude and then obscure the real and demonstrable violence that power visits on us every day. “I thought her voice was an important voice,” Trump said last month when criticized for boosting the spurious medical claims of an erratic Houston doctor and self-trained demonologist, “but I know nothing about her.” It’s a remarkable thing to say, and yet somehow it isn’t.Then as now, Trump didn’t know anything about any of it—he never does, he never will, he doesn’t care—but he wanted to make sure that everyone else heard about it all the same. When other lonely, wrongheaded or web-damaged people extend the same dubious service to those in their lives, they sometimes attach perfunctory well wishes. The president doesn’t bother with that. As far as he knows, he’s just doing his job.* This post originally misstated where Kamala Harris was born.
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James O’Keefe had big plans
for 2020. The founder of Project Veritas, the conspiratorial right-wing group
that specializes in Fox News–friendly “stings” intended
to expose supposed liberal bias and corruption in American society, was
planning on getting married this past May. The wedding, to a public school
teacher, was to be at an exclusive country club in upstate New York. The guest
list was packed with Make America Great Again world cognoscenti: Donald Trump Jr., Sean Hannity,
Michelle Malkin, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and his activist wife
Ginni were all invited, as were several of O’Keefe’s most generous conservative donors, including
Texas shale oil billionaire George Bishop and Bullpen Capital founder Paul
Martino.The wedding was, per an email blast, “postponed indefinitely”
over the coronavirus, as the pandemic swept across the state this spring and
early summer. Although O’Keefe himself
declined to comment on this and many other details for this story, a
well-placed frenemy is “90 percent sure they broke up.” In
any event, while the pandemic may have derailed his personal life, it has only
heightened the urgency of some of O’Keefe’s most lucratively funded dirty tricks. For well over a year, Project Veritas has been secretly producing
undercover stings designed to undermine the integrity of absentee and mail-in
ballot counts—an endeavor codenamed “Diamond Dog,” according to documents we have obtained.
Diamond Dog began as only one facet of Project Veritas’s 2020 rat-fucking strategy, but with the onset
of the pandemic, which has made in-person voting a dicey proposition, it has
since become one of the group’s top-line action
items.The shift reflects the Republican Party’s near-existential concerns about mail-in voting
in November. Donald Trump has disingenuously railed against the practice
numerous times over the past few months, betraying a deep anxiety. “Mail in ballots substantially increases the risk of crime and
VOTER FRAUD!” he has tweeted. At other times he has
claimed: “It will be the greatest Rigged Election in history”;
“IT WILL ALSO LEAD
TO THE END OF OUR GREAT REPUBLICAN PARTY”;
and “SCAM!” Last week, he went so far as to suggest that the
election should be delayed,
saying that because of “Universal Mail-in Voting,” the
vote would be “INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT.”The purpose of Diamond Dog, as one source close to the
organization put it, is “literally to get Trump reelected.” This
source, like other past and present Project Veritas employees who have talked
to us for this article, expressed fear of reprisals from the group and would
only speak under the condition of anonymity.The purpose of Diamond Dog, as one source close to the
organization put it, is “literally to get Trump reelected.”Last year, Project Veritas’s
donor development team solicited big-ticket funders with a pitch deck—frequently tailored to
a given patron’s pet ideological
grievances and personal hang-ups—offering tantalizing details about the
group’s undercover operations for the 2020
campaign cycle. One iteration of this Apple Keynote file was prepared for an
ask meeting with a person who appears to be Cognex Corporation founder Robert Shillman, a devoted funder of Islamophobic causes who was also
one of O’Keefe’s
would-be wedding guests. (Shillman ended up pledging to donate $50,000 to the
group.) The slate of investigations in the “Dr.
Bob” pitch included
schemes to procure evidence of “illegal aliens
voting,” mail-in
ballot tampering at “nursing
homes,” and
“the sale of absentee
ballots and voter profiles on the ‘Dark Web.’”By the end of summer 2019, Diamond Dog had already grown to be a
cross-country effort, based on internal Project Veritas memos, research notes,
and other documents that we have obtained. In
California and Texas, Project Veritas has tasked its operatives with
unearthing supposed evidence of widespread mail-in ballot forgery. In both
states, Project Veritas has worked to infiltrate the groups of volunteers and
paid canvassers who collect absentee and mail-in
voter applications from low-income, elderly, and minority groups—a perfectly legal
practice in most states that conservatives have tried to label as nefarious “ballot harvesting.”In Texas, Project Veritas has also
coordinated in secret with a local Republican operative named Aaron
Harris, codenamed “Dragon,” currently chief of staff
to Republican congressman Lance Gooden. In turn, through the activist group he
founded, Direct Action Texas, Harris has helped Project Veritas covertly
strategize with a staffer working for the office of the state’s Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton. Paxton
is leading the state’s “election integrity initiative,” one
of many Republican efforts nationwide to suppress the vote under the guise of
rooting out the nearly non-existent threat of voter fraud.Granted, Project Veritas, whose fervor to own the libs is matched
only by its comical incompetence, is hardly likely to tip the election in
Donald Trump’s favor all by
itself. But it is at the vanguard of a larger underhanded approach that
Republicans, starting at the very top, are taking to the 2020 cycle. If they
want to win, they really have no other choice but to undermine the vote: Trump’s poll numbers are in the basement, and he
appears constitutionally incapable of making appeals beyond his hardcore
supporters on the right. Republicans have all but admitted that this is their strategy. In
coordination with the Republican National Committee and a raft of independent
conservative groups, Trump has staked the success of his entire reelection
campaign to a widespread voter suppression effort built on the pretext of
preserving election integrity. The project, led by his campaign’s senior counsel Justin Clark, has worked to
place operatives in at least 10 battleground states to challenge voter rolls
and procedures. Between lawsuits and local advertising blitzes—all
regularly relayed to Trump in the Oval Office—the effort could cost “well
over $20 million,” as the RNC told The Washington Post. Project Veritas has been among the on-the-ground organizations at
the forefront of these efforts and has benefited substantially as a result.
According to internal Project Veritas documents, the group’s fundraising total for 2019 leaped up to more
than $13.44 million, $4.58 million more than their 2018 returns and the group’s largest reported annual revenue figure to
date. The group may be comically incompetent, but in these cursed times, we all
know how dangerous comical incompetence can be once enough money and clout
line up behind it.For an operation premised on conspiracy theories and fueled by
raging paranoia, it will come as no surprise that the agents helping to
spearhead Project Veritas’s election mischief are oddballs on the fringes of
American political life. In one slide prepared for
Dr. Bob, a 69-year-old Florida resident, a registered Republican named Joseph
Vancheri notifies O’Keefe of his soon-to-be
status as a poll worker in Broward County, likely for undercover Election Day
snooping on Project Veritas’s
behalf. Vancheri, an ex-cop and die-hard Trump supporter, has routinely taken to Facebook to lash out against “all the Trump haters” and “SHEEP,” including
“SHIFTY SCHIFF” and “the Idiot Warren,” using Trump’s
preferred epithet “Pocohontas [sic].” A
first-generation immigrant
himself, Vancheri has nevertheless long harbored hardline views on
immigration that echo his anxieties over the
potential for illicit enfranchisement of foreigners. In another
slide, Project Veritas boasts of receiving a tip from a former
broadcast meteorologist named Arch
Kennedy, who found it suspicious that 300 people were all registered to vote at
the address for Emory University’s
Emory Muslim Student Association in Atlanta. (In all likelihood these voters,
who constitute 2 percent of Emory’s
total student population and .0028 percent of Georgia’s population, have their mail forwarded there.) In 2017,
Arch organized one of the anti-Muslim group ACT! For America’s
28 nationwide “March Against Sharia” rallies. Held in Atlanta’s
Piedmont Park, it was a sparsely attended affair but still managed to include
Republican Georgia State Senator Michael Williams, then mounting a doomed
primary campaign for governor. A slide from a Project Veritas pitch deck identifies “Ballot Harvesting” as a top priority for the group.It’s unclear if either Vancheri or Kennedy’s offerings matured into full-fledged stings
banked for the 2020 election. Neither they nor Project Veritas responded for
comment, while the Project Veritas source who supplied the “Dr. Bob” pitch deck admitted that “a lot of it was kinda BS,” another example of the group “hyping themselves up to make themselves look better” and squeeze more money out of
donors. Project Veritas went back to the well
this weekend, soliciting donors in a mass email Saturday afternoon that
promised a major ballot harvesting investigation that needs to be “completed as soon as possible.” But other stings outlined in the Keynote
file did materialize. The presentation, for example, teased an inside man at
Pinterest who was “increasingly
worried” about the platform’s “expanding community safety
restrictions.” Sure enough,
two months later, an ex-Pinterest Android app developer named Eric Cochran came
forward with (later debunked)
allegations in a series of Project Veritas videos
and a Newsweek op-ed
claiming that the platform was censoring anti-abortion Christian advertisers.
The pitch deck also promised an exposé from a “CNN Insider” named
Cary Poarch, a bombshell that fizzled in October 2019 when Poarch’s hidden
recordings, taken while working as a freelance satellite truck operator for the news
network, failed to expose more than the personal opinions of a few random
employees. Well before the pandemic drew national attention to mail-in
voting, these documents show a discernible focus on “ballot harvesting” as
part of the larger Republican effort to paint voting by mail as a threat to
democracy. The concern stems from the party’s entrenched belief that, as Trump has tweeted,
vote-by-mail “doesn’t work out well for Republicans,”
since it often helps low-income people and minorities. These documents show a discernible focus on “ballot harvesting” as
part of the larger Republican effort to paint voting by mail as a threat to
democracy.By late August 2019, the “Story Objective” for Diamond
Dog had expanded, per one internal meeting document, to exposing “corruption
within CA ballot harvesting companies and other states (TX) based on intel
gains.” A Project Veritas undercover operative
codenamed “Magnum” had been busy “attending local
Democratic events in CA to find discussions of harvesting.” Another
operative codenamed “GDog” was creating
an entrapment scheme by posting “ads online looking for people to join his ballot harvesting.” Texas has been a major theater for Project Veritas’s Diamond Dog operations, in no small measure
because raw demographics have been threatening to turn the state blue for years.
The sense of crisis comes from the state GOP’s
failure to bring Latinos into their voting bloc. The legacy of such botched
strategizing has been an assault on the state’s Latino
electorate itself, with right-wing officials and political operatives raising
suspicions about their very legitimacy as legal participants in the voting
process.Aaron Harris, a son of white evangelical missionaries who picked
up Portuguese while growing up in Brazil and went on to become fluent in
Spanish, has been relentlessly stoking paranoia over mail-in ballots
since his first failed foray as a paid political consultant in 2014. Despite a sizable war chest from Dallas hotel magnate and
Tea Party financier Monty Bennett, Harris’s candidates in the 2015 local election for
the Tarrant Regional Water District lost. He quickly became fixated on the idea
that thousands of forged mail-in ballot applications had been responsible for
their defeat. Unlike some
Project Veritas associates, Harris has already managed to stir up some public
alarm about alleged balloting fraud in cooperation with elected officials from
the Republican Party. He has made repeated open records requests for “applications for ballot by mail” and copies of signed “ballot carrier envelopes” in
Tarrant County and elsewhere in Texas, eyeballing the signatures on
each for signs of fraud. (Emily J. Will, the board-certified forensic
document examiner who tried to warn 60 Minutes about the dubious provenance of President George W.
Bush’s
supposedly doctored Air National Guard records in 2004, told us that a
non-expert like Harris couldn’t be relied upon to discern a forged signature.) In 2016, Harris
sent the fruits of that labor to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, leading to
four conspicuously timed indictments two years later on
the eve of the 2018 midterm elections. Paxton described the four Hispanic
women, paid canvassers soliciting mail-in ballot applications door-to-door, as
an “organized voter fraud ring.” He named (but did not charge) a former local Democratic Party
leader, Stuart Clegg, as the ringleader in the court filings.  That case, which is still ongoing, reveals the ways in which the
official GOP subtly coordinates with its army of right-wing irregulars in the
field. Paxton stridently enforces one of the strictest voter I.D. laws in the nation,
while Harris and his political allies at Direct Action Texas and Empower Texans
work to independently legitimize the attorney general’s partisan vendettas. Harris and local Republican
lawyer Alex Kim, for example, inserted themselves into the prosecution’s case by independently visiting one of the charged canvassers in
prison, seemingly on their own initiative, in an effort to coerce the woman
into flipping on Clegg. (A month after helping Harris sneak into the Tarrant
County Jail to harass the canvasser, Kim won a local race to preside over the entire county as a judge for Texas’s 323rd District Court.) Paxton’s office has often pursued these voter
fraud cases through a prosecutorial diversion program, allowing them to juke their stats with “de minimis”
cases without ever having to prove their arguments in open
court or subject their methods to independent review. Their biggest confirmed
conviction to date: sending a 37-year-old Mexican citizen and mother of four,
Rosa Maria Ortega, to prison for eight years for the high crime of
being confused that her status as a legal resident in Texas did not actually
confer unto her the voting privileges of full United States citizenship. Ortega voted in
five elections between 2004 and her 2017 sentencing, casting ballots for
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2012—and, tragically, for Ken Paxton
himself in the 2014 Texas attorney general’s race.All signs point toward Paxton getting even more aggressive in
2020, thanks to a wrecked-up and paralyzed response to the pandemic by both
Trump and Texas Governor Greg Abbott. Republicans are nervous that even
blood-red Texas might be in play come November. Last April, Paxton threatened felony charges for anyone who requests
or advocates for mail-in ballots “based solely on fear of
contracting Covid-19”—a move that was upheld by the Texas Supreme Court in May, then by the Trump-stacked U.S. Supreme Court in June. It’s now sure to set the stage for many of the
alleged mail-in schemes that Project Veritas will purport to expose later this
year.One local Project
Veritas operative assigned to coordinate with Aaron Harris in Texas is also a
former undercover volunteer: Cassandra Spencer, codenamed “Foxtrot” and sometimes “Foxtrot
Smith” internally. In 2017,
Spencer became O’Keefe’s “Facebook Insider” after leaving a public information officer post with the
Pflugerville, Texas, police department to join Facebook’s contingent workforce operations at BCForward in Austin as a social media content moderator.Spencer has positioned herself at the extremely online
intersection of gaming culture and the alt-right. She has described
herself as a “Proud Boy’s Girl” on
Medium and attended “Austin’s premier anime convention” IKKiCON in Final Fantasy X cosplay. She traveled to
Washington, D.C., for the inaugural DeploraBall and operates her own Twitch stream, which she dubbed “a First
Amendment zone” for her conservative followers, “not like
many others.” For the 2020 Democratic primary in Iowa,
Spencer posed as a volunteer for presidential hopefuls Elizabeth Warren and
Bernie Sanders as part of a Project Veritas sting then-codenamed “Gold
Mine.” An internal Project Veritas document warns: “CANNOT MENTION ATTORNEY GENERAL.” Texas’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, has led the state’s crackdown on supposed voter fraud.Already staked
out on the Texas ballot-harvesting vanguard, Aaron Harris “met with Foxtrot” in person and “gave her a lead with someone to follow,” per internal Project Veritas research notes. As Diamond Dog progressed, Harris’s ties to Project Veritas deepened to include longtime employee and recruiting director Spencer Meads, codenamed “Brady,” and possibly an undercover journalist (UCJ) codenamed “Peter Pan.” Project Veritas’s expanding pool of
Texas sources was meant to be a state secret, but the document offered a huge
clue about who might be involved in an all-caps and highlighted portion
that read: “CANNOT MENTION
ATTORNEY GENERAL.” In the same
document, after listing a series of major metropolitan areas in Texas as
potential sites for their “ballot
harvesting” investigation, a
question is proposed: “Where
does the AG’s guy suggest they go?”When pressed for comment on his apparent role in facilitating
communications between the Texas attorney general’s office and Project Veritas, Harris responded
via his congressional email, “Do not contact me about my previous
employment on official channels. Learn to be competent at your job.” After
it was pointed out to Harris that the internal Project Veritas documents were
sourced in the early fall of 2019, approximately 10 months after he became Congressman
Gooden’s chief of staff, Harris became
belligerent. To questions reiterated via personal text message, he responded, “I’ve asked you to stop harassing me and you
want to argue about it? You are an idiot. You just keep proving it.”Spencer did not respond to requests for comment for this story.   Only two principal targets, old Harris foes, were mentioned by
name in the Project Veritas strategy document: Texas-based personal injury attorney
Domingo Garcia, a former state representative and the president
of the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC; and the Harvest
Project Food Rescue of Dallas, a community group that Harris seems
to believe is an insidious front through which the
state’s left-wing operatives entice immigrant
communities, with the lure of unsold fresh produce donated by local
distributors, into filling out their own mail-in ballots and thus
enfranchising themselves. (“I wake up usually at 4:30 in the morning,
I have to go pick up the food by six,” Harvest Project co-founder Danaë Gutiérrez-Martínez
said when asked about Harris’s allegations. “I
don’t get home ’til eight at night, nine at night, sometimes, to
get up the next day and do it again, especially right now with everything
that’s happening. You know, I must be Superwoman if I have time to do anything
else.”) A long-since-ousted co-founder of the Harvest Project, Jose
Barrientos was very publicly implicated in a mail-in ballot
forgery scheme in 2017. But Paxton and the local district attorney ultimately
indicted someone else entirely, 27-year-old Miguel Hernandez, for the felony
offense. After 180 days stewing in jail, Hernandez was allowed to plead guilty
to a misdemeanor with the understanding that his sentence would be limited to time served. Less well known than O’Keefe’s blunders on the national stage are the numerous documented instances in which his stings have been cited to justify new and more onerous voter I.D. laws.The beef between Harris’s
groups and LULAC has been considerably more fraught. In the fall of 2016,
Garcia publicly offered a $25,000 reward, funded through LULAC, for any
information leading to the conviction of individuals “trying to intimidate a
senior in Fort Worth or anywhere in Texas.” The target
of their bounty was pretty clear, teed-up as it was by a Texas state
representative, Ramón Romero, who had called out Harris
by name
for his door-to-door inquisition of seniors in Fort Worth’s predominantly Hispanic north side. Later at
that same press conference, a related community service nonprofit, the United
Hispanic Council of Tarrant County, announced that it had filed a complaint
with the U.S. Department of Justice against Harris’s Direct Action Texas for creating “an
atmosphere of fear and intimidation” in local Hispanic neighborhoods.In January 2019, LULAC filed a lawsuit against Attorney General Paxton and the secretary
of state in Texas, David Whitley, accusing them both of violating
the Voting Rights Act in their haphazard attempt to purge the state’s voter rolls of non-citizens.Whitley’s offices would quietly walk back their initial list of 95,000
suspicious voters, many of whom were discovered to be, in fact, naturalized
citizens. Shortly thereafter, San Antonio federal district court Judge Fred
Biery put a stop to the purge, declaring that state
Republicans were trying “to ferret the infinitesimal needles out of the haystack of 15
million Texas voters.” Harris, for his part, was unrepentant, telling the Texas Observer, “We are changing the
entire discussion on voter fraud in Texas.” He was not
wrong. While Harris is now planning to run for a House seat himself, his
tireless efforts there have laid the groundwork for Project Veritas and its GOP
partners this election season.When mainstream Americans think about James O’Keefe, if they think about James O’Keefe at all, it’s
usually in reference to his most hilarious failures: ruining his own
sting on George Soros’s Open Society Foundation by
leaving a self-incriminating voicemail; failing to lure a CNN reporter onto his yacht for a
detailed “faux seducing” prank;
revealing his unseemly ties to the billionaire mercenary Erik
Prince by posting his own vanity
spy training photos on social media. If Diamond Dog follows the
Project Veritas playbook, it will likely focus on goosing a few unguarded
comments out of canvassers and other volunteers in the hope of netting an
inflammatory sound bite or two.A modest, practically harmless October Surprise. But it’s typically down ballot where the average
Project Veritas video tends to have its most pernicious effects. Less well
known than O’Keefe’s
blunders on the national stage are the numerous documented instances in which
his stings have been cited to justify new and more onerous voter I.D. laws or
other election integrity legislation in state legislatures across the country.In April 2012, Chris McDaniel, then Mississippi’s Senate elections committee chairman, cited a
Project Veritas voter fraud video as evidence justifying the passage of the
state’s “photo identification requirement” bill⁠,
which the state’s Republican Governor
Phil Bryant signed that May. Despite legal challenges, this law is still on the books today. Also that year, a Republican Minnesota state representative,
Steve Drazkowski, praised a locally shot O’Keefe video—in which Project
Veritas undercover operatives requested ballot applications for their friends “Timothy
Tebow and Thomas Brady”—during a floor debate for his party’s own draconian voter I.D. bill. While
Minnesota’s Democratic Governor
Mark Dayton vetoed a strict version of that voter I.D. legislation, and Minnesota
voters backed his decision in a ballot initiative later that year, the state’s Republican Party still plans to revisit the issue again this year. (“We
have had a number of studies that have been completed, there’s a lot of new data on this topic, and there are
court cases that have been decided,” as Minnesota GOP State Senator Scott
Newman ominously put it, “none of which we had in 2012.”) O’Keefe’s “Primary
of the Living Dead” stunts during the New
Hampshire and North Carolina primaries in 2012—in
which his operatives requested but crucially did not actually attempt to use,
the ballots of deceased primary voters—aided the passage of stringent voter I.D. laws in those
states. After New Hampshire enacted a law in 2018 tightening the state’s voting statutes, partly in response to a
new series of Project Veritas videos, Democratic legislators made repeated attempts to repeal them, only to be thwarted by
Republican Governor Chris Sununu’s
veto.O’Keefe’s
wealthy donors surely remember these and other victories in vivid detail, in no
small measure because they are reiterated tirelessly during O’Keefe’s paid speaking engagements and fundraising
conclaves. Among Project Veritas’s
2019 contributors were several wealthy political groups, charitable foundations,
and conservative billionaires with apparent interests in the outcome of Diamond
Dog.From California, a donation of at least $10,000 from a pledged $100,000 came to Veritas from Susan
Groff, president of the Los Angeles-area construction
equipment rental company Northwest Excavating. A prolific Republican donor along with her husband Howard, both Groffs were praised as “good friends, entrepreneurs and patriots” in
a loving tribute entered into the Congressional Record by their longtime beneficiary, former GOP House Rep.
Elton Gallegly. (Another $50,000 came into Project Veritas from a donor listed
only as “Arnott”; the Orange County-based investment guru
Robert D. Arnott, a Koch network ally and prolific Republican donor, denied responsibility
when reached via email.)In Texas, another $50,000 was passed on to Project Veritas from
the Texas Free Market Fund through the group Donors Trust, the dark money “donor-advised
fund” that has helped make contributions from
the Kochs, the DeVos family, and others untraceable in future IRS filings. The
charitable foundation of late Texas oilman Ken W. “Stinky” Davis, based like Project Veritas ally
Aaron Harris in Tarrant County, also kicked in $5,000 to the group, the latest
in the foundation’s influential
spending spree on Republican politics in the Lone Star State and across the country.In Florida, another donation of $50,000 came to the group through
Donors Trust, this time from the free market defenders at the Thomas W. Smith
Foundation. There was also a whopping
$261,000 donation from the “Smith Family.” Could it be
the Smith family that has monopolized local network TV affiliates through Sinclair
Broadcasting? Or is it Randall and Barbara Smith, Palm Beach
residents whose vulture fund Alden Global Capital was once described by Joshua
Benton, the founder of Harvard’s Nieman Journalism
Lab, as “the gelatinous cube
scouring the news industry’s dungeon”? Neither Smith
families responded to requests for clarification on this issue.Many additional hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of
contributions to Project Veritas were attributed solely to “DT” on
the group’s quarterly financial
meeting documents. The initials may refer to Donors Trust or to the
constellation of corporate and (ostensibly) philanthropic organizations tied to
President Donald Trump himself. While Trump is a well-known past donor to
Project Veritas—a framed photo of him and O’Keefe rests prominently on a bookshelf at Project
Veritas headquarters in Mamaroneck, New York—many other donors were
evidently so secret that they were listed simply as “anonymous” even
on the group’s own internal
documents. Cash matters, but O’Keefe’s personal connections are where the depth and
seamlessness of this coordination with the Republican Party become truly
apparent. They also offer a glimpse into the vast network that has formed to
suppress the vote this fall—a network years in the making, of which
Project Veritas is but a humble node.Take litigator William Consovoy,
the legal point man on many of the conservative-funded election integrity cases
pursued during the Trump era. He is, like O’Keefe,
a New Jersey native with a long history in local Republican politics. A
former law clerk for Clarence Thomas, Consovoy is also reportedly a friend of Federalist Society Executive Vice President Leonard Leo, whose nephew David Maxham has been a
friend of O’Keefe’s
since their undergraduate years at Rutgers. (Maxham, naturally, was also
invited to O’Keefe’s
wedding.)This year, Leonard Leo has stepped aside from day-to-day
management of the Federalist Society to run a new conservative donor group, CRC Advisors,
that is pouring money into Consovoy’s
legal challenges in key battleground states across the country. CRC has been
steering money into something called the “Honest Election­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­s
Project,” a fictitious name filed in Virginia for Leo’s old group the Judicial Education Project,
now officially called the 85 Fund. As The Guardian reported, 99 percent of the
Judicial Education Project’s funding in 2018 was
a single $7.8 million donation funneled through Donors Trust.With generous assistance from the Honest Election­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­s
Project and the RNC, Consovoy’s firm Consovoy
McCarthy PLLC has recently brought cases against the re-enfranchising of felons
in Florida and sued
to block California’s plans to deliver
absentee ballots to all of the state’s
registered voters. Consovoy has contributed to related motions filed in
Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, Michigan, and Texas, where Ken Paxton’s victory against mail-in voting in May earned praise from President Trump on Twitter. If you strain to look beyond the lonely partisan kitsch of James
O’Keefe’s bungled scams and
harebrained hoaxes, it’s plain to see the march of a whole battalion of Diamond
Dog operatives and lawyers turned loose on the integrity of the ballot in key
battleground states.Liz Farkas, a New York state–licensed private investigator, provided additional reporting and research for this article.
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