According to the Washington Post, an official in the Dominican Republic is claiming he was paid by The Daily Caller to get three prostitutes on the record claiming they were with Senator Robert Menendez.

The local lawyer told Dominican investigators that a foreign man, who identified himself as “Carlos,” had offered him $5,000 to find and pay women in the Caribbean nation willing to make the claims about Menendez, according to Jose Antonio Polanco, district attorney for the La Romana region, where the investigation is being conducted.

The videotaped claims of two women, made with their faces obscured, were posted last fall on the Daily Caller. The site reported that “the two women said they met Menendez around Easter at Casa de Campo, an expensive 7,000-acre resort in the Dominican Republic. . . . They claimed Menendez agreed to pay them $500 for sex acts, but in the end they each received only $100.”

The Daily Caller issued a statement Friday saying that the information allegedly provided by the Dominican lawyer, Melanio Figueroa, was false.

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I felt obligated to watch the FreedomWorks webcast Monday afternoon, if only to capture a few golden moments with star videographer lying liar James O'Keefe. O'Keefe was sharing his secrets of successful videography with the FreedomWorks crowd, while tossing in an occasional pitch for that bastion of integrity, the Franklin Center and their MediaTrackers project.

I took the liberty of editing the video to save you seventeen minutes of O'Keefe's peculiar brand of smirk-laced bravado, but I think I caught the essence of what he was trying to say in just under five minutes.

Here are O'Keefe's Five Rules, summarized:

1. Force a consequence: A different way of saying this is "Be the story." When O'Keefe addressed the criticism he's gotten for the editing he did to create a false narrative, he didn't deny he did it, but justified it by saying laws were changed after he released those videos. He failed to note that the consequences of the 47 percent video weren't forced, but were the quite natural consequence of seeing Mitt Romney, up close and unscripted.

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Oh, I know I can't wait to have James O'Keefe uncover the truth about something. Anything at all would be a refreshing change, since O'Keefe doesn't seem to recognize the truth when it comes and smacks him on the butt, to the tune of $100,000.

No, it's just another opportunity for some wingnut welfare appeals. One of the best known ways wingnuts support their own is to give them a bogus book contract which then gets published through Regnery with a nice little advance to the wingnut of choice and a gamed place on various bestseller lists.

O'Keefe released a statement about his settlement with Juan Carlos Vera making it abundantly clear he has no regrets at all:

“There comes a time when the cost to defend yourself against meritless accusations becomes so burdensome financially and personally, it is simply too great. The settlement admits no liability and there is no benefit from extending this ridiculous lawsuit.

“Sadly, this is the cost of exposing the truth. That’s why so few people do it. There are liability issues inherent in undercover journalism. But let me be clear, this lawsuit had nothing to do with editing or misrepresentation. It was an action under the California Invasion of Privacy Act. The anti-recording statute under which the suit was brought is unconstitutional, overbroad, and gives the police and other public officials too much power.

“As President of Project Veritas and undertaking 5 current investigations, my time and resources are better served in working toward our mission of exposing waste, fraud, and abuse then defending myself against lies. I will not be deterred from investigating and exposing corruption. Now more than ever, America is in need of a more ethical and transparent society.”

Never-heard before details surrounding this case and much more will be revealed in a book by James O'Keefe to be released in June 2013.

I'm sure Nadia Naffe would like James O'Keefe to tell all, starting with his little stunt at the farmhouse, and his efforts to frame reputable journalism professors.

NPR would appreciate the truth about how he punked them, too. Along with ACORN, of course.

It's nice that O'Keefe had to settle his lawsuit with fired ACORN employee Juan Carlos Vera, but he managed to do it without ever admitting the truth. In the settlement agreement, O'Keefe "regrets any pain suffered by Vera or his family." Sure he regrets it. So much he called it a "meritless lawsuit." Some regret there.

Yeah, being made out to be a sex trafficker does tend to cause pain. So does losing your job for doing the right thing. But being a wingnut means never having to say you're sorry.

You know what makes me sorry? Thinking how many trees will die as a sacrifice to O'Keefe's wingnut-welfare book, provided by the high-class grifters of the right wing.

Last week, the Boston Phoenix published a fabulous long read on Nadia Naffe, James O'Keefe, and the slimy underbelly of conservative "journalism." I use that term guardedly and with a large grain of salt.

We've told pieces of Nadia's story here, here and here, but reporter Chris Faraone dug deep into the ugly that is conservative media and dredged a lot more sludge up to the surface. I highly recommend taking a few minutes and reading the whole thing.

Nadia's story is bad enough, but it isn't unique. Conservative media, particularly online, is nothing more than an organized and well-funded smear machine, and they don't care who they hit as long as they're viewed as an "enemy."

Charlie Pierce:

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This is not a story about free speech, but when it is published the right wing will squawk loud, long and hard about how it really is about free speech. They use free speech as a cudgel: They're always entitled to it, but the rest of us can just shut the hell up and sit down. For the right, free speech is only free when it supports their point of view.

In a nutshell, this is the story of slime merchant James O'Keefe's attempts to prevent the truth about the ugly underbelly of his smear operations from becoming known -- in part because that truth could well land him in prison -- and how his cohorts in the smear operation, especially his "legal team" in the L.A. District Attorney's office, have relentlessly attempted to keep that truth hidden.

Lies: James O'Keefe's Obsession With Frames

Nadia Naffe was once an associate of James O'Keefe's. She was recruited to play whatever role he could cook up in his latest frame scheme of the day, funded by his billionaires through his recently approved non-profit organization. You can see more examples of his duplicitous skulduggery here, here, here and here. Those do not include the evil he did to ACORN, NPR, Medicaid providers, Planned Parenthood, Abbie Boudreau and Shirley Sherrod, which are particularly insidious.

Yes, James O'Keefe is a slime artist, and once he and Andrew Breitbart found each other, they found that magic slime chemistry that kept the dream alive. There's little doubt their fraudulent campaign against ACORN resulted in that organization's demise, and his frauds have harmed countless other organizations, including NPR and Planned Parenthood. Yet despite all of the ratf*cking he's tried since then, the only one that's brought consequences for O'Keefe is the attempted wiretap of Senator Mary Landrieu's office in New Orleans -- which landed O'Keefe in jail and on probation.

Sex: O'Keefe's Fantasy Life

James O'Keefe also seems to have some issues with women. The incident with CNN reporter Abbie Boudreau was about as sexist as anything I've seen in this lifetime. Remember the plot? He was going to lure Ms. Boudreau onto a boat and feed her strawberries, get her drunk, hit on her, and have the tape running the entire time. His point? Who knows? Maybe he just wanted to embarrass her or worse, seduce her and sell the sex tape.

At any rate, his "assistant", Izzy Santa, intervened, warned Boudreau off from the plan and they got away unscathed.

However, that didn't stop O'Keefe. He recruited a new woman as his accomplice, and hatched a plan to go after banks that had been assisted by TARP funding. Somewhere along the way, he also got some legal eagle whispering in his ear that wiretapping was totally legal if there was suspicion of bribery or other nefarious activity.

The only problem I see with that stellar legal advice? It doesn't appear to give private individuals the right to wiretap the phones of a member of Congress, which is what Naffe alleges she did on O'Keefe's behalf.

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There have been reams of analysis over why Mitt Romney's campaign seems to be fading in the stretch, and we're no exception. I could list many, going back a year to when he said "corporations are people, too" to his off-the-cuff "I don't care about poor people" to his "I like to fire people" to his most recent 47 percent comments.

You could argue that Mitt Romney's own statements are enough to disqualify him from being president. But lately, I've seen another argument floating around that warrants discussion, too. George Zornick, writing for The Nation, framed it this way:

Romney seems to have outsourced a substantial part of his communications operation and opposition research to right-wing blogs—and keeps getting burned for it. Will he learn to stop?

Media Matters published an in-depth study of how closely Romney's campaign tracks with right-wing blog memes just after The Atlantic's Elspeth Reeve took a look at four primary Romney campaign themes and tied them back to right-wing blogs and blog comments.

Reeve makes the case that Romney is exactly the candidate conservatives wanted, and that candidate is losing the election.

There's a pattern emerging to Mitt Romney's worst gaffes: his biggest political missteps come whenever he repeats something the conservative opinion complex has already repeated endlessly. Instead of being the candidate that conservative bloggers feared as a moderate, he's been exactly the candidate they wanted. And he's losing. The most recent example, of course, is Romney's comment to donors that 47 percent of Americans are voting for President Obama because they're getting a government handout -- which has been a meme on conservative blogs for months. In December 2011, RedState editor Erick Erickson, who is the creator of that meme, wrote a widely-noted post titled "Mitt Romney as the Nominee: Conservatism Dies and Barack Obama Wins." He predicted Romney's candidacy would be "an utter disaster for conservatives" because Romney was "a guy who keeps selling out the very principles conservatives claim to hold dear" and who won't "seriously take conservatives seriously." If the polls don't change in the next 49 days, Erickson will have been only half right. Obama will have won, but not because Romney ran as a moderate. It will be in part because he adopted conservative bloggers' memes as critical parts of his campaign message.

Media Matters' analysis includes this indictment:

But in the past, when national candidates needed to learn a political language they sought out experts in the field, and respected opinion-makers. They didn't rely on half-witted bloggers, cable TV wake-up personalities, and talk show hosts who push sludge in the form of 'debate.' (i.e. Obama's allegiance is to the Quran!)

I think this is a dangerous argument to make as broadly as it has been made. Possibly my perspective might come from the fact that someone on the right might view me as a "half-witted blogger" and discount anything I might write as unworthy of consideration, so there might be a bit of a self-serving reaction there. Take it for what you will.

My problem with the assertion that Romney is spewing right-wing memes originated by "half-witted bloggers" is that it assumes those ideas began with bloggers. As you can see from the round-robin of email published last week between Foster Friess, James O'Keefe, and John Fund, the right wing message machine tightly integrated with think tanks, high-profile journalists, and the money boys who fund them.

There is absolutely no daylight between Fox News and any online group. In fact, Fox News routinely uses people from right-wing web sites as "commentators," right alongside their think tank folks and of course, the shadow Romney campaign advisors. It's a symbiotic relationship which blends online with broadcast with the man-on-the-street opinionators. All of this is true.

This is very different than the structures on the left. Lefty bloggers aren't funded by anyone but their readers. Cue request for donations.

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Buzzfeed has published the most bizarre set of emails between right wing operatives freaking out during the Scott Brown/Martha Coakley race in January of 2010 that I've ever seen.

The plot, hatched by a strange alliance of high-profile conservatives, was to have James O'Keefe and his "crew" catch the SEIU in some kind of voter fraud similar to what O'Keefe has tried to commit in various states around the nation in order to claim that voter ID laws are necessary.

Let's note for the record that the entire right wing has been curiously silent about the voter registration fraud schemes bought and paid for by the Republican National Committee. You would think concerned conservatives like Fund, Fox and Friess would be very, very concerned, but instead, silence fills the hole where outrage should be.

The Players
John Fund is a conservative champion of Voter ID laws, and senior editor for The American Spectator. Fund also writes for the Wall Street Journal.. Steve Friess is the son of right-wing moneybags Foster Friess, of "aspirin between her knees" fame. And of course, James O'Keefe is the Breitbart disciple who loves to edit video to make it look like people are doing things they aren't in order to destroy organizations like ACORN.

Others involved include Heather Higgins, pundit and president of Independent Women's Voices. Higgins is also affiliated with the Hoover Institution.

The Plot

It begins with a tip that appears to have come via neocon radio host John Batchelor. The tip says that the SEIU is contracting for buses to take voters to the polls, asserting that "if you're black or brown they'll rope you in and take you to the polls, registration can be worked out."

That tip went to John Fund, who then forwarded it to Heather Higgins, who forwarded it to Foster Friess. Out of this, comes the plan from Steve Friess to make an "ACORN sting video." Oh, the paranoia just shines through. Also the racism.

Some black /Latina conservatives could be wired for video, and get picked up on one of these busses, and show what goes on. My guess -they are offering cash, (which I am pretty sure is illegal), and I also would wager that at least some of these busses are making more than one stop with the same people - ie getting them to vote twice -though I don't know the mechanics of that.

Perhaps some private detective types would be needed to help track down the busses, and a block or two ahead of them to drop our cameramen off...

Too much to dream? Imagine pulling this off - legal / image problems for SEIU would be a good thing... think there's upside to this?

Brietbart would know, and Fund would know - 'if we catch them doing X, it could mean Y' - I just don't know what the stakes are...

The most interesting part of the Steve Friess email was right at the end, where he asks his dad to 'bounce this off Breitbart.' At the time, O'Keefe hadn't been arrested for his attempted bugging of Mary Landrieu's office and was still widely hailed as a conservative hero. Evidently O'Keefe was also still part of the Breitbart inner circle, too.

O'Keefe forwarded on the email to Nadia Naffe, who worked for O'Keefe for awhile before there was a break and she accused him of harassment.

The End

Evidently they did try to get something, but never used it. Buzzfeed reports:

Reached by email, Naffe said the emails were authentic: "Fund and Steve Friess, the son of billionaire Foster Friess, introduced the idea to O'keefe that SEIU would fraudulently register anyone with brown skin to vote."

"James flew me out to Boston to find the SEIU busses, just days after that email was sent," Naffe said. She claimed that "Congressman Steve King from Iowa was waiting at the hotel when we arrived to take us to dinner. He gave us a pep talk about illegal voting."

"O'keefe has the footage, though I'm doubtful he would share any of it. Since, he was arrested a week later in New Orleans while attempting to wire tap Senator Mary Landrieu," Naffe said.

This may not rise to the level of blockbuster reporting, but I did think it was interesting to see how intertwined the networks are. John Fund, Andrew Breitbart and Foster Friess, all huddled together to make sure those nasty black and brown people didn't vote in Massachusetts.

Meanwhile in other pockets of RepublicanLand, they're fraudulently changing voter registrations, tossing Democratic registrations in the trash, and otherwise working on rigging elections. What a bunch of poseurs.

It's already pretty well established that Jim Hoft is the wingnutosphere's most brazenly dishonest blogger, which really is saying something, considering the competition.

It's not just that he's been trying to characterize neo-Nazi killers as liberal Occupy types. After all, this is a guy who immediately claimed that Obama's birth certificate was a hoax, who heavily promoted the Kenneth Gladney "beaten by SEIU thugs" hoax, and who spins conspiracy theories out of groaningly stupid mistakes on his part.

So this past weekend he just continued the tradition of towering mendacity. He came out to Providence, RI, and invaded the Netroots Nation convention. He was seen hanging out with James O'Keefe, and they evidently wanted to dig up dirt on the Netroots folks. (You can judge for yourself the results of his "investigation", but we won't pay for the shower you'll want to take afterward.)

Our friend devtob saw Hoft walk over to the little cluster of Occupy protesters who had gathered across the street from the convention center. It was obvious that he wanted to get the Occupy folks to say something outrageous, so he pretended to be one of them, even going so far as to hold up a "Tax the 1%" sign and chant along. Witnesses who were there said Hoft was saying outrageous things and trying to get the Occupy folks to agree with him. They refused to take the bait.

Good on them. And shame on Hoft. Though of course he has no conception of that.

(Thanks to devtob for passing along this photo.)

James O'Keefe has some high-rolling donors. I always wondered who was behind his bogus efforts to smear people with edited video, and now I have a better idea.

Lately, the right wing blogosphere has been eating each other alive while desperately trying to smear a couple of left wing bloggers for reasons I don't fully understand. That story is one that reads like a bad spy novel, and not worth trying to sort out. But James O'Keefe's ongoing difficulties with women, and especially women he hires? That's worth looking at more carefully.

Just to refresh memories, O'Keefe hatched a couple of "projects" that were intended to smear journalists. One was his "To Catch a Journalist" media trap game, and the other was his incredibly stupid effort to entrap CNN reporter Abbie Boudreau by "seducing" her. The full plan, which is even worse than originally reported, is here.

One thing that O'Keefe demonstrates over and over again is that he should be nowhere near women. He seems to be prone to sexual and sexist behavior while around them. For these two plans, he recruited two different women. The first, who was supposed to be a part of the Boudreau scam, was Izzy (Isabel) Santa, who is the one who stopped the ridiculous scenario from continuing by tipping Boudreau off to what O'Keefe had planned for her. In October, 2010 Santa's attorney demanded that Project Veritas pay off her contract. Subsequent to that, a settlement agreement was drafted where Project Veritas agreed to pay Santa $20,000 as a final settlement and agreement between them. An unsigned copy of that settlement agreement is posted online, and I don't know whether it was the final version or not.

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You'd think the wingers would figure out that James O'Keefe makes them look like fools every time he posts another one of his "videos." You'd think they might consider not pimping those videos like they're real when they're so easy to debunk. You'd think.

This time, it's North Carolina under fire, but O'Keefe ridiculously claims voter fraud when the only fraud is O'Keefe and his bogus claims. This time around, O'Keefe features a "dead voter" and a voter who he claims is illegally registered to vote because he was not a citizen at the time he was called for jury duty. Unfortunately for O'Keefe, he became a citizen in the 80s, a fact that was easily verifiable before publishing the video.

As for O'Keefe's dead guy, it turns out James forgot that "Jr." at the end of a guy's name means he's the son of the dead guy and also happens to be a very much alive registered voter.

Via Media Matters:

Yes, as multiple obituaries for Bolton note, he was survived by, among others, his son Michael Gordon Bolton, Jr. Public records searches using the Nexis database confirm that Bolton Jr. was registered to vote at the same address given to the poll worker by the O'Keefe operative.

This isn't the only error of this sort O'Keefe made. As ThinkProgress noted, the "non-citizen" voter supposedly exposed by the video is actually a naturalized citizen.

The best screw-up of all is the one where O'Keefe punks the Daily Caller, Breitbart.com and Michelle Malkin. I love it when one of their own hangs them out to dry so thoroughly. In the opener of his ten-minute long video, O'Keefe's minions are walking up a driveway to "prove" that a non-citizen has voted in the North Carolina primary.

Via ThinkProgress Justice:

Now, it turns out that the second “non-citizen,” William Romero, is actually a citizen as well, according to his family.

The video opens with O’Keefe’s cameraman walking up Romero’s driveway and confronting a member of his family about whether he is a citizen. O’Keefe points to court records from 2010 where Romero was excused from jury duty because he was not a citizen at the time. Therefore, as O’Keefe argues, Romero’s voter registration dated December 5, 2011 is fraudulent because Romero “is not a United States citizen.”

Oops! That calendar can be a pesky thing. It turns out Romero became a citizen in early 2011, and registered to vote because that's what good citizens in this country do: they vote.

In fact, Romero’s family told ThinkProgress he became a naturalized citizen in early 2011.

What’s more, Romero’s family told ThinkProgress that they had began receiving harassing telephone calls two weeks before the incident in the video asking if Romero was a citizen. They confirmed to the caller — it’s unclear whether they were speaking with O’Keefe himself or another individual — that Romero is indeed a citizen. Nevertheless, O’Keefe proceeded to ambush the family at their home and publish this video claiming he’s not a citizen.

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