The New Republic published an exhaustive piece on James O'Keefe and his group, "Project Veritas" — who have been an integral part of the GOP's plan to steal the 2020 presidential election for well over a year, now.
These efforts fall under the code name "Diamond Dog," and they predate the pandemic by half-a-year, at least. The sole purpose of "Diamond Dog" is to re-elect Donald Trump.
According to The New Republic:
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.
Talk about failing up. O'Keefe is the guy who couldn't pull off a sting operation even if the lead singer of the Police himself was involved. His pathetic attempts to "expose" liberal politicians and media organizations for wrong-doing and bias are legendary in their incompetence — bordering on comical — and here he is at the center of the metastasizing Republican movement to de-legitimize the vote.
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.
O'Keefe's projects and poorly edited "exposés" have infected local Republican politics of many states, leading to actual policy changes and laws passed to "fight" non-existent voter fraud. None more grotesquely than Texas, though, which has been teetering on the brink of battleground status for a while, now. Trump hasn't exactly endeared himself to the Latinx voters in that state during his tenure, and Gov. Greg Abbott's disastrous response to COVID-19 has the GOP nervous there, leading their Attorney General Ken Paxton to clamp down on anything resembling voting rights for minorities.
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.
Project Veritas is raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars in dark money from organizations and donors connected to the Kochs, the DeVos family, and possibly Donald Trump's network itself. Thank you, Citizens United.
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.
The New Republic lists this vast network of O'Keefe's as just one of many components to the massive voter suppression efforts the GOP is unleashing in their dying gasps to cling to power at all costs. These f*ckers may be down, but they're not out by any stretch of the imagination. The fact that Project Veritas is one of their success stories is reflective of the fact that clearly stupidity and incompetence is rewarded.
Trump is in the White House, after all.
