Commercialism has destroyed the True Meaning of Black Friday! In case you don't know, it's the day that Satanists and Atheists and maybe some Jews and Muslims unite to begin their war on Christmas.
Right on brother Moe! I urge all who can't take another december filled with endless replays of jingle Bells Rock and White Christmas to join our cause!
Of course she's 191 years old! Two words: coffee enemas!
Good guess. She was a huge proponent of enemas. She was also a raw vegan. Complete neurotic stress case, she didn't really make the case for 'balance' and 'tranquility of mind'. She always looked like she was about to have a mental breakdown and was constantly getting pulled over for speeding.
She was pretty hostile early on, but I think life broke her and she became a little humbled. She was fired from our place, her husband was cheating on her and they broke up, her business was struggling, when she came back after being let go she was sweeter and was even admitting that raw veganism is a huge pain in the ass to wake up to every day and that it wasn't at all easy (complete opposite of what she used to claim when converting all the girls at work to veganism).
I had lunch with Karen and Ryan. We went to a nearby Thai place. Karen ordered hers as a 3 and Ryan went for a 4 - couple of daredevils, those two are. Then we went to a bar next to the restaurant and had a few beers. I haven't had a drink in forever, so my mind is kinda foggy. Karen and Ryan are good peoples.
The Thanksgiving holiday has been pretty hellish for the last 15 years. This year’s holiday has also been hellish but for different reasons. Yesterday was one of the few bright spots of the week thanks to JSG and Pogo!.
Yeah, that boatload of tinfoil hat antisemitism, blaming "Banking Families", "Bloodline Families", "Rothschilds", "Soros", "Mossad" referring to them members of the "Overloards" and "Sinister Designers" that have ruined America, was on the Twitter account that Trump tipped his hat to a day ago.
I still haven't gotten Simon into X-Men. Buuuut, we found a big bunch of Teen Titans from the Geoff Johns run (early '00s) at the thrift store for $0.99 each and we bought those up and he loves them.
Interesting. I don't have to sign in. Hmm. It's a great tale. In short: Project Veritas (Breitbart employee James O'Keefe's fake 'truth in media' goon squad) paid a woman to go to Washington Post claiming to have been a teenaged sex partner of Roy Moore's. She told WaPo that she had gotten pregnant with Moore's child at 15 and that Moore had driven her to get it aborted. She hounded the WaPo reporter saying that she would only go on the record if WaPo could promise that Moore wouldn't be elected, etc.
In short: Trump's cronies paid a woman to manufacture a sexual assault/and coerced abortion story so as to undermine real victims of sexual assault in order to help an accused sex criminal get elected in Alabama.
The woman baited the WaPo journalists to promise (on hidden video) her that this would take down Moore. The video would then be edited to depict the hungry WaPo journalists as coaxing her into telling them the false story. Project Veritas would wait until WaPo published the fake story before revealing the sting. WaPo would be damaged and the story would confirm the false narrative already laid out that suggested that the media had fabricated the entire case against Moore.
And it really is Trump's people. As I have mentioned several times before, Donald Trump donated money to Project Veritas before the election. James O'Keefe worked under Andrew Breitbart and Stephen Bannon at Breitbart. I hope to god that this string is picked up in the media, because even if the connection is a few steps removed, it is obvious that Project Veritas are agents of the Trump Administration working in concert with Breitbart and other right-wing media outlets. Remember, PV are the ones who dropped those 'Rigging the Election' videos in mid-October just before the election (it was in the comments sections of those videos that I was able to expose dozens of YouTube accounts that were claiming to be Democrats switching their votes to Trump as bots run for Project Veritas/Breitbart/Trump Campaign).
The Gateway Pundit string is also interesting. It suggests that GP was involved and laid out some lies (about someone hearing from a friend that Washington Post was offering cash for accusations against Moore) that would later serve as 'confirmation' of what would revealed by Project Veritas.
I really want this to damage him. The Presidents goons a) going after the press (I don't love the Washington Post and am as critical of them as any other source, but I still don't like it) and b) consciously trying to undermine rape victims, is a new low. Even for the Trump Administration and its support staff.
Investigations A woman approached The Post with dramatic — and false — tale about Roy Moore. She appears to be part of undercover sting operation. By Shawn Boburg, Aaron C. Davis and Alice Crites November 27 at 11:35 PM
A woman who falsely claimed to The Washington Post that Roy Moore, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama, impregnated her as a teenager appears to work with an organization that uses deceptive tactics to secretly record conversations in an effort to embarrass its targets. In a series of interviews over two weeks, the woman shared a dramatic story about an alleged sexual relationship with Moore in 1992 that led to an abortion when she was 15. During the interviews, she repeatedly pressed Post reporters to give their opinions on the effects that her claims could have on Moore’s candidacy if she went public. The Post did not publish an article based on her unsubstantiated account. When Post reporters confronted her with inconsistencies in her story and an Internet posting that raised doubts about her motivations, she insisted that she was not working with any organization that targets journalists. But on Monday morning, Post reporters saw her walking into the New York offices of Project Veritas, an organization that targets the mainstream news media and left-leaning groups. The organization sets up undercover “stings” that involve using false cover stories and covert video recordings meant to expose what the group says is media bias. James O’Keefe, the Project Veritas founder who was convicted of a misdemeanor in 2010 for using a fake identity to enter a federal building during a previous sting, declined to answer questions about the woman outside the organization’s offices on Monday morning shortly after the woman walked inside. “I am not doing an interview right now, so I’m not going to say a word,” O’Keefe said. In a follow-up interview, O’Keefe declined to answer repeated questions about whether the woman was employed at Project Veritas. He also did not respond when asked if he was working with Moore, former White House adviser and Moore supporter Stephen K. Bannon, or Republican strategists. The group’s efforts illustrate the lengths to which activists have gone to try to discredit media outlets for reporting on allegations from multiple women that Moore pursued them when they were teenagers and he was in his early 30s. Moore has denied that he did anything improper. A spokesman for Moore’s campaign did not respond to a message seeking comment. The woman who approached Post reporters, Jaime T. Phillips, did not respond to calls to her cellphone later Monday. Her car remained in the Project Veritas parking lot for more than an hour. The Post positioned videographers outside the group’s office in Mamaroneck, N.Y, after determining that Phillips lives in Stamford, Conn., and realizing that the two locations were just 16 miles apart. Two reporters followed her from her home as she drove to the office. After Phillips was observed entering the Project Veritas office, The Post made the unusual decision to report her previous offthe-record comments. “We always honor ‘off-the-record’ agreements when they’re entered into in good faith,” said Martin Baron, The Post’s executive editor. “But this so-called off-the-record conversation was the essence of a scheme to deceive and embarrass us. The intent by Project Veritas clearly was to publicize the conversation if we fell for the trap. Because of our customary journalistic rigor, we weren’t fooled, and we can’t honor an ‘off-the-record’ agreement that was solicited in maliciously bad faith.” Phillips’s arrival at the Project Veritas office capped a weeks-long effort that began only hours after The Post published an article on Nov. 9 that included allegations that Moore once initiated a sexual encounter with a 14-year-old named Leigh Corfman. Post reporter Beth Reinhard, who co-wrote the article about Corfman, received a cryptic email early the next morning. “Roy Moore in Alabama . . . I might know something but I need to keep myself safe. How do we do this?” the apparent tipster wrote under an account with the name “Lindsay James.” The email’s subject line was “Roy Moore in AL.” The sender’s email address included “rolltide,” the rallying cry of the University of Alabama’s sports teams, which are nicknamed the Crimson Tide. Reinhard sent an email asking if the person was willing to talk off the record. “Not sure if I trust the phone,” came the reply. “Can we just stick to email?” “I need to be confident that you can protect me before I will tell all,” the person wrote in a subsequent email. “I have stuff I’ve been hiding for a long time but maybe it should stay that way.” The tipster’s email came amid counterattacks by Moore supporters aimed at The Post and its reporters. That same day, Gateway Pundit, a conservative site, spread a false story from a Twitter account, @umpire43, that said, “A family friend in Alabama just told my wife that a WAPO reporter named Beth offer her 1000$ to accuse Roy Moore.” The Twitter account, which has a history of spreading misinformation, has since been deleted. The Post, like many other news organizations, has a strict policy against paying people for information and did not do so in its coverage of Moore. On Nov. 14, a pastor in Alabama said he received a voice mail from a man falsely claiming to be a Post reporter and seeking women “willing to make damaging remarks” about Moore for money. No one associated with The Post made any such call. In the days that followed the purported tipster’s initial emails, Reinhard communicated with the woman through an encrypted text messaging service and spoke by phone with the person to set up a meeting. When the woman suggested a meeting in New York, Reinhard told her she would have to know more about her story and her background. The woman offered that her real name was Jaime Phillips. Phillips said she lived in New York but would be in the Washington area during Thanksgiving week and suggested meeting Tuesday at a shopping mall in Tysons Corner, Va. “I’m planning to do some shopping there so I’ll find a good place to meet before you get there,” Phillips wrote in a message sent via Signal, the encrypted messaging service. When Reinhard suggested bringing another reporter, Phillips wrote, “I’m not really comfortable with anyone else being there this time.” Reinhard arrived to find Phillips, wearing a brown leather jacket and with long red hair, already seated in a booth in the restaurant. The 41-year-old said she had been abused as a child, Reinhard said. Her family had moved often. She said she moved in with an aunt in the Talladega area of Alabama and started attending a church youth group when she met Moore in 1992, the year he became a county judge. She said she was 15. She said they started a “secret” sexual relationship. “I knew it wasn’t right, but I didn’t care,” she said. She said that she got pregnant, that Moore talked her into an abortion and that he drove her to Mississippi to get it. In the interview, she told Reinhard that she was so upset she couldn’t finish her salad. Phillips said she had started thinking about coming forward after the allegations about Hollywood film producer Harvey Weinstein surfaced. Then she said she saw the news about Moore flashing across the television screen while in a break room at her job at a company called NFM Lending in Westchester County, N.Y., Reinhard said. Phillips also repeatedly asked the reporter to guarantee her that Moore would lose the election if she came forward. Reinhard told her in a subsequent text message that she could not predict what the impact would be. Reinhard said she also explained to Phillips that her claims would have to be fact-checked. Additionally, Reinhard asked her for documents that would corroborate or support her story. Later that day, Phillips told Reinhard that she felt “anxiety & negative energy after our meeting,” text messages show. “You just didn’t convince me that I should come forward,” she wrote. Reinhard replied, “I’m so sorry but I want to be straight with you about the fact-checking process and the fact that we can’t guarantee what will happen as a result of another story.” Phillips was not satisfied. On Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, she suggested meeting with another Post reporter, Stephanie McCrummen, who co-wrote the initial article about Corfman. “I’d rather go to another paper than talk to you again,” Phillips told Reinhard. Back at the newsroom, Reinhard became concerned about elements of Phillips’s story. Phillips had said she lived in Alabama only for a summer while a teenager, but the cellphone number Phillips provided had an Alabama area code. Reinhard called NFM Lending in Westchester County, but they said a person named Jaime Phillips did not work there. Alice Crites, a Post researcher who was looking into Phillips’s background, found a document that strongly reinforced the reporters’ suspicions: a Web page for a fundraising campaign by someone with the same name. It was on the website GoFundMe.com under the name Jaime Phillips. “I’m moving to New York!” the May 29 appeal said. “I’ve accepted a job to work in the conservative media movement to combat the lies and deceipt of the liberal MSM. I’ll be using my skills as a researcher and fact-checker to help our movement. I was laid off from my mortgage job a few months ago and came across the opportunity to change my career path.” In a March posting on its Facebook page, Project Veritas said it was seeking 12 new “undercover reporters,” though the organization’s operatives use methods that are eschewed by mainstream journalists, such as misrepresenting themselves. A posting for the “journalist” job on the Project Veritas website that month warned that the job “is not a role for the faint of heart.” The job’s listed goal: “To adopt an alias persona, gain access to an identified person of interest and persuade that person to reveal information.” It also listed tasks that the job applicant should be able to master, including: “Learning a script,” “Preparing a background story to support your role,” “Gaining an appointment or access to the target of the investigation,” and “Operating concealed recording equipment.” Project Veritas, founded in 2010, is a tax-exempt charity that says its mission is to “investigate and expose corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud and other misconduct.” It raised $4.8 million and employed 38 people in 2016, according to its public tax filing. It also had 92 volunteers. O’Keefe’s criminal record has caused the charity problems in some states. Mississippi and Utah stripped the group of a license to raise money in those states because it failed to disclose O’Keefe’s conviction on state applications, records show. Also working at Veritas is former television producer Robert J. Halderman, who was sentenced to six months in jail in 2010 after he was accused of trying to blackmail late-night host David Letterman. Halderman was with O’Keefe outside the Project Veritas offices Monday as a reporter tried to ask about Phillips’s role with the organization. Because Jaime Phillips is a relatively common name, it wasn’t a certainty that the GoFundMe page that Crites found was created by the same woman who approached The Post. But there was another telling detail, in addition to the name. One of two donations listed on the page was from a person whose name matched her daughter’s, according to public records. McCrummen agreed to meet Phillips that afternoon. Phillips suggested meeting somewhere in Alexandria, Va., saying she was shopping in the area. Post videographers accompanied McCrummen, who brought a printout of the fundraising page to the interview. Again, Phillips had arrived early and was waiting for McCrummen, her purse resting on the table. When McCrummen put her purse near Phillips’s purse to block a possible camera, Phillips moved hers. The Post videographers sat separately, unnoticed, at an adjacent table. Phillips said she didn’t want to get into the details of what she had said happened between her and Moore. She said she wanted McCrummen to assure her that the article would result in Moore’s defeat, according to a recording. McCrummen instead asked her about her story regarding Moore. Phillips complained that President Trump had endorsed Moore. “So my whole thing is, like, I want him to be completely taken out of the race,” she said. “And I really expected that was going to happen, and now it’s not. So, I don’t know what you think about that.” McCrummen asked Phillips to verify her identity with a photo identification. Phillips provided a Georgia driver’s license. McCrummen then asked her about the GoFundMe page. “We have a process of doing background, checking backgrounds and this kind of thing, so I wanted to ask you about one thing,” McCrummen said, pulling out a copy of the page and reading from it. “So I just wanted to ask you if you could explain this, and I also wanted to let you know, Jaime, that this is being recorded and video recorded.” “Okay,” Phillips said. “Um, yeah, I was looking to take a job last summer in New York, but it fell through,” Phillips said. “Yeah, it was going to be with the Daily Caller, but it ended up falling through, so I wasn’t able to do it.” When asked who at the Daily Caller interviewed her, Phillips said, “Kathy,” pausing before adding the last name, “Johnson.” Paul Conner, executive editor of the Daily Caller, said Monday that no one with the name Kathy Johnson works for the publication and that he has no record of having personally interviewed Phillips. Conner later said in an email that he had asked other top editors at the Daily Caller and the affiliated Daily Caller News Foundation about Phillips. “None of us has interviewed a woman by the name Jaime Phillips,” Conner wrote. At the Alexandria restaurant on Wednesday, Phillips also told The Post that she had not been in contact with the Moore campaign. As the interview ended, Phillips told McCrummen she was not recording the conversation. “I think I probably just want to cancel and not go through with it at this point,” Phillips said at Souvlaki Bar shortly before ending the interview. “I’m not going to answer any more questions,” she said. “I think I’m just going to go.” She picked up her coat and bag, returned her drink to the front counter and left the restaurant. By 7 p.m. the message on the GoFundMe page was gone, replaced by a new one. “Campaign is complete and no longer active,” it read. 4231 Comments Shawn Boburg is a reporter for The Washington Post's investigative unit. Follow @ShawnBoburg Aaron Davis is a reporter for The Post’s Investigative team. Follow @byaaroncdavis
Comments
Death to Christmas!
She was pretty hostile early on, but I think life broke her and she became a little humbled. She was fired from our place, her husband was cheating on her and they broke up, her business was struggling, when she came back after being let go she was sweeter and was even admitting that raw veganism is a huge pain in the ass to wake up to every day and that it wasn't at all easy (complete opposite of what she used to claim when converting all the girls at work to veganism).
Just sayin'...
I would love to see James O'Keefe vanish from politics. Unlikely to happen, but I can wish.
In short: Trump's cronies paid a woman to manufacture a sexual assault/and coerced abortion story so as to undermine real victims of sexual assault in order to help an accused sex criminal get elected in Alabama.
The woman baited the WaPo journalists to promise (on hidden video) her that this would take down Moore. The video would then be edited to depict the hungry WaPo journalists as coaxing her into telling them the false story. Project Veritas would wait until WaPo published the fake story before revealing the sting. WaPo would be damaged and the story would confirm the false narrative already laid out that suggested that the media had fabricated the entire case against Moore.
The Gateway Pundit string is also interesting. It suggests that GP was involved and laid out some lies (about someone hearing from a friend that Washington Post was offering cash for accusations against Moore) that would later serve as 'confirmation' of what would revealed by Project Veritas.
I really want this to damage him. The Presidents goons a) going after the press (I don't love the Washington Post and am as critical of them as any other source, but I still don't like it) and b) consciously trying to undermine rape victims, is a new low. Even for the Trump Administration and its support staff.
A woman approached The
Post with dramatic — and false — tale about Roy Moore. She appears to be part of
undercover sting operation.
By Shawn Boburg, Aaron C. Davis and Alice Crites November 27 at 11:35 PM
A woman who falsely claimed to The Washington Post that Roy Moore, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama, impregnated her as a teenager appears to work with an organization that uses deceptive tactics to secretly record
conversations in an effort to embarrass its targets.
In a series of interviews over two weeks, the woman shared a dramatic story about an alleged sexual relationship with Moore
in 1992 that led to an abortion when she was 15. During the interviews, she repeatedly pressed Post reporters to give their
opinions on the effects that her claims could have on Moore’s candidacy if she went public.
The Post did not publish an article based on her unsubstantiated account. When Post reporters confronted her with
inconsistencies in her story and an Internet posting that raised doubts about her motivations, she insisted that she was not
working with any organization that targets journalists.
But on Monday morning, Post reporters saw her walking into the New York offices of Project Veritas, an organization that
targets the mainstream news media and left-leaning groups. The organization sets up undercover “stings” that involve using
false cover stories and covert video recordings meant to expose what the group says is media bias.
James O’Keefe, the Project Veritas founder who was convicted of a misdemeanor in 2010 for using a fake identity to enter a
federal building during a previous sting, declined to answer questions about the woman outside the organization’s offices on
Monday morning shortly after the woman walked inside.
“I am not doing an interview right now, so I’m not going to say a word,” O’Keefe said.
In a follow-up interview, O’Keefe declined to answer repeated questions about whether the woman was employed at Project
Veritas. He also did not respond when asked if he was working with Moore, former White House adviser and Moore supporter
Stephen K. Bannon, or Republican strategists.
The group’s efforts illustrate the lengths to which activists have gone to try to discredit media outlets for reporting on
allegations from multiple women that Moore pursued them when they were teenagers and he was in his early 30s. Moore has
denied that he did anything improper.
A spokesman for Moore’s campaign did not respond to a message seeking comment.
The woman who approached Post reporters, Jaime T. Phillips, did not respond to calls to her cellphone later Monday. Her car
remained in the Project Veritas parking lot for more than an hour.
The Post positioned videographers outside the group’s office in Mamaroneck, N.Y, after determining that Phillips lives in
Stamford, Conn., and realizing that the two locations were just 16 miles apart. Two reporters followed her from her home as
she drove to the office.
After Phillips was observed entering the Project Veritas office, The Post made the unusual decision to report her previous offthe-record
comments.
“We always honor ‘off-the-record’ agreements when they’re entered into in good faith,” said Martin Baron, The Post’s
executive editor. “But this so-called off-the-record conversation was the essence of a scheme to deceive and embarrass us. The
intent by Project Veritas clearly was to publicize the conversation if we fell for the trap. Because of our customary journalistic
rigor, we weren’t fooled, and we can’t honor an ‘off-the-record’ agreement that was solicited in maliciously bad faith.”
Phillips’s arrival at the Project Veritas office capped a weeks-long effort that began only hours after The Post published an
article on Nov. 9 that included allegations that Moore once initiated a sexual encounter with a 14-year-old named Leigh
Corfman.
Post reporter Beth Reinhard, who co-wrote the article about Corfman, received a cryptic email early the next morning.
“Roy Moore in Alabama . . . I might know something but I need to keep myself safe. How do we do this?” the apparent tipster
wrote under an account with the name “Lindsay James.”
The email’s subject line was “Roy Moore in AL.” The sender’s email address included “rolltide,” the rallying cry of the
University of Alabama’s sports teams, which are nicknamed the Crimson Tide.
Reinhard sent an email asking if the person was willing to talk off the record.
“Not sure if I trust the phone,” came the reply. “Can we just stick to email?”
“I need to be confident that you can protect me before I will tell all,” the person wrote in a subsequent email. “I have stuff I’ve
been hiding for a long time but maybe it should stay that way.”
The tipster’s email came amid counterattacks by Moore supporters aimed at The Post and its reporters.
That same day, Gateway Pundit, a conservative site, spread a false story from a Twitter account, @umpire43, that said, “A
family friend in Alabama just told my wife that a WAPO reporter named Beth offer her 1000$ to accuse Roy Moore.” The
Twitter account, which has a history of spreading misinformation, has since been deleted.
The Post, like many other news organizations, has a strict policy against paying people for information and did not do so in its
coverage of Moore.
On Nov. 14, a pastor in Alabama said he received a voice mail from a man falsely claiming to be a Post reporter and seeking
women “willing to make damaging remarks” about Moore for money. No one associated with The Post made any such call.
In the days that followed the purported tipster’s initial emails, Reinhard communicated with the woman through an encrypted
text messaging service and spoke by phone with the person to set up a meeting. When the woman suggested a meeting in New
York, Reinhard told her she would have to know more about her story and her background. The woman offered that her real
name was Jaime Phillips.
Phillips said she lived in New York but would be in the Washington area during Thanksgiving week and suggested meeting
Tuesday at a shopping mall in Tysons Corner, Va. “I’m planning to do some shopping there so I’ll find a good place to meet
before you get there,” Phillips wrote in a message sent via Signal, the encrypted messaging service.
When Reinhard suggested bringing another reporter, Phillips wrote, “I’m not really comfortable with anyone else being there
this time.”
Reinhard arrived to find Phillips, wearing a brown leather jacket and with long red hair, already seated in a booth in the
restaurant.
The 41-year-old said she had been abused as a child, Reinhard said. Her family had moved often. She said she moved in with
an aunt in the Talladega area of Alabama and started attending a church youth group when she met Moore in 1992, the year he
became a county judge. She said she was 15. She said they started a “secret” sexual relationship.
“I knew it wasn’t right, but I didn’t care,” she said.
She said that she got pregnant, that Moore talked her into an abortion and that he drove her to Mississippi to get it.
In the interview, she told Reinhard that she was so upset she couldn’t finish her salad.
Phillips said she had started thinking about coming forward after the allegations about Hollywood film producer Harvey
Weinstein surfaced. Then she said she saw the news about Moore flashing across the television screen while in a break room at
her job at a company called NFM Lending in Westchester County, N.Y., Reinhard said.
Phillips also repeatedly asked the reporter to guarantee her that Moore would lose the election if she came forward. Reinhard
told her in a subsequent text message that she could not predict what the impact would be. Reinhard said she also explained to
Phillips that her claims would have to be fact-checked. Additionally, Reinhard asked her for documents that would
corroborate or support her story.
Later that day, Phillips told Reinhard that she felt “anxiety & negative energy after our meeting,” text messages show. “You just
didn’t convince me that I should come forward,” she wrote.
Reinhard replied, “I’m so sorry but I want to be straight with you about the fact-checking process and the fact that we can’t
guarantee what will happen as a result of another story.”
Phillips was not satisfied. On Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, she suggested meeting with another Post reporter,
Stephanie McCrummen, who co-wrote the initial article about Corfman. “I’d rather go to another paper than talk to you
again,” Phillips told Reinhard.
Back at the newsroom, Reinhard became concerned about elements of Phillips’s story. Phillips had said she lived in Alabama
only for a summer while a teenager, but the cellphone number Phillips provided had an Alabama area code. Reinhard called
NFM Lending in Westchester County, but they said a person named Jaime Phillips did not work there.
Alice Crites, a Post researcher who was looking into Phillips’s background, found a document that strongly reinforced the
reporters’ suspicions: a Web page for a fundraising campaign by someone with the same name. It was on the website
GoFundMe.com under the name Jaime Phillips.
“I’m moving to New York!” the May 29 appeal said. “I’ve accepted a job to work in the conservative media movement to
combat the lies and deceipt of the liberal MSM. I’ll be using my skills as a researcher and fact-checker to help our movement. I
was laid off from my mortgage job a few months ago and came across the opportunity to change my career path.”
In a March posting on its Facebook page, Project Veritas said it was seeking 12 new “undercover reporters,” though the
organization’s operatives use methods that are eschewed by mainstream journalists, such as misrepresenting themselves.
A posting for the “journalist” job on the Project Veritas website that month warned that the job “is not a role for the faint of
heart.”
The job’s listed goal: “To adopt an alias persona, gain access to an identified person of interest and persuade that person to
reveal information.”
It also listed tasks that the job applicant should be able to master, including: “Learning a script,” “Preparing a background
story to support your role,” “Gaining an appointment or access to the target of the investigation,” and “Operating concealed
recording equipment.”
Project Veritas, founded in 2010, is a tax-exempt charity that says its mission is to “investigate and expose corruption,
dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud and other misconduct.” It raised $4.8 million and employed 38 people in 2016,
according to its public tax filing. It also had 92 volunteers.
O’Keefe’s criminal record has caused the charity problems in some states. Mississippi and Utah stripped the group of a license
to raise money in those states because it failed to disclose O’Keefe’s conviction on state applications, records show.
Also working at Veritas is former television producer Robert J. Halderman, who was sentenced to six months in jail in 2010
after he was accused of trying to blackmail late-night host David Letterman. Halderman was with O’Keefe outside the Project
Veritas offices Monday as a reporter tried to ask about Phillips’s role with the organization.
Because Jaime Phillips is a relatively common name, it wasn’t a certainty that the GoFundMe page that Crites found was
created by the same woman who approached The Post. But there was another telling detail, in addition to the name. One of
two donations listed on the page was from a person whose name matched her daughter’s, according to public records.
McCrummen agreed to meet Phillips that afternoon.
Phillips suggested meeting somewhere in Alexandria, Va., saying she was shopping in the area. Post videographers
accompanied McCrummen, who brought a printout of the fundraising page to the interview.
Again, Phillips had arrived early and was waiting for McCrummen, her purse resting on the table. When McCrummen put her
purse near Phillips’s purse to block a possible camera, Phillips moved hers.
The Post videographers sat separately, unnoticed, at an adjacent table.
Phillips said she didn’t want to get into the details of what she had said happened between her and Moore.
She said she wanted McCrummen to assure her that the article would result in Moore’s defeat, according to a
recording. McCrummen instead asked her about her story regarding Moore.
Phillips complained that President Trump had endorsed Moore.
“So my whole thing is, like, I want him to be completely taken out of the race,” she said. “And I really expected that was going
to happen, and now it’s not. So, I don’t know what you think about that.”
McCrummen asked Phillips to verify her identity with a photo identification. Phillips provided a Georgia driver’s license.
McCrummen then asked her about the GoFundMe page.
“We have a process of doing background, checking backgrounds and this kind of thing, so I wanted to ask you about one
thing,” McCrummen said, pulling out a copy of the page and reading from it. “So I just wanted to ask you if you could explain
this, and I also wanted to let you know, Jaime, that this is being recorded and video recorded.”
“Okay,” Phillips said. “Um, yeah, I was looking to take a job last summer in New York, but it fell through,” Phillips said. “Yeah,
it was going to be with the Daily Caller, but it ended up falling through, so I wasn’t able to do it.”
When asked who at the Daily Caller interviewed her, Phillips said, “Kathy,” pausing before adding the last name, “Johnson.”
Paul Conner, executive editor of the Daily Caller, said Monday that no one with the name Kathy Johnson works for the
publication and that he has no record of having personally interviewed Phillips. Conner later said in an email that he had
asked other top editors at the Daily Caller and the affiliated Daily Caller News Foundation about Phillips.
“None of us has interviewed a woman by the name Jaime Phillips,” Conner wrote.
At the Alexandria restaurant on Wednesday, Phillips also told The Post that she had not been in contact with the Moore
campaign. As the interview ended, Phillips told McCrummen she was not recording the conversation.
“I think I probably just want to cancel and not go through with it at this point,” Phillips said at Souvlaki Bar shortly before
ending the interview.
“I’m not going to answer any more questions,” she said. “I think I’m just going to go.”
She picked up her coat and bag, returned her drink to the front counter and left the restaurant.
By 7 p.m. the message on the GoFundMe page was gone, replaced by a new one.
“Campaign is complete and no longer active,” it read.
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Shawn Boburg is a reporter for The Washington Post's investigative unit. Follow @ShawnBoburg
Aaron Davis is a reporter for The Post’s Investigative team. Follow @byaaroncdavis
Exhibit A: US gun violence spawns a new epidemic: conspiracy theorists harassing victims