title: Security (finance)

text: London is the centre of the eurosecurities markets. There was a huge rise in the eurosecurities market in London in the early 1980s. Settlement of trades in eurosecurities is currently effected through two European computerized clearing/depositories called Euroclear (in Belgium) and Clearstream (formerly Cedelbank) in Luxembourg.


title: Security (finance)

text: The main market for Eurobonds is the EuroMTS, owned by Borsa Italiana and Euronext. There are ramp up market in Emergent countries, but it is growing slowly.


title: Security (finance)

text: Securities that are represented in paper (physical) form are called certificated securities. They may be "bearer" or "registered".


title: Security (finance)

text: Securities may also be held in the Direct Registration System (DRS), which is a method of recording shares of stock in book-entry form. Book-entry means the company's transfer agent maintains the shares on the owner's behalf without the need for physical share certificates. Shares held in un-certificated book-entry form have the same rights and privileges as shares held in certificated form.


title: Security (finance)

text: Bearer securities are completely negotiable and entitle the holder to the rights under the security (e.g., to payment if it is a debt security, and voting if it is an equity security). They are transferred by delivering the instrument from person to person. In some cases, transfer is by endorsement, or signing the back of the instrument, and delivery.


title: Security (finance)

text: Regulatory and fiscal authorities sometimes regard bearer securities negatively, as they may be used to facilitate the evasion of regulatory restrictions and tax. In the United Kingdom, for example, the issue of bearer securities was heavily restricted firstly by the "Exchange Control Act" 1947 until 1953. Bearer securities are very rare in the United States because of the negative tax implications they may have to the issuer and holder.


title: Security (finance)

text: In Luxembourg, the law of 28 July 2014 concerning the compulsory deposit and immobilization of shares and units in bearer form adopts the compulsory deposit and immobilization of bearer shares and units with a depositary allowing identification of the holders thereof.


title: Security (finance)

text: In the case of registered securities, certificates bearing the name of the holder are issued, but these merely represent the securities. A person does not automatically acquire legal ownership by having possession of the certificate. Instead, the issuer (or its appointed agent) maintains a register in which details of the holder of the securities are entered and updated as appropriate. A transfer of registered securities is effected by amending the register.


title: Security (finance)

text: Modern practice has developed to eliminate both the need for certificates and maintenance of a complete security register by the issuer. There are two general ways this has been accomplished.


title: Security (finance)

text: In some jurisdictions, such as France, it is possible for issuers of that jurisdiction to maintain a legal record of their securities electronically.


title: Security (finance)

text: In the United States, the current "official" version of Article 8 of the Uniform Commercial Code permits non-certificated securities. However, the "official" UCC is a mere draft that must be enacted individually by each U.S. state. Though all 50 states (as well as the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands) have enacted some form of Article 8, many of them still appear to use older versions of Article 8, including some that did not permit non-certificated securities.


title: Security (finance)

text: To facilitate the electronic transfer of interests in securities without dealing with inconsistent versions of Article 8, a system has developed whereby issuers deposit a single global certificate representing all the outstanding securities of a class or series with a universal depository. This depository is called The Depository Trust Company, or DTC. DTC's parent, Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), is a non-profit cooperative owned by approximately thirty of the largest Wall Street players that typically act as brokers or dealers in securities. These thirty banks are called the DTC participants. DTC, through a legal nominee, owns each of the global securities on behalf of all the DTC participants.


title: Security (finance)

text: All securities traded through DTC are in fact held, in electronic form, on the books of various intermediaries between the ultimate owner, e.g., a retail investor, and the DTC participants. For example, Mr. Smith may hold 100 shares of Coca-Cola, Inc. in his brokerage account at local broker Jones & Co. brokers. In turn, Jones & Co. may hold 1000 shares of Coca-Cola on behalf of Mr. Smith and nine other customers. These 1000 shares are held by Jones & Co. in an account with Goldman Sachs, a DTC participant, or in an account at another DTC participant. Goldman Sachs in turn may hold millions of Coca-Cola shares on its books on behalf of hundreds of brokers similar to Jones & Co. Each day, the DTC participants settle their accounts with the other DTC participants and adjust the number of shares held on their books for the benefit of customers like Jones & Co. Ownership of securities in this fashion is called beneficial ownership. Each intermediary holds on behalf of someone beneath him in the chain. The ultimate owner is called the beneficial owner. This is also referred to as owning in "Street name".


title: Security (finance)

text: Among brokerages and mutual fund companies, a large amount of mutual fund share transactions take place among intermediaries as opposed to shares being sold and redeemed directly with the transfer agent of the fund. Most of these intermediaries such as brokerage firms clear the shares electronically through the National Securities Clearing Corp. or "NSCC", a subsidiary of DTCC.


title: Security (finance)

text: Besides DTC, two other large securities depositories exist, both in Europe: Euroclear and Clearstream.


title: Security (finance)

text: Each divided security constitutes a separate asset, which is legally distinct from each other security in the same issue. Pre-electronic bearer securities were divided. Each instrument constitutes the separate covenant of the issuer and is a separate debt.


title: Security (finance)

text: With undivided securities, the entire issue makes up one single asset, with each of the securities being a fractional part of this undivided whole. Shares in the secondary markets are always undivided. The issuer owes only one set of obligations to shareholders under its memorandum, articles of association and company law. A share represents an undivided fractional part of the issuing company. Registered debt securities also have this undivided nature.


title: Security (finance)

text: In a fungible security, all holdings of the security are treated identically and are interchangeable.


title: Security (finance)

text: Sometimes securities are not fungible with other securities, for example different series of bonds issued by the same company at different times with different conditions attaching to them.


title: Security (finance)

text: In the US, the public offer and sale of securities must be either registered pursuant to a registration statement that is filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or are offered and sold pursuant to an exemption therefrom. Dealing in securities is regulated by both federal authorities (SEC) and state securities departments. In addition, the brokerage industry is supposedly self policed by self-regulatory organizations (SROs), such as the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), formerly the National Association of Securities Dealers (or NASD), or the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board (MSRB).


title: Security (finance)

text: With respect to investment schemes that do not fall within the traditional categories of securities listed in the definition of a security (Sec. 2(a)(1) of the Securities Act of 1933 and Sec. 3(a)(10) of the 34 act) the US Courts have developed a broad definition for securities that must then be registered with the SEC. When determining if there is an "investment contract" that must be registered the courts look for an investment of money, a common enterprise and expectation of profits to come primarily from the efforts of others. See "SEC v. W.J. Howey Co."


title: Project Veritas

text: Project Veritas is an American far-right activist group founded by James O'Keefe in 2010. The group produces deceptively edited videos of its undercover operations, which use secret recordings in an effort to discredit mainstream media organizations and progressive groups. Project Veritas also uses entrapment to generate bad publicity for its targets, and has propagated disinformation and conspiracy theories in its videos and operations.


title: Project Veritas

text: Targets of Project Veritas include Planned Parenthood, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), NPR, CNN, and "The Washington Post". In 2009, Project Veritas associates published misleading videos that depicted ACORN employees providing advice on concealing illegal activity, causing ACORN to shut down after losing funding; ACORN was cleared of wrongdoing by the Attorney General of California in 2010, and the associates paid a total of $150,000 in settlements to an ACORN employee who sued for defamation. NPR CEO Vivian Schiller resigned in 2013 after Project Veritas released a deceptively edited video portraying another NPR executive making controversial comments about the Tea Party movement and NPR's federal funding. Project Veritas unsuccessfully attempted to mislead "The Washington Post" into publishing false information about the Roy Moore sexual misconduct allegations in 2017; the "Post" won a Pulitzer Prize after uncovering the operation. In 2022, a jury awarded $120,000 against Project Veritas for fraudulent misrepresentation concerning nonprofit Democracy Partners.


title: Project Veritas

text: As a non-governmental organization, Project Veritas is financed by conservative fund Donors Trust (which provided over $6.6million from 2011 to 2019) and other supporters including the Donald J. Trump Foundation. In 2020, "The New York Times" published an exposé detailing Project Veritas' use of spies recruited by Erik Prince, to infiltrate "Democratic congressional campaigns, labor organizations and other groups considered hostile to the Trump agenda". The "Times" piece notes O'Keefe's and Prince's close links to the Trump administration, and details contributions such as a $1million transfer of funds from an undisclosed source to support their work. The findings were based in part on discovery documents in a case brought by the American Federation of Teachers, Michigan, which had been infiltrated by Project Veritas.


title: Project Veritas

text: During the 2016 United States presidential election, the organization falsely claimed to have shown that Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign accepted illegal donations from foreign sources. Two Project Veritas members were sued for defamation by an employee of Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) who was wrongfully depicted as a "willing participant in an underage sex-trafficking scheme". The suit resulted in two settlements: O'Keefe issued a statement of regret and paid the ACORN employee $100,000 in 2013; the other Project Veritas member paid the employee an additional $50,000 in 2012.


title: Project Veritas

text: In 2017, Project Veritas was caught in a failed attempt to trick "The Washington Post" into posting a fabricated story about the sexual misconduct allegations against Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore. Rather than uncritically publish a story that accused Republican candidate Moore of impregnating a teenager, "The Washington Post" critically examined the story that they were presented with, checked the source, assessed her credibility, and ultimately found that there was no merit to her claims, and that instead Project Veritas was trying to dupe "The Washington Post".


title: Project Veritas

text: O'Keefe has been barred from fundraising for Project Veritas in Florida, Maine, Mississippi, Utah, and Wisconsin, partly because of his federal criminal record for entering a federal building under fraudulent pretenses and partly because Project Veritas has repeatedly failed to properly disclose O'Keefe's criminal convictions in applications for nonprofit status. Similar disclosure issues for the group's registration also exist in New Mexico, New York, and North Carolina.


title: Project Veritas

text: On February 11, 2021, the Twitter account for Project Veritas was "permanently suspended for repeated violations of Twitter's private information policy." At the same time, O'Keefe's personal account was temporarily locked for violating the policy pending the deletion of a tweet. Twitter permanently suspended O'Keefe's personal account on April 15 for violating the website's policy on "platform manipulation and spam", which prohibits the use of fake accounts to "artificially amplify or disrupt conversations". O'Keefe denied that he used fake accounts on Twitter and stated that he intends to sue Twitter in response. In November, 2022 Twitter's new CEO Elon Musk announced the Project Veritas Twitter account was restored along with a number of other high profile far-right accounts.


title: Project Veritas

text: In September 2021, the headquarters of Project Veritas in Marmaroneck, New York, was destroyed by Hurricane Ida. Later that month, the organization announced that it had been scammed out of in what appeared to be a business email compromise attack. Attackers monitoring O'Keefe's email communications with his attorneys succeeded in interjecting an email from a similar-looking account into a conversation about an invoice payment, and the organization transferred funds to an account operated by the scammers.


title: Project Veritas

text: Project Veritas uses deceptive techniques, including recording people without their knowledge and misrepresenting their employees' identities and purposes. It hires former U.S. and British military and intelligence agents to train its employees, who are often referred to as "agents" or "operatives" in internal documents. Internal memos show that Project Veritas clears these activities with its legal team to stay within the boundaries of the law, which "The New York Times" says is a sign of Project Veritas' interest in "using tactics that test the boundaries of legality and are outside of mainstream reporting techniques." "Rolling Stone" called Project Veritas' reporting practices "dubious" with their reporters actively manipulating their targets into the reactions.


title: Project Veritas

text: Project Veritas was founded in June 2010, but O'Keefe had produced two major deceptive videos before founding the project.


title: Project Veritas

text: In 2006, O'Keefe met Lila Rose, the founder of an anti-abortion group on the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) campus. They secretly recorded encounters in Planned Parenthood clinics in Los Angeles and Santa Monica, in which Rose posed as a 15-year-old girl impregnated by a 23-year-old male. Rose and O'Keefe made two videos incorporating heavily edited versions of the recordings and released them on YouTube. The video omitted the portions of the full conversation, in which a Planned Parenthood employee asked Rose to consult her mother about the pregnancy and another employee told Rose, "We have to follow the laws". Rose took down the videos after Planned Parenthood sent her a cease and desist letter in May 2007 asserting that the videos violated California's voice recording laws, which required consent from all recorded parties.


title: Project Veritas

text: The organization produced deceptively edited videos targeting the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a 40-year-old advocacy organization for individuals of low and moderate income.


title: Project Veritas

text: In September 2009, O'Keefe and his associate, Hannah Giles, published edited hidden camera recordings in which Giles posed as a prostitute and O'Keefe as her boyfriend, a law student, in an attempt to elicit damaging responses from employees of ACORN. ACORN mostly registered people from the Latino and African American communities.


title: Project Veritas

text: The videos were recorded during the summer of 2009 and appeared to show low-level ACORN employees in six cities providing advice to Giles and O'Keefe on how to avoid detection by authorities of tax evasion, human smuggling and child prostitution. He framed the undercover recordings with a preface of him dressed in a "pimp" outfit, which he also wore in TV media interviews. This gave viewers, including the media, the impression that he had dressed that way when speaking to ACORN workers. However, he actually entered the ACORN offices in conservative street clothes (the sleeve of his dress shirt is visible on camera). Furthermore, the ACORN employees involved reported his activities to the San Diego Police Department after he left. O'Keefe selectively edited and manipulated his recordings of ACORN employees and distorted the chronologies. Several journalists and media outlets have expressed regret for not properly scrutinizing and vetting his work.


title: Project Veritas

text: After the videos were released through the fall of 2009, Congress voted to freeze federal funding to ACORN. The Census Bureau and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) terminated their contract relationships with ACORN. By December 2009, an external investigation of ACORN was published which cleared the organization of any illegality, while commenting that its poor management practices contributed to unprofessional actions by some low-level employees. In March 2010, ACORN announced it would dissolve due to loss of funding from government and especially private sources. On March 1, 2010, Brooklyn District Attorney Charles J. Hynes found that there was no criminal wrongdoing by the ACORN staff in New York.


title: Project Veritas

text: The California Attorney General's Office granted O'Keefe and Giles limited immunity from prosecution in exchange for providing the full, unedited videotapes related to ACORN offices in California. On the basis of the edited videotape which O'Keefe released, Vera appeared to be a willing participant in helping with O'Keefe's plan to smuggle young women into the United States illegally. However, authorities confirmed that Vera immediately contacted them about O'Keefe and that he had also encouraged O'Keefe to share as much information as possible about his scheme and gather further evidence of O'Keefe's purported illegal activities, which could then be used by prosecutors to bring charges against O'Keefe for attempted human trafficking. Due to O'Keefe's release of the dubiously edited video, intentionally designed to "prove" that ACORN employees were ready and willing to engage in illicit activities, Vera lost his job and was falsely portrayed as being engaged in human trafficking.


title: Project Veritas

text: O'Keefe moved for summary judgment in his favor, arguing that the plaintiff had no reasonable expectation that the conversation would be private. In August 2012, the federal judge hearing the case denied O'Keefe's motion for summary judgment. The judge ruled that O'Keefe had "misled plaintiff to believe that the conversation would remain confidential by posing as a client seeking services from ACORN and asking whether their conversation was confidential." On March 5, 2013, O'Keefe agreed to pay $100,000 to former California ACORN employee Juan Carlos Vera, and acknowledged in the settlement that at the time he published his video he was unaware that Vera had notified the police about the incident. As part of the settlement, O'Keefe apologized for his actions, expressing regret for "any pain suffered by Mr. Vera or his family." Giles paid Vera $50,000 in a separate settlement in the summer of 2012.


title: Project Veritas

text: On June 14, 2010, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) published its report finding no evidence that ACORN, or any of its related organizations, had mishandled any of the $40 million in federal money which they had received in recent years.


title: Project Veritas

text: Starting October 25, 2010, O'Keefe posted a series of videos on the Internet entitled "Teachers Unions Gone Wild." At the time, the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) was in negotiations with Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor, over teacher pay benefits and tenure. O'Keefe obtained one video from recordings made by "citizen journalists", whom he recruited to attend the NJEA's leadership conference. They secretly recorded meetings and conversations with teacher participants. It featured teachers discussing the difficulty of firing a tenured teacher.


title: Project Veritas

text: A second video featured a staged phone conversation by O'Keefe with Lawrence E. Everett, assistant superintendent of the Passaic, New Jersey city schools, in which Everett refused to commit to firing a teacher based upon the purported claim by a parent that the teacher had used the "n-word" with his child. The third video (October 26, 2010) featured audio of a voice, identified as NJEA Associate Director Wayne Dibofsky, who alleged voter fraud during the 1997 Jersey City mayoral election. The voice of Robert Byrne, Jersey City municipal clerk, was recorded on the same video; he noted that the election was monitored by lawyers for both candidates.


title: Project Veritas

text: New Jersey's Republican Governor Chris Christie stated at the time that nothing on the videos surprised him. NJEA spokesman Steve Wollmer said the union and its attorneys were discussing their options regarding possible legal action, although no action was ever taken. Wollmer called the videos "a calculated attack on this organization and its members", and described O'Keefe as "flat-out sleazy".


title: Project Veritas

text: In the summer of 2011, O'Keefe released videos in which an actor working for Project Veritas attempted to apply for benefits while hinting that he was a drug smuggler; the actor failed to obtain benefits. In Maine, Governor Paul LePage concluded upon further examination of the videos that there was no fraud or intent to commit fraud.


title: Project Veritas

text: The videos received less media attention than earlier O'Keefe efforts. Generally, the state officials and representatives acknowledged potential problems but also took a measured tone in response, to allow time to fully investigate and evaluate the incidents. After viewing the video, Maine governor Paul LePage thanked the individual who took the video and noted: "The video in its entirety does not show a person willfully helping someone de-fraud the welfare system. It does show a need for further job knowledge and continuous and improved staff training." He also stated that "we would be six months further along in fixing the problem" if he had received the video when it was filmed. LePage directed his agency director to work on correcting the problem.


title: Project Veritas

text: Ben Johnson of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services noted that benefits were never granted in the case, and that the made-up story would have been caught if the application process had proceeded. He said his office would use the video to strengthen staff training. Mike DeWine, Attorney General of Ohio, described the Ohio video as "outrageous" and intended to instruct his state's Medicaid fraud unit to look into the incident. The director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, Michael Colbert, notified county leaders of a mandatory retraining, "to ensure they can identify people trying to defraud the government". A spokesman for Virginia governor Bob McDonnell said that he had asked state police to review the video and take whatever actions are appropriate.


title: Project Veritas

text: In Charleston, South Carolina, the director of that state's Department of Health and Human Services, Anthony Kreck, said the video filmed in his state "raises concerns about how well trained and supported our staff are to handle outrageous situations." He also expressed concern for the safety of the state employee with the figure ["Sean Murphy"] in the video "who could be interpreted as intimidating" and questioned why security wasn't called.


title: Project Veritas

text: On March 8, 2011, shortly before the US Congress was to vote on funding for National Public Radio (NPR), O'Keefe released a heavily edited video of a discussion with Ronald Schiller, NPR's senior vice president for fundraising, and associate Betsy Liley. The content was secretly recorded by O'Keefe's partners, Simon Templar (a pseudonym) and Shaughn Adeleye, who pretended to be Muslim individuals named Ibrahim Kasaam and Amir Malik.


title: Project Veritas

text: In the video, the NPR executives were shown meeting with Kasaam and Malik, who styled themselves as representatives of a self-described Muslim charity called the "Muslim Education Action Center" that wished to donate money to NPR. NPR responded by stating that Schiller's remarks were presented out of sequence and that he said that he would speak personally, and not for NPR. Schiller said some highly placed Republicans believed the Republican Party had been hijacked by a radical group (the Tea Party) that they characterized as "Islamophobic" and "seriously racist, racist people", and while Schiller did not disagree, according to NPR, O'Keefe's editing made it appear those were Schiller's opinions. Schiller then says that unlike establishment Republicans, the growing Tea Party movement in the party "is fanatically involved in people's personal lives and very fundamental Christian — I wouldn't even call it Christian. It's this weird evangelical kind of move."


title: Project Veritas

text: Later in the edited video, Schiller seems to say he believes NPR "would be better off in the long run without federal funding", explaining that removal of federal funding would allow NPR more independence and remove the widely held misconception that NPR is significantly funded by the public. But on the raw tape, Schiller also said that withdrawing federal funding would cause local stations to go under and that NPR is doing "everything we can" to keep it.


title: Project Veritas

text: In a statement released before analysis of the longer raw video, NPR said, "The fraudulent organization represented in this video repeatedly pressed us to accept a $5 million check, with no strings attached, which we repeatedly refused to accept. We are appalled by the comments made by Ron Schiller in the video, which are contrary to what NPR stands for."


title: Project Veritas

text: Journalists Ben Smith, James Poniewozik, and Dave Weigel have expressed regret for giving O'Keefe's NPR videos wider circulation without scrutinizing them for themselves.


title: Project Veritas

text: Comparison of the raw video with the released one revealed editing that was characterized as "selective" and "deceptive" by Michael Gerson, opinion writer in "The Washington Post", who wrote, "O'Keefe did not merely leave a false impression; he manufactured an elaborate, alluring lie." "Time" magazine wrote that the video "transposed remarks from a different part of the meeting", was "manipulative" and "a partisan hit-job."


title: Project Veritas

text: The raw video shows Schiller told the two men "that donors cannot expect to influence news coverage". On the longer tape, he says, "There is such a big firewall between funding and reporting: Reporters will not be swayed in any way, shape or form." The broadcast journalist Al Tompkins, who now teaches at the Poynter Institute, noted that Ron Schiller was a fundraiser, not an official affecting the newsroom. He commented on the raw tape: "The message that he said most often—I counted six times: He told these two people that he had never met before that you cannot buy coverage", Tompkins said. "He says it over and over and over again.


title: Project Veritas

text: On March 17, Martha T. Moore of "USA Today" reported: "According to "The Blaze" analysis, Ron Schiller's most inflammatory remarks, that Tea Party members are 'seriously racist', were made as he was recounting the views of Republicans he has spoken with—although he does not appear to disagree. It also shows Schiller appearing to laugh about the potential spread of Islamic "sharia" law, when the longer version shows he laughed in reaction to something completely different."


title: Project Veritas

text: Two days later, O'Keefe released a video in which Betsy Liley, senior director of institutional giving at NPR, appeared to have checked with senior management and said MEAC was cleared to make donations anonymously and NPR could help shield donations from government audits, but added that, in order to proceed, additional background information would be required, including an IRS Form 990. Liley advised the caller that NPR executives would investigate them before accepting any large donation, examining tax records and checking out other organizations that have received donations from them. Liley raises the possibility of NPR's turning down substantial gifts and stresses the "firewall" between the revenue-generating part of NPR and its news operation. NPR put Liley on administrative leave. In emails released following the publication of the Liley video, NPR confirmed that the official had consulted appropriately with top management and notified the purported donors of problems with their desired method of donation.


title: Project Veritas

text: The video, which was released directly before a congressional vote on funding, caused immediate reaction from NPR critics in Congress. Ronald Schiller, who had already submitted his resignation in January so that he could join the Aspen Institute, moved up his resignation after the video release when NPR put him on administrative leave. NPR CEO Vivian Schiller (no relation to Ronald Schiller), who had not been implicated in the Project Veritas video, quickly resigned. Vivian Schiller's resignation, mutually decided with the NPR board, was in part an attempt to show Congressional funders that NPR could hold itself accountable.


title: Project Veritas

text: In January 2012, O'Keefe released a video of associates obtaining a number of ballots for the New Hampshire primary by using the names of recently deceased voters. He stated that the video showed "the integrity of the elections process is severely comprised ." His team culled names from published obituaries, which were checked against public voter roll information. O'Keefe said his team broke no laws, as they did not pretend to be the deceased persons when they asked for the ballots, and they did not cast votes after receiving ballots. One of his associates' attempts was caught by a voting supervisor at the polling station who recognized that the name he gave was of a deceased individual; the associate in question left before police arrived.


title: Project Veritas

text: Sarah Parnass of ABC News reported that the video "either exposes why voting laws are too lax or comes close to itself being voter fraud (or both) ..." One media account referred to it as a stunt. New Hampshire Governor John Lynch said, "I think it is outrageous that we have out-of-staters coming into New Hampshire, coming into our polling places and misrepresenting themselves to the election officials, and I hope that they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, if in fact they're found guilty of some criminal act." The New Hampshire Attorney General and the US Attorney's Office announced investigations into the video.


title: Project Veritas

text: New Hampshire Associate Attorney General Richard Head said he would investigate the possible weaknesses in the voting system, but noted the state did not have a history of known fraud related to person[s] seeking ballot[s] in the name of a dead person or persons. Head announced he would investigate the possibility that the filmmakers committed crimes while producing the videos.


title: Project Veritas

text: Hamline University law professor David Schultz said, "If they [O'Keefe's group] were intentionally going in and trying to fraudulently obtain a ballot, they violated the law", referring to Title 42, which prohibits procuring ballots fraudulently. The New Hampshire Attorney General's office later dropped its investigation of O'Keefe for potential voter fraud in 2013.


title: Project Veritas

text: On October 24, 2012, a video was released showing Patrick Moran, son of then-U.S. Congressman Jim Moran (D-VA), and a field director with his father's campaign, discussing a plan to cast fraudulent ballots, which was proposed to him by someone who posed as a fervent supporter of the campaign. The person he was speaking with was a conservative activist with O'Keefe's Project Veritas, and was secretly recording the conversation. Patrick Moran resigned from the campaign, saying he did not want to be a distraction during the election, stating:[A]t no point have I, or will I ever endorse any sort of illegal or unethical behavior. At no point did I take this person seriously. He struck me as being unstable and joking, and for only that reason did I humor him. In hindsight, I should have immediately walked away, making it clear that there is no place in the electoral process for even the suggestion of illegal behavior, joking or not.The Arlington County Police Department was made aware of the video and opened a criminal investigation into "every component" of the matter.


title: Project Veritas

text: On January 31, 2013, Arlington County announced that the investigation, by its police department in collaboration with the Offices of the Virginia Attorney General and the Arlington County Commonwealth's Attorney, had concluded and that no charges would be brought. The County stated: "Patrick Moran and the Jim Moran for Congress campaign provided full cooperation throughout the investigation. Despite repeated attempts to involve the party responsible for producing the video, they failed to provide any assistance."


title: Project Veritas

text: In 2014, Project Veritas released a video purporting to show illegalities in voter registration activities conducted by Battleground Texas. A complaint against Battleground Texas was filed with the Secretary of State office, where the case was ultimately referred to two special prosecutors. The special prosecutors' 18 page report concluded there was "no applicable criminal offense for the alleged act and insufficient evidence to suggest potential offenses." The report also described the video as "little more than a canard and political disinformation". The case was dismissed.


title: Project Veritas

text: In 2014, at the Cannes Film Festival, Project Veritas released a deceptive video purporting to show that Josh Fox and other environmentalist documentary film makers could be influenced by foreign money. Fox is known for "Gasland", a film which exposed problems with the use of fracking for gas and oil production in the United States. Pretending to represent Middle Eastern petroleum interests, Project Veritas operatives promised anonymous funding if Fox would produce a documentary to their liking. Their professed interest was that opposing fracking would preserve U.S. reliance on Middle Eastern oil. Fox released his own recording of the phone call, which showed the Project Veritas video was a misrepresentation. Fox had repeatedly told the fake investors that he was not interested.


title: Project Veritas

text: On October 18, 2016, O'Keefe released a series of videos on Project Veritas' YouTube channel titled "Rigging the Election" apparently showing former national field director Scott Foval of Americans United for Change mentioning they should ensure they have people at the front of the rope lines at rallies in order to ask questions, a common practice known as "bird dogging". The accuracy of the videos was questioned for possibly omitting context, and the unedited raw footage has not been made available. The GOP-appointed Attorney General of Wisconsin, Brad Schimel, investigated the claims made in the video twice, both times finding no evidence that Foval broke any voting laws.


title: Project Veritas

text: DNC Chair Donna Brazile said, "We do not believe, or have any evidence to suggest, that the activities articulated in the video actually occurred." Scott Foval was fired by Americans United for Change after the first video was released. Foval later said he had been set up. Robert Creamer a DNC consultant and husband of U.S. Representative Jan Schakowsky, D-IL, said, "We regret the unprofessional and careless hypothetical conversations that were captured on hidden cameras of a regional contractor for our firm, and he is no longer working with us," he said. "While none of the schemes described in the conversations ever took place, these conversations do not at all reflect the values of Democracy Partners." Shortly afterwards, Creamer, who was also featured in the video, said he would end his consulting arrangement with the DNC to avoid becoming a "distraction".


title: Project Veritas

text: Following the publication of his videos, O'Keefe filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) against the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton and the DNC, alleging "a criminal conspiracy" involving the Clinton campaign, the DNC and three left-leaning super PACs. On June 1, 2017, Creamer's firm, Democracy Partners, filed a $1 million lawsuit against Project Veritas, claiming Project Veritas had lied to gain access to the firm and violating anti-wiretapping laws. In September 2022, a jury found that Project Veritas had violated wiretapping laws and misrepresented itself to Democracy Partners, whom the jury awarded with $120,000. Project Veritas said that it would appeal the jury's decision.


title: Project Veritas

text: In response to a third video, in which O'Keefe stated that Clinton was behind an illegal public relations gimmick to punish Trump for not releasing his tax returns, the Clinton campaign denied any wrongdoing. Independent campaign finance experts posited the video doesn't support O'Keefe's claims. Clinton said she was aware of the activists dressed as Donald Duck, who were following Donald Trump while asking about his tax returns, and said she was amused.


title: Project Veritas

text: On October 26, 2016, O'Keefe posted a fourth video on his Project Veritas Action YouTube channel. The video alleged that liberal groups supporting Hillary Clinton were illegally taking foreign money. The targeted group, Americans United for Change foundation, is a 501(c)4 organization and is allowed to legally accept foreign contributions. However, AUC returned the money shortly after the video was released. The group's chief stated, "We returned the money because the last thing we want to be associated with is a character like O'Keefe who has been convicted and successfully sued for his illegal tactics and fraudulent activities."


title: Project Veritas

text: On January 9, 2017, Project Veritas operative Allison Maass was filmed attempting to bribe members of Americans Take Action into inciting a riot at Trump's inauguration. On January 16, 2017, Project Veritas uploaded a video showing DC Antifascist Coalition members of Disrupt J20 plotting to use "stink bombs" at the DeploraBall. After the video's release, Disrupt J20 denied the statements, saying that the members deliberately gave false information to Veritas. The video led to the arrest of one man allegedly involved in the plan, as well as two associates. All three individuals pleaded guilty.


title: Project Veritas

text: In October 2016, Project Veritas released a video taken at a United Federation of Teachers holiday party on December 16, 2015. It was secretly recorded by a Project Veritas associate posing as a political consultant. In the video, the Democratic representative from Manhattan on the New York City Board of Elections, Commissioner Alan Schulkin, agreed with several of the Veritas operatives' statements criticizing Mayor Bill de Blasio's municipal ID program. Schulkin said, "The law says you can't ask for anything. Which they really should be able to do. I believe they should be able to do it. They should ask for your ID. I think there is a lot of voter fraud." and "People don't realise certain neighbourhoods in particular, they bus people around to vote" and "They put them in a bus and go poll site to poll site."


title: Project Veritas

text: Shortly after the release of the video, Mayor de Blasio called Schulkin's behavior "entirely inappropriate" and said that Schulkin should resign. In a follow-up interview with the "New York Post", Schulkin stated, "I should have said 'potential fraud' instead of 'fraud'". Referring to the Project Veritas operative who secretly recorded him, Schulkin said, "She was like a nuisance. I was just trying to placate her", noting that in his haste to get away from her, he "was agreeing with her when I shouldn't have been." Schulkin was not reappointed after his term expired on December 31, 2016.


title: Project Veritas

text: On June 26, 2017, O'Keefe released a hidden-camera video on Project Veritas' YouTube channel that showed John Bonifield, a producer of health and medical stories for CNN, saying that CNN's coverage of the Russian investigation was for "ratings" and that the coverage was "mostly bullshit". Bonifield had no involvement in CNN's political reporting; the video falsely implied that Bonifeld held a senior decision-making role at CNN. When questioned about who Bonifield was speaking to or the video's source, Project Veritas declined to comment. According to an investigation by CNN, Veritas' operative gained access to Bonifield by falsely presenting themselves as someone seeking a mentor for a career in journalism. In a statement, CNN stated: "CNN stands by our medical producer John Bonifield. Diversity of personal opinion is what makes CNN strong, we welcome it and embrace it." During a White House press briefing, deputy White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders encouraged people to watch the video "whether it's accurate or not".


title: Project Veritas

text: On June 28, 2017, O'Keefe released the second part of the series of undercover videos, by then dubbed "American Pravda". In the video, CNN anchor Van Jones said, "The Russia thing is just a big nothingburger." When asked about the video in an email, CNN responded "lol". During that same day, the videos were posted on Donald Trump's Instagram account. Jones said that O'Keefe had deceptively edited the video to take his remarks out of context and was attempting to "pull off a hoax". Jones added that he believed that there probably was collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.


title: Project Veritas

text: On June 30, 2017, O'Keefe released the third part of the undercover videos. Part 3 of the series showed CNN associate producer Jimmy Carr saying that Trump is "fucking crazy" and that "on the inside, we all recognize he is a clown, that he is hilariously unqualified for this, he's really bad at this, and that he does not have America's best interests". Carr also said "This is a man who's not actually a Republican, he just adopted that because that was the party he thought he could win in. He doesn't believe anything that these people believe." Additionally, he said American voters are "stupid as shit". He also made comments about Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway, calling her an "awful woman" and stating that she "looks like she got hit with a shovel". In a fourth video published by Project Veritas on July 5, Carr criticized CNN co-anchor Chris Cuomo.


title: Project Veritas

text: On May 2, 2018, Project Veritas posted on YouTube two videos in which a Project Veritas employee, posing as the sister of a non-existent teacher, falsely stated that their fictional brother had pushed a student and expressed concern for their future; the union administrators they were speaking to reassured them. In the second video, the administrator referenced a teacher who had been accused of fourth-degree criminal sexual contact with a 16-year-old student, stating that they had successfully defended them; in reality, the teacher had pled guilty. The union attempted to force the administrator in question to resign, but an arbitrator blocked this decision, ruling it "too harsh a penalty" for their statements.


title: Project Veritas

text: In 2019, a former software engineer, Zachary Vorhies, released internal Google documents to Project Veritas regarding the 2016 presidential election. "CNBC" reviewed the documents and reported that "the documents do not appear to contain any outright allegation of vote manipulation or attempts to bias the election." Google declined to comment on the material.


title: Project Veritas

text: CNBC reported that among other things, the documents appeared to include lists related to how Google determines whether news sources are credible or whether they contain hate speech, which Project Veritas purported to indicate bias in search rankings. In response to a tweet by Donald Trump, in which he claimed, without evidence, that Google manipulated 2.6 million votes favoring Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, a Google spokesperson reiterated a previous statement that Google has "never re-ranked or altered search results to manipulate political sentiment."


title: Project Veritas

text: In 2019, Project Veritas accused ABC News of suppressing a 2015 interview with a key accuser of the alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Project Veritas obtained a recording of ABC news anchor Amy Robach in an unguarded moment lamenting that her interview had never been broadcast. Robach and an ABC official say the story lacked sufficient corroboration at that time.


title: Project Veritas

text: In September 2020, Project Veritas and O'Keefe had repeatedly promoted the release of material supposedly showing evidence of voter fraud, with September 28 being the promoted release date. On September 27, Mike Lindell, honorary chairman of President Trump's re-election campaign in Minnesota, abruptly announced that the release date was changed to that very day, within hours of "The New York Times" publishing information on its investigation of the tax returns of Donald Trump. Researchers at Stanford University and the University of Washington concluded that the change in timing was likely connected to the "Times" story.


title: Project Veritas

text: O'Keefe began releasing the material on Twitter on September 27, in video form. Within seven minutes, Donald Trump Jr., the son of the president, separately uploaded the video to Twitter, instead of re-sharing the video from O'Keefe's account. Two minutes later, an account for Trump's re-election campaign re-shared the video, while Trump himself soon began responding. Additionally, Trump Jr. uploaded the video to Facebook earlier than O'Keefe. These events present "questions of coordination" on whether the Trump campaign "had access to the video before the general public", stated the researchers from the two universities. In addition, several well-known right-wing Twitter accounts both promoted the release of the material, and immediately shared the Twitter video upon release, leading to researchers concluding that this was "a great example of what a coordinated disinformation campaign looks like".


title: Project Veritas

text: Project Veritas alleged that the material they released showed that Minnesota's Representative Ilhan Omar was connected to a cash-for-ballot harvesting scheme. Fact-checking website Snopes wrote that the videos "lack evidence to support this accusation", and that they included "clips of conversations that raise questions about the original context and intent of the words spoken." Snopes requested that Project Veritas release its raw, unedited footage, but Project Veritas refused. Snopes also could not verify the accuracy of the Somali to English translations done by Project Veritas. "USA Today" offered a similar assessment in their fact-check, stating that the Project Veritas material provides "no actual proof of fraud or any relationship between individuals in the video and Omar or her campaign". "The New York Times" wrote that the Project Veritas used only unidentified sources, and provided "no verifiable evidence that Representative Ilhan Omar's campaign had collected ballots illegally," writing that the story "was probably part of a coordinated disinformation effort".


title: Project Veritas

text: The main material featured by Project Veritas were two videos uploaded to YouTube. The videos feature only one person who was both identified and interviewed on-camera: Omar Jamal. He describes himself as "part of the Ramsey County Sheriff's Office". The Office stated that Omar Jamal was part of the community support group, instead of being involved in policing activities. Omar Jamal was not speaking on behalf of the Office when he alleged voter fraud, stated the Office. Omar Jamal also mentions his leadership of the Somali Watchdog Group. Its website was created in August 2020, which mentions no other members of the organization other than Omar Jamal. "The Daily Dot" describes Omar Jamal as "uncredentialed" and "questionable", noting that he claimed to have studied at Tufts University Graduate School of International Affairs, but the school denied it. The Daily Dot also states that Omar Jamal is not the United Nations Permanent Representative to the Federal Republic of Somalia, as he has claimed. Shortly after the release of the videos, Jamal started soliciting for public donations on GoFundMe, asking for a total of $500,000 for legal defense funds and for "financial stability".


title: Project Veritas

text: Project Veritas named the first YouTube video: "Ilhan Omar connected Ballot Harvester in cash-for-ballots scheme: 'Car is full' of absentee ballots." This video featured Snapchat clips of Liban Osman, a man from Minneapolis. Liban Osman never mentions Ilhan Omar, but does refer to his brother, Jamal Osman, a Minneapolis City Councilman. In different Snapchat clips, Mohamed separately makes reference to the topics of money and ballots, although he never says he received money to collect ballots. Ballot harvesting is legal in Minnesota, and there was no limit on collecting absentee ballots in Minnesota from late July 2020 to early September 2020. FOX 9 received the full Snapchat clips from Liban Osman, who alleged that Project Veritas had edited and combined the videos to take them out of context. FOX 9 described the full clips as showing that Liban Osman was working for his brother, not Ilhan Omar. The full Snapchat clips also showed that when Liban Osman discussed money in politics, he was referring to his brother's competitors in Minneapolis' Ward 6 election, many of whom had little-funded campaigns. Liban Osman told FOX 9 that he rejected a $10,000 bribe by Omar Jamal to say that Liban Osman was offering to pay people to vote for Ilhan Omar.


title: Project Veritas

text: The second YouTube video uploaded on this topic by Project Veritas was entitled "Omar Connected Harvester SEEN Exchanging $200 for General Election Ballot. 'We don't care illegal." However, Snopes states that it is "unclear what's going on. All one sees in the video is two unidentified men speaking Somali in an outdoor setting, discussing filling out a voter registration form. At one point, money allegedly changes hands." FOX 9 heard from two sources that the two men in the above incident are Omar Jamal and a relative of his, and that what Omar Jamal was doing was passing his relative $200 to transfer to the family of another relative, who was sick in Somalia.


title: Project Veritas

text: As a result of the videos, the Minneapolis Police is "looking into the validity" of the allegations. "Sahan Journal" reported that Omar Jamal had later given an interview where he stated that he had not met any person who was paid to vote, which would contradict what he told Project Veritas.


title: Project Veritas

text: Project Veritas released a video where a Pennsylvania postal worker in Erie claimed, without evidence, that on November 5, the Erie postmaster told a postal supervisor "that they messed up yesterday", because "they had postmarked one of the ballots the fourth instead of the third, because they were supposed to put them for the third".


title: Project Veritas

text: On November 10, officials of the Postal Service Office of Inspector General told members of Congress that the postal worker had recanted the claims to investigators. Shortly afterwards, multiple news reports reported that the postal worker, Richard Hopkins, told investigators from the U.S. Postal Service's Office of Inspector General that his allegations were not true and had signed an affidavit recanting his claims. Hopkins initially denied that he had recanted his allegations; however, he had no comment when the final Postmaster's General report and audio recordings from his interview confirmed that he had done so.


title: Project Veritas

text: Also on November 11, Project Veritas released a two-hour audio recording purportedly of the conversation between Hopkins and the investigators. "The Washington Post" described it as "not clear" if Project Veritas had edited the audio recording before release. In the recording, Hopkins is heard saying that Project Veritas wrote his affidavit for him. Additionally, Hopkins recounted that when he was interacting with Project Veritas, he was in "so much shock [he] wasn't paying that much attention to what they were telling me". Hopkins says in the audio that he heard parts of a conversation, with the specific phrases he heard being "ballots on the 4th", "all for the 3rd", and "one postmarked on the 4th". Hopkins acknowledged in the audio that he had not heard the word "backdate".


title: Project Veritas

text: The Postal Service inspector general investigated and released a report in March 2021 confirming that Hopkins had recanted the account and finding no evidence to support his original claim. Project Veritas continued to promote the postal worker's claims of fraud after they had been discredited.


title: Project Veritas

text: On 13 January 2021, Raquel Rodriguez, a former campaign worker was arrested and charged with election tampering, after Project Veritas posted an edited video of the woman, in which she appears to be helping an elderly person fill out a mail-in ballot form and discussing assisting people at the polls. Rodriguez stated that she is the niece of the woman she is seen on video with, and has moved to have charges dismissed on the grounds that it is not unlawful to help relatives vote.


title: Project Veritas

text: Project Veritas released a hidden camera video alleging a voter in New Hampshire had voted twice (once under an assumed name) in 2016. The person had been investigated by the New Hampshire State Police and referred to the state Attorney General in 2020, but the investigation languished unresolved until Project Veritas pursued the matter with the Attorney General's office. The man pled guilty to a felony of voting twice and was sentenced to 90 days in jail, which was suspended. He also pled guilty and was fined for a civil violation of applying for and receiving a ballot using a false name. The voter had been appointed an Inspector of Elections, someone who assists in the polling place during an election, although the appointment was rescinded following Project Veritas' reporting.


title: Project Veritas

text: O'Keefe and colleagues were arrested in the Hale Boggs Federal Complex in New Orleans in January 2010 and charged with entering federal property under false pretenses with the intent of committing a felony, at the office of United States Senator Mary Landrieu, a Democrat. His three fellow activists, who were dressed as telephone repairmen when apprehended, included Robert Flanagan, the son of William Flanagan, acting U.S. Attorney of the Eastern District of Louisiana. The four men were charged with malicious intent to damage the phone system. O'Keefe stated that he had entered Landrieu's office to investigate complaints that she was ignoring phone calls from constituents during the debate over President Barack Obama's health care bill.


title: Project Veritas

text: The charges in the case were reduced from a felony to a single misdemeanor count of entering a federal building under false pretenses. O'Keefe and the others pleaded guilty on May 26. O'Keefe was sentenced to three years' probation, 100 hours of community service and a $1,500 fine. The other three men received lesser sentences.


title: Project Veritas

text: In August 2013, O'Keefe revisited the incident by releasing a video entitled: "a confrontation with former U.S. Attorney Jim Letten on the campus of Tulane University". Letten is a former Republican U.S. Attorney who recused himself from the Landrieu incident because he knew the father of one of the men involved. The video shows Letten accusing O'Keefe of "terrorizing" Letten's wife at their home, of harassing him, and trespassing on the Tulane campus. He called O'Keefe a "coward" and a "spud", and referred to O'Keefe and his companions as "hobbits" and "scum".


title: Project Veritas

text: In August 2010, O'Keefe planned a staged encounter with the CNN correspondent Abbie Boudreau, who was doing a documentary on the young conservative movement. He set up an appointment at his office in Maryland to discuss a video shoot. Izzy Santa, executive director of Project Veritas, approached Boudreau when she arrived at the site. Santa warned Boudreau that O'Keefe was planning to meet with her on board a nearby boat, where he would try to seduce Boudreau. This would be filmed on hidden cameras. Boudreau did not board the boat and soon left the area.


title: Project Veritas

text: CNN later published a 13-page plan written by O'Keefe mentor Ben Wetmore. It listed props for the boat scheme, including pornography, sexual aids, condoms, a blindfold and "fuzzy" handcuffs. When questioned by CNN, O'Keefe denied he was going to follow the Wetmore plan, as he found parts of it inappropriate. Boudreau commented "that does not appear to be true, according to a series of emails we obtained from Izzy Santa, who says the e-mails reveal James' true intentions."


title: Project Veritas

text: Following the Boudreau incident, Project Veritas paid Izzy Santa a five-figure settlement after she threatened to sue, which included a nondisclosure agreement.


title: Project Veritas

text: In October 2014, O'Keefe and his two colleagues attempted to bait staffers for Congressman Jared Polis (D-CO) and then-U.S. Senator Mark Udall (D-CO), as well as independent expenditure organizations, into approving voter fraud, according to several staffers who interacted with O'Keefe and his colleagues. Staffers began photographing O'Keefe's crew and advising them that what they were advocating was illegal; one nonprofit said they contacted police.


title: Project Veritas

text: The 2013 Colorado election modernization act had required that all registered voters receive mail-in ballots. PV released a video showing a few individuals appearing to be OK with illegal suggestions PV's people proffered, e.g. finding and voting discarded ballots. But no evidence of illegal activity was shown.


title: Project Veritas

text: On March 16, 2016, O'Keefe attempted to call Open Society Foundations under the assumed name of Victor Kesh, describing himself as attached to "a foundation" seeking to "get involved with you and aid what you do in fighting for European values." O'Keefe forgot to hang up after recording the voicemail, and several more minutes of audio were recorded, revealing that he was attached to Discover the Networks and planning a series of attempts to create embarrassing videos or other recordings of targeted groups.


title: Project Veritas

text: Beginning in July 2017, Project Veritas operative Jaime Phillips attempted to infiltrate "The Washington Post" and other media outlets by joining networking groups related to journalism and left-leaning politics. She and a male companion attended events related to the "Post", and their conversations with journalists were sometimes covertly recorded.


title: Project Veritas

text: In November 2017, "The Washington Post" reported that several women accused Republican Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore of pursuing them while they were teenagers and he was in his 30s. Later that same month, Jaime Phillips approached "The Washington Post" and falsely claimed that Moore had impregnated her as a teenager and that she had an abortion. In conducting its usual fact-checking, the "Post" discovered multiple red flags in her story. They found a GoFundMe page in her name that said, "I've accepted a job to work in the conservative media movement to combat the lies and of the liberal MSM." After a "Post" reporter confronted her with the inconsistencies during a video-recorded interview, Phillips denied that she was working with an organization that targets journalists, and said that she no longer wanted to do the story. She was seen outside Project Veritas' office in Mamaroneck, New York, with her car remaining at the office's parking lot for more than an hour. O'Keefe declined to comment about the woman's apparent connection to Project Veritas. Instead of running a story about Phillips' supposed pregnancy, the "Post" published an article about the attempted sting operation. The "Post" decided to disclose Phillips' original discussions made off the record, saying that Phillips' lies voided any agreement to keep those disclosures confidential.


title: Project Veritas

text: Hours after the "Post" published this story, O'Keefe released a video which he claimed exposed the newspaper's liberal bias. The video includes undercover footage of conversations with two "Post" employees, national security reporter Dan Lamothe and product director Joey Marburger. These employees explained to undercover Project Veritas operatives the difference between the news reporting of "The Washington Post" (which calls out the Trump administration's missteps while giving "him credit where there's credit" due) and the "Post"s opinion editorials; O'Keefe said that this exposed the "Washington Post"s "hidden agenda".


title: Project Veritas

text: O'Keefe was criticized for his failed sting, and "The Washington Post" was praised. Rod Dreher of "The American Conservative" praised the "Post" and called on conservative donors to stop giving money to O'Keefe's outfit. Dan McLaughlin of the conservative "National Review" said that O'Keefe's sting was an "own goal" and that O'Keefe was doing a disservice to the conservative movement; Jim Geraghty of the "National Review" made a similar assessment. Byron York of "The Washington Examiner" said that O'Keefe's "idiocy" was "beyond boneheaded," and that "O'Keefe really ought to hang it up." Ben Shapiro, the conservative editor in chief of "The Daily Wire", said that the botched sting was "horrible, both morally and effectively." Conor Friedersdorf of "The Atlantic" wrote, "If James O'Keefe respected the right-wing populists who make up the audience of Project Veritas ... he would tell them the truth about all of the organizations that he targets. Instead, Project Veritas operates in bad faith, an attribute it demonstrated again this week in the aftermath of its bungled attempt to trick "The Washington Post"." Noah Rothman of the conservative magazine "Commentary" chastised O'Keefe for being exploitative of his audience: "No longer are institutions like Veritas dedicated to combating ignorance in their audience. They're actively courting it."


title: Project Veritas

text: Jonathan Chait of "New York" magazine said that O'Keefe, having set out to prove that the "Post" was fake news, ended up disproving it. O'Keefe's plot collapsed because it was premised on a ludicrously false worldview, wrote Chait. ""The Washington Post" does not, in fact, publish unverified accusations just because they're against Republicans." O'Keefe's attempts to prove rampant voter fraud have failed "because voter fraud is not rampant."


title: Project Veritas

text: In 2018, "The Washington Post" was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for its coverage of the allegations against Moore, including its exposé of the unsuccessful Project Veritas sting.


title: Project Veritas

text: "The New York Times" reported in May 2021 that multiple operatives from Project Veritas were involved in a scheme to discredit FBI employees and other officials who they viewed to be enemies of President Trump. Living out of a large shared home in Georgetown, women employed by Project Veritas went on dates with FBI employees in an attempt to secretly record them denigrating Trump. National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster was a primary target of this operation, though efforts against him ended in March 2018 when McMaster resigned his position.


title: Project Veritas

text: Project Veritas has sued "The New York Times" over a 2020 story released by the newspaper concerning a Project Veritas video alleging voter fraud in Minnesota.


title: Project Veritas

text: Project Veritas released a series of videos, starting on 20 September 2021 and finishing on 6 October 2021, with millions of views on YouTube, showing nurse Jodi O'Malley, who works for the Indian Health Service in Arizona, speaking with a doctor identified as Maria Gonzales. Gonzales can be heard saying: "All this is bullshit. Now, [a patient] probably [has] myocarditis due to the vaccine. But now, they are not going to blame the vaccine, they are not reporting it. They want to shove it under the mat.” Claims that the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) fails to register reports are misleading. VAERS, which currently contains over 720,000 reports, was designed for purposes of early warning and it may contain "incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable" information. Despite minor challenges, data from VAERS still is helpful to health regulators such as the CDC and the FDA in their search for vaccine-related adverse effects.


title: Project Veritas

text: "The New York Times" reported in November 2021 that the FBI raided the homes of Project Veritas employees as part of a Justice Department investigation into the alleged theft and publication of the diary of Ashley Biden, a daughter of President Joe Biden. Some pages were posted on a right-wing website on October 24, 2020. The FBI also raided O'Keefe's apartment. O'Keefe confirmed that the FBI searched the homes of current and former employees. In a video statement, O'Keefe said Project Veritas chose not to publish the diary because it could not be authenticated. O'Keefe also said Project Veritas returned the diary to law enforcement and attempted to return it to one of Biden's lawyers, who had "refused to authenticate it".


title: Project Veritas

text: On November 14, 2021, the American Civil Liberties Union published a statement in response to the raid:


title: Project Veritas

text: The Committee to Protect Journalists, while clarifying that "we do not endorse some of the tactics Project Veritas employs", expressed concern that lacking "a clear link between members of Project Veritas and allegations of criminal activities" the FBI raids and seizure of evidence were a "dangerous precedent that could allow law enforcement to search and confiscate reporters' unpublished source material in vague attempts to identify whistleblowers."


title: Project Veritas

text: In December 2021, a federal judge appointed Barbara Jones to serve as a special master to ensure prosecutors could not access materials protected by attorney-client privilege and that the group's First Amendment rights as a media organization were protected.


title: Project Veritas

text: In March 2022, Project Veritas issued a letter to the special master, alleging that the Justice Department subverted First Amendment protections and secretly seized Veritas' internal emails. Veritas further alleged that the Justice Department issued gag orders to Microsoft, the host of the emails, barring them from revealing the seizures to Veritas.


title: Project Veritas

text: In August 2022, Florida residents Aimee Harris and Robert Kurlander pleaded guilty in federal court to stealing the diary and other items belonging to Ashley Biden, and selling them to Project Veritas. The two agreed to cooperate with the Justice Department's investigation into how the diary was acquired by Project Veritas.


title: Project Veritas

text: Much of the funding for Project Veritas comes from anonymous donations through Donors Trust, a conservative, American nonprofit donor-advised fund backed by the Koch brothers, which according to its promotional materials, says that it will "keep your charitable giving private, especially gifts funding sensitive or controversial issues". Donors Trust provided Project Veritas with gradually increasing cash infusions, including $25,000 in 2011, $922,500 in 2015, $1.7 million in 2016, and over $4 million in 2019.


title: Project Veritas

text: Other prominent donors include the Donald J. Trump Foundation, which donated $20,000 in 2015, including a $10,000 transfer in May 2015, which was made a month before the launch of Donald Trump's presidential campaign. O'Keefe attended, as a guest of the Trump campaign, the final presidential debate, and was later available in the spin room following the Las Vegas event.


title: Project Veritas

text: The group is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization. The group's political branch is Project Veritas Action (also known as the Project Veritas Action Fund), a 501(c)(4) organization.


title: Project Veritas

text: "The Daily Dot" reported that they found a pattern in which Project Veritas' supposed whistleblowers "almost all establish crowdfunding pages hyped by Project Veritas within days and hours of going public with their allegations." "The Daily Dot" provided seven examples in 2019 or 2020: Richard Hopkins, Zach McElroy, Eric Cochran, Cary Poarch, Greg Copolla, Ryan Hartwig, and Omar Jamal, who each raised between $20,000 to over $115,000 on GoFundMe, although in some instances, the money was not disbursed.


title: Project Veritas

text: In the aftermath of the 2022 FBI raid on O'Keefe, Project Veritas said they did journalism and could invoke First Amendment rights that protect members of news media. According to "Columbia Journalism Review" "the Justice Manual, a departmental handbook, doesn’t directly define who qualifies as news media, and thus receives those protections, instead favoring a case-by-case approach. To make its evaluation, the department employs a 'News Media Policy Consultation' form, which (as revealed by a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Timm and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University) lays out twelve factors for law enforcement agents to consider, including whether the individual possesses press credentials and whether they 'primarily [report] facts, as opposed to expressing opinion.' ... In the case of Veritas, according to filings, prosecutors determined that O’Keefe didn’t meet its standards for news media."


title: James Carville

text: Chester James Carville Jr. (born October 25, 1944) is an American political consultant, author, and occasional actor who has strategized for candidates for public office in the United States and in at least 23 nations abroad. A Democrat, he is an expert pundit in U.S. elections who appears frequently on cable news programs, podcasts, and public speeches.


title: James Carville

text: Nicknamed the "Ragin' Cajun", Carville gained national attention for his work as a lead strategist in Bill Clinton's winning 1992 Presidential campaign. Carville also had a principal role crafting strategy for three unsuccessful Democratic Party presidential contenders, including Massachusetts Senator John Kerry in 2004, New York Senator Hillary Clinton in 2008, and Colorado Senator Michael Bennet's campaign for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2020.


title: James Carville

text: Carville was born on October 25, 1944, at a U.S. Army hospital at Georgia's Fort Benning, where his father was stationed during World War II. His mother, Lucille (née Normand), stayed behind in Carville, Louisiana, where James was raised, but went to Ft. Benning long enough to have her firstborn son. Carville would later note: "We were availing ourselves to free government health services." Lucille Carville, a former school teacher, spoke French at home, and sold the "World Book Encyclopedia" door-to-door, and his father, Chester James Carville Sr., was a postmaster as well as owner of a general store.


title: James Carville

text: Carville, Louisiana, a neighborhood in the city of St. Gabriel, in Iberville Parish, located sixteen miles south of the capital city of Baton Rouge on the Mississippi River, was named after his paternal grandfather, Louis Arthur Carville, who was once the postmaster. Louis Arthur's mother, Octavia Dehon, was of Belgian parentage and had married John Madison Carville, described in a biography as "Irish-born" and a "carpetbagger," both of whom established the general store operated by the family in Carville, in 1882. Carville has seven siblings (Bonnie, Mary Ann, Gail, Pat, Steve, Bill, and Angela.).


title: James Carville

text: Among Carville's earliest political campaign work was ripping down the campaign signs of a candidate for public office during his high school years. Carville graduated from Ascension Catholic High School in Donaldsonville, Louisiana, in 1962.


title: James Carville

text: He attended Louisiana State University (LSU) from 1962 to 1966, but did not graduate at that time. In a 1994 feature in "Newsweek", Carville characterized himself as "something less than an attentive scholar. I had fifty-six hours' worth of Fs before LSU finally threw me out."


title: James Carville

text: Carville served a two year enlistment in the United States Marine Corps, from 1966 to 1968, where he was stationed stateside, at Camp Pendleton in San Diego. He achieved the rank of Corporal.


title: James Carville

text: Following the conclusion of his military enlistment, Carville finished his studies at LSU at night, where he earned his Bachelor of Science degree in General Studies in 1970 and his Juris Doctor degree in 1973. Carville is a member of the Sigma Nu fraternity. He later worked as a junior high school science teacher. Before entering politics, Carville worked as an attorney at McKernnan, Beychok, Screen and Pierson, a Baton Rouge law firm, from 1973 to 1979.


title: James Carville

text: Carville was trained in consulting by Gus Weill, who in 1958 had opened the first advertising firm that specialized in political campaigns in the state capital in Baton Rouge.


title: James Carville

text: In a 2012 piece he wrote for Foreign Affairs, Carville described one of his earliest political jobs distributing 'hate sheets' with negative literature on a political opponent at grocery stores on behalf of Ossie Bluege Brown, during Brown's 1972 campaign for district attorney of East Baton Rouge Parish. Two years earlier, Brown had defended Staff Sergeant David Mitchell, the first of 17 soldiers charged in connection with the deaths of villagers during the Mỹ Lai massacre. Brown's tenure as D.A. was marked by his crusades against narcotics and pornography. In 1973, Brown prevented Baton Rouge theaters from showing Bernardo Bertolucci's X-rated film, "Last Tango in Paris," In 1979, Brown blocked the showing of the comedy, "Monty Python's Life of Brian." Brown asked Baton Rouge magazine distributors not to offer the March 1977 issue of Hustler, which a state court judge in Ohio ruled obscene.


title: James Carville

text: In addition to his work as an attorney, in the late 1970s, Carville also worked for Gus Weill & Ray Strother's Weill-Strother, a Baton-Rouge-based political consulting firm that, over the years, had assisted with electoral campaigns and political messaging for Louisiana governors Jimmie Davis, John McKeithen, Edwin Edwards, and U.S. Representative Otto Passman.


title: James Carville

text: In the early 1980s, Carville served as executive assistant to East Baton Rouge Parish mayor-president Pat Screen.


title: James Carville

text: In early 1985, Carville consulted to help Cathy Long win a special election to central Louisiana's now defunct 8th congressional district, following the death of her husband, Gillis William Long, of Louisiana's Long family political dynasty.


title: James Carville

text: In 1984, Carville became acquainted with his consulting partner Paul Begala when Carville managed then Texas state legislator Lloyd Doggett's unsuccessful campaign for the open Texas Senate seat. Carville helped Doggett, an unabashed liberal and committed enemy of special interests, secure the Democratic nomination in a primary that included conservative U.S. Representative Kent Hance, and centrist former congressman Bob Krueger. During the primary, Carville borrowed a rubber vertebrae exhibit from a friend who was a personal injury attorney, and coached Doggett on using it as a prop on the stump to attack Krueger as a political flip flopper who lacked resolve and 'backbone.'


title: James Carville

text: During the general election, Doggett's opponent, Phil Gramm, leveraged vicious identity-based attacks on Doggett. On one occasion, Doggett ended up returning small dollar fundraising he received from a gay rights group. Gramm emphasized themes of "family values," including his insistence at a June 1984 prayer breakfast on "having people who believe in Christianity in charge of government," and Carville counter-punched that theme as anti-semitic. Doggett was defeated in the general election, polling 2,207,557 votes (41.5 percent), to Gramm's 3,116,348 votes (58.5 percent).


title: James Carville

text: Finding himself out of work after the November 1984 defeat, Carville recalled, "I was scared to death, I was 40 years old, and didn't have any health insurance, I didn't have any money, I was mortified."


title: James Carville

text: During the 1986 general election, Carville helped Bob Casey Sr. win election as the 42nd Governor of Pennsylvania by defeating his Democratic primary opponent, Ed Rendell, in early 1986, and general election opponent Dick Thornburgh's lieutenant governor, Bill Scranton, who had taken the lead in the polls after announcing that his campaign was pulling all negative ads, and challenged Casey to do the same. However, the Scranton campaign misstepped by sending a mailer to 600,000 Republican voters that featured a letter from Scranton's father. An additional brochure harshly attacking Casey's ethics was also included. Carville began counterpunching; he contacted journalists and characterized the mailer as outrageous. Scranton claimed that he did not know about the mailing, so Carville ordered 600,000 blank envelopes, loaded them up on a truck – mountains of envelopes – and dumped them on a street corner near Scranton's campaign headquarters. Television cameras captured the campaign, asking: "How could you send out this many envelopes and not know about it?" Three weeks before the election, a poster appeared statewide, depicting Scranton as a "long-haired, dope smoking hippie." The race was virtually tied until five days before the election, when Carville launched the "guru," a TV commercial that portrayed Scranton as having been a regular drug user during the 1960s, also mocking Scranton's interest in transcendental meditation and his ties to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The image of Scranton as a meditating, long haired, dope-smoking hippie, with a background of sitar music, was credited with tipping the scales against Scranton in the socially conservative rural sections of Pennsylvania where Carville selectively decided to run the "guru" TV commercial. Casey went on to win the election by a narrow margin of 79,216 out of 3.3 million total votes cast.


title: James Carville

text: In 1987, Carville worked as a campaign manager to cast Kentucky businessman Wallace Wilkinson as a self-made millionaire anti-establishment gubernatorial candidate. Wilkinson, who had made his fortune in retail, and real estate development, and who was sued for not paying overtime to his employees, and refused to release his tax returns to the public, charged his Democratic primary opponents with wanting to raise taxes, and continually campaigned on creating a state lottery to raise public revenue. During the general election portion of the campaign, on September 25th, 1987, Carville appeared on WLEX-TV's 'Your Government' public affairs program, and implored reporters to look into the background of Wilkinson's opponent John Harper's family, noting: "there might be problems with some of Harper's children." After the incident, Harper confirmed that his son had been shot and killed by Franklin County, Ohio police during a 1978 pharmacy robbery. Wilkinson won the general election polling 504,674 votes (64.5%) to Harper's 273,141 (34.91%), and as Kentucky's 57th governor, secured passage of a state constitutional amendment to allow a lottery.


title: James Carville

text: In 1989 and 1990, Carville assisted conservative Democrat and four term lieutenant governor Zell Miller in winning the state party's gubernatorial nomination in a five candidate contest that included Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, then-state senator Roy Barnes, and former governor Lester Maddox.


title: James Carville

text: Miller campaigned on a platform of shock incarceration boot camps for first time drug offenders, blasted Young for "an explosion of crime" in Atlanta, and painted Young with wanting to "run away from" the issue of drugs. At Carville's counseling, Miller made a state lottery in lieu of state tax increases a central theme of his campaign. Carville attributed Miller's eleven point primary victory over Young to the attraction of the lottery issue and its capacity to turn out white suburban voters. "Zell Miller was able to set the agenda, and the agenda was the lottery," Carville noted at the time.


title: James Carville

text: Miller won the nominating contest in the August, 1990 runoff against Young, and later defeated Johnny Isakson in the November, 1990 general election. Miller was later a keynote speaker at the 1992 Democratic National Convention and 2004 Republican National Conventions.


title: James Carville

text: Carville consulted in 1990 for former Texas Congressman and sitting state Attorney General Jim Mattox, a bare-knuckled political brawler who routinely traveled to Huntsville to attend state executions in Texas, the most active state in carrying out the death penalty. On advice from Carville, Mattox who was seeking the Democratic gubernatorial nomination that year, based his campaign on the claim that a state lottery would solve Texas' revenue needs without additional state taxes.


title: James Carville

text: With no facts to support the charge, Mattox also ran a television advertisement accusing his primary opponent, State Treasurer Ann Richards a recovering alcoholic, as a cannabis and cocaine user who might falter in fulfilling the responsibilities of being governor. In losing the nominating contest to Richards, Mattox gained a reputation as a combative campaigner.


title: James Carville

text: In 1991, Carville consulted for Harris Wofford in his run for the open U.S. Senate seat left vacant when Senator John Heinz was killed in an April, 1991 plane crash. Following the crash, Carville, who was by then a close political confidant of Governor Casey, hatched a plan to offer his appointment of the Senate seat to Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca, an Allentown native who declined the offer within 24 hours. Attorney and later Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney II was also considered, but Casey ultimately decided to appoint Wofford, then his state Secretary of Labor, to fill the seat, and Wofford faced a special election in November of that year.


title: James Carville

text: Against the national backdrop of the first Gulf War, and a dour economy, Wofford's general election opponent, George H.W. Bush's sitting U.S. Attorney General, Dick Thornburgh, was widely seen as a surrogate of the Bush political machine, and the contest was widely viewed as an early referendum on Bush's reelection prospects the following year.


title: James Carville

text: Wofford was one of the first whites to graduate from Howard University school of law, travelled to India and wrote a book on Gandhi, co-founded the Peace Corps, and was arrested at the 1968 Democratic National Convention for disorderly conduct, and was an opponent of apartheid. A philosophical progressive, and college president, he had served as an aide to both John F. Kennedy, and a friend and adviser to Martin Luther King Jr. Wofford had the air of an "anti-politician," rumpled in appearance, and uncomfortable with small talk who ran a campaign with themes of economic populism.


title: James Carville

text: Though the issue polled a distant 5th in voter concerns, Wofford himself eschewed guidance from his consultants in demanding national health insurance be the centerpiece of his campaign. With the assistance of a guild of Philadelphia ophthalmologists, Wofford crafted an impactful slogan: "If criminals have access to a lawyer, working Americans should have a right to a doctor."


title: James Carville

text: In the months leading into the election, Wofford overcame Thornburgh's 44 point lead in the polls and defeated him in November, garnering 1,860,760 votes (55 percent), to Thornburgh's 1,521,986 (45 percent).


title: James Carville

text: Carville again consulted for Wofford's re-election campaign in 1994 when he was narrowly defeated by Republican Rick Santorum.


title: James Carville

text: In late 1992, and early 1993, Carville consulted for San Fernando Valley state assemblyman Richard Katz in his run for the open 1993 Los Angeles mayoral election, which was the first time in 63 years that an incumbent mayor didn't appear on the ballot. Katz ran on a tough-on-crime platform that included gun control, including new sales taxes on firearms and ammunition, and selling-off city-owned infrastructure, such as the Ontario International Airport, to pay police overtime, while promising not to raise property taxes. Despite retaining Carville, and spending a million dollars on campaign television commercials, Katz finished behind three other candidates, garnering 46,173 votes, or 9.73% of 474,366 total votes cast in the nonpartisan blanket mayoral primary, and did not advance to the general election.


title: James Carville

text: In 1992, Carville helped lead Bill Clinton to a win against George H. W. Bush in the presidential election. In crafting an economic strategy for Clinton, Carville reprised the populist rhetoric his client, Pennsylvania Senator Harris Wofford, successfully wielded the prior year, which was distilled into a series of articles Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele wrote for "The Philadelphia Inquirer". The articles were re-printed into book form: "America: What Went Wrong?" which became a prop Clinton brandished effectively from the stump during a time of economic recession. In bringing in the series of articles from the Wofford campaign, Carville imported an angry left-wing populism as a campaign theme.


title: James Carville

text: One of the formulations he used in that campaign has entered common usage, derived from a list he posted in the campaign war room to help focus himself and his staff, with these three points:


title: James Carville

text: Carville sought to shield Clinton from Gennifer Flowers' allegations of her extramarital sexual affair which emerged shortly before the 1992 New Hampshire Democratic primary. Carville alleged that Flowers was paid $175,000 by a supermarket tabloid for sharing her story, and that "the mainstream media got sucker-punched" by her allegations. Carville set out to shame the press, berating reporters with charges of "cash for trash" journalism, and noted: "I'm a lot more expensive than Gennifer Flowers.". Flowers later brought a civil suit against Carville in 1999 (see below).


title: James Carville

text: In June 1992, trailing George H. W. Bush and Ross Perot in the polls, Clinton limped toward the national convention, while the Los Angeles riots crowded him out of news coverage. Carville knew he needed to bring Clinton back into the news limelight. He did so by orchestrating Clinton's splashy criticism of hip hop artist Sister Souljah in a prepared speech Clinton delivered at the Rainbow Coalition's June 1992 "Rebuild America" conference in Washington, DC. Sister Souljah had remarked: "If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?" Clinton responded in his speech by saying, "If you took the words, 'white' and 'black' and you reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech." Clinton refuted the suggestion that his speech was a calculated attempt to appeal to moderate and conservative swing voters by standing up to a core Democratic constituency. The speech had the effect of opening up a public war between Clinton and Jesse Jackson.


title: James Carville

text: In 1993, Carville was honored as Campaign District Manager of the Year by the American Association of Political Consultants. His role in the Clinton campaign was documented in the feature-length Academy Award-nominated film "The War Room".


title: James Carville

text: Carville continued to serve the Democratic National Committee in a political capacity during the 1990s, and had an ongoing need to regularly visit the White House to speak with then President Bill Clinton on political matters. Accordingly, Carville was once one of only twenty individuals at the time who was granted a permanent "Non-Government Service" security badge, which were used for non-government employees, such as contractors, who needed regular access to the White House grounds. In consideration for the privilege of the permanent pass, the Clinton Administration asked Carville to submit to a full security clearance style FBI background check.


title: James Carville

text: In response to the 1997 civil lawsuit then Arkansas state employee Paula Jones filed against Bill Clinton over her claims of sexual harassment while attending a conference on official business, Carville infamously remarked: "Drag a hundred dollars through a trailer park and there's no telling what you'll find." South Carolina U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham later made reference to Carville's trailer park line during the 2018 Brett Kavanaugh SCOTUS confirmation hearings in reference to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. During an October, 2018 interview with Michael Smerconish on CNN, on the topic of Graham alluding to Carville's "drag $100", Carville remarked that, at the time, "I was making a joke", and added "I'm always complimented when people use my lines; you always like to leave a little legacy out there."


title: James Carville

text: In 1999, Gennifer Flowers, who had previously alleged an affair with Carville's 1992 client Bill Clinton, sued Carville and his colleague George Stephanopoulos for defamation of character. In 2000, Flowers additionally named Hillary Clinton as a defendant in the suit. Attorney Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch, a conservative advocacy organization, represented her in the suit. Flowers contended that Carville and Stephanopoulos ignored obvious warning signs that news media reporting did not conclusively determine that tapes of her recorded telephone conversations with Clinton were "doctored." In 2004, a federal district court dismissed the case with summary judgment. Klayman then appealed the case on Flowers' behalf. In 2006, 14 years after the allegations of the affair became an issue for Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit affirmed the lower court's dismissal.


title: James Carville

text: Beginning in the mid-1990s, Carville worked on a number of election campaigns abroad, including those of Tony Blair, then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, during the 2001 general election (in which Blair was comfortably re-elected), and with the Liberal Party of Canada.


title: James Carville

text: Carville viewed working campaigns abroad as more commercially lucrative, and with less reputational risk than campaigns in the United States noting in 2009: "If you help elect a president and then you get involved in a governor's race and you lose, it's going to be a little bit damaging to your reputation. But if you go to Peru and you run a presidential race and you lose, no one knows or cares. So why go to New Jersey and lose for 100 grand when you can go to Peru and lose for a million?"


title: James Carville

text: Carville has been less forthcoming to the news media about his work abroad, and remarked to a "Los Angeles Times" reporter in 1999, "I won't comment on anything I do outside the U.S."


title: James Carville

text: In 2002, on behalf of the U.S. State Department, Carville, and his wife, political consultant Mary Matalin, met with a group of 55 Arab women political leaders during the 2002 United States midterm elections. The programming, "Women as Political Leaders" International Visitor (IV) Program", was the first program implemented under the auspices of the Middle East Partnership Initiative, a collection of 40 programs headed by then deputy assistant secretary for Near East Affairs Liz Cheney. In addition to events with Carville and Matalin, the group met with congressional, state and local campaign staff, and observed campaign work during their visits to Concord, New Hampshire, Dallas, Texas, Detroit, Michigan, Toledo, Ohio, Raleigh, North Carolina, and Tallahassee and Tampa, Florida.


title: James Carville

text: That year, Carville also proposed visiting Arab and Muslim nations on behalf of the US government to do "some kind of propaganda," adding "I'd love to use my experience and skills to tell people about my country and what's available to them beyond hopelessness and terrorism." He added, "What the terrorists are after is the younger and increasingly poor population. What they are offering is not that much, but we are not doing a good job telling those young people the other side of the story. It's time we told them about choices they have without imposing American values."


title: James Carville

text: Carville, Begala, and Mary Matalin advised incumbent Greek Prime Minister Konstantinos Mitsotakis in an election that saw local Greek press allege United States interference in the election. Unpopular because his program of economic austerity and privatization, Mitsotakis failed in his reelection bid, and lost to democratic socialist Andreas Papandreou.


title: James Carville

text: In 1994, Carville consulted for Fernando Henrique Cardoso in his successful 1994 campaign for the Brazilian presidency. Cardoso, a professor and Fulbright Fellow lectured in the United States during the 1980s at Columbia University on issues of democracy in Brazil. Cardoso, often nicknamed "FHC", was elected with the support of a heterodox alliance of his own Social Democratic Party, the PSDB, and two right-wing parties, the Liberal Front Party (PFL) and the Brazilian Labour Party (PTB). During his tenure in office, Cardoso's administration liquidated public assets and deepened the privatization of government-owned enterprises in steel milling, telecommunications and mining, along with making reforms to Brazil's social security income program and tax systems.


title: James Carville

text: In 1997, Carville consulted for then leader of the National Congress of Honduras, Carlos Flores Facussé in his presidential campaign. Flores attended the American School of Tegucigalpa, studied international finance at Louisiana State University in the early 1970s, and married a U.S. citizen from Tennessee.


title: James Carville

text: He later became the publisher of his family's "La Tribuna", a leading Honduran newspaper, and served on various corporate boards of directors, including the Central Bank of Honduras, and became involved in politics. Flores was aligned with former president Roberto Suazo Cordova's "Rodista" faction, the more conservative wing of the liberal party. Vowing to move Honduras past its image of being primarily a banana and coffee exporter, Flores campaigned on his "New Agenda" platform, that included a ten point plan to stabilize the economy. Flores distanced himself from the outgoing Reina administration, while successfully portraying himself as an opposition candidate from the same party.


title: James Carville

text: In the November, 1997 general election, Flores faced National party candidate Nora Gúnera de Melgar, the wife of General Juan Alberto Melgar Castro, who seized power in a 1975 coup which removed then president Oswaldo López Arellano after his bananagate bribery scandal with United Fruit Company.


title: James Carville

text: Flores defeated his opponent by a 10% margin of 195,418 votes out of a total of 1,885,388 votes cast. Gúnera de Melgar's campaign was aided by the assistance Dick Morris, rival political consultant and also a political adviser to Bill Clinton. Morris claimed he had no knowledge of Carville's involvement with his opponent until after the election.


title: James Carville

text: In October, 1998, Hurricane Mitch devastated Honduras, and post hurricane reconstruction efforts resulted in international development banks renegotiating much of Honduras' external debt in exchange for structural adjustment policies. After selling state-owned airports and energy companies, Flores unsuccessfully attempted to privatize Hondutel, the state-owned telephone utility, and when that effort failed, the International Monetary Fund froze the distribution of loans and demanded that the government further accelerate its privatization programs.


title: James Carville

text: In 1998, Carville help craft a successful strategy to elect Jamil Mahuad Witt as President of Ecuador. Mahuad, an Ecuadorian-born attorney, earned a Master of Public Administration from Harvard Kennedy School, where he was Mason Fellow. He was also a US State Department-sponsored Fulbright Fellow, who lectured in ethics and politics at several universities.


title: James Carville

text: Mahuad was elected Mayor of Quito in the 1990s before retaining the services of Carville to help him win the Ecuadorian presidency, in a campaign in which Mahuad touted his educational background at Harvard Kennendy School.