Right-Wing Provocateurs Caught In The Act

The first report comes from Michigan, where right-wing provocateurs Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, who have been allowed to get away with their shit for years by law enforcement, finally ran into a no nonsense attorney general who has had enough. The Detroit Fee Press reports, Michigan attorney general charges right-wing provocateurs with election felonies:

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel (above) is charging two well-known election provocateurs with felonies related to a racist robocall in metro Detroit that spread false information about the upcoming general election.

Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman are accused of orchestrating calls that went to thousands of voters in Detroit and other cities. The calls reportedly targeted Black voters and spread misinformation about voting by mail.

“Any effort to interfere with, intimidate or intentionally mislead Michigan voters will be met with swift and severe consequences,” Nessel said in a news release.

“This effort specifically targeted minority voters in an attempt to deter them from voting in the November election. We’re all well aware of the frustrations caused by the millions of nuisance robocalls flooding our cellphones and landlines each day, but this particular message poses grave consequences for our democracy and the principles upon which it was built. Michigan voters are entitled to a full, free and fair election in November and my office will not hesitate to pursue those who jeopardize that.”

Wohl and Burkman had denied any involvement in the calls, although the audio in the call cited an organization with which they are affiliated. The two are known for creating hoaxes and spreading misinformation in an effort to champion conservative causes and President Donald Trump.

According to Nessel’s Office, their investigation determined similar calls went to residents in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Illinois. Investigators believe roughly 85,000 robocalls were made, although a definitive total is unknown.

The charges were filed in 36th District Court in Detroit. Wohl lives in California and Burkman lives in Virginia. The news release said Nessel’s Office is working to ensure both appear in Michigan to respond to the charges.

Both are charged with one count of attempting to intimidate voters, one count of conspiracy to commit an election law violation, one count of using a computer to attempt to intimidate voters and one count of using a computer to commit the crime of conspiracy. Each is a felony and carries a punishment of anywhere from five to seven years in prison.

The call falsely claimed that voters who apply for and use absentee ballots are providing personal information that may be used by police to carry out warrants, by credit card companies to attempt to collect debts and the CDC to “track people for mandatory vaccines.”

None of this is true.

“Don’t be (inaudible) into giving your private information to the man. Stay safe, and beware of vote by mail,” the robocall states, according to a copy of the recording previously provided by the Office of Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.

In a statement, Benson also pledged to prevent the spread of misinformation ahead of the general election.

“I have zero tolerance for anyone who would seek to deceive citizens about their right to vote,” Benson said in the news release.

“I am grateful to the attorney general for her swift and thorough investigation, putting anyone else who would seek to undermine citizens’ fundamental rights on notice that we will use every tool at our disposal to dispel false rhetoric and seek justice on behalf of every voter who is targeted and harmed by any attempt to suppress their vote.”

Wohl also faces a felony charge in California from 2019, where he is accused of illegal sale of securities in 2016. In February, he pleaded not guilty.

The second report comes from right here in Arizona, where right-wing provocateurs Project Veritas apparently were trying to set up one of their bogus video “stings” for Democratic Senate candidate Mark Kelly.  Mike Christy reports for the Arizona Daily Star, Political Notebook: Kelly targeted by Project Veritas:

A right-wing group known for undercover stings and deceptive videos showed up unannounced Wednesday morning at the Tucson home of U.S. Senate candidate Mark Kelly, a Democrat, and his wife, former U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords.

Campaign spokesman Jacob Peters said the three men from Project Veritas Action identified themselves and asked to speak to Kelly, then lingered on the property after they were told that he was not available, Peters said.

“They refused to leave Mark and Gabby’s front door for more than 30 minutes, and it took repeated requests to get them to step away and leave the property,” the spokesman said in a written statement. “They set up a camera and recorded something from the front driveway before eventually leaving.”

Peters said Giffords was not home at the time, but Kelly was inside the house preparing for his interview with the Arizona Daily Star’s editorial board. The police were not notified.

“This is beyond the pale, as is the fact that they are preparing some sort of disinformation campaign,” Peters said.

A spokesman for Project Veritas Action told the Arizona Republic the men were there to question Kelly about his stance on gun control and disputed that the men were asked repeatedly to leave.

The group, founded by conservative political activist James O’Keefe in 2010 [- remember this douchebag? -] known for using aliases and other so-called “guerilla” tactics to gain inside access to – and secretly record – media organizations and Democratic Party campaigns. Its tactics and its reports have been widely discredited by scholars and journalism organizations.

Note: In 2010, James O’Keefe was sentenced to three years of probation, 100 hours of community service and a $1,500 fine after he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges stemming from his involvement in a break-in at Sen. Mary Landrieu’s (D-La.) office on allegations of phone-tampering. ACORN filmmaker James O’Keefe sentenced in Sen. Mary Landrieu break-in.

Previous targets of Project Veritas and Project Veritas Action include Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, former Sen. Claire McCaskill, Pete Buttigieg and, most recently, U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar.

About this: The NewYork Times reports, Project Veritas Video Was a ‘Coordinated Disinformation Campaign,’ Researchers Say:

A deceptive video released on Sunday by the conservative activist James O’Keefe, which claimed through unidentified sources and with no verifiable evidence that Representative Ilhan Omar’s campaign had collected ballots illegally, was probably part of a coordinated disinformation effort, according to researchers at Stanford University and the University of Washington.

Mr. O’Keefe and his group, Project Veritas, appear to have made an abrupt decision to release the video sooner than planned after The New York Times published a sweeping investigation of President Trump’s taxes, the researchers said. They also noted that the timing and metadata of a Twitter post in which [Donald Trump. Jr.] shared the video suggested that he might have known about it in advance.

Kind of like the Podesta email file dump from Wikileaks only hours after the Access Hollywood tape blew up the media in October 2016, dontcha think? Junior has learned well from Russian Intelligence.

Project Veritas had hyped the video on social media for several days before publishing it. In posts amplified by other prominent conservative accounts, Mr. O’Keefe teased what he said was evidence of voter fraud, and urged people to sign up at “ballot-harvesting.com” to receive the supposed evidence when it came out. (None of the material in the video actually proved voter fraud.)

Mr. O’Keefe’s promotional posts had said the video would be released on Monday, but Project Veritas released it on Sunday instead, a few hours after the publication of The Times’s investigation. The researchers concluded that this timing was unlikely to be a coincidence “given the huge marketing about a 9/28 release date,” they wrote in an analysis that Alex Stamos, who led the research team at the Stanford Internet Observatory, shared with The Times.

“It’s a great example of what a coordinated disinformation campaign looks like: pre-seeding the ground and then simultaneously hitting from a bunch of different accounts at once,” Mr. Stamos said.

Many of the same accounts that had shared promotional tweets also shared the video as soon as it was released, moving it quickly into Twitter’s trending topics alongside The Times’s tax investigation.

* * *

Mr. O’Keefe posted the video on Twitter at 9 p.m. on the dot, and the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. tweeted it just seven minutes later. Two minutes after that, the president’s “war room” account retweeted him, and the president himself soon began commenting.

Notably, the video that the younger Mr. Trump posted did not have the “from James O’Keefe” label that appeared when other Twitter users shared the video uploaded by Mr. O’Keefe.

“This detail, along with video metadata demonstrating that the Donald Trump Jr. version of the video was separately uploaded and re-encoded by Twitter, indicates that the Trump campaign possibly had access to the video before the general public and raises questions of coordination,” the Stanford and University of Washington researchers wrote, noting also that Mr. Trump posted the video on Facebook 10 minutes before Mr. O’Keefe posted it there.

That would be illegal campaign coordination with an independent organization, not that the Attorney General gives a damn.

Asked for comment, the Trump campaign said that Donald Trump Jr. had received a downloadable link to the video after it was publicly released. It did not comment on Mr. Lindell’s post or on the timing of the video’s release, and a spokesman for the younger Mr. Trump did not respond to a request for comment.

* * *

Mr. O’Keefe and Project Veritas have a long history of releasing manipulated or selectively edited footage purporting to show illegal conduct by Democrats and liberal groups.

They have all been epic fails.

The researchers reported the video to multiple social media platforms. Facebook added a link to its “voting information center” to one upload of the video but placed no notice on the original upload. Twitter, YouTube and Reddit took no action. TikTok was the only platform that removed all uploads of the video.

The Arizona Republic adds some additional detail which indicates a similar deceptive video was in the works for Mark Kelly. Project Veritas Action shows up at Senate candidate Mark Kelly’s home:

Jacob Peters, a Kelly campaign spokesman, told The Republic the middle-aged men at 9:30 a.m. Wednesday appeared at the home Kelly, an Arizona Democrat, shares with his wife, former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz.

They wanted to talk to Kelly.

They identified themselves as members of Project Veritas, known for gaining access under false pretenses, and for releasing deceptive videos. They would not leave, even when told Kelly was unavailable, and stayed for at least 30 minutes, Peters said.

“They refused to leave Mark and Gabby’s front door for more than thirty minutes and it took repeated requests to get them to step away and leave the property,” Peters said in a written statement. “They set up a camera and recorded something from the front driveway before eventually leaving.”

Peters said the men had two cameras and recorded themselves, and potentially Peters, before getting back in an SUV and driving away.

“This is beyond the pale, as is the fact that they are preparing some sort of disinformation campaign,” Peters said.

Peters called on Sen. Martha McSally, Kelly’s Republican opponent in the Nov. 3 election, to “disavow this group and their tactics now and join us in telling them they have no place in this campaign.”

Kelly’s campaign did not immediately report the encounter to police. The Republic reached out to McSally’s campaign for comment, but was not immediately successful.

McCabe told The Republic that the men identified themselves as journalists with Project Veritas Action and said they wanted to ask Kelly questions about his stance on gun control. He disputed the Kelly campaign’s account that the men were asked repeatedly to leave.

Kelly emerged as a national advocate of gun safety after the attempted assassination of Giffords in 2011 near Tucson. She survived the mass shooting, which killed six and wounded 13. Giffords was shot in the head. Later, Kelly and Giffords co-founded the national anti-gun-violence organization now known as Giffords.

McCabe said the men asked if they could enter the home’s inner courtyard and were allowed into that area. They asked a woman who answered the door if they could speak to Kelly and waited while she got a response. The woman told the men that Kelly was busy, McCabe said. The men presented media credentials [they are not media] and about 30 minutes later, someone began shooting a video of them and told them they were trespassing.

McCabe said Project Veritas was seeking answers from Kelly tied to an assertion allegedly made by a member of Mission for Arizona to a “Project Veritas undercover reporter” that Kelly was “not being up front about his support of universal background checks and an assault weapons ban because Mark Kelly is trying to win over independent and Republican candidates.”

Mission for Arizona is an Arizona Democratic group working to elect Kelly and Democrats up and down the ballot.

McCabe said the men sought an answer from Kelly about whether he was “downplaying his position on gun rights in order to win Republican, independent votes in Arizona,” crucial to a statewide win.

Kelly supports universal background checks and an assault weapons ban.

The controversial group, led by founder James O’Keefe, has posted undercover videos with liberal campaigns and candidates across the nation over the years. In some cases, candidates targeted by the group are unaware they were filmed or targeted until the videos were published and released with fanfare by the group.

Project Veritas has engaged in Arizona before. In 2018, they targeted then-Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, who was in a tight race for the state’s other Senate seat against McSally. The group released a 15-minute video that included several clips of Sinema and her campaign workers making candid, off-the-cuff remarks.

In that video, multiple staffers talked about how Sinema was running a moderate, centrist campaign to get elected but that she actually held more left-leaning, progressive views. Sinema won that race.

And Mark Kelly is on pace to win his race.