Judge Rules O'Keefe's Schemes Can Be Portrayed to Jury As 'Political Spying'
Project Spying
Self-proclaimed conservative journalist James O’Keefe faces a lawsuit for his group’s actions, and he’s already fighting at a disadvantage after this latest ruling.
Will Sommer
Updated Oct. 25, 2021 3:12PM ET
Published Oct. 25, 2021 4:59AM ET
A federal judge has dealt conservative figure James O’Keefe a legal blow, ruling that his group’s undercover operations against a Democratic consulting firm can fairly be described at an upcoming million-dollar trial as “political spying.”
Making matters worse for the right-wing star, the judge cited O’Keefe’s own book as evidence against him.
In 2016, Allison Maass, an operative for O’Keefe’s Project Veritas group, took an internship at Democratic firm Democracy Partners under a fake name. While staffers at the firm thought Maass was working to elect Democrats in the 2016 campaign, she was secretly recording them and relaying undercover video and notes on the group to Project Veritas. Project Veritas eventually released the video, prompting Democracy Partners founder Robert Creamer to “step back” from the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Creamer and Democracy Partners sued Project Veritas in 2017 over the sting. Now, with the trial set for December, O’Keefe’s lawyers wanted to preemptively prevent the plaintiffs’ lawyers from describing Project Veritas’s work in court as “political spying.”
In an Oct. 14 court opinion, though, U.S. District Court Judge Paul L. Friedman ruled that it’s reasonable to describe O’Keefe’s group’s actions in that way.
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