Topic: WorldNetDaily
An anonymously written Sept. 28 WorldNetDaily article breathlessly reported:
A Project Veritas undercover investigation released Sunday night alleges paid workers in the district of Rep. Ilhan Omar in Minneapolis are illegally gathering absentee ballots from elderly Somali immigrants.
Members of the Somali community interviewed by Project Veritas charge Omar and the state Democratic Party, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, are behind the "ballot harvesting."
The investigation features alleged ballot harvester Liban Mohamed in a Snapchat video with piles of ballots on his car dashboard.
WND offered a follow-up the next day:
An undercover video investigation by James O'Keefe's Project Veritas revealed a Minnesota-based source describes Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., as the mastermind behind a cash-for-ballots, voter-fraud scheme.
"Nobody would say that Ilhan Omar isn't part of this," said Omar Jamal, a Somali community insider and the chairman of the Somali Watchdog group. "Unless you're from a different planet, but if you live in this universe, I think everybody knows it."
One little problem: none of this appears to be true. The Daily Dot reports that Jamal's Somali Watchdog Group may not actually exist, with its website getting registered only two months ago -- about the time that Project Veritas started its alleged sting -- and it couldn't find anyone else associated with the group other than Jamal. Jamal also claimed he worked with the Ramsey County Sheriff's Department, which couldn't be verified and which Project Veritas didn't provide verification of.
Meanwhile, Liban Mohamed Osman says that Jamal offered him $10,000 to claim he was taking part in voter fraud for Omar. And Jamal himself has backtracked on claims he made in Project Veritas videos and says he hasn't met anyone who received cash in exchange for a vote.
Neddless to say, WND hasn't told you any of this, nor has it updated or corrected any of its original reporting. The only other reference to this story it has done is an Oct. 4 item repeating a Fox News piece on alleged Democrat Tulsi Gabbard promoting the story. Needless to say, WND did not report that Gabbard has since apologized to Omar.
Promoting bogus stories and refusing to correct the record when they've been exposed as bogus? That's the WND we know.
P.S. One of the Project Veritas employees desperately trying to defend their work is Jered Ede, its chief legal officer. That name might sounda little familiar for his previous work of fraud: He was an intern for CNSNews.com in 2005, when he falsely accused Paul Begala of claiming that Republicans "want to kill us." Further, his idea of "journalism" when he was editor of a conservative magazine at Johns Hopkins University was to illustrate an article with a picture of a dog defecating on a picture of Bill Clinton -- the kind of work that would seem to make him a sadly good fit for Project Veritas.
