Topic: Accuracy in Media
Project Veritas provocateur and convicted criminal James O'Keefe unveiled his latest trolling operation last week, which consisted of an O'Keefe operative serving as a moderating party between a Hillary Clinton campaign merch table operator and someone who claimed to be Canadian who wanted to buy a couple of Hillary T-shirts, then claiming this was a massive scandal of foreign contributions to Hillary's campaign.
This was so embarrassing, even many conservative outlets ignored the story, and the right-wing Daily Caller pretty much mocked it.
But not Accuracy in Media's Cliff Kincaid. "The law says that foreigners are strictly prohibited from contributing to U.S. political campaigns, and O’Keefe had dramatic evidence of the campaign law violation. The video was played on a television screen for all to see," he thundered in a Sept. 1 column, which was curiously silent about the exact nature of what happened. He complained that media outlets mocked O'Keefe (not mentioning the right-wing outlets that also mocked and ignored O'Keefe), then thundered again:
But those distortions won’t suffice when the video evidence itself can be seen by millions, telling the real story that some in the media try to conceal. As Project Veritas emphasized, the video shows Molly Barker, the Director of Marketing for Hillary Clinton’s national campaign, knowingly breaking campaign finance law by accepting a straw donation from a foreign national.
Kincaid didn't mention that if Hillary's campaign broke the law, O'Keefe's organization did as well. As the Daily Beast's Olivia Nuzzi pointed out, Project Veritas broke the law twice by invervening in the transaction between the campaign and the alleged Canadian (Project Veritas doesn't know the identity of the that person, let alone if the person is actually Canadian) and by having its operative make the transaction under a false name.
But the facts don't matter to Kincaid, who declared that "the great number of journalists who showed up was an indication that, when it comes to Hillary, nobody really knows how serious the law-breaking will get. O’Keefe suggested that more evidence against the campaign is yet to come."
