Dirty politics & dirty tricks

James O'Keefe, the sleazemaster of Project Veritas

The New York Times writes on how the radical right lies and sleaze group, Project Veritas, aggressively intrudes into private lives to find dirt for Republican political advantage:

Ashley Biden’s Diary Was Shown at Trump Fund-Raiser. Weeks Later, 

Project Veritas Called Her.

The right-wing group’s deceptive call to the president’s daughter a month before Election Day is among the new details that show how the organization worked to expose personal information about the Biden family.

A month before the 2020 election, Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s daughter, Ashley, received a call from a man offering help. Striking a friendly tone, the man said that he had found a diary that he believed belonged to Ms. Biden and that he wanted to return it to her.

Ms. Biden had in fact kept a diary the previous year as she recovered from addiction and had stored it and some other belongings at a friend’s home in Florida where she had been living until a few months earlier. The diary’s highly personal contents, if publicly disclosed, could prove an embarrassment or a distraction to her father at a critical moment in the campaign.

She agreed with the caller to send someone to retrieve the diary the next day.

But Ms. Biden was not dealing with a good Samaritan.

The man on the other end of the phone worked for Project Veritas, a conservative group that had become a favorite of President Donald J. Trump, according to interviews with people familiar with the sequence of events. From a conference room at the group’s headquarters in Westchester County, N.Y., surrounded by other top members of the group, the caller was seeking to trick Ms. Biden into confirming the authenticity of the diary, which Project Veritas was about to purchase from two intermediaries for $40,000.

The caller did not identify himself as being affiliated with Project Veritas, according to accounts from two people with knowledge of the conversation. By the end of the call, several of the group’s operatives who had either listened in, heard recordings of the call or been told of it believed that Ms. Biden had said more than enough to confirm that it was hers.

Drawn from interviews, court filings and other documents, the new information adds further texture to what is known about an episode that has led to a criminal investigation of Project Veritas by federal prosecutors who have suggested they have evidence that the group was complicit in stealing Ms. Biden’s property and in transporting stolen goods across state lines.

And by showing that Project Veritas employed deception rather than traditional journalistic techniques in the way it approached Ms. Biden — the caller identified himself with a fake name — the new accounts could further complicate the organization’s assertions in court filings that it should be treated as a publisher and granted First Amendment protections. Project Veritas regularly carries out undercover stings, surveillance operations and ambush interviews, mostly against liberal groups and journalists.

At the same time, new information about the case suggests that the effort to make the diary public reached deeper into Mr. Trump’s circle than previously known.

A month before the call to Ms. Biden, the diary had been passed around a Trump fund-raiser in Florida at the home of a donor who helped steer the diary to Project Veritas and was later nominated by Mr. Trump to the National Cancer Advisory Board. 

Project Veritas — which is suing The New York Times for defamation in an unrelated case — has denied any wrongdoing or knowledge that the belongings had been stolen. It has portrayed itself as a media organization that is being unfairly investigated for simply doing journalism and has assailed the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for their handling of the case.

Prosecutors have signaled that they view the circumstances very differently, all but dismissing in one court filing the group’s defense that it was acting as a news organization, saying that “there is no First Amendment protection for the theft and interstate transport of stolen property.”

In response to a request to Project Veritas for comment, Mr. O’Keefe sent an email criticizing The Times. “Imagine writing so thoroughly divergent from reality and so mendacious with innuendo that there is literally no utterance that won’t make it worse,” he said.

At this point, I now firmly believe that: 

• America's radical right and in particular the Republican Party and its major donors and propagandists do not speak or act in good faith or with good will; 
• Relentless ill-will and bad faith come from a recognition that because their ideologies, morals and policy preferences are out of synch with an apparent permanent majority in America, the radical right minority has to resort to staunch anti-democratic authoritarianism in a desperate attempt to not lose the concentrated power and wealth the elites have long enjoyed; and
• Due to the desperate situation that radical right extremist elites find themselves, mostly laissez-faire capitalists and aggressive, vengeful Christian fundamentalists, the ends justify all means that might be feasible and practical, legal or not, moral or not, deadly or not, and dirty or not.  

So, is it time to unleash the dogs of dirty politics to look into the dirty laundry of Don Jr, Ivanka, Eric, Barron, Melania and the children, spouse and/or close relatives of Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell, Marjory Taylor Greene, Kevin McCarthy, Mike Pence, William Barr and all the rest of the morally rotted GOP leadership? We are in an all-out war of corruption, deceit, lies and American fascism against honesty, transparency, truth and American democracy. Maybe the ends do justify the means. 

Questions: Do political ends justify dirty politics and tricks means, e.g., since they are just legal dark free speech? Does it make any difference if democracy falls if its defenders do not adopt dirty politics and dirty tricks tactics? 

He's so sure of himself