James O’Keefe Used Money From Project Veritas to Try to D.J. at Coachella

The disgraced founder of Project Veritas, the right-wing nonprofit known for undercover “stings,” used the organization’s funds on a desperate attempt to D.J. at Coachella, a Washington Post report published Wednesday found.

James O’Keefe founded Project Veritas in 2010, rising to far-right prominence for his secretly recorded videos. O’Keefe claimed he was trying to expose wrongdoing by journalists, labor unions, and liberal figures and organizations, but it was later proven the videos were edited to leave out crucial context. O’Keefe was forced out of the nonprofit in February under a cloud of allegations of workplace misconduct and mismanaged funds.

Following O’Keefe’s departure, the Project Veritas board hired an outside law firm to conduct an internal audit. The nonprofit raised millions of dollars from conservative donors but recently was forced to lay off more than half of its staff and has since been operating on a skeleton crew. The results of the audit were shared with The Washington Post.

The audit found that O’Keefe had used hundreds of thousands of organization dollars to pay for personal expenses. This included $2,500 for a set of D.J. equipment, because O’Keefe wanted to perform at Coachella, the Post reported, citing two anonymous former employees. O’Keefe was apparently upset that his staff couldn’t book him a performance slot at the music festival, which has featured major acts including Beyoncé, Blackpink, and Billie Eilish.

O’Keefe also allegedly pressured his staff to set up donor meetings in California so he could use the organization’s funds to visit his girlfriend, who has been identified as California real estate agent and Selling the OC cast member Alexandra Rose. O’Keefe would write his romantic getaways off as work trips but only meet with minor donors. He also allegedly demanded his employees buy Rose “many expensive bottles of tequila,” according to the Post.

Other expenses included $600 for bottled water during one trip to San Antonio and $20,500 to move some staff operations to Virginia from Mamaroneck, New York, to coincide with O’Keefe’s stint as the lead in a September 2021 production of the musical Oklahoma! O’Keefe left his staff to deal with Hurricane Ida flooding their Mamaroneck office while he evacuated early to make one of the performances.

In August 2022, O’Keefe spent $12,000 for a helicopter flight to Southwest Harbor, Maine, from New York, and then $1,400 for a chauffeured black car from Portland to Southwest Harbor when bad weather forced the helicopter to land early. He actually spent $208,980 on luxury black-car travel over the course of two years.

A federal judge ruled Wednesday that Donald Trump is liable for defaming E. Jean Carroll in 2019 and owes her monetary damages, which will be set at a later trial.

Trump was unanimously found liable in May for sexual abuse and battery against Carroll in the mid-1990s and for defaming her in 2022 while denying the assault. She had a second defamation lawsuit against him for comments that he made in 2019 that was originally set to go to trial in January.

Judge Lewis Kaplan, who also presided over her first lawsuit, issued a partial summary ruling Wednesday in Carroll’s favor, noting that Trump was already found to have defamed her.

“The truth or falsity of Mr Trump’s 2019 statements therefore depends—like the truth or falsity of his 2022 statement—on whether Ms Carroll lied about Mr Trump sexually assaulting her,” Kaplan said. “The jury’s finding that she did not therefore is binding in this case and precludes Mr Trump from contesting the falsity of his 2019 statements.”

Kaplan said that the January trial will simply be to set the amount of monetary damages Trump owes Carroll. The judge also denied Trump’s request to cap any future damages, meaning that the previous amount awarded should not be a factor the jury considers. Trump already owes Carroll $5 million from the first trial, and she is seeking $10 million this time around.

Carroll accused Trump in her 2019 memoir of raping her in the Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s. She initially sued him twice for defamation: first in 2019, when he said she made up the rape allegation to promote her book, and again in November for posts he made about her on social media. Carroll is not the only woman to accuse Trump of sexual assault, but her first case was the first to make it to a courtroom.

Trump continues to vehemently deny all of the allegations and launched fresh vitriol at Carroll during the disastrous CNN town hall earlier this year. She amended her second lawsuit to include those comments.

Trump has tried repeatedly to wiggle out of paying Carroll what he owes her and of going to trial a second time. He even countersued her for defamation. But his efforts have been thwarted at every turn.

Kaplan has repeatedly tossed out Trump’s requests, slamming the arguments as “entirely unpersuasive” and noting that Carroll’s accusations that Trump raped her—not just sexually abused her—are “substantially true.” Trump also suffered a major blow in July when the Department of Justice said it no longer considers him immune in the case.

The secretary of the Navy has condemned Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville for “aiding and abetting” Communist regimes with his months-long blockade of military promotions in objection to the Department of Defense’s abortion policy.

The Republican senator has blocked hundreds of promotions since March in protest over the department’s policy of reimbursing travel costs for service members who have to go out of state for an abortion. The Defense Department has warned that the blockade, which has left three branches of the military without official leaders, harms U.S. national security. Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro on Tuesday issued the most scathing denunciation yet.

“As someone who was born in a Communist country, I would have never imagined that actually one of our own senators would actually be aiding and abetting Communist and other autocratic regimes around the world,” Del Toro, who was born in Cuba, told CNN. “This is having a real negative impact.”

Tuberville has blocked an unprecedented 301 military promotions over the abortion policy, resulting in the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps being led by “acting” military leaders instead of confirmed ones. Some Pentagon officials have commented that if this continues, the Joint Chiefs of Staff will have to be renamed the “Joint Chief of Staff,” the Defense Department noted wryly in a Tuesday news brief.

The Pentagon says the policy will stay in place, and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Mark Milley warned that U.S. adversaries could interpret Tuberville’s blockade to mean the “United States was in a situation of internal division, instability … at the highest levels of its military.”

Tuberville continues to falsely insist that he is not endangering U.S. security or military readiness. “I’m disappointed that a secretary would say that about a senator. Makes you feel bad that we got leaders in the country like that,” he told CNN’s Manu Raju on Tuesday. “If I thought it was hurting readiness, I wouldn’t be doing this. But it’s not.”

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby hit back later that evening. “My best advice to the senator is, if you don’t like being criticized for this outrageous effort to hold up these promotions and advancements, then lift your hold,” he said on CNN.

“If it bothers you that we’re publicly talking about the impacts it’s having—and it is having an impact—then just lift the hold.”

Tuberville may have already reaped some consequences for the blockade. President Joe Biden announced in July he will keep the U.S. Space Command headquarters in Colorado, instead of moving it to Alabama as his predecessor wanted. White House officials said abortion policy had no influence in the decision, but the move still means that Alabama will miss out on 1,400 jobs and millions of dollars in economic impact.

A recent Wall Street Journal poll announced that most voters think Joe Biden is too old to be president for a second term—and a 2024 matchup between Biden and Donald Trump would be evenly split. The poll has since been covered across multiple mainstream media outlets, including MSNBC, CNN, and Fox.

There’s just one problem: The poll was conducted in part by Trump’s former campaign pollster.

The poll, which was published Monday, found that Biden and Trump are tied with 46 percent support each. But “nearly three-quarters of voters say the president is too old to run again,” the Journal article said. It has garnered widespread media attention and outrage. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough pointed out that Trump has been indicted four times and lied many, many more times, and yet he is tied with Biden simply because the latter is just three years older.

But the Journal neglects to provide information about one of the men behind the poll. Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio conducted the survey in partnership with a Democratic colleague, Michael Bocian. In a separate piece, the Journal acknowledged that Fabrizio “works for a super PAC supporting Trump’s candidacy.”

What the Journal does not mention anywhere is that Fabrizio also worked as the chief pollster on Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. And since the start of 2023, Trump’s super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., has paid Fabrizio’s company more than $567,000, according to FEC filings.

Fabrizio also has extensive ties to former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. Manafort was convicted of tax evasion and bank fraud in 2018 (as well as of having terrible taste in jackets by the court of public opinion).

Fabrizio owned the firm that made a shady payment of $125,000 to Manafort in 2017. Fabrizio was also the lead Trump campaign pollster at the time Manafort provided raw polling data to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, via Manafort’s associate Konstantin Kilimnik. Deripaska has been under U.S. sanctions since 2018, and Kilimnik has been discovered to be a Russian spy.

Over 60 protesters have been indicted on RICO charges for their efforts to block construction of the massive police training facility known as “Cop City” outside of Atlanta, Georgia.

The indictment out of Fulton County court last Tuesday charges 61 protesters with violating Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Many are facing additional charges of domestic terrorism or money laundering. The indictment was handed up by the same grand jury that handed up the indictments against Donald Trump and his co-defendants, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and is being prosecuted by Georgia Republican Attorney General Chris Carr.

Over the past year and a half, Georgia police have made dozens of arrests at the proposed site for Cop City, with charges ranging from alleged property damage and trespassing to domestic terrorism.

In May, Atlanta police arrested the organizers of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, a bail fund for the protesters of Cop City. One of the fund’s organizers who was arrested, Marlon Kautz, had predicted in February that the state would level RICO charges at the protesters. 

“We understand that this movement is as broad as society itself. It includes environmental activists, community groups, faith leaders, abolitionists, students, artists, and people from all over,” Kautz said in February.

“But police, prosecutors, and even Governor Kemp have been trying to suggest in the media and in court that the opposition to Cop City is actually the work of a criminal organization whose members conspire to commit acts of terrorism. In essence, they’re trying to concoct a RICO-like story about the movement.”

Kautz along with fellow Atlanta Solidarity Fund organizers Adele Maclean and Savannah Patterson are listed in the RICO indictment, and are also facing an additional 15 counts of money laundering.

The date listed on the indictments is May 25, 2020, the day George Floyd was murdered by police officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis. Although this date predates any Stop Cop City protesting, it’s possible that the Attorney General’s office plans to link the Stop Cop City movement with the larger protests that followed Floyd’s death.

The Cop City Vote coalition, an Atlanta-based campaign leading a referendum to halt the construction of the police facility, released a statement condemning the indictment.

“Today, Republican Attorney General Chris Carr, who used his platform to recruit for the January 6 insurrection, announced blatantly authoritarian RICO charges against 61 people,” the statement said. “These charges, like the previous repressive prosecutions by the State of Georgia, seek to intimidate protestors, legal observers, and bail funds alike, and send the chilling message that any dissent to Cop City will be punished with the full power and violence of the government.”

In June, Atlanta District Attorney Sherry Boston announced that her office would withdraw from criminal cases tied to the Cop City Protests the state’s Republican Attorney General had leveled at protesters. Boston cited the domestic terrorism charges specifically and said that she and Attorney General Chris Carr had “fundamentally different prosecution philosophies.”

The new indictment out of Fulton County is the state’s latest attempt to suppress political protest and dissent, even in the wake of violent police brutality—and to push through the massive $90 million police facility, no matter the cost.

This story has been updated.