A Michigan judge barred conservative provocateur James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas organization from publishing documents or recordings of union officials, finding that the defendants likely planned to use the information to characterize the Michigan affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) in a false light.
The judge also ruled that it appeared likely the information was illegally obtained. Project Veritas and the operative at the heart of the sting were served the injunction on Friday afternoon, a union official told The Intercept.
“I don’t have any comment until I can see what you’re referring to,” O’Keefe said, when reached by The Intercept. The sting has not been previously reported. O’Keefe did not appear to have known his operative had been exposed.
“Nobody’s been served,” said Russell Verney, executive director of Project Veritas, saying that nobody has put documents in their hands. “We don’t comment on investigations, either real or imagined ones,” he said. Andrew Crook, an AFT spokesperson, said the union has a UPS confirmation of delivery, which he said meets the Michigan legal standard for service; Crook provided the UPS confirmation to The Intercept.
The union group quietly filed the lawsuit on Wednesday accusing Project Veritas of infiltrating and illegally gathering proprietary information from AFT Michigan over the summer, including by surreptitiously recording office conversations. Michigan Circuit Court Judge Brian R. Sullivan granted the group’s request for an emergency injunction barring the defendants from disseminating said information.
“We intend to pursue their activity to the fullest extent of the laws,” AFT President Randi Weingarten told The Intercept.
She said that the union was most concerned not with Project Veritas uncovering something untoward, but that they may heavily edit the video or take a remark out of context. “Our worst-case scenario is what they do in their deception and what they do in their distortion,” she said.
Weingarten said she did not know the substance on the recordings. “I am sure in a union office, just like in any other office setting, around the water-cooler there are comments that are made that nobody would want to see on the front pages of newspapers. Do I know what they are? No.”
According to the complaint, political operative Marisa Jorge posed as a University of Michigan student interested in becoming a teacher and applied for a summer internship with the teachers union. (Verney, the Project Veritas executive director, said he knows Marisa Jorge, but wouldn’t confirm or deny whether she works for the organization.) Jorge was hired as an intern in May, and over the course of three months, she gathered information that exceeded the scope of her duties, the lawsuit alleges. For example, she showed a particular interest in employees who were disciplined for inappropriate sexual interactions with students. On more than one occasion, the lawsuit alleges, Jorge was found sitting alone in other employees’ offices, accessing information she had no right to.
Jorge told her internship bosses that she wanted to be a second-grade teacher, so they arranged for her to visit classrooms. She asked to attend bargaining sessions and, through the course of her work, was given access to confidential databases, according to the lawsuit. Her co-workers had no reason to believe she was not who she claimed to be.
“Defendant’s purpose was to use private, proprietary information to attempt to embarrass the Plaintiff and adversely impact labor organizations representing public schools,” the lawsuit said. “Plaintiff believes that Defendant Jorge and PV” — Project Veritas — “intended to disclose private and proprietary information to the public at large. Defendant has engaged in such behavior on numerous occasions in the past.”
Weingarten said that Jorge was trusted by the staff. “People embraced her, she went to people’s homes, she went out to meals,” she said.
They became suspicious when, after her internship ended, Jorge returned and asked if there was more work to be done. The staff wondered, wait, wasn’t she supposed to be back at school at the University of Michigan? They then swapped notes, and it was soon clear they’d been had. They searched for images of O’Keefe operatives, and found Jorge’s photo from her unsuccessful attempts to infiltrate the inaugural protests. They also discovered that she is a graduate of Virginia’s Liberty University.
ATTENTION DC & NC organizers:
This person works w @Project_Veritas & @JamesOKeefeIII who record lefties w/o consent & post embarrassing vids pic.twitter.com/yAzn7dNR71— Brendan Orsinger??? (@ToBeSelfEvident) January 9, 2017
The lawsuit accuses Jorge of fraudulent misrepresentation, trespass, eavesdropping, and theft. It also accuses Jorge and Project Veritas of conspiring to infiltrate AFT Michigan, gather and copy proprietary information, and disseminate that information to paint the union group in a false light.
By granting a temporary restraining order, Sullivan has indicated his belief that the allegations are more than likely to be true and that the benefit of barring the defendants from disseminating the information Jorge collected outweighs the harm of suppressing her speech. The injunction will stay in place for at least 14 days, and the case is set for a hearing on October 5.
Michigan is a hotbed in the fight between public schools, whose teachers AFT represents, and the charter school movement. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s super-wealthy family has been the most powerful and influential player in the charter school movement in the state, generally, and Detroit in particular. With a net worth of well over $5 billion, the DeVos family has contributed at least $100 million to Michigan political campaigns and conservative causes over the past two decades.
O’Keefe has “mentioned her specifically in the past few weeks,” Weingarten said, referring to DeVos. “Let’s put it this way: The Michigan story under DeVos’s advocacy is one that has really hurt children.” (A call to DeVos’s foundation was not immediately returned.)
This would not be the first time Project Veritas targeted a labor organization that represents public school employees. Founder James O’Keefe in 2010 infiltrated the New Jersey Education Association Leadership Conference and produced a project called “Teachers Union Gone Wild.” Last summer, the group produced another video purporting to show a New Jersey middle school teacher offering journalists cocaine at a 2015 union convention. Following the video release, O’Keefe went on the radio to say his teacher union exposés are not over.
O’Keefe made his name in 2009 by helping to bring down ACORN, a liberal community-organizing group. The next year, he and three others walked into the New Orleans office of Sen. Mary Landrieu dressed as telephone repairmen as part of an undercover operation, and he was arrested and ultimately convicted of entering federal property under false pretenses. In 2011, O’Keefe released undercover conversations with two high-ranking NPR executives, forcing them to step down. He recently turned his sights to CNN, releasing an undercover video of a CNN producer saying the network’s coverage of possible collusion between President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia was “mostly bullshit.”
Trump’s foundation donated $10,000 to Project Veritas one month before Trump announced his candidacy.
O’Keefe and his group were hit with a $1 million lawsuit in June after sending an operative undercover to work as an intern with Democratic campaign consultants Democracy Partners.
Update: December 27, 2017
The injunction has been lifted. O’Keefe didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, but Weingarten and AFT Michigan President David Hecker provided The Intercept with the following statement:
Today, a judge made clear to Project Veritas that their unlawful tactics have a price. We understand that Judge Parker chose to show deference to free speech in lifting the injunction that has been in place for three months, but she made crystal clear that AFT’s claim about Project Veritas violating Michigan law when they infiltrated our confidential operations is likely to succeed.
“We believe strongly in the First Amendment, and while our swift action in seeking judicial relief was a heavy lift from a legal perspective, it established a strong foundation for our longer-term goal of protecting students, teachers and families in Michigan from the abusive actions of Project Veritas.
Judge Parker’s decision supports our position that we have a right of action the moment Project Veritas publishes anything illegally obtained by their operative Melissa Jorge. Today’s decision gives clear warning that Project Veritas and people working on their behalf, in this case former Liberty University student Marisa Jorge, will be held liable for their actions. For too long James O’Keefe and his associates have advanced a political agenda from secret donors using secret infiltration and lies, heavily edited videos and spurious claims. O’Keefe has repeatedly declared his war on teachers, students and families organizing in the interest of high quality public education, and routinely advances false narratives based on heavily manipulated video. We will be zealous in seeking full relief and damages the moment O’Keefe goes public with any of the material stolen or illegally obtained by Project Veritas associates, and in challenging media narratives that promote false propaganda in the interest of secret political agendas.
Top photo: Conservative undercover journalist James O’Keefe holds a news conference at the National Press Club Sept. 1, 2015, in Washington.
I place no trust in this organization “Project Veritas.” That’s not “truth-telling” or “journalism” Project Veritas is engaging in. This woman was just lying to get inside an organization to find information in order to create another lie, one that she and her group were already going to sell to the audience no matter what her findings said. If she really was searching for the truth, she could have been honest herself.
Highly disturbing. True video, taken by an employee, subject to censorship based on a guess about what someone might do with it! It doesn’t matter if the people are deceptive or bullies; their freedom of expression must be accepted, so that we can decide sanely on some viable alternate response if it is needed.
Wow, the Intercept is inconsistent on O’Keefe. After one of your stories praised undercover journalism that targets North Korea (Jon Schwarz’s article from last month), you take a much harsher line on O’Keefe’s undercover journalism. Could that be because O’Keefe targets fellow progressives?
Your headline misleadingly calls O’Keefe a “provocateur”, which isn’t what his group is actually doing (at least not in this case). O’Keefe’s group placed an undercover journalist in the AFT trying to find info about whether teachers were abusing their authority for sexual misconduct etc. Seems worth doing, since teachers have a huge amount of power and sometimes misuse it.
I notice that your caption-writer was a lot fairer than the three authors of your story were. The caption at the bottom of the story correctly identified O’Keefe as a conservative undercover journalist, which is exactly what he is. But in your headline and the text of your article, he’s no better than a provocateur.
O’Keefe is a smear campaign artist, nothing more and nothing less.
As the Intercept article shows, the judge’s argument for suppressing information is the kind of rationale that could be used EVEN WHEN the info to be suppressed has something to say about reality. Similarly, your own ad hominem response is too eager to dismiss the current Project Veritas investigation as a smear without even knowing whether it will have something useful to say about reality. You just support prior restraint of the investigation without knowing anything about what the investigation will say. Myself, I’m not so quick to dismiss things as “smears”; one of the criteria for deciding whether something should or shouldn’t be dismissed as a smear is whether it’s likely to help people find out more about reality. Wish you would add some sattva to your “Bodhi”.
The Intercept did a shoddy job with this story. You never link to the judge’s order or the AFT’s complaint even though it’s clear you have access to them. You don’t address the logical flaws in the judge’s order. You even quote, apparently agreeing with the judge, a line from the judge’s order which is so ridiculous that the judge himself changed it later, although you failed to report that.
Readers should be given the chance to see the AFT’s complaint and the judge’s order themselves. So here are the links, taken from the AFT’s website. The Intercept should, of course, link to copies of the documents that aren’t hosted by a party to the case.
https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/complaint_aftmi_veritas_092717.pdf
https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/tro_aftmi_veritas_092917.pdf
You describe the judge as “finding that the defendants likely planned to use the information to characterize the Michigan affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) in a false light.” That’s a pretty ridiculous rationale for suppressing info: we’re going to keep you from publishing the facts you found out, because we just assume that you’ll use these facts to characterize someone in a false light, even though the underlying facts you’re reporting on are true! The judge did actually write that in the original version of his order, but it’s a highly abusive rationale for suppressing speech.
To a large extent, evaluating whether information has been presented in a false light is affected by subjective bias, and there’s not always a clear standard for deciding. If someone keeps on telling the public embarrassing things about groups on one side of the political spectrum, the allies of the groups that end up looking bad will always start making knee-jerk responses like “This guy always presents people in a false light”. And those who viscerally dislike having the public hear about behind-the-scenes scandals also often use the “false light” excuse to try to justify suppressing info. If a judge is allowed to say “You can’t let the public know about this info because you’re presenting it in a false light”, judges from each part of the political spectrum will use that excuse to suppress facts that embarrass their side, and judges who just have a general dislike of the public finding out about embarrassing stuff will be too quick to use the “false light” excuse as well. So when the power of the law is used to keep information about wrongdoing hidden, it’s dangerous for judges to be able to use their subjective opinion of what’s a “false light” to keep the public from finding things out. That favors those who just don’t want the public to know about certain people’s wrongdoing. It amounts to keeping the public from being informed about what’s really going on. The problem in society is not that the public in general knows too much about the bad things that politically influential people are secretly doing, but that the general public knows far too little. The more that wrongdoing like that can be kept hidden, the more the general public will be abused, exploited, and left ignorant. There’s no question that this kind of wrongdoing happens inside liberal as well as conservative groups. A society where this wrongdoing is more regularly exposed (a goal that O’Keefe helps to achieve, at least as far one side of the political spectrum is concerned) is in a better position to develop the capabilities, the accountablity, the ethical advances, and the dignity that a self-governing people can achieve.
It’s true that the AFT’s lawsuit claimed that the information about the union was likely to be presented in a false light, and the judge seems to have quickly agreed to that, but the judge didn’t cite any reason for thinking so. In this case there isn’t even any proof that the info about the AFT was going to be presented in a false light — the judge was just guessing that it would be, before any info was even published. One reason courts usually shouldn’t have the power of “prior restraint” on info is because judges are even worse at guessing in advance that something is going to be presented in a false light than at deciding whether something actually has been presented in a false light.
In any case, the judge seems to have backed away from what you quoted him as saying. He has now taken the “false light” stuff out of his order. In the PDF of the judge’s order, which I linked to above, the line about “It appears to the Court that the Defendants intend to publish this information for the purpose of characterizing Plaintiff in a false light” has been partially crossed out. The new version of the judge’s order says nothing about what the defendants intend to do except that they intend to publish the information; and it adds that the information is “confidential and proprietary and taken without authority or consent”. I suppose the AFT’s lawyer, who started out making this claim about a “false light” in order to influence the judge, realized that it would be awful for their case if the judge actually wrote “false light” in the court order, so maybe the AFT’s lawyer got the judge to edit that out in the new version of the order.
No it isn’t. The legal question is whether or not the “information” presented is “false” or “misleading”. Now for reality challenged right wing cranks there is no such thing as a “fact”. Much less any reality where something a conservative does or says could be characterized as “false” or “misleading” rather than a conservative’s skanked up perception of their subjective biases/motivated reasoning infused way of perceiving the world as a function of their “opinion”.
That’s not withstanding James O’Keefe has been both convicted in federal court, and been sued successfully for doing precisely what he is accused of here–fraudulent activity and using the fruits of that fraudulent activity to paint people in a false light. It’s what he does, not journalism.
http://injury.findlaw.com/torts-and-personal-injuries/defamation-vs–false-light–what-is-the-difference-.html
There must be a lot of money for DeVos and her fellow swamp creatures to make off their terrible charter schools. Like tax dollars ripped out of our pockets and deposited directly in theirs. They don’t even care that our children will suffer, all they care about is moneymoneymoney. Subhumans.
Anybody that actually takes the time to watch a project veritas video knows that nothing is “.heavily edited”. Complete bullshit. The litmus test is that you simply go and watch one; no point sitting here arguing about it.
You cannot tell if a video has been manipulated by watching it. The only way to tell is to get camera original files and do a test of the compression algorithm. Each camera has it’s own particular “thumb print” so to speak. James O’Keefe has never, ever produced camera original files. Probably for a reason.
Establishment fears the exposure of MSM Fake News and Lefty Globalist Propaganda The Entertainment Industry is next. We are already seeing them double down . In the past a lot of Globalist Entertainment had it’s Globalist/ Lefty messages delivered subtly now Post Trump and the Rise of White Right Wing Nationalim they are becoming more ” transparent”.. shedding more n more of the subtleness n delivering the Ideology/narrative more directly. desperate times call for desperate measures. Lol. Big sports ” opiate of the masses” is getting it now Hollywood is next . It’s a brave New world! and a fine tme to be alive bearing witness.
Have another Red Bull and Vodka there, tweeks. Your eyes must be spinning like ferris wheels right now.
Not good. Surprised a judge ruled to bar publication, even temporarily. With few exceptions, prior restraint is a bad idea. “Water cooler” conversations are not barred from the public discourse nor are deceptive editing practices illegal. Sound like the union is engaging in prior smearing tactics to get in front of the story and cover its embarrassment. Smart tactic, bad law.
If the publishing organization itself did something illegal–if Wikileaks aided and abetted Chelsea Manning rather than just publish what she stole–that’s different. O’Keefe may be the Saul Goodman of journalism, slipping Jamie with a publishing platform could be like a chimp a machine gun, but it isn’t illegal.
O’Keefe is good at what he does and that’s why conservatives tell themselves to better call Project Veritas when they want to take down organizations and people they don’t like.
Defamation is illegal, and that is what O’Keefe engages in.
>Defamation is illegal, and that is what O’Keefe engages in.
Then all of mainstream media is illegal based on that criteria, as they heavily and dishonestly edit news data all the time.
I get the criticisms of O’Keefe, and I wish the hell he was more like Julian Assange, but the reality is that this ruling is not good news in terms of the free flow of news and information.
Maybe it is legal to print so called heavily or deceptive editing and I have read stories which were. Here’s the problemishes with it. It’s at times coming from someone who is trying to cause harm. They don’t care who gets in the way they take no hostages. They edit it so much it is no longer what was said. As taken out of context. When this happens there’s so much damage, real harm that can, and will happen to all people involved. It also has a trickle down effect on their families as well. Jobs will be lost, children could be bullied in school, other members of your family will be putting their heads down and friends may believe it. All because people think it’s their right to hear this. Ok, I’m in there too. But, what I read when this stuff is printed is at the beginning of the article is “this has been found to be taken out of context, or heavily edited. Then people are getting somewhat of the truth. The can pick and choose. If it’s crap and lies everyone’s looking for grab the National Enquirer.
Project veritas practises the sound bite. Same as the main stream media. At worst, they are generally excerpted and spun for focus. Just liek the news.
Planned parenthood got hammered because they were selling fetus parts for money. That wasn’t a lie unless you wanted to mince words over the difference between payment and reimbursement when you want to skirt the law. Planned parenthood, once found out stopped trying to skirt the law, which will tell you what their lawyers felt about the practice with someone watching who didn’t want to skirt the law by phrasing things differently. Was it a full on discussion of the overall value of planned parenthood, no. It was focusing on something a broad swath of people found objectionable. It did so specifically because that was the reaction they wanted. Which is pretty much how the nightly news operates too. So…
Then you had the union leadership video in the elections. That was basically a 2 minute and change sound bite that was damning. While it wasn’t surprising to the rank and file who spent the 18 months prior hearing how the DNC was evil and betraying them, then got the last minute 180 degree turn of vote Hillary or we are all going to die by Christams. What it did was explain to the rank and file how blatantly that was a cheap and shoddy buy off of the leadership. not that this wasn’t expected, but it made it pretty explicit.
You probably don’t want to take Project Veritas’ conclusions at face value, but if they have something it’s probably worthwhile asking some pointed questions in that direction.
Yeah, except that Planned Parenthood wasn’t selling parts. I guess you missed out on that. They were DONATING tissue with permission from the donor.
I guess you missed the part where they were exonerated and their accusers were indicted.
Project Veritas is run by a third rate conman who settles for faked videos because actual investigation would be too much work.
anyone defending o’keefe as an investigator or his minions as anything but prejudiced rightwing liars is flogging a dead horse…
And there’s the rub. These folks give no credence to the idea of ‘fair’ and ‘balanced’ editorial decisions, issue no mea culpa even when the lies are exposed as the lead story for days, don’t jump through the hoops that make ‘undercover reporting’ legal, but, because of that, we’re willing to decry that not only was the emperor (CNN) wearing no clothes, but knew it.