(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) After spending the past week in the “sensory deprivation chamber that is a federal courtroom,” Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe revealed that the conservative watchdog outfit has lost its first case to a Washington, D.C., jury.
“Up until this week and frankly for the entire duration of Project Veritas’s existence, Project Veritas has never lost a lawsuit,” O’Keefe said Saturday during North Carolina Faith and Freedom’s Salt and Light conference. “Not once—including, we have sued the New York Times for defamation and we’re winning in New York.”
The case in question related to Democracy Partners, a shadowy political operation coordinated by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign to instigate violence at political events and blame conservatives.
“In 2016 we exposed these Democratic operatives working in and around the Hillary campaign and they were saying horrible things… that they agitate at Trump rallies, that they send people in to get beat up and they don’t want anybody to know that this is something that is paid for by the Democratic National Committee,” O’Keefe said.
“In fact, they told us—their words not mine—‘There’s a double-blind that exists. There’s a secret way to funnel the money into this group that goes to do all this fomenting at these rallies,'” O’Keefe added. “And we caught all this on hidden camera. Project Veritas did our jobs.”
In addition to revealing the attempts to cover their tracks, agitators directly implicated Clinton herself, long before she was exposed to have helped hatch the phony Russia-collusion hoax against Republican rival Donald Trump.
“It was unethical if not illegal. He was saying that it was then-candidate Secretary Clinton’s idea to do all this—to put ducks on the ground,” O’Keefe said.
The hidden-camera bombshell exposed Democracy Partners operatives Bob Creamer, Scott Foval and Aaron Black, forcing some of those involved to lose their jobs.
“What happens in our country, when you do expose them—well, we got sued,” O’Keefe said.
“They didn’t sue us because we were lying… they didn’t sue us under some theory of false light, like I was misportraying them,” he continued. “No, no—get this. They actually sued me for breach of a fiduciary duty. These operatives working in and around the DNC argued to a judge that I have a fiduciary—my undercover person—had a duty—an obligation, a duty of care to the news subjects they were reporting on.”
Additionally, the planitiffs sued O’Keefe for wiretapping, despite the fact Washington, D.C., where the conversations took place, does not require two-party consent for recording.
“And they sued me for something called ‘misrepresentation,’ which is interesting because all investigative reporters have to misrepresent themselves to a degree to get the truth,” O’Keefe said. “In order to get the truth to the people, we have to dig deep, because if we just take what people tell us at face value they’ll often lie to us, and then we give those lies to the news consumer.”
O’Keefe said at the conclusion of the case, the jury found Project Vetitas liable for damages but had remained deadlocked on the amount of damages since, in reality, the plaintiffs’ own words were to blame.
“The jury left the line blank for damages,” O’Keefe noted.
But the federal judge in the case refused to accept the decision as it stood.
The judge said “I think we need to send the jury back to keep deliberating,” O’Keefe recalled.
“Twenty minutes later, the jurors come back, and it is blank again,” O’Keefe continued. “… To our shock, that federal judge in D.C. sent the jury in a second time.”
He noted that even the plaintiff’s attorney—who looked and sounded like Sen. Bernie Sanders—was dumbfounded when asked how to interpret the blank line.
The jury finally returned after its third round of deliberation with the figure of $120,000.
O’Keefe’s lawyers raised objections, pointing out that Project Veritas should be protected under the 1st Amendement’s press freedoms.
However, the biased judge said the suit was justified because they had used false pretenses to get the information, noting that if the Ku Klux Klan had gone in and asked Democracy Partners, they would not have been likely to give it up.
“That federal judge actually, through his metaphor, compared Project Veritas to the Ku Klux Klan,” said the shocked O’Keefe.
Though it may be the watchdog group’s first loss, according to O’Keefe, he said he planned to appeal to the D.C. Circuit Court and, if necessary, the U.S. Supreme Court.
“We don’t settle lawsuits at Project Veritas,” he said. “We go all the way.”
The verdict is the latest in a run of deeply questionable decisions by radical leftist judges that effectively undermine some of the basic rules of law.
The acquittal of Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann durning the John Durham investigation, the indictment of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon for a specious “contempt of Congress” claim, and the decision by Florida magistrate Bruce Reinhart to approve a dubious warrant to raid Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home are all examples of the current double-standard of justice being applied under the Biden administration.
O’Keefe likewise has been subjected to a politically motivated Biden raid after having obtained the abandonned diary of the president’s daughter, Ashley Biden, who had left it at a halfway house in Florida.
Project Veritas opted not to publish the shocking contents of the diary—including a confession that Ashley and Joe Biden had taken “inappropriate” showers together—because it was unable to verify that the diary was truly hers until the FBI came looking for it.
O’Keefe condemned the chilling effect that such targeted attacks may have on journalism as a whole.
“If you don’t have the right to do that, to inform your fellow citizen, then you don’t have any rights at all,” he said at the faith-based Salt and Light conference.
But he promised that Project Veritas would never give up its fight, despite the tyrannical efforts to silence it.
“Whenever you feel despair [over the attack on democratic principles] … just remember that Project Veritas has sources everywhere,” he said. “If you’re lying, cheating or stealing, we will make you famous.”
Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at truthsocial.com/@bensellers.
