Conservative undercover journalist James O’Keefe and the Washington Post “busted” each other Monday, as the Post discovered O’Keefe’s Project Veritas was investigating it, prompting O’Keefe to publish some of his work.
The Post reported Monday that it had been approached by a woman falsely claiming to have been impregnated by Alabama Republican U.S. Senate nominee Roy Moore — after which, she claimed, she also had an abortion.
“But on Monday morning, Post reporters saw her walking into the New York offices of Project Veritas, an organization that targets the mainstream news media and left-leaning groups,” the Post reported, blowing her cover.
The Post then undertook its own O’Keefe-style investigation, and secretly recorded the Project Veritas reporter’s conversation with a Post reporter.
The Post‘s Stephanie McCrummen asked the Project Veritas undercover reporter: “I also, frankly, want to know who you might be working for now … And are you in contact with other people, are you in contact with the Roy Moore campaign, or Steve Bannon, or Breitbart?”
Later, it attempted to interview O’Keefe, and asked him “if he was working with Moore, former White House adviser and Moore supporter Stephen K. Bannon, or Republican strategists.”
(No one at Breitbart News was involved in, or aware of, O’Keefe’s investigation.)
O’Keefe then released his undercover footage Monday evening that Project Veritas had gathered on the Post, and promising more to come.
In one sequence, the Post‘s Dan Lamothe, who covers national security issues, is seen on video telling a Project Veritas undercover reporter that the newspaper “definitely” does not like Trump. He comments on his newspaper’s editorials against Trump: “Those have become critical to the point where I’ll read some of them and I’m like, ‘Whoa!’ Like, ‘I work for this place?’.”
In another portion of the video, Lamothe is shown criticizing his newspaper’s focus on “sensational” news rather than on substantive issues. “I can’t tell you how many times we get an email at work: ‘Oh did you see what [Trump] just tweeted? What are we gonna do about it?’.”
He also knocks the Post‘s competitors, and is shown saying that some New York Times reporters were “over the top” and that CNN was “always over the top.”
Another Post employee, described in the video as Joey Marburger, “director of product,” gives Post owner — and mega-billionaire — Jeff Bezos credit for its controversial Trump-era slogan, “Democracy dies in darkness.”
O’Keefe, narrating the Project Veritas video, declared: “See, Washington Post, democracy does die in darkness. But it also dies in silence, too. Stay tuned, because there are more videos to come.”
As debate heated up on social media in advance of the Project Veritas video release, O’Keefe tweeted: “The entire media establishment is against Project Veritas. Number one trending on Twitter. For good reason. There is a video coming out in momentarily inside the Washington Post. The last video cost NYT reporter his job. They are scared. As always, there’s more than one Video!”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. He is the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.