The Patriot Post® · Project Veritas and the Botched Sting

“Veritas vos Liberabit” — the truth will set you free — has been The Patriot Post’s motto since our inception in 1996. A well-funded group called Project Veritas uses the same Latin word to describe its efforts to expose leftist hypocrisy, bias and lies. Unfortunately, that group failed to live up to its name this week.

First, some background. Project Veritas’ founder, James O'Keefe, has made a living with undercover “sting” videos. His first claim to fame was cracking the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) in a series of videos revealing that ACORN would help certain patrons skirt the law. ACORN soon lost government funding and went defunct. O'Keefe, however, learned some of the wrong lessons. It wasn’t long before he was arrested for a stunt involving Louisiana Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu. His shenanigans continued, even if sometimes with rewarding “gotcha” videos against the Left.

O'Keefe’s latest adventure saw him trying to take down The Washington Post for its politically timed hit job on Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore. O'Keefe used a woman to try to plant a false story with the Post so as to discredit the paper’s other reporting. “In a series of interviews over two weeks,” the Post reported, “the woman shared a dramatic story about an alleged sexual relationship with Moore in 1992 that led to an abortion when she was 15.” The Post was already on guard for such attempts to undermine its credibility, however, and easily sniffed out the “inconsistencies in her story.” The game was up when the Post’s reporters saw her entering the offices of Project Veritas.

O'Keefe’s ill-conceived sting actually makes the Post more credible. Unlike the affair with Rolling Stone, the problem with the Post’s stories on Moore wasn’t the credibility of the paper’s reporting or the accounts of Moore’s accusers — which are largely believable and which the candidate has yet to convincingly deny. The problem with the Post’s blockbuster scoop was the timing. We strongly suspect the Post sat on the story, waiting to release its report until after Moore won the GOP Senate primary. O'Keefe’s attempt to discredit the Post and Moore’s accusers, all while theoretically getting Moore off the hook, doesn’t address the real issue.

In fact, conservatives shouldn’t mistake the Post’s bias for a lack of professionalism. There’s a reason why the Post is one of the nation’s leading newspapers — its reporters are good at what they do. That’s true even if the paper is a propaganda outlet for the Democrat Party, courtesy of its owner, billionaire Jeff Bezos.