Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks to her supporters during her Primary Night Event at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in March 15, 2016 in West Palm Beach. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images Conservative group may have broken Fla. law in secret recording of Clinton campaign voter-registration shenanigans

The conservative Project Veritas group might have broken Florida law by secretly shooting video of Hillary Clinton staffers making crude comments and discussing the destruction of Republican voter-registration forms.

The video was shot recently by a Project Veritas mole who infiltrated the Clinton campaign’s Palm Beach County operation run by the Florida Democratic Party, which denies wrongdoing and says its staffers were surreptitiously recorded without their permission or knowledge, a violation of Florida law.


The video rocketed through conservative media after it was released yesterday and led to protesters outside the campaign’s office in the county, where Donald Trump spoke earlier today and owns the Mar-a-Lago resort. While Trump backers say the video shows how the election will be “rigged,” there’s no evidence that Clinton’s campaign broke the law — unlike Project Veritas, which could not be reached via phone or email for comment.

The title of the video — “HIDDEN CAM: Clinton Staffer Says I Could ‘Grab [Her] Ass’ and Not Get Fired” — tacitly acknowledges the Democrats were not informed of the recording. The video draws the most attention, initially, to a Clinton staffer named Wylie Mao, who was recorded making his comments in a restaurant with other Clinton staffers.

“I think the bar of acceptable conduct in this campaign is pretty low,” Mao says at one point before making a reference to a female Clinton staffer by first name only. “To be fired I would have to grab Emma’s ass twice and she would have to complain about it, I would have to sexually harass someone.”

For Project Veritas’ founder, James O’Keefe, the comments from the low-level Clinton staffer are comparable to those made by the Republican nominee for president in newly released video from 2005 when he said that, as a “star,” women let him “grab them by the pussy.”

“Let's get this straight. Trump's ‘grab them by the’ [self-censored pause] generated wall-to-wall TV coverage and generated the narrative that this is his true character and how he acts with women,” O’Keefe says on the Project Veritas video. “Therefore, because of the precedent set by the mainstream media, I expect wall-to-wall-coverage of this Hillary staffer bragging about the ease that you can commit sexual harassment inside Hillary’s campaign and not get fired.”

In the video, Mao also says that staffers could destroy completed voter-registration forms, which he called “VR forms,” without much punishment.

“I think if I ripped up completed VR forms — like 20 of them — I think I would get reprimanded. I don’t think I would get fired,” Mao says.

According to Max Steele, a spokesman for the state Democratic Party, Mao or anyone else would lose their jobs for destroying voter-registration forms.

"Sexual assault and harassment, and destruction of voter registration forms, are serious offenses,” Steele said in a written statement. “There is no question that a staff member who engaged in this kind of behavior would be immediately terminated, and we are investigating the claims. Remarks like these do not represent the Florida Democratic Party and are completely inappropriate."

The video neither shows nor alleges that anyone affiliated with Clinton’s campaign actually destroyed any forms. Florida Democrats are surpassing Republicans in signing up voters. The state party has submitted 503,000 voter registration forms for this election; the state Republican Party only 60,000. The Florida Democratic Party said it trains volunteers on proper handling of the registration forms and tracks the documents to make sure none is destroyed in violation of state law.

Under state law, a “person may not knowingly destroy, mutilate, or deface a voter registration form or election ballot or obstruct or delay the delivery of a voter registration form or election ballot.” The third-degree felony carries a maximum five-year-prison term and $5,000 fine.

However, the video itself could constitute a third-degree felony on the part of Project Veritas because of Florida’s law that requires consent before someone is recorded. A person must give explicit consent or give “implied consent” by continuing to talk after being told he or she is being recorded.

After this story posted online, O'Keefe responded by discussing the undercover recording of 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who was caught on video appearing to disparage almost half of the electorate in a Boca Raton fundraiser.

"@politico, so you're worried abt FL '2 party consent' for my @HillaryClinton sex assault vid, but not for 47% video?" O'Keefe said via Twitter.

POLITICO, in fact, wrote the story in 2012 that the secretly recorded video of Mitt Romney decrying the “47 percent” of Americans who won't vote for him might have run afoul of state law that bars eavesdropping.

In 2009, Project Veritas’s founder, O’Keefe, agreed to pay a $100,000 settlement to an employee of the voter-registration group ACORN after secretly recording him in California and producing a deceptive video. O’Keefe’s work ultimately brought down ACORN.

In the new Florida case, no complaints have been filed, said Mike Edmondson, a spokesman for Palm Beach County state attorney Dave Aronberg, who would be in charge of prosecuting the case.

“A ‘victim’ would need to file a complaint with law enforcement to initiate an investigation," Edmondson said via email. “Generally a violation is a third degree felony punishable to 5 years in prison. Not aware of a complaint at this point."

Asked about whether Project Veritas could argue it did not break the law because the Clinton staffers gave implied consent or if they had no reasonable expectation of privacy, Edmondson said that “each case is fact specific and your questions are too general to answer other than in Florida it is always best to ask and receive consent before recording a private conversation.”

For Dan Gelber, a lawyer who handled a high-profile 2005 media case involving the statute, Project Veritas clearly broke the law.

“This is a textbook example of violating the statute,” said Gelber, a former federal prosecutor and Democratic state legislator from Miami. “There’s no consent here.”

It’s unclear if Mao or the other staffers, Mark Hodges or Trevor LaFauci, will file a complaint. None could be reached through the campaign or state party. Mao and LaFauci have locked their Twitter accounts and Hodges appears to have deleted his account.

Of the three, Hodges has relatively noncontroversial cameos in the video. He acknowledges avoiding Donald Trump supporters and, during the lunchtime chat with Mao, complains of a volunteer who wants to go to a Sept. 30 Clinton event in Coral Springs.

“Tell her to fuck off and volunteer for U.S. Weekend because it's a weekend of action, and you can't win votes at a fucking rally,” Hodges says.

LaFauci is the most-compromised of the three. At one point, an undercover Project Veritas “journalist” named “Max” claims he destroyed three “Trump ballots” — an impossibility because ballots are distributed by county election supervisors to individual voters, not political operatives or canvassers.

“I was ripping up the ballots [sic],” Max tells LaFauci. “So we’re ok with that?”

“Yeah,” LaFauci responds. “I appreciate you telling me.”

“Are you going to report it at all?” LaFauci was asked.

“Nah,” LaFauci responds, adding later that he’s ok with what happened “as long as you habit of it.”

Updated at 8:15 p.m. with comments via Twitter by Project Veritas’ founder, James O’Keefe.