Massive fail of the month

One of James O’Keefe’s dumbest stunts: wearing a crude Osama bin Laden costume, crossing the US-Mexico border

Right wing smear merchant James O’Keefe performed a majestic face plant recently, when he phoned the George Soros-funded Open Society Foundation posing as a “Hungarian-American” named “Victor Kesh” to set up one of his creepy dishonest hit jobs — and forgot to hang up the phone after leaving a message.

O’Keefe ended up leaving a much longer message than he intended. Seven minutes longer. And it included the discussion he had with his fellow right wing operatives about perpetrating the sting. All recorded on his intended target’s voicemail; a classic O’Keefe moment.

As Dana Geraghty recalls it, March 16th was a “rather quiet Wednesday.” That afternoon, she was in her cubicle at the Open Society Foundations, on West Fifty-seventh Street, where she helps oversee the nonprofit group’s pro-democracy programs in Eurasia. The Foundations are the philanthropic creation of George Soros, the hedge-fund billionaire, who is a prominent donor to liberal causes, including Hillary Clinton’s Presidential bid. Soros, who has spent nineteen million dollars on the 2016 Presidential campaign, is regarded with suspicion by many conservatives. National Review has suggested that he may be fomenting protests against Donald Trump by secretly funding what it called a “rent-a-mob.” Geraghty, who is twenty-eight, had programmed her office phone to forward messages from unfamiliar callers to her e-mail inbox. She was about to review several messages when she noticed that one of them was extraordinarily long. “Who leaves a seven-minute voice mail?” Geraghty asked herself. She clicked on it. “Hey, Dana,” a voice began. The caller sounded to her like an older American male. “My name is, uh, Victor Kesh. I’m a Hungarian-American who represents a, uh, foundation . . . that would like to get involved with you and aid what you do in fighting for, um, European values.” He asked Geraghty for the name of someone he could talk to “about supporting you guys and coördinating with you on some of your efforts.” Requesting a callback, he left a phone number with a 914 area code—Westchester County. […] She continued to listen, and the man’s voice suddenly took on a more commanding tone. The caller had failed to hang up, and Kesh, unaware that he was still being recorded, seemed to be conducting a meeting about how to perpetrate an elaborate sting on Soros. “What needs to happen,” he said, is for “someone other than me to make a hundred phone calls like that”—to Soros, to his employees, and to the Democracy Alliance, a club of wealthy liberal political donors that Soros helped to found, which is expected to play a large role in financing this year’s campaigns. Kesh described sending into the Soros offices an “undercover” agent who could “talk the talk” with Open Society executives. Kesh’s goal wasn’t fully spelled out on the recording, but the gist was that an operative posing as a potential donor could penetrate Soros’s operation and make secret videos that exposed embarrassing activities. Soros, he assured the others, has “thousands of organizations” on the left in league with him. Kesh said that the name of his project was Discover the Networks.

Read the whole thing; as a pure massive fail it’s right up there with some of Chuck C. Johnson’s most ridiculous moments. These guys think they’re right wing journalistic undercover masterminds, and really… they’re just sneaky, underhanded dopes who try to trick people into doing embarrassing or illegal things.

Here’s a transcript of the whole call, and here’s the audio.

MP3 Audio