James O’Keefe’s allies defend his work and accuse the media of minimizing it. The derailed plans of James O'Keefe

After pulling off the brazen hidden camera sting credited with bringing down the liberal organizing group ACORN, James O’Keefe dreamt up an even bolder plan: to build a permanent undercover video operation that would expose institutions of the American left.

But things have not gone according to plan.


O’Keefe’s vision, pieced together from court filings, interviews and tax records filed by his nonprofit Project Verita s, has been hampered by bitter infighting, lack of funding and even his own fame.

And O’Keefe has begun to fight back, preparing lawsuits against two former associates-turned-critics — one who claims O’Keefe had little to do with his biggest post-ACORN exposé, focused on NPR, and another former colleague who says she backed out of a project last month because of O’Keefe’s lack of professionalism.

The mounting turmoil comes as O’Keefe’s recent efforts — including an apparently ongoing media bias exposé called “To Catch a Journalist” and an effort to highlight the hypocrisy of Occupy Wall Street protesters — have mostly fallen flat.

While O’Keefe’s allies staunchly defend his work and accuse the media of minimizing it, some also concede he may need to adapt in order to live up to conservative hopes that he would lead a new wave of potent conservative activist journalism.

“There are a lot of people who want to destroy him, so I’m sympathetic to him and I understand that, like me, he is going to have to figure out how to manage people and how to manage this imperfect environment,” said Internet entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart, an O’Keefe mentor.

“People are drawn to wanting to enter James O’Keefe’s more exciting, aggressive form of journalism. So it doesn’t surprise me that there are behind-the-scenes ego problems between people,” said Breitbart, who posted O’Keefe’s blockbuster ACORN videos and defended them against criticisms of misleading editing. Breitbart attributed the squabbles buffeting O’Keefe to a liberal establishment intent on “exploit[ing] a weakness in his operation or a weakness in one of his presentations.”

For his part, O’Keefe suggested the tension with former activists and weaker-than-expected fundraising have not diminished his impact, telling POLITICO in an email that Project Veritas’s recent efforts “exposed the journalism establishment for actively campaigning for or against certain politicians and propping up movements they agree with such as Occupy Wall Street.”

Yet there was relatively little buzz on the right for O’Keefe’s Occupy Wall Street video — for which he posed as a banker in French cuffs and tortoise-shell glasses and secretly recorded mostly disheveled or confused protesters prattling on incoherently or conspiratorially last month — nor for his “To Catch a Journalist” series.

“To Catch a Journalist” has targeted journalism professors at Columbia and New York University and reporters at The Huffington Post and Newark’s Star-Ledger.

One professor featured in the series, Columbia Journalism School’s Sree Sreenivasan, last week laughed off O’Keefe’s questions about a Star-Ledger reporter secretly filmed disparaging Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and another who sent Project Veritas a profane email after being spotlighted in a previous installment in the series.

O’Keefe “show[ed] once again that ambush interviews and selective editing don’t make you into a citizen journalist,” Sreenivasan wrote Monday.

In fact, O’Keefe has been mostly limited to doing follow-up interviews, as opposed to the more brazen undercover work that he did in his seminal ACORN sting, said Francisco Gonzalez, a close O’Keefe friend and adviser who sits on the board of Project Veritas.

In fact, O’Keefe has been mostly limited to doing follow-up interviews, as opposed to the more brazen undercover work that he did in his seminal ACORN sting, said Francisco Gonzalez, a close O’Keefe friend and adviser who sits on the board of Project Veritas.

“It’s really tough for him as James O’Keefe to go undercover, because once you have done a few of these, people are going to start recognizing you,” he said. “So the bigger, broader goal for Project Veritas is to educate and train citizen journalists across the country to empower themselves to do their own investigations.”

Yet O’Keefe has had a series of falling outs with close associates involved in his stings — and some of them have grumbled that he lacks the undercover journalism chops and leadership ability to turn Project Veritas into a force.

“What people around him learn about O’Keefe is that he doesn’t plan or research anything he does,” said a former associate who devised and implemented the NPR sting, which led to the resignation of the taxpayer-supported radio network’s president.

In the NPR sting, executives of the radio network were secretly recorded disparaging conservatives and they appear to consider accepting money from a made-up group with ties to the radical Muslim Brotherhood. The project, involving a fake website and email addresses, was Project Veritas’s most elaborate to date, and the former associate, who goes by the pseudonym “Simon Templar,” said O’Keefe was “clueless and uninvolved” in the planning and only handled the editing.

“But he’ll trample even his best friends to get in front of a camera and present their ideas and work as his own,” said the associate, who agreed to talk to POLITICO only to respond to comments from O’Keefe’s camp. He asserted that O’Keefe “was frantically desperate to get himself back in the news for something positive” after a spat of bad press over his May 2010 guilty plea to entering a federal building under false pretenses during a botched sting of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and an embarrassing botched sting of a CNN reporter in August 2010.

Templar said that O’Keefe reneged on a promise to credit him and another activist named Oluwaseun “Shaughn” Adeleye for their work on the NPR sting and later threatened to blacklist Templar in the conservative movement if he complained publicly.

Another activist, Nadia Naffe, who worked with O’Keefe on the “To Catch a Journalist” project, backed out last month, before the project was completed, alleging in an email to O’Keefe and the Project Veritas board that O’Keefe treated her disrespectfully.

In response, O’Keefe’s attorney, Ben Light, fired off a letter accusing her of “working with others to smear my client’s reputation” and threatening a lawsuit. Light said he was also preparing a lawsuit against Templar for breaching a confidentiality agreement.

“These are personal attacks that are just garbage,” Light said. “They’re not even newsworthy. So we’re going to do everything that we can to stop them.”

Project Veritas paid a former employee named Izzy Santa a five-figure settlement after she threatened to sue. Santa’s settlement included a nondisclosure agreement, and she declined POLITICO’s interview requests. She and O’Keefe had a falling out after she tipped off one of his targets, Abbie Boudreau, about a lewd plan to embarrass her. Boudreau was working for CNN on a documentary about O’Keefe and other young conservative activists at the time.

Gonzalez, the Project Veritas board member, said he was “very disappointed” that Santa tipped off Boudreau instead of coming to him, and he suggested that Naffe was “trying to take advantage of James.”

O’Keefe, meanwhile, asserted that Templar and Adeleye — who he pointed out were “volunteers within Project Veritas” — were properly credited for their roles in the NPR sting. “At every opportunity I publicly gave the volunteers credit for their contributions to the project and their accomplishments,” he said in an email.

Without Templar and Adeleye, “there would be no NPR investigation,” Gonzalez conceded. “I don’t think it was James’ idea. I think it was their idea,” he said. He acknowledged that O’Keefe has sometimes overshadowed other activists and added “I don’t know if folks are craving attention or are jealous that James gets a lot of the attention.”

And while he said Project Veritas has implemented legal and strategic vetting procedures for stings and activists in order to avoid future clashes and embarrassments, Gonzalez predicted that O’Keefe could one day be a sting victim at the hands of a jilted associate or other enemy.

“It’s bound to happen,” he said. “I mean, he does it to people and people are going to do it to him, and we fully understand that.”

Yet despite O’Keefe’s efforts to cast himself as a political outsider, Project Veritas has also been trying to use his appeal to raise money from within the conservative movement, which shied away from him after the botched Landrieu caper and the aborted CNN prank.

“He gained many fans after the ACORN sting,” said Gonzalez. “But then, when he was arrested and then we had the CNN thing happening,” Gonzalez said “even many in the conservative movement started doubting whether James could really go forward beyond that.”

While O’Keefe told POLITICO that Project Veritas “relies more on lots of small donors than on a couple of big donors,” in its August 2010 application to the Internal Revenue Service for tax-exempt status, the group indicated it would focus “on major donors who express interest in our work.”

It also reported agreements relationships with well-connected consultants, including GOP direct mail pioneer Richard Viguerie, as well as Texas fundraiser Kate Doner, who has ties to deep-pocketed groups funded by ultrawealthy conservatives.

O’Keefe is getting advice and assistance from Eric O’Keefe, a conservative operative who is not related but also has connections to the billionaire Koch brothers.

While the group has yet to report its initial fundraising tallies, Gonzales said it is “not anywhere near” the $600,000 fundraising goal for this year it reported to the IRS, though he is still optimistic even with its biggest gift to date coming in at $15,000.

The group also has been unable to pay the $120,000 annual salary it proposed for James O’Keefe in its tax filings, said Gonzalez. “He’s barely paying his own expenses,” said Gonzalez.

In fact, even as Project Veritas has fallen short of its fundraising goals, O’Keefe has established some connections of his own to deep-pocketed conservative groups, according to the mandatory travel requests he’s had to file with the court as a condition of his probation. They show that groups including Young America’s Foundation, the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity and the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity have paid him for speaking gigs or to jet him around the country.

This month, the judge on his case cleared him to travel to Washington on the dime of Americans for Prosperity Foundation to speak at the group’s Defending the Dream Summit, where he was greeted with a standing ovation and told activists “I expose the truth and whatever happens, happens.”