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"Some say we have created a new genre. We have only resurrected one. It is called the truth, known in latin as veritas."

James E. O'Keefe III (born June 28, 1984) is an American conservative conman and videographer who garnered media attention in September 2009 for creating the ACORN undercover videos, which resulted in a loss of public funds for the community organizer. The tapes were later exposed to be a complete hoax, and in the words of California Attorney General Jerry Brown, "severely edited."

In 2006 and 2007, O'Keefe and fellow activist Lila Rose released two sets of video and audio recordings which impacted the public funding of Planned Parenthood. In April 2010, O'Keefe obtained a brief job with the United States Census Bureau and released undercover videos in which he was overpaid for four hours of work during a two day period and supervisors were unconcerned.

In January 2010, O'Keefe and three editors of conservative college publications were arrested by the FBI at the federal offices of Senator Mary Landrieu on felony charges of entering federal property under false pretenses with the intent of committing a felony. In March 2010 O'Keefe's charges were refiled as a misdemeanor, and that May he pled guilty and was sentenced to three years' probation, 100 hours of community service and was fined $1,500.

Personal life, education, and philosophy

O'Keefe is the eldest child of James E. O'Keefe Jr., a materials engineer, and Deborah McHaffie O'Keefe, a physical therapist. His younger sister is a painter and sculptor and his family is of Irish-American ancestry. He grew up in Bergen County, New Jersey, in a home that was politically "conservative but not rigidly so", according to his father. He graduated from Westwood High School, where he showed an early interest in the arts, theater, and journalism. He played the leading role in his high school's 2002 production of the musical Crazy for You and attained the highest rank, Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America.

He attended Rutgers University, where he majored in philosophy and founded the Rutgers Centurion, a conservative student newspaper. He also began making videos, including one in which he and a few other students attempted to ban Lucky Charms from the campus dining halls claiming that the breakfast cereal was offensive to Americans of Irish heritage. According to the New York Times, "O’Keefe quickly exhibited his absurdist improvisational style" in the video, "telling a school official that the leprechaun on the cereal box appeared as 'an Irish-American' who is 'portrayed as a little green-cladded gnome or huckster.'" The plea was taken seriously and Lucky Charms was temporarily removed from Brower dining hall in April, 2005.

Following graduation, he worked for Ben Wetmore at the Leadership Institute in Arlington, Virginia traveling to various colleges to train students how to start up independent newspapers. According to Morton Blackwell, the president of the Leadership Institute, O'Keefe's longstanding ambition was to catch his subjects in videos "breaking the law." It has been pointed out the subjects in O'Keefe's videos can't be charged with crimes no matter what is said, since undercover reporters posing as characters do not carry the underlying criminal act required for a conspiracy charge. O'Keefe, however, stated to the Los Angeles Times that his videos "are not supposed to necessarily show people breaking laws. They are supposed to change hearts and minds."

O'Keefe attended Western State law school for one year. O'Keefe currently works as a speaker and video producer. In addition, in a January 26, 2010 interview, Andrew Breitbart, editor of the Drudge Report and owner of Breitbart.com, BigGovernment.com, BigHollwood.com and BigJournalism.com, says he pays O'Keefe a salary for his "life rights".

O'Keefe has described himself as an "investigative journalist without formal training" who follows Saul Alinsky's rule of making "the enemy live up to its own book of rules." He has been called a "guerrilla documentarian" and a "daredevil videographer", and usually confronts subjects undercover and caricatures their social values by carrying them to outlandish extremes. O'Keefe describes his politics as "progressive radical". Most media coverage describes him as a conservative as he was once employed by Morton Blackwell at the Leadership Institute. O'Keefe has expressed admiration for the philosophies of British writer G.K. Chesterton and Soviet novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Planned Parenthood videos

During 2006 and 2007 O'Keefe helped plan and produce a number of undercover video shoots at Planned Parenthood. The videos, shot with pro-life activist Lila Rose, caught several Planned Parenthood workers attempting to circumvent state laws requiring abortion clinics to report statutory rape. The videos received national media coverage.

O'Keefe met Rose while she was still a UCLA student. At the time he was visiting UCLA as part of his 2006 tenure as a Leadership Institute campus representative. With O'Keefe's support and advice Rose launched her first foray in activism at the UCLA campus health center. Soon he came up with the idea to have her pose as an underaged pregnant teenager, go to Planned Parenthood clinics for advice, and tape the conversations that followed. Their expectation was that the clinics would try to get around laws concerning statutory rape or engage in other illegal behavior. The project featured seven videos. In the first, a Santa Monica clinic advised Rose not write an underage birthdate on clinic forms. Instead it advised her to "figure out a birthdate that works" and lie about her age to be eligible for an abortion. Later videos of the exchanges led to Tennessee lawmakers seeking to end a $721,000 contract with Planned Parenthood, and the Orange County Board of Supervisors in California voting to suspend a grant worth nearly $300,000 to Planned Parenthood.

The next year, O'Keefe called several Planned Parenthood clinics posing as a donor. In the calls he specified his gift should go to fund abortions of minorities because "the less black kids out there the better." All seven states he called agreed to accept his donation. After audio recordings of the conversations were made public in 2008, Planned Parenthood issued an apology for the behavior of the staff members on the phone, calling it inappropriate. In his call to Planned Parenthood of Albuquerque, O'Keefe discussed affirmative action and said there were too many black people because they compete with white Americans for admission to schools. The clinic representative replied in sympathetic tones, "Yes, yes, it’s a strange time for sure." To a similar disscusion Planned Parenthood of Ohio replied, "For whatever reason we'll accept the money." Planned Parenthood of Idaho's vice president, Autumn Kersey, was suspended after the recordings divulged her laughing, saying, “understandable, understandable," and saying: "Excuse my hesitation, this is the first time I've had a donor call and make this kind of request, so I'm excited and want to make sure I don't leave anything out."

The recordings led to calls by black leaders to withdraw public financing of Planned Parenthood, recalling its founder Margaret Sanger's support for racial eugenics. The call results also prompted a group of African-Americans pastors to protest in Washington, DC accusing Planned Parenthood of "Genocide" on blacks. Dr. Alveda King, the niece of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., supported the campaign.

ACORN undercover videos

The ACORN undercover videos controversy started in September 2009 when Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe published selectively edited hidden-camera recordings in which Giles posed as a prostitute and O'Keefe claimed to be her boyfriend in order to elicit damaging responses from employees of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). The videos were recorded over the summer of 2009 while visiting ACORN offices in eight cities and purported to show low-level ACORN employeees in six cities providing advice to Giles and O'Keefe on how to avoid taxes and detection by the authorities with regard to their plans to engage in tax evasion, human smuggling and child prostitution. After the videos were made public, the U.S. Congress voted to eliminate federal funding to ACORN, although the resolutions were later nullified in a federal court ruling that the measures were an unconstitutional bill of attainder, a decision reversed by a federal appeals court. In March 2010, ACORN announced it would be closing its offices and disbanding due to loss of funding from government and private donors. An internal ACORN investigation concluded that ACORN had poor management practices that contributed to unprofessional actions by a number of its low-level employees. On March 1, 2010, the district attorney for Brooklyn concluded that there was no criminal wrongdoing by the ACORN staff in the Brooklyn ACORN office. An investigation report by California Attorney General Edmund G. Brown Jr. released on April 1, 2010 found the videos from Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Bernardino to be "severely edited" and did not find evidence of criminal conduct on the part of ACORN employees, with the Attorney General stating "things are not always as partisan zealots portray them through highly selective editing of reality." Brown found that Juan Carlos Vera, one of the ACORN employees featured in the undercover videos did gather information from O'Keefe and Giles and then reported it to his brother, a police detective. The report stated, "“Even if O’Keefe and Giles had truly intended to break the law, there is no evidence that any of the ACORN employees had the intent to aid and abet such criminal conduct or agreed to join in that illegal conduct.” As of April 2, 2010, the other ACORN videos have not been released to the public in their full, unedited form, leading to speculation that the videos have been heavily edited to distort what happened during the tapings. On June 14, 2010, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) released its findings which showed that the now-disbanded community organizing group ACORN evidenced no sign that it, or any of its related organizations, mishandled any of the $40 million in federal money which they had received in recent years, despite O'Keefe's efforts to discredit them., On July 8, 2010, Vera who was featured in one of the ACORN undercover videos and subsequently lost his job filed a lawsuit against O'Keefe, Giles and other unidentified defendants alleging invasion of privacy, citing a California law that outlaws such recordings without consent of all parties involved.

New Orleans arrest

According to the charging document, on January 25, 2010 O'Keefe along with Stan Dai, Joseph Basel and Robert Flanagan entered the offices of Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu. Basel and Flanagan were dressed as repair technicians from a telephone company and told the staff they were there on reports the phone system was broken. While they were there they tried to engage the staff in conversations about the phone system and to call Landrieu's phones from their cell phones. They then asked if they could have access to the phone cabinet. O'Keefe stood nearby with a small camera recording their activity.

The staff grew suspicious and called the police. Soon O'Keefe, Dai, Basel and Flanagan were arrested on felony charges by the FBI on the charge of attempting to gain access to a federal office and phones. Although initially charged with a felony, the accusation was reduced to entering a federal building under false pretenses, a misdemeanor.

In a post-arrest interview on Fox News, O'Keefe said he entered Landrieu's office to investigate accusations it was ignoring phone calls from constituents during the health care debate. The group devised a plan involving disguises because they believed that if they simply entered Senator Landrieu’s office and identified themselves as journalists, they would not likely receive truthful answers.

As the charge was a misdemeanor, U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval had jurisdiction to try the case. Unusually, he declined to exercise his right to hear it and transferred proceedings to a federal magistrate. Nonetheless in his court order Duval chided the defendants: "Deception is alleged to have been used by the defendants to achieve their purposes which in and of itself is unconscionable," and the "perceived righteousness of a cause does not justify nefarious and potentially dangerous actions." O'Keefe pled guilty to federal Judge Daniel Knowles May 26 and was sentenced to three years' probation, 100 hours of community service and a $1,500 fine. Basel, Dai, and Flanagan received lesser sentences of two years' probation, 75 hours of community service and a $1,500 fine.

Attempt to 'punk' CNN correspondent

In late September, 2010, CNN published details of O'Keefe's attempt to embarrass CNN and one of their journalists.

O'Keefe and CNN investigative correspondent Abbie Boudreau held a meeting on August 17, 2010 in Lusby, Maryland to discuss the request by CNN to be on the set of a music video featuring O'Keefe. CNN was doing an investigative report on young conservative activists, which included O'Keefe. Boudrou drove to the agreed meeting place, a house located on a tributary of the Patuxent River, and was met by Izzy Santa, the executive producer of O'Keefe's non-profit organization Project Veritas. She got into Boudrou's vehicle and expressed moral reservations about what was planned to occur and warned Boudreau that O'Keefe was planning to 'punk' her by getting her to board a nearby boat so that she could be secretly recorded. After she didn't get on the boat, O'Keefe left the boat and they had a brief exchange, ending with Boudreau cancelling the meeting. Santa later sent a number of e-mails to CNN documenting O'Keefe's intent to set up the elaborate hoax involving sex toys and sexual conversation which was intended to embarrass both Boudreau and CNN.

CNN eventually obtained a paper entitled "CNN Caper" which outlined the details of the hoax. Santa confirmed the document's authenticity with the news organization. Although O'Keefe had attempted to get Boudreau to enter the boat, he later attempted to deny involvement, telling CNN "That is not my work product. When it was sent to me, I immediately found certain elements highly objectionable and inappropriate, and did not consider them for one minute following it."

Izzy Santa has since been relieved of her responsibilities at Project Veritas, but is still on their payroll.

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63. Our Documentary Takes A Strange Detour

External links

• Four charged in incident, Christian Science Monitor, January 28, 2010.
• James O'Keefe's biography and articles at BigGovernment.com
• Project Veritas

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• 1984 births
• American activists
• Eagle Scouts
• Living people
• People from Bergen County, New Jersey
• Rutgers University alumni
• American filmmakers