Conservative provocateur who tried to plant fake stories in The Washington Post says it's OK to lie if you're lying to journalists

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February 23, 2018 10:13 PM

James O’Keefe said lying in the process of obtaining a story is ethical, including an apparent plot to plant a false story in the Washington Post.

Right-wing provocateur James O'Keefe said his undercover staff are encouraged to deceive and lie to reporters.
O'Keefe was exposed for lying to The Washington Post last year, in an apparent attempt to plant a false story during the Alabama special Senate election.

At the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) just outside Washington, O'Keefe participated in a panel titled "

O'Keefe added that he never intended to plant a false story in The Washington Post, despite a detailed report from the newspaper chronicling one of his employees attempting to persuade reporters that Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore had impregnated her as a teenager.

"We never intended to plant a false story," O'Keefe said. "It was always the intent to get a meeting and that was it."

Rather, O'Keefe said that their intention was to discuss politics with the Post reporters in an attempt to expose liberal bias. O'Keefe acknowledged that the sting was a failure and that "reporters sometimes are successful and sometimes are not."

"It was in the meeting to have a conversation, that's it. That's the extent of it," O'Keefe added. "And I would happily go under oath in a court of law to say what I just said, as would my undercover people — as with my journalists. The media lied. The media lied."

The Post chronicled O'Keefe's employee, Jaime T. Phillips, in her plan to convince the newspaper to publish her account at the height of the Alabama special election last year, in which Moore's campaign was embroiled in allegations of sexual misconduct by several women, some of whom were teenagers at the time of the incidents.

"We always honor 'off-the-record' agreements when they’re entered into in good faith," said Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron in November.

"But this so-called off-the-record conversation was the essence of a scheme to deceive and embarrass us. The intent by Project Veritas clearly was to publicize the conversation if we fell for the trap. Because of our customary journalistic rigor, we weren't fooled, and we can't honor an 'off-the-record' agreement that was solicited in maliciously bad faith."

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