Federal Judge Rules It ‘Fair’ to Characterize Project Veritas as ‘Political Spying’

Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images.

A federal judge has ruled it “fair” to describe the undercover activities of conservative activist James O’Keefe‘s Project Veritas as “political spying.”

The ruling is related to a lawsuit, filed in 2017, that will be before the court this year.

An intern working at a Democratic firm, Democracy Partners, in 2016 was actually working undercover for Project Veritas, recording staffers and catching the firm’s founder, Robert Creamer suggesting that they incite violence at rallies held by then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. Creamer, whose organization was working with the campaign of then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, stepped back from his role on the campaign following the Project Veritas release of the undercover footage.

Democracy Partners and Creamer sued over that footage. In advance of the December-set trial, O’Keefe’s attorneys filed to prevent the plaintiffs from describing the group’s actions as “political spying, but were not successful.

The Daily Beast reported on Monday:

In an Oct. 14 court opinion, though, U.S. District Court Judge Paul L. Friedman ruled that it’s reasonable to describe O’Keefe’s group’s actions in that way.

“‘Political spying’ is a fair characterization of the undisputed facts of this case,” Friedman, a Bill Clinton appointee, wrote.

O’Keefe’s lawyers had argued that Project Veritas operates as journalists, an argument that would likely make it easier at trial for Project Veritas to claim their activities were protected under the First Amendment. But much of the evidence that Project Veritas’s operation could be called spying came from O’Keefe’s own 2018 book, American Pravda.

In that book, O’Keefe explicitly compared their operative’s actions to those of a spy, writing that Allison Maass was “literally living out her character in America’s capital city much as Americans overseas did in Moscow during the Cold War.”