You could be forgiven, if you don’t follow the Alt-Right, for not knowing who Michael Black is, but James O'Keefe is a name you should recognize. A maker of undercover political hit jobs, he reached greatest prominence with his “ACORN videos”, which led to congress initiating a funding freeze against the organization and ultimately the organization’s dissolution. Yet all investigations into the organization, while finding organizational deficits, found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing. Multiple investigations found the clips to be “heavily edited”, including having the order of events reversed and anything that worked against the pre-planned narrative removed. One of the people featured in the video, Juan Carlos Vera, later sued O’Keefe and won a $100k settlement.
O’Keefe has, of course, not stopped there; with his new “Project Veritas”, he’s released around two new hack job videos per year. His latest, popular among the Alt-Right, alleges that the Clinton campaign is hiring paid instigators to stir up fights at Trump rallies, with clips of a protester named Aaron Black and others in a group called Democracy Partners saying that they coordinate such actions with the campaign and the DNC.
Well… apparently all is not as it seems.
Apparently Black has been working in close coordination with Breitbart this entire election cycle to get Trump nominated. Breitbart used him as a rabble-rouser at Cruz and Rubio rallies (you may remember him as “Rubio-Bot”, for example); his actions were coordinated with top staff. When Breitbart sought to smear their own reporter, Michelle Fields — who had been assaulted by Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski — Black reached out to them, helping them protest her hiring with Huffington Post.
So far, Democracy Partners is standing behind Black and their organization’s cooperation with Breitbart in general, insisting that they weren’t working just to get Trump nominated and that Breitbart was just a useful outlet for them.
The Clinton campaign says has repeatedly stated that they have never worked with Democracy Partners.
And James O’Keefe remains a lying hack.