Thread by @McDutchoven

Diary🧵

"n 2020, a Peruvian-born millionaire who resided in a marina development in Jupiter started fighting with neighbors who objected to a Trump flag he flew - The local feud escalated into a series of nationally publicized pro-Trump boat parades.

nymag.com/intelligencer/…

The night before the event, a Republican donor named Elizabeth Fago threw a campaign fundraiser at her dockside mansion. Kimberly Guilfoyle and Donald Trump Jr. were at the party, and so were a pair of local entrepreneurs, Aimee Harris and Robert Kurlander

The two locals tried to make a deal with Don Jr which appears to have been entertained at some length

"Don Jr. says he “never saw the diary,” but according to a source familiar some representatives of the Trump campaign took the sellers to a private room"

The next morning,

an armada of pleasure craft set sail with Roger Stone aboard its flagship. Don Jr. and Guilfoyle waved from the stern of a blue Hinckley yacht.

(CGI re-enactment:)

A few days later, Kurlander reported bad news from his contacts with the Trump campaign.“They want it to go to the FBI,” he texted Harris. He said there was “NO WAY” Trump could use the diary. “It has to be done a different way.”

(LOL which lawyer told them, probably cippolone)

Even though, after the initial totally legit back room meeting, "Kurlander predicted it would be worth “a SHIT TON of money.”

(CGI reenactment of Don Jr totally saying "no"😉):

"*Luckily*, Kurlander and Harris had a backup bidder, one in the habit of pushing the boundaries of journalism in pursuit of his idea of the truth."

James O’Keefe III is the 38-year-old founder of Project Veritas 🤫

(Who has resigned from his own org in since this article)

"The diary, though,- was a stolen document, the product of a crime.

In time, it would become the object of an FBI investigation that has already resulted in felony guilty pleas by Harris and Kurlander"

(FELONY GUILTY PLEAS)

and reached inside Project Veritas, prying open its

drawers and inboxes and peering into its unorthodox (read: corrupt, faulty, brazenly wrong, unethical, bullshit) reporting practices

"By the time Harris got to Project Veritas, word of the diary’s existence had already made its way around the conservative-news ecosystem. “It was on the quote-unquote market to, I guess you could say, the right-wing dark lords,”

CGI related

"In September 2020, Fago’s daughter called the Project Veritas tip line, saying she knew someone in possession of Ashley Biden’s diary. “I think it’s worth taking a look at,” the tipster said, according to a legal filing. She described its contents as “pretty crazy.”"

At the time this eerily forgiving tale was published there wasn't yet enough questions asked by the author

"Where Harris discovered the diary, and how, remains unexplained. In one version of events she has given, it was in the garage, discarded like junk"

"The content Project Veritas produced reflected the preoccupations of its audience. Recurring topics included phantom election fraud, COVID-vaccine conspiracies," and bullshit with acronyms that don't exist in our public schools to begin with. And they produce hate speech

Kurlander texted Harris

He warned Harris that Project Veritas was “trying to make a story” that would “ruin” Ashley Biden’s life

(Stalking)

"Meads, a longtime friend of O’Keefe’s who had worked for Project Veritas on and off for nearly a decade, met with Harris and Kurlander at their Manhattan hotel shortly after Labor Day. They allegedly handed over the diary as well as a digital camera containing Biden-family"

On October 24, a website called National File posted an article headlined “EXCLUSIVE SOURCE: Biden Daughter’s Diary Details [unverified lies here].”

Two days later, the site published a PDF copy of the diary.

National File is run by Noel Fritsch, a North Carolina political consultant who has worked for some of the most extreme candidates on the right.

He claims his copy of the diary leaked from Project Veritas.

"Hardly anyone noticed the National File stories - but Okeefe apparently decided to quietly get rid of the diary."

"Although Project Veritas never used the diary, it paid a total of $40,000 to Harris and Kurlander. The money was evenly split between them, and the final payment was made on October 24, the same day National File published its first story" 🙄

On the Sunday after the election, a Florida lawyer showed up at the Delray Beach Police Department and said he had come across some “possibly stolen” property. He showed an officer two pieces of luggage containing various envelopes and documents labeled with the name ASHLEY BIDEN

"The $20,000 allotted to Harris was paid directly to the lawyers in her custody case. Fago was invited to the White House for Election Night 2020. Don Jr. and Guilfoyle soon ended up buying a mansion in Jupiter with Fago’s son acting as their broker"

That December, before leaving office, Donald Trump appointed Fago to the nonpartisan National Cancer Advisory Board.

🙂 Biden removed her

In Bidens first year:

"The failed Sting Ray diary operation had generated an atmosphere of stress and suspicion. Meads and Cochran left their jobs. At a barbecue attended by staff, two individuals who were present say that O’Keefe broke down and curled up into a fetal position"

“He’s bawling, crying out loud, like, hysterically,” says one of the witnesses. “No one would talk about it, but then it came out afterward that he was so overwhelmed by the diary thing.”

“Anything that happened at that moment in time had nothing to do with the diary, it’s just factually incorrect,” O’Keefe told me in response.

“Use common sense. Why would I be curled in a fetal position? There was no diary fallout prior to the fall of 2021.” - (says a guy that tells covid and election lies for a living)

By that October, O’Keefe and his attorneys had become aware that the FBI was asking questions.

By November O'Keefe had been raided at his home according to various mostly right wing reporting that likes the word raided when they often mean something was given to them or ordered seized

(Like the class docs)
salon.com/2021/11/06/fbi…

.... "before dawn on the morning of November 4, 2021, *Eric Cochran" was awakened by a loud banging. He came to the door of his residence in Mamaroneck, carrying a recording device in his hand."

“This is a search warrant.”

"Around the same time, in Murray Hill, an FBI team bashed its way through the door to Spencer Meads’s apartment with a battering ram. He and a roommate were handcuffed, and around a dozen agents searched the apartment and confiscated his work phone and other devices."

"The day after the searches, Project Veritas shared a video with its 1.5 million YouTube subscribers. “By making this statement, I am putting myself at great risk,” O’Keefe said
In vague terms, he described how Project Veritas had obtained the diary from “tipsters”"

He claimed his reporters had been unable to authenticate the document, leading him to kill the story. “Our efforts were the stuff of responsible, ethical journalism, and we are in no doubt that Project Veritas acted properly at each and every step,” O’Keefe said

This was despite the fact that the website,

who claims to have received it from Project Veritas,

as the final payment to the felony confessor was paid,

released the diary as PDF

"The following morning, FBI agents served another search warrant, this time on O’Keefe’s apartment, handcuffed him, and pulled him into the hallway in his underwear."
🤭

Although idiots contend that Okeefe is producing news most people can tell the difference

"By O’Keefe’s own account, though, his organization’s methods can look a lot like something less defensible: political espionage"

Okeefe is an extreme right political hack

"His 2018 book, American Pravda, begins with an early meeting with Donald Trump - He recounts a six-month undercover operation that Project Veritas staged against organizations doing fieldwork for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign."

Here's a bit more context on their dirty fascist ops
nytimes.com/2020/03/07/us/…

"the pattern of transactions in the diary case makes it appear as if Project Veritas offered additional money for the authenticating material.

“That’s what gets people in trouble,” says Cameron Stracher, an attorney who has represented the National Enquirer."

Accepting stolen material is one thing; asking for more of it starts to look like a conspiracy. “Even nudge-nudge, wink-wink can be a crime,” he says.