‘Never in a million years would Twitter take down posts from an NYT reporter’ – Project Veritas founder O'Keefe to RT

7 Feb, 2020 15:49

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James O'Keefe © REUTERS/Yuri Gripas 

James O’Keefe, who had his account locked down after tweeting about Bernie Sanders’s staffers, told RT the reason he was hit so hard by Twitter’s online minders is that he doesn’t come from an established, corporate publisher.

O’Keefe, a conservative activist and founder of investigative outlet Project Veritas, was targeted by social media censors earlier this month, when he sent a tweet to Dave Weigel of the Washington Post, asking him to remove a “factually inaccurate bit of reporting” on Sanders staffers Kyle Jurek and Martin Weissgerber.

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The two were called “volunteers” in the Post article which covered Project Veritas’s #Expose2020 Sanders campaign. The designation didn’t sit well with O’Keefe, who insisted that both Jurek and Weissgerber “are still paid employees of Bernie Sanders’ campaign.”

The offending Project Veritas tweet included a screenshot of a page found on the Federal Election Commission (FEC) website showing that Jurek, at least, had received a salary from the campaign as recently as August 2019. As O’Keefe told RT, the page included “publicly available ... documents” revealing Jurek's address and the amount of money paid to him by the Sanders campaign.

Shortly thereafter, Twitter locked his account until he deleted the tweet disclosing the staffer’s details.

“As a matter of ethics, this is a publicly available government website. The Federal Election Commission publishes the fact that Kyle Jurek was a paid employee. I don’t want to delete the tweet, I think that it would be unethical for me to delete information like that,” O’Keefe explained.

Project Veritas, he opined, has only been subject to the lockdown because it’s not part of the established mainstream media cohort. “We’re not the CNN, we’re not the New York Times, they would never do this, by the way, to a New York Times reporter,” O’Keefe argued.

Never in a million years would Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, take down a tweet from a New York Times reporter linking an FEC [page].   

Project Veritas recently released a video – shot by an undercover reporter – in which Jurek ranted about burning cities and imprisoning dissidents. He also said that “if Bernie doesn’t get the nomination or it goes to a second round at the DNC convention, f**king Milwaukee will burn.”

A subsequent video exposed Weissgerber, who floated sending Republicans to “reeducation camps” and Sanders dissolving the Senate and House of Representatives should he become president. However, little of the hidden-camera footage of the apparent gulag enthusiasts appears to have been shot at Sanders’s campaign headquarters. Project Veritas’s detractors have long accused the outlet of deceptively editing and misrepresenting footage.

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The Sanders campaign has not publicly addressed the hidden-camera videos. However, campaign COO John Robinson allegedly emailed staffers to warn them against saying anything that might reflect poorly on the campaign, advising them to always assume they were being recorded.

O’Keefe rose to prominence with hidden camera exposés and whistleblower reports from organizations including Facebook, Google, Pinterest, and CNN. Project Veritas’s #Expose2020 campaign has thus far taken on only Sanders and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren’s campaigns.