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Undercover video investigator James O’Keefe of Project Veritas has turned the tables on a top New Hampshire law official who tried to indict him for a video sting that exposed vote fraud in the state.
In his latest video, O’Keefe – employing the confrontational style that made Mike Wallace famous – showed up at the office of state Associate Attorney General Richard Head with a microphone, three video cameramen and a copy of O’Keefe’s new book, set for release Tuesday, which features an entire chapter on Head and the voter-fraud case.
O’Keefe explains in the opening scene of his video, outside the New Hampshire Department of Justice, that he planned to go inside and ask Head why he had not responded to his Freedom of Information Act request to Head’s office May 8, 2012, asking for all communications Head had with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.
“We all know that the Justice Department has been spying on the Associated Press,” O’Keefe says in his introduction. “What you may not know is that the attorney general’s office here in New Hampshire tried to indict myself and my colleagues last year for exposing voter fraud.”
The episode began in January 2012 when O’Keefe released a video of associates acquiring ballots for the New Hampshire Primary by using the names of recently deceased voters. The video, O’Keefe said at the time, showed that “the integrity of the elections process is severely comprised.”
After the January 2012 video was released, the New Hampshire attorney general’s office launched a comprehensive review of state voting procedures. But Head also announced he would investigate the possibility that O’Keefe and his associates committed crimes by recording another person without their consent and fraudulently obtaining a ballot.
O’Keefe and his team, who found the names in published obituaries, insisted they broke no laws, because they didn’t pretend to be the deceased persons when they asked for the ballots and didn’t cast any votes.
O’Keefe is perhaps best known for this hidden-camera recordings in 2009 that showed ACORN employees in six cities advising him and his associate, Hannah Giles, how to avoid detection by authorities of tax evasion, human smuggling and child prostitution.
The U.S. Congress subsequently voted to freeze federal funding to ACORN, and the Census Bureau and the IRS terminated their contract relationships with the organization.
In March 2010, ACORN announced it would dissolve due to loss of funding.
An undercover Project Veritas video in May shows two corporate distributors of the so-called “Obama phone” handing them out to people who say they will sell them for drug money or for other purposes. The phone distribution is a project of the Federal Communications Commission’s ‘Lifeline’ program for low-income people.
‘Did you know about that?’
In the New Hampshire investigation, state authorities went to the home of Project Veritas videographer Mike Rogers in May 2012 with a criminal grand-jury subpoena for O’Keefe.
O’Keefe wanted to know how state officials knew they could find O’Keefe at Rogers’ home and filed the public-records request. He received no answer.
In the latest video, O’Keefe poses his unanswered questions directly to Head on camera.
O’Keefe recalls to Head that state officials sent agents to Rogers’ house in what he described as a “raid.”
“The family felt terrorized based on what happened,” O’Keefe tells Head. “Did you know about that, that they went into his house in the dead of night and they showed pictures … and they tried to indict me for our voter-fraud work in the state of New Hampshire showing ballots being offered out in the names of the dead?
“Why,” O’Keefe asks, “did the state of New Hampshire … try to indict me for doing investigative reporting?”
Head replies that O’Keefe was asking “a slightly loaded question in terms of the way it was phrased.”
“I would not describe the effort of a prosecutor to locate you during the course of an investigation of some work you had done in the state of New Hampshire in the way that you characterized it,” the New Hampshire official says.
Head admits, however, he was aware that an investigator talked to family members of Mike Rogers in an attempt to locate O’Keefe.
O’Keefe then asks if the investigator had a subpoena from a grand jury before he went to Rogers’ house?
“I’m not commenting on anything in terms of, relating to, grand jury work,” Head replies.
On camera, O’Keefe gave Head a copy of O’Keefe’s new book, “Breakthrough,” which devotes a chapter to the New Hampshire official titled “The Rise of Richard Head.”
The chapter, according to O’Keefe, recounts how Head sent a certified letter to a woman named Nadia Naffe, asking her to turn over seven years of emails from O’Keefe’s Gmail account that O’Keefe believed she obtained illegally.
O’Keefe asked Head on camera why he made the request if the emails were obtained illegally.
In the video, Head says he only had information that Naffe possessed the emails and didn’t know how she had obtained them.
“At that time we were in an investigation,” Head says. “Those emails may have been useful. And since she had possession of them, I made a request for them.”
After O’Keefe’s investigation, the New Hampshire legislature passed a voter ID law, overturning the veto of Gov. John Lynch, a Democrat.
Lynch had condemned the Project Veritas video probe, calling for an investigation of O’Keefe.
“I think it is outrageous that we have out-of-staters coming into New Hampshire, coming into our polling places and misrepresenting themselves to the election officials,” Lynch said at the time, “and I hope that they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, if in fact they’re found guilty of some criminal act.”
‘Easy’ election fraud
Last year, Project Veritas conducted a series of investigations in more than a dozen states “demonstrating the ease with which election fraud can be committed and legitimate voters can be disenfranchised.”
A video sting by O’Keefe, first reported by WND, prompted the resignation of Democratic campaign staffer Patrick Moran, the son of Rep. Jim Moran son, and a criminal investigation by the Arlington County Police Department in Northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C. Prosecutors decided not to press charges.
The Moran video:
Patrick Moran, who is also the nephew of Virginia Democratic Party Chairman Brian Moran, Jim Moran’s brother, is seen on video suggesting that the undercover Project Veritas reporter create fake utility bills to serve as voter ID so he can cast ballots in the names of registered voters. Moran warns there will be “a lot of voter protection” at the polling places to enforce the state’s identification laws.
As WND reported, in October, O’Keefe’s team captured on video a regional director of the voter mobilization group launched by Barack Obama, Organizing for America, helping an undercover reporter vote for the president in two states. The director was fired after the video was reported.
Project Veritas effort in Texas, New Jersey, New York and Connecticut showed Obama campaign workers, including Organizing for America Regional Field Director Stephanie Caballero, helping people who declare they want to commit election fraud. The investigation was inspired by a column by WND columnist Chuck Norris.
Caballero was fired shortly after the Project Veritas video was released.
In April 2012, a Project Veritas investigator was offered the ballot of Attorney General Eric Holder at a polling place.
Media double standards
Earlier this year, O’Keefe exposed media double standards when he captured on camera journalists who work for the newspaper that revealed the addresses of gun-permit holders in the New York City area. He showed that they were unwilling to take a dose of their own medicine and declare their homes “gun-free zones.”
The gun control issue, Project Veritas said, “is being driven by a hypocritical media on the back of a national tragedy.”
See the video:
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WND also reported Project Veritas investigators showed some police officers are telling citizens they are on their own if an attacker confronts them in their home.
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