Imagine if Hillary Clinton or the Clinton Foundation had sent over a donation to Correct the Record just ahead of her announcement that she was running for President. Imagine that the news broke in the last couple of weeks of the election, just as Correct the Record was releasing some opposition research on Trump.
Boy, would the media be all over that? You bet they would.
That's what Donald Trump did, according to a report from ThinkProgress today.
In May, 2015, just ahead of his run for President, Trump's foundation sent a $10,000 donation to James O'Keefe's Project Veritas.
Trump neglected, however, to mention his own connection to the videos, released by James O’Keefe and his Project Veritas tax-exempt group. According to a list of charitable donations made by Trump‘s controversial foundation (provided to the Washington Post in April by Trump’s campaign), on May 13, 2015, it gave $10,000 to Project Veritas.
Trump, who claimed in the same debate that Hillary Clinton “shouldn’t be allowed to run” for president “based on what she did with e-mails and so many other things,” was funding a convicted criminal. O’Keefe was sentenced to three years of probation, 100 hours of community service, and a $1,500 fine in 2010 after taking a plea bargain following a botched “sting” attempt at the office of then-Sen. Mary Landrieu.
What’s more, there is a great deal of reason to be skeptical of the videos themselves. O’Keefe has a long history of selectively editing videos to present a false impression to the viewer. His most famous video, an attack on the now-defunct community organizing group ACORN, supposedly showed employees agreeing to help him smuggle underage prostitutes into the country. It turned out the employees later had called the police and O’Keefe eventually paid $100,000 in a settlement after being sued for surreptitious recording of someone’s voice and image.
So far, I'm not seeing much buzz about this. It ought to be the lead story on cable news right now, and it certainly ought to cast some shade on O'Keefe's ginned up, edited attacks on Democratic operatives.
