Hit Job: How Sting Artist James O’Keefe Tried to Set His Latest Trap – And Got Stung Himself

Ins ide a Hollywood Hit Job: How Sting Artist James O’Keefe Tried to Set His Latest Trap – And Got Stung Himself

Sting artist James O’Keefe says anti-fracking filmmaker Josh Fox is one of his latest victims. But Fox says his own secret tape reveals O’Keefe’s true methods.

O'Keefe continues to reach new lows in his smear tactics. I'd love to see this guy go out and get a real job, instead of using daddy's money to run smear campaigns and buy his way out of jail.

On Wednesday, conservative activist and renegade filmmaker James O’Keefe made his Cannes Film Festival debut with a new, secretly recorded 20-minute video that he says exposes the hypocrisy of two environmentalist documentarians and two Hollywood actors. At the end of the clip, after Josh and Rebecca Tickell, Mariel Hemingway, and Ed Begley Jr. appear to have unwittingly agreed to accept financing for an anti-fracking film from Middle East oil interests, O’Keefe claims he’s caught other allegedly altruistic actors and filmmakers in his trap, teasing a clip of a phone conversation with filmmaker Josh Fox.

But this time, O’Keefe wasn’t the only one making secret recordings. Left a bit paranoid by years of vicious—and often surreptitious—attacks from the natural gas industry and its supporters following the premiere of his 2010 Oscar-nominated anti-fracking documentary, Gasland, and its 2012 sequel, Gasland II, Fox taped his interaction with one of O’Keefe’s minions and documented the elaborate lengths they went to entrap him.

His central claim in his video is an outright lie, and relies on heavily editing his target's responses.

Fox was bombarded with unsolicited emails from O'Keefe and O'keefe stuffed mail into his mailbox (believe it or not, that's a felony).

O'keefe libeled Fox, and publishing accusations that he knows are false in order to cause harm.

O'keefe is claiming in his latest video that he is about to break wide open the salacious nature of anti-fracking celebrities. O'keefe claims:

We’re about to break one of the most important stories in the history of Project Veritas.

We have undercover footage of well-known public figures engaged in the type of shady deal-making that we’re dedicated to exposing.

What he doesn't inform you of, of course, is that the only "shady deal-making" taking place is his own.

Thankfully, Fox had the wherewithal to record his own interactions with O'keefe's minions in there crude attempt at entrapment.

"Anonymous" has also looked into the background of O'keefe bogus claims, and are posting the results (as ongoing) to pastebin, where they usually upload their handiwork.

a reply to: Blackmarketeer

O'keefe reminds me of a garbage man, except that instead of taking the trash away from your house, he's always trying to find a way to bring it in. Should have been put in jail a long time ago.

But hey, I'll just bet that won't stop Fox News and the right-wing echo chamber from picking his story up and running with it like a "Hail Mary" pass, while their audience eats it up like cotton candy. Not to mention our own little right-wing echo chamber here on ATS.

F&S for the OP!

I know you don't really need the flags & stars but IMO, anytime someone exposes the truth about a dick like O'Keefe, it should be rewarded.

It's a shame good people had to suffer from James O’Keefe's ideology.

He goes beyond just arguments and trolling, to actively smearing people and organizations with libelous doctored footage and audio.

It's disgusting - worse is that so many people believe him and his exposés to be legitimate.

O'Keefe is as much a sting artist as Ronald McDonald is a nutritionist.
both are a bunch of clowns that have no right suggesting the latter.

O'Keefe's entire mocumentry style "stings" relies on 2 things
Editing footage to suit his agenda, and
a lower than average audience (and media) that will never question his tactics or editing.

Two more takes on this:

Fox "News" is treating this like it's a bonafide fact, Ed Begley Jr. took money from sleazy mideast oilmen (gasp, the horror), ignoring, as usual, the contrived evidence and shenanigans used by O'Keefe. But then, we all know Fox Noise is deep in the back pocket of corporate interests.

Fake Mideast oilman traps Mariel Hemingway, Ed Begley in video sting

Wonkette's coverage (NSFW language):

You Are Not Going To Believe This, But James O’Keefe’s Hollywood ‘Sting’ *May* Have Been Deceptively Edited

Hey, remember yesterday, when superjournalist James O’Keefe proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that hypocrite “environmentalist” Ed Begley Jr. makes love to greasy piles of Muslim oil money, and Mariel Hemingway’s a giant whore? Well, not to pull your world out from under you, but those tapes may have been selectively edited.

Now the FBI may be getting involved:

FBI Urged to Investigate James O'Keefe's Tactics in Hollywood Activist Sting Operation

The journalist who captured Mariel Hemingway, Ed Begley Jr. and other environmentalists in secretly recorded video may have broken laws. There has been "a tremendous amount of negative fallout," says Begley Jr.

O'Keefe is the biggest tool out there.

The sad thing is that it doesn't matter...and O'Keefe knows this.

He knows his audience, as long as he tells them what they want to hear, they don't care how true it is.

Well here's the video...

Maybe Ed Begley Jr. and Mariel Hemingway were "Interested"?

Their ears sure seemed to be "Perky" LOL

New O’Keefe video “punks” Hollywood enviros

Hollywood celebrities caught on hidden camera accepting money from "Middle Eastern oil interests"
www.youtube.com...

originally posted by: SaturnFX
O'Keefe is as much a sting artist as Ronald McDonald is a nutritionist.
both are a bunch of clowns that have no right suggesting the latter.

O'Keefe's entire mocumentry style "stings" relies on 2 things
Editing footage to suit his agenda, and
a lower than average audience (and media) that will never question his tactics or editing.

LoL I agree with you, but what you outlined sounds like just about every 'news' outlet in existence.

Hahaha

-FBB

a reply to: xuenchen

Maybe Ed Begley Jr. and Mariel Hemingway were "Interested"?

Their ears sure seemed to be "Perky" LOL

Well, gee - that's exactly the effect O'Keefe wanted to create with his video edits. I'd say Begley, Hemingway and Fox all have a very good case for libel against O'Keefe.

a reply to: Blackmarketeer

so i guess pastebin must be a banned site from ats, since posting its link autodeletes the url http:///nycrajzg click the quote button on my post to see the full link or go to pastebin . com and paste this to the end of the url /nycrajzg

good thread, thanks for making it

This is the full unedited piece .So far it's the same but has more of the small talk a reply to: xuenchen

a reply to: Blackmarketeer

O'Keefe is pure slime, I don't know (well I suspect I know) how he's avoided jail all this time, something has to be up for him to come close a couple of times to criminal charges and yet he's still doing the same crap over and over. Worse, I think is his target audience has been shown time and again that he's a complete fraud, yet still buy into and propagate them as if somehow it's going to be different than the last time. It really goes to show how some people aren't interested in the truth and only want to participate in slamming others, even if it costs the livelihood of those others. It's all extremely disgusting.

So where is the so called video??? A bunch of words doesn't prove anything.

a reply to: the2ofusr1

Exactly, the leftist propaganda got counter exposed again by O'Keefe he is too smart for them. hahaha

a reply to: Blackmarketeer

Uhm, It looks like to me that a bait was set forth by Okeefe and they took it. I'm not sure what your point is but reading the article: the tickells come accross as deceptive and got caught , whether they were setup or not is irrelevant as they took the bait.

Are you more concerned about the bait being put forth than the people who took the bait?

“We’re confident that we can keep this zip-locked, you know tight, tight, air-tight forever,” Josh Tickell is heard saying to Turner during one phone conversation.

Money to us...It’s money...we have no moral issue...But we know how a lot of people that would be necessary to pull this off, they would have issue.”

the Tickells don’t deny that they were far too eager to take money from a questionable source.

Even Fox sees them as questionable.

Fox, who says he ignored a request from Beacon to sign a nondisclosure agreement after their first and only phone call, doesn’t have a lot of sympathy for the Tickells.

I will wait for FOX to release his video but for now it looks like Okeefe is the lesser evil here.

a reply to: interupt42

Apparently reading the article is out of the question, so to briefly summarize: Fox/friends didn't "take the bait." He viewed it as sketchy to begin with, thought it was a setup, having been on the receiving end of the oil companies ire ever since "Gasland." It's why he recorded the meeting with O'Keefe's doltish operatives in the first place. It's why when O'Keefe released their edited version of the setup, Fox was able to counter with the full unedited version. O'Keefe tried once again to use edited footage to make Fox and others look like toadies while he posed as a Middle East jackass, and instead looked like a jackass when Fox released the full meeting.

This is what James O'Keefe has sunk to, running "sting operations" on the likes of Ed Begley Jr. Luckily for Fox, his Gasland movies exposure of fracking practices wised him up to the smear tactics of oil company dirtbags like O'Keefe.

Filmmaker Steven Tabakin, who was in the room with Fox during the phone call with Turner, says he is concerned about the lasting impact O’Keefe could have on the documentary filmmakers.

“If the result of this is that we all have to vet every single person that even expresses interest in supporting a film that’s important to us that we’re passionate about, it has had a chilling effect, and it’s going to be an enormous waste of time because it’s very, very difficult to get movies made, in particular movies that take on major issues and powerful forces,” he says.

To paraphrase:

"When authoritarian rule comes to America in the 21st century, it will be done by civilians wrapped in the flag and carrying a hidden camera."

Under corporatism run by oligarchs, James O'Keefe is their secret police ready to make sure all are deterred from speaking out. James "The Quisling" O'Keefe.

I never really saw the issue to begin with.

Hollywood people aren't "normal" at the best of times.

So they solicited funds or not for a movie.

O'Keefe is just grasping at straws with this one.

I already knew that Hollywood folks were all hypocrites anyway. They are fun to watch fight aliens and chase in cars and fight ninjas.

But they are self-absorbed egocentric morons.

If O'Keefe wanted to impress me, he'd nail Hillary or Susan Rice or Reid on BLS, or Boehner crying over spilt scotch.

Sounds similar to what happened when he did the sting on ACORN and NPR. That isn't the case with his other videos, so I don't get why he didn't just leave it at those videos, instead of dealing in the same shady behavior that his subject(s) are/or are allegedly doing. Kind of undermines your credibility, doing something like that.