RETRACTION #311

[Valin]

Project Veritas

Mar. 11 2020

 

_____________________________________________________________________________

New York Times Turns Story About Project Veritas Into Another Hoax About Trump

When the Old Grey Lady says something ‘is unclear,’ watch out. She’s telling you the evidence doesn’t justifying the reporting, so innuendo shall suffice.

Margot Cleveland

March 9, 2020

If there were Pulitzers for innuendo and chutzpah, Mark Mazzetti and Adam Goldman scribed the winning entry for both categories in Saturday’s New York Times.

“Erik Prince, the security contractor with close ties to the Trump administration, has in recent years helped recruit former American and British spies for secretive intelligence-gathering operations that included infiltrating Democratic congressional campaigns, labor organizations and other groups considered hostile to the Trump agenda, according to interviews and documents,” the duo opened.

This opening was quite the oversell, though, as the authors shortly revealed that the “secretive intelligence-gathering operations” were stings run by Project Veritas, and the “other groups considered hostile to the Trump agenda,” consisted of organizations such as Planned Parenthood. (In an amusing self-own, Mazzetti and Goldman identified the New York Times and Washington Post as other anti-Trump targets.) Notwithstanding the many insinuations, the article established no nexus between Donald Trump or his administration and Project Veritas’ activities.

But that didn’t stop the Times from turning a story about Project Veritas into yet another hoax about Trump. Yet the details sprinkled throughout the 2,000-word article revealed that the real story was about James O’Keefe’s organization, which in 2017 targeted the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) with a fake intern, and in 2018 used the same woman to pose as a volunteer for the then-congressional campaign of Democrat Abigail Spanberger.

(Snip)