James O’Keefe and his group, Project Veritas, appear to have made an abrupt decision to release the video sooner than planned, according to the researchers.
A deceptive video released Sunday by conservative activist James O’Keefe, which claimed through unidentified sources and with no verifiable evidence that Rep. Ilhan Omar’s campaign had collected ballots illegally, was probably part of a coordinated disinformation effort, according to researchers at Stanford University.
O’Keefe and his group, Project Veritas, appear to have made an abrupt decision to release the video sooner than planned after the New York Times published a sweeping investigation of President Donald Trump’s taxes, the researchers said. They also noted that the timing and metadata of a Twitter post in which Trump’s son shared the video suggested that he might have known about it in advance.
Project Veritas had hyped the video on social media for several days before publishing it. In posts amplified by other prominent conservative accounts, O’Keefe teased what he said was evidence of voter fraud, and urged people to sign up at “ballot-harvesting.com” to receive the supposed evidence when it came out. (None of the material in the video actually proved voter fraud.) Continue reading.