In a recent sting operation, right-wing provocateur James O’Keefe posed as the brother of Sen. Lisa Murkowski at a polling site in Alaska in order to depict the state’s elections as vulnerable to fraud.
Since O’Keefe said he didn’t have identification, poll workers followed state and federal law by handing him a “questioned ballot,” which has to be reviewed by a bipartisan board to determine whether the voter is qualified.
Election expert Stephen Richer said in an interview that O’Keefe didn’t capture poll workers doing anything wrong, but the Project Veritas founder himself may have broken the law.
“In pulling this little stunt, [O’Keefe] might have himself committed an unlawful act because Alaska law calls it a Class C felony if you are impersonating a voter — and importantly, it says you don't have to have cast the ballot,” Richer said. “You just have to have impersonated the voter.”
O’Keefe himself appears to be aware of the possibility: On his X account, O’Keefe posted a screenshot of a Murkowski staffer stating that a member of his organization “actively engaged in voter fraud.” He characterized that response as a “legal threat to my newsroom.”
For more than a decade, O’Keefe’s undercover sting operations have sparked criminal and civil liability, and he has responded to them by claiming press freedom protections — with a mixed record of success.
In 2010, O’Keefe was prosecuted and convicted of a federal misdemeanor for attempting to enter the New Orleans office of Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu under false pretenses. The FBI raided his New York home a little more than a decade later to investigate the theft of Ashley Biden’s diary. Prosecutors ultimately declined to bring charges against Project Veritas or anyone within the organization in connection with that case.
In a series called “Dating the Deep State,” Project Veritas operatives engaged in “honeypot” operations against government employees, capturing them on tape criticizing Trump. Those stunts have sparked civil litigation for, among other things, defamation and alleged violations of federal wiretapping law.
In an extended interview, Richer called O’Keefe’s latest gambit particularly “disgusting” because it invites harassment of innocent poll workers.
“It just makes me so frustrated because these people are not only trying to give to society, but they actually did everything right,” Richer said. “And here is O’Keefe presenting them, painting them as unlawful actors. And it’s all in furtherance of, he would say, promoting the Save America Act [and] trying to get Lisa Murkowski to move on that. But in reality, it’s always James O’Keefe promoting James O’Keefe.”
Watch my full interview with Richer about the O’Keefe affair here, and paid subscribers can see it ad-free below the paywall.
Check out the full All Rise News playlist on Legal AF here.
Also featured in this week’s rewind:
* The author of Minnesota’s “nudification” ban discusses battling Trump and Musk in court.
* The CEO of the League of Women Voters discusses Trump’s attack on voting by mail.
