James O'keefe Wife: Meet Beverley Knight

Exploring the core elements of James O'keefe Wife: Meet Beverley Knight—check out the main takeaways.

O’Keefe is an American political activist and provocateur who formed Project Veritas, a far-right activist organization that targets progressive organizations and mainstream media outlets by employing deceptive editing methods.

O’Keefe and Project Veritas have both produced covertly taped undercover audio and video encounters in governmental, nonprofit, and academic institutions that purport to show representatives of those institutions acting abusively or illegally; the recordings are frequently edited to distort the context of the conversations and the subjects’ responses.

O’Keefe first gained widespread attention for his selectively edited videos of employees at Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) offices in 2009, his arrest and misdemeanor guilty plea for breaking into then-U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu’s (D-LA) federal office under false pretenses in 2010, and the publication of deceptive videos of conversations with two senior, now-former NPR executives in 2011.

The United States Congress decided to put a hold on funding for the nonprofit organization after seeing his crudely altered tapes that appeared to show ACORN employees helping a couple plan a crime.

Before investigations into the recordings revealed no unlawful behavior had taken place, the non-profit also lost the majority of its private funding as a result of the national scandal. ACORN had to close or rebrand the majority of its offices in March 2010 because it was on the verge of bankruptcy.

The US Government Accountability Office and the California State Attorney General’s Office both produced related investigative reports shortly after.

The California ACORN employees had not breached any laws, according to the Attorney General’s Office, which concluded that O’Keefe had misrepresented their behavior.

The GAO’s preliminary investigation revealed that ACORN had used federal funding wisely. One of the sacked ACORN employees filed a lawsuit against O’Keefe for invasion of privacy; in response, O’Keefe apologized and agreed to pay the plaintiff $100,000.

Together with the far right, O’Keefe has acquired the support of right-wing and conservative media outlets and interest groups.

He received a contract with Andrew Breitbart in 2009 with the opportunity to distribute fresh films only on BigGovernment.