Brooks Agnew – Nobody really knew who James O’Keefe was back in 2009, but when he and an associate went around the country catching employees at ACORN offices on video helping out with what turned out to be a hypothetical scam involving a pimp who was setting up a brothel full of underaged girls and the products of those exploits were tumbling onto the pages of Andrew Breitbart’s then-new site Big Government, O’Keefe got very famous very fast.
Since then, he’s been one of the most active conservative media figures in America, pumping out investigative journalism in a fire-hose stream. Not everything has worked out, as one might imagine — when O’Keefe and his team tried a more satirical video chiding then-Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office staff for their refusal to answer their phones following Landrieu’s Obamacare vote, the senator’s allies went after him and ultimately got him enmeshed in a federal criminal prosecution for supposedly “wiretapping” her office, something he didn’t do.
And just recently, O’Keefe got into a snit with the board of Project Veritas, his investigative media organization, which resulted in his getting bounced from the company.
Nobody really thought that would end his career, and it hasn’t. He’s back with a new outfit, O’Keefe Media Group (OMG, which is a hilarious name for certain), and he’s got a bit more understated, but potentially every bit as effective investigation:
People in politics, particularly on the Republican side, will tell you they’ve had some real suspicions about ActBlue for a long time. To generate as many small donations as that organization does is something that Republican vehicles like WinRed have never been able to come close to doing, despite the fact that Republican voters are generally of a socioeconomic profile in which $25, $50, or $100 donations ought to be very common.
Are folks on the left more passionate about politics than folks on the right? Generally, yes — a little. But not so much that what ActBlue does, which was to generate some 76 million political contributions in 2021–2022 (not $76 million — 76 million separate contributions), would have nowhere near an analog from the GOP.
O’Keefe’s initial foray into this, which was to visit a few of the more obviously suspicious donors and have them say on camera that no, they didn’t make the vast majority of those donations attributed to them, shows why.
At my site, the Hayride, we’re doing more of a lazy man’s version in Louisiana of what O’Keefe is doing in Maryland. And we came up with a fun example of what looks a whole lot like money laundering through ActBlue:
For example, it took us no time at all to find a New Orleans resident named Cornelius Maneaux who’s listed as “not employed” but nevertheless donated to ActBlue some 847 times between January 4, 2021 and December 31, 2022 in amounts ranging from $1 to $100 for a total of $18,276.54.
O’Keefe is exhorting conservative media folks and even people who are just bored or irritated with how things are to get involved in exposing this stuff, and he’s right. Of course, you might also be right if your response, as we’ll likely see in the comments, is that nothing will be done about this because this is federal election fraud and the Biden FEC and DOJ are corrupt and politicized and will never bite their own hands.
Still, exposing it is worth doing for its own sake. The truth is its own reward. And while the people in charge of American government now are far more shameless and destructive than even they were in 2009, that doesn’t matter. We should get the word out about this because it’s been going on for a very long time and nobody has bothered to expose it.
Kudos to O’Keefe. I’m reminded of the scene in The Untouchables when Elliot Ness and his team do the unthinkable and raid the warehouse (in the basement of the post office, no less) where Al Capone’s gang is storing all the illegal booze, and the gang members are gobsmacked at the idea the feds would show up.
The highly suspicious nature of these ActBlue “donations” has been out in the open for a long time and yet nobody has done anything about it. Now James O’Keefe, a modern-day Elliot Ness of sorts, has burst in and exposed the looks-like-money-laundering pattern going on with the Democrats’ preferred fundraising platform.
And the fact nobody in the federal government does anything about it, if in fact they don’t, is its own indictment.
Feel free to pursue this at your own leisure. The campaign contributions to ActBlue can be found at the FEC website here, and when you find the ones most interesting, you can use the filters on the left sidebar to isolate them, then hit the “export” button to download them as a CSV file. When you do that and look at it, you’ll see the addresses.
From there, it’s pretty easy to look them up on Google Maps, and you can tell whether it’s plausible for the donor to be making chronic contributions to ActBlue. I’m going to say Maneaux, of the slums of New Orleans, decidedly is not. But he certainly isn’t alone in that status,
SF Source Brooks Agnew Apr 2023