A woman who falsely claimed to The Washington Post that Roy Moore, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama, impregnated her as a teenager appears to work with an organization that uses deceptive tactics to secretly record conversations in an effort to embarrass its targets.
In a series of interviews over two weeks, the woman shared a dramatic story about an alleged sexual relationship with Moore in 1992 that led to an abortion when she was 15. During the interviews, she repeatedly pressed Post reporters to give their opinions on the effects that her claims could have on Moore’s candidacy if she went public.
.. The organization sets up undercover “stings” that involve using false cover stories and covert video recordings meant to expose what the group says is media bias.
.. O’Keefe declined to answer repeated questions about whether the woman was employed at Project Veritas. He also did not respond when asked if he was working with Moore, former White House adviser and Moore supporter Stephen K. Bannon, or Republican strategists.
.. After Phillips was observed entering the Project Veritas office, The Post made the unusual decision to report her previous off-the-record comments.
“We always honor ‘off-the-record’ agreements when they’re entered into in good faith,” said Martin Baron, The Post’s executive editor. “But this so-called off-the-record conversation was the essence of a scheme to deceive and embarrass us. The intent by Project Veritas clearly was to publicize the conversation if we fell for the trap. Because of our customary journalistic rigor, we weren’t fooled, and we can’t honor an ‘off-the-record’ agreement that was solicited in maliciously bad faith.”
.. That same day, Gateway Pundit, a conservative site, spread a false story from a Twitter account, @umpire43, that said, “A family friend in Alabama just told my wife that a WAPO reporter named Beth offer her 1000$ to accuse Roy Moore.” The Twitter account, which has a history of spreading misinformation, has since been deleted.
.. Nov. 14, a pastor in Alabama said he received a voice mail from a man falsely claiming to be a Post reporter and seeking women “willing to make damaging remarks” about Moore for money. No one associated with The Post made any such call.
.. When Reinhard suggested bringing another reporter, Phillips wrote, “I’m not really comfortable with anyone else being there this time.”
.. Phillips also repeatedly asked the reporter to guarantee her that Moore would lose the election if she came forward. Reinhard told her in a subsequent text message that she could not predict what the impact would be. Reinhard said she also explained to Phillips that her claims would have to be fact-checked. Additionally, Reinhard asked her for documents that would corroborate or support her story.
.. Phillips had said she lived in Alabama only for a summer while a teenager, but the cellphone number Phillips provided had an Alabama area code.
Reinhard called NFM Lending in Westchester County, but they said a person named Jaime Phillips did not work there.
.. Also working at Veritas is former television producer Robert J. Halderman, who was sentenced to six months in jail in 2010 after he was accused of trying to blackmail late-night host David Letterman.
.. When McCrummen put her purse near Phillips’s purse to block a possible camera, Phillips moved hers.
.. Phillips said she didn’t want to get into the details of what she had said happened between her and Moore.
.. When asked who at the Daily Caller interviewed her, Phillips said, “Kathy,” pausing before adding the last name, “Johnson.”
Paul Conner, executive editor of the Daily Caller, said Monday that no one with the name Kathy Johnson works for the publication and that he has no record of having personally interviewed Phillips
.. As the interview ended, Phillips told McCrummen she was not recording the conversation.
“I think I probably just want to cancel and not go through with it at this point,”
.. “I’m not going to answer any more questions,” she said. “I think I’m just going to go.”
.. By 7 p.m. the message on the GoFundMe page was gone, replaced by a new one.
“Campaign is complete and no longer active,” it read.
David Boies’s Complicated Conflicts
Did the superstar lawyer cross ethical lines in his representation of Harvey Weinstein?
“Lawyers are not permitted to engage in dishonesty or deceit,” Kathleen Clark, a Washington University law professor who specializes in legal ethics, told me. “Black Cube seems to make its living by engaging in dishonesty and deceit, at least in part.”
.. he hired several other lawyers to represent him,” he wrote. Those lawyers then sought out Black Cube and other investigators and wrote up a contract for their services. Boies, by his own telling, then returned to sign a contract drafted by other lawyers between a client he wasn’t representing and private investigators he didn’t choose or oversee in a matter he says he had declined to take part.
.. He and his firm have a long relationship with Weinstein. In 2015, the Hollywood producer hired Boies to represent him in contract negotiations with the Weinstein Company
.. During those negotiations, the company’s board of directors learned of confidential settlements between Weinstein and three or four accusers. Boies told the Times he had given some legal advice to Weinstein for one of those settlements but did not specify which.
.. The New Yorker speculated that Boies’s involvement with the Black Cube letter may have been an effort to keep secret the investigators’ activities through attorney-client privilege. But that privilege would only exist between Weinstein and Boies, not between Boies and a third party, Clark said. “There’s another privilege that’s less powerful called work-product privilege, which can apply if information is developed in anticipation of litigation,” she explained. The first paragraph of the contract between Boies Schiller and Black Cube asserts that the work was for “litigation-support services,”
.. Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor who focuses on legal ethics, said it’s not unusual for law firms to hire private investigators, especially for corporations and wealthy clients. But he noted that firms are obligated to ensure those investigators abide by the same ethical boundaries as the lawyers themselves. “Most prominently, a lawyer cannot contact an opposing client whom he knows is represented by counsel,” Gillers pointed out. “You can’t go talk to an opponent. You have to go through his lawyer.”
.. The New York State Bar Association’s rules of professional conduct instruct lawyers and law firms to “[not] engage in any conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation.” Those rules also forbid lawyers from taking adverse action against a current client by negotiating against them or representing an opponent in litigation. But state disciplinary bodies, which are often underfunded, typically only enforce these rules against the worst offenders in the legal community, Gillers said... law firms usually try to avoid conflict-of-interest situations because of the potential financial impact... The fear of lawsuits also acts as a deterrent. “Firms worry about civil liability, malpractice liability, breach-of-fiduciary-duty liability, they worry about disqualification from a matter,” Gillers said. “And they worry about adverse publicity.”
David Boies’s Egregious Involvement With Harvey Weinstein
“If evidence could be uncovered to convince The Times the charges should not be published, I did not believe, and do not believe, that that would be adverse to The Times’s interests.”
.. But as The Times’s leadership pointed out in its own statement, it never contemplated that the firm would contract with investigators to do opposition research on its own reporters. Unsurprisingly, The Times considered this conduct to be a “grave betrayal of trust,” and grounds to terminate the firm. It is hard to imagine how a lawyer of Mr. Boies’s caliber would not have anticipated this reaction.
It gets worse. Bar ethical rules prohibit lawyers not only from engaging in fraud, deceit or misrepresentation, but also from inducing others to do so. They also specifically forbid lawyers from directing non-lawyers to engage in prohibited conduct. Black Cube employees were in fact involved in such deceit; investigators misrepresented their identities in order to gain confidences from women whom Mr. Weinstein had harassed or assaulted.
Although Mr. Boies now claims that he had no knowledge of such practices, he surely was in a position to have such knowledge and had reason to suspect them. He had hired an organization known for hardball tactics and reportedly received reports of their findings.
.. Mr. Boies stated: “Mr. Weinstein has himself recognized that his contact with women was indefensible and incredible hurtful. In retrospect, I knew enough in 2015 that I believe I should have been on notice of a problem and done something about it.”
.. When leaders with such high visibility cut ethical corners, it sends a powerful and corrosive message.
Trump and Ryan Versus the Little People
First is the poster child family Paul Ryan keeps talking about, a family with two children making $59,000 a year. In the first year of the Cut Cut Cut Act, such a family would indeed receive a tax cut. But this cut comes from several special tax credits that are basically loss leaders to help sell the plan; they all either expire in later years or will get eroded by inflation. By 2027, with the plan fully phased in, that exemplary family would actually be facing a significant tax increase relative to current law.
.. it’s not just Wall Street stiffs who would find themselves in that situation: So would doctors, lawyers, engineers, and other well-paid professionals. Overall, the Tax Policy Center estimates that more than a quarter of the population would see taxes go up, not down, under the G.O.P. proposal; for those with incomes between $200,000 and $500,000, that fraction rises to more than 40 percent... Finally, let’s imagine a very lucky individual — let’s arbitrarily call him Eric Trump — who stands to inherit a stake in a business he doesn’t run, plus a bunch of stock. He’ll get his inheritance tax-free, because the estate tax gets phased out in the G.O.P. bill. He’ll get to pay a low tax rate on his business income. And his stocks will pay higher dividends, because the G.O.P. bill also sharply cuts corporate tax rates, and most of the benefit of those cuts will probably flow to shareholders... So when Gary Cohn, Trump’s top economic adviser, says that the bill’s goalis “to deliver middle-class tax cuts to the hard-working families in this country,” he’s claiming that up is down and black is white. This bill does little or nothing for the middle class, and even among the affluent it’s biased against those who work hard in favor of the idle rich... You might wonder how Republicans imagine that they can get away with this. But anyone who has paid attention to U.S. politics knows the answer.
- First, they will lie, unashamedly, about what their bill actually does.
- Second, they will try to distract working-class voters by stoking racial animosity.