By BECKYZ. DERNBACH, HIBAH ANSARI and JOEY PETERS,
Sahan Journal
Allegations of voter fraud in Minneapolis took right-wing media by storm Sunday night. They stem from a report by Project Veritas, a video sting operation led by Republican provocateur James O’Keefe.
Project Veritas’ latest stunt exposé accuses Ilhan Omar’s campaign of “ballot harvesting”: a mail-in ballot practice—often legal—that occurs when a third party collects election ballots from voters and submits them to election judges. Various anonymous sources describe collecting ballots from elders in the local Somali community during August’s primary election.
The report, which is clouded with muddled and unsubstantiated information, shows a video of a man—apparently the brother of a city councilmember—claiming to hold 300 harvested ballots in his car. Omar Jamal, a longtime Somali community activist with a questionable reputation, alleges without evidence that Representative Ilhan Omar’s campaign participated in the harvesting operation.
The report comes in the midst of a steady and deceptive campaign from President Donald J. Trump to undermine mail-in voting. It followed an explosive New York Times investigative report on Trump’s tax returns.
Confused? You’re not alone. Below, Sahan Journal breaks down the latest controversy, which received five enthusiastic retweets on Sunday from Trump’s Twitter account.
What is Project Veritas? And who is James O’Keefe?
Project Veritas is a “right-wing disinformation outfit,” according to media researchers at Harvard University. It’s known for its sting operations, entrapment tactics, and deceptively edited videos. James O’Keefe is the group’s provocateur leader. In the early years of the Obama administration, O’Keefe became a conservative darling after he released viral and misleading videos about community organizing group ACORN and Planned Parenthood.
What accusations have been leveled against his methods?
Veritas and O’Keefe often go undercover—itself a widely discredited journalistic tactic—and try to pressure people to behave in certain ways that will make them look bad when they are later exposed on camera.
ACORN folded in the wake of O’Keefe’s sting videos, but the California attorney general concluded that the videos significantly distorted what happened. Shortly afterward, O’Keefe was charged with a felony for attempting to tamper with the phones of then–Senator Mary Landrieu, a Democrat from Louisiana, in an attempted video sting.
In 2014, Colorado Democrats said they’d caught O’Keefe, in the guise of a college student with a different name, trying to bait them into voter fraud.
And in 2017, Project Veritas famously failed to execute a sting operation against the Washington Post with false sexual-assault allegations against then–Senate candidate Roy Moore. (Several women had raised real claims against Moore for sexually pursuing teenage girls.)
Why is Project Veritas in the news again?
Sunday night, Project Veritas posted a new video sting, focusing on the recent Minneapolis primary election. For the past year, the group has been executing stings across the country to undermine the credibility of mail-in voting. The operation’s purpose, according to a source close with Project Veritas who spoke to The New Republic, is “literally to get Trump reelected.”
What do we actually see in the video?
Honestly, it’s kind of hard to follow. Like many Project Veritas videos, it’s edited in a choppy manner with narration that attempts to knit together a coherent story. Here’s what’s on screen
The video opens with O’Keefe from Project Veritas “at the scene of the crime,” he says, on a rooftop in front of the Cedar–Riverside apartments. O’Keefe then introduces a man he says is Liban Mohamed. O’Keefe says Liban recorded himself on Snapchat “bragging about all the illegal ballot harvesting that he does.”
It’s not clear, however, if that’s what the video actually shows.
“Money is everything,” Liban Mohamed says in his Snapchat clip. “Money is the king in this world. If you got no money, you should not be here, period. You know what I am saying? Money is everything and a campaign is managed by money.”
In another Snapchat video, Liban Mohamed flashes a stack of envelopes with the caption: “Two in the morning still working and collecting absentee ballots.”
The video then transitions to a recorded interview with Omar Jamal, a so-called “insider” with the Somali Watchdog Group.
Omar Jamal says of Liban Mohamed, “I think he was both with Ilhan Omar and Jamal [Osman], but I think he was more with Ilhan Omar.”
Based on recorded phone conversations he says he had with Liban Mohamed, Omar Jamal claims that the ballot harvesters baited elderly residents for their absentee ballots.
A bit later, an anonymous source says (in Somali) that campaign workers for Ilhan Omar were filling out the ballots. The source’s face is blurred out of the video; Project Veritas asserts this is a “ballot harvester.”
Through a translator, the blurred source says, “They came to us, to our apartments. They say, this year, you will vote for Ilhan.”
In a poorly framed video interview, we catch glimpses of “Jamal,” an alleged DFL member, talking to a Project Veritas journalist about the Snapchat videos. “They fight you if you speak up,” Jamal says. No one establishes any connection between “Jamal” and the DFL.
Another anonymous source outside of the Horn Towers apartments says, “They took every ballot,” from the seniors living in the complex’s three buildings.
This last anonymous source claims harvesters were carrying around bags of money. In the video, the source says harvesters gave people money for ballots.
Again though, with all the anonymous sources and vague allegations, even people sympathetic to O’Keefe’s conspiracy theory may have trouble following the plotline.
A second Project Veritas video that Donald Trump, Jr. tweeted out Monday night purports to show a “ballot harvester” paying a voter $200 in exchange for a vote. The video does not, in fact, clearly show any exchange of money.
What it does show is someone explaining, in Somali, how to fill out a voter registration form. This practice is entirely legal.
Who is Omar Jamal?
In the Project Veritas video, Omar Jamal alleges that Ilhan’s office is involved in voter fraud.
Omar Jamal has a history of making provocative and unsubstantiated allegations in the media, dating back more than a decade. In 2009, while the FBI investigated whether missing Somali teenagers had joined terrorists abroad, Omar Jamal went on several national TV programs to state that al-Qaeda cells were actively operating in the Twin Cities.
He also participated in a panel organized by Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher about a controversial training program on stopping terrorism. At the time, the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations denounced the panel. And it expressed doubts about Omar Jamal, pointing to allegations that he lied to immigration officials in the early 2000s.
Today, Omar Jamal works as a civilian employee at the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office. Though not an officer of the law, he often collaborates with Sheriff Fletcher.
In a prepared statement, Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Roy Magnuson said that Omar Jamal was not acting as an employee of the office when he made the voting fraud allegations. “Any direct implication would be a violation of department policies,” Magnuson said. The Project Veritas report also lists Omar Jamal as chair of the Somali Watchdog Group, a limited liability company formed in 2017.
Source: Sahan Journal