Project Veritas effort to infiltrate The Washington Post dates back months

[Eugene]

Source: Washington Post

Woman’s effort to infiltrate The Washington Post dated back months

By Beth Reinhard, Aaron C. Davis and Andrew Ba Tran November 29 at 9:24 PM

The failed effort by conservative activists to plant a false story about Senate candidate Roy Moore in The Washington Post was part of a months-long campaign to infiltrate The Post and other media outlets in Washington and New York, according to interviews, text messages and social media posts that have since been deleted.

Starting in July, Jaime Phillips, an operative with the organization Project Veritas, which purports to expose media bias, joined two dozen networking groups related to either journalism or left-leaning politics. She signed up to attend 15 related events, often accompanied by a male companion, and appeared at least twice at gatherings for departing Post staffers.

Phillips, 41, presented herself to journalists variously as the owner of a start-up looking to recruit writers, a graduate student studying national security or a contractor new to the area. This summer, she tweeted posts in support of gun control and critical of Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigrants — a departure from the spring when, on accounts that have since been deleted, she used the #MAGA hashtag and mocked the Women’s March on Washington that followed Trump’s inauguration as the “Midol March.”

Her true identity and intentions were revealed only when The Post published a story on Monday, along with photos and video, about her false claim to Post reporters that Moore had impregnated her when she was a teenager. The Post reported that Phillips appeared to work for Project Veritas, an organization that uses false cover stories and covert video recordings in an attempt to embarrass its targets.

Phillips’s sustained attempt to insinuate herself into the social circles of reporters makes clear that her deception — and the efforts to discredit The Post’s reporting — went much further than the attempt to plant one fabricated article.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/womans-effort-to-infiltrate-the-washington-post-dates-back-months/2017/11/29/ce95e01a-d51e-11e7-b62d-d9345ced896d_story.html

[dalton99a]

1. Makes ya wonder how many moles they have out there

[Nitram]

2. Sounds like she was trying to recruit or use departing Post reporters with a possible grudge against

the organization.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

3. Another link:

From the article:

....
On Sept. 24, reporters for the New York Times, McClatchy News, Bloomberg BNA, the Center for Public Integrity, among other media outlets, spoke with Phillips at a gathering of investigative reporters at a Washington bar, according to five journalists who attended.

Emily Goodell, who was beginning a six-month reporting internship at the Student Press Law Center, ended up spending more than four hours with Phillips, she said.

“I decided to go to networking events, looking to meet people and make connections . . . That’s how I ended up at an Investigative Reporters and Editors happy hour meetup on Sept. 14. That’s how I came to meet Jaime Phillips, although she introduced herself to me under a false name: Jaime Taylor,” Goodell wrote in a blog post about the encounter published Wednesday evening on the law center’s website.

In an interview Tuesday, Goodell, 21, said Phillips had a list of journalists she wanted to meet, and Goodell helped her find them.
....

The woman who tried to sting The Washington Post also lied to me

By Emily Goodell | Published 14 hours ago

....
It may sound dramatic, but the consequences could have been. A reporter is only as good as their name and names are easy to ruin nowadays. All it takes is one clip, one mistake, and your career is over — and that's without someone actively trying to ruin you or your news organization.

In almost any other setting, I would have fact-checked and verified everything. Caution, skepticism, a penchant for hard facts and substantial proof: these are trademarks of a good reporter. But because I was in a networking setting, casually among colleagues in a comfortable environment where everyone was there to get to know each other, I accepted her claim to be another journalist.

I am writing this in the hopes that all reporters, not just those who are in the early years of their career like me, can learn from my experience. I got lucky this time, but it was a wake–up call for me. Sometimes I forget the lengths to which people will go to discredit news organizations. I definitely let myself forget that individual reporters, not just their organizations, are the focus of such attacks.

SPLC staff writer Emily Goodell can be reached by email, by phone at [phone], or on Twitter @GoodellEmily.

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