Weigel at WaPo:
Scott Foval and Robert Creamer, two little-known but influential Democratic political operatives, have left their jobs after video investigations by James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas Action found them entertaining dark notions about how to win elections. Foval was laid off Monday by Americans United for Change, where he had been national field director; Creamer announced Tuesday night that he was “stepping back” from the work he was doing for the unified Democratic campaign for Hillary Clinton.
The moves came after 36 hours of coverage, led by conservative and social media, for O’Keefe’s video series “Rigging the Election.” In them, Foval is filmed telling hidden-camera-toting journalists about how they have disrupted Republican events. Foval also goes on at length about how an organization might cover up in-person voter fraud. In another Tuesday night statement, the Creamer-founded Democracy Partners, which used Foval as a contractor, denounced both Project Veritas and the statements caught on camera….
In the “voter fraud” video, Foval looks — somehow — even worse, describing how voters could be sent to Midwestern states to cast fraudulent ballots. But when PVAction edits this into a narrative, something gets lost. Foval says that “Bob Creamer comes up with a lot of these ideas,” but what the “ideas” are is lost to a quick edit. After a quick introduction of Creamer that covers his 2005 conviction for tax evasion, Creamer is seen talking to a journalist posing as a possible donor, rambling a bit as he describes how to get voter IDs to people who need them.
“What do you really need, okay?” says the journalist. “What makes you a citizen? And if you look at that checklist, it’s an ID card of any kind that shows you who you are and a pay stub that shows you’re getting paid at a local address some place.”…
o get registered, you mean?” asks Creamer.
“Yeah,” says the journalist. “Let’s say I had business inside of, say, Illinois or Michigan, and I hired people, and I had addresses for them, I could write them checks, I could use them as day laborers or whatever and use them and find my way around the voter registration law for Hispanics.”
Creamer quickly begins jotting down names of voter registration groups: “There are a couple of different organizations — that’s their big trick.” But while the implication is that the journalist is pitching mass voter fraud, he never says as much, and Creamer never agrees to it. In another tape, filmed at a restaurant, Creamer hears another version of the pitch and says, “My fear is that someone would decide that this is a big voter fraud scheme.”
In the end, PVAction’s evidence that Creamer might help with a voter fraud scheme is that Foval hints at it. In a follow-up clip, Foval tells the undercover journalist that Creamer was not onboard with any scheme to grant ID cards but that he told Creamer it could be handled by someone else. “We talk about a lot of things we don’t talk about,” Foval says conspiratorially. In PVAction’s telling, the “someone else” might be “dreamer” activist César Vargas, who is filmed saying he might be able to help another undercover journalist, if not in 2016.
But Vargas, as of now the only target of these videos who has not lost a job, claims that PVAction left out exculpatory video of the interview. “They have a transcript of our conversation to confirm I told them that voting twice was illegal,” Vargas wrote on Facebook on Tuesday. “I will not respond to Fox News or the trolls but let them have their field day of conspiracies.”