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Liberal groups fear election infiltration from O’Keefe and allies

This summer, a mystery man named James Fortune began approaching voting rights groups in North Carolina. ... Fortune, who claimed to be the operator of a progressive-minded North Carolina gym called “Equality Gym,” donated a few thousand dollars to the groups. Then he started asking whether they could illegally register undocumented immigrants to vote.

As the groups became suspicious, Fortune vanished—leaving behind only a blurry picture of himself, no proof that his gym actually existed, and suspicions that he was using an alias. But the wired money came from a Georgia group with ties to a QAnon House candidate and a network of other Republican figures, raising suspicions among the groups that Fortune was working for right-wing undercover prankster James O’Keefe or an O’Keefe imitator.

Right around the same time that Fortune was attempting to infiltrate progressive North Carolina groups, a so-called documentary film crew called “Zeitgeist Pictures” began interviewing six liberal groups in Wisconsin for what they claimed was a documentary about voting rights. The groups became suspicious, though, after the filmmakers began asking whether the groups were willing to break the law to illegally register voters.

The film crew disappeared as the groups grew more suspicious when they found no proof, aside from a barebones website, that there’s an actual film company called Zeitgeist Pictures. The activists interviewed by the crew claim they were able to identify one of their “interviewers” as O’Keefe associate Christian Hartsock, using pictures of Hartsock online. ... Unlike the Wisconsin operation, the North Carolina scheme hasn’t been publicly linked to O’Keefe, and Project Veritas spokesman Neil W. McCabe said O’Keefe’s group won’t “comment on investigations, real or imagined.” But on Monday, Project Veritas plans to release a video that O’Keefe claims will offer “UNDENIABLE VIDEO PROOF OF SYSTEMIC VOTER FRAUD.”

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