Erik Prince, the security contractor with close ties to the Trump administration, has in recent years helped recruit former American and British spies for secretive intelligence-gathering operations that included infiltrating Democratic congressional campaigns, labor organizations and other groups considered hostile to the Trump agenda, according to interviews and documents.
One of the former spies, an ex-MI6 officer named Richard Seddon, helped run a 2017 operation to copy files and record conversations in a Michigan office of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest teachers unions in the nation. Mr. Seddon directed an undercover operative to secretly tape the unions local leaders and try to gather information that could be made public to damage the organization, documents show.
Using a different alias the next year, the same undercover operative infiltrated the congressional campaign of Abigail Spanberger, then a former C.I.A. officer who went on to win an important House seat in Virginia as a Democrat. The campaign discovered the operative and fired her.
Both operations were run by Project Veritas, a conservative group that has gained attention using hidden cameras and microphones for sting operations on news organizations, Democratic politicians and liberal advocacy groups. Mr. Seddons role in the teachers union operation detailed in internal Project Veritas emails that have emerged from the discovery process of a court battle between the group and the union has not previously been reported, nor has Mr. Princes role in recruiting Mr. Seddon for the groups activities.
Both Project Veritas and Mr. Prince have ties to President Trumps aides and family. Whether any Trump administration officials or advisers to the president were involved in the operations, even tacitly, is unclear. But the effort is a glimpse of a vigorous private campaign to try to undermine political groups or individuals perceived to be in opposition to Mr. Trumps agenda.
Mr. Prince, the former head of Blackwater Worldwide and the brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, has at times served as an informal adviser to Trump administration officials. He worked with the former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn during the presidential transition. In 2017, he met with White House and Pentagon officials to pitch a plan to privatize the Afghan war using contractors in lieu of American troops. Jim Mattis, then the defense secretary, rejected the idea.
Mr. Prince appears to have become interested in using former spies to train Project Veritas operatives in espionage tactics sometime during the 2016 presidential campaign. Reaching out to several intelligence veterans and occasionally using Mr. Seddon to make the pitch Mr. Prince said he wanted the Project Veritas employees to learn skills like how to recruit sources and how to conduct clandestine recordings, among other surveillance techniques.
James OKeefe, the head of Project Veritas, declined to answer detailed questions about Mr. Prince, Mr. Seddon and other topics, but he called his group a proud independent news organization that is involved in dozens of investigations. He said that numerous sources were coming to the group providing confidential documents, insights into internal processes and wearing hidden cameras to expose corruption and misconduct.
A spokesman for Mr. Prince declined to comment. Emails sent to Mr. Seddon went unanswered.
Mr. Prince is under investigation by the Justice Department over whether he lied to a congressional committee examining Russian interference in the 2016 election, and for possible violations of American export laws. Last year, the House Intelligence Committee made a criminal referral to the Justice Department about Mr. Prince, saying he lied about the circumstances of his meeting with a Russian banker in the Seychelles in January 2017.
Once a small operation running on a shoestring budget, Project Veritas in recent years has had a surge in donations from both private donors and conservative foundations. According to its latest publicly available tax filing, Project Veritas received $8.6 million in contributions and grants in 2018. Mr. OKeefe earned about $387,000.
Last year, the group received a $1 million contribution made through the law firm Alston & Bird, a financial document obtained by The New York Times showed. A spokesman for the firm said that Alston & Bird has never contributed to Project Veritas on its own behalf, nor is it a client of ours. The spokesman declined to say on whose behalf the contribution was made.
The financial document also listed the names of others who gave much smaller amounts to Project Veritas last year. Several of them confirmed their donations.
The group has also become intertwined with the political activities of Mr. Trump and his family. The Trump Foundation gave $20,000 to Project Veritas in 2015, the year that Mr. Trump began his bid for the presidency. The next year, during a presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump claimed without substantiation that videos released by Mr. OKeefe showed that Mrs. Clinton and President Barack Obama had paid people to incite violence at rallies for Mr. Trump.
In a book published in 2018, Mr. OKeefe wrote that Mr. Trump years earlier had encouraged him to infiltrate Columbia University and obtain Mr. Obamas records.
Last month, Project Veritas made public secretly recorded video of a longtime ABC News correspondent who was critical of the networks political coverage and its emphasis on business considerations over journalism. Many conservatives have gleefully pounced on Project Veritass disclosures, including one particularly influential voice: Donald Trump Jr., the presidents eldest son.
The website for Mr. OKeefes coming wedding listed Donald Trump Jr. as an invited guest. ... Mr. Seddon regularly updated Mr. OKeefe about the operation against the Michigan teachers union, according to internal Project Veritas emails, where the language of the groups leaders is marbled with spy jargon.
They used a code name LibertyU for their operative inside the organization, Marisa Jorge, who graduated from Liberty University in Virginia, one of the nations largest Christian colleges. Mr. Seddon wrote that Ms. Jorge copied a great many documents from the file room, and Mr. OKeefe bragged that the group would be able to get a ton more access agents inside the educational establishment.
The emails refer to other operations, including weekly case updates, along with training activities that involved operational targe
If project veritas could stop misrepresenting all the things they post, they might actually do some good. But they clearly post everything out of context with heavy editing.