White House Puts Top Official On Leave After Trashing Trump In Sting Operation
"Such views expressed by the individual are not reflective of patriots who admirably serve in the Administration."
Biden-voting Secret Service agent stripped of security clearance after spilling beans to undercover reporter
The U.S. Secret Service has placed an agent assigned to Vice President JD Vance's protective detail on administrative leave after he allegedly divulged sensitive security secrets to an undercover female reporter.
In footage published on Tuesday by investigative journalist James O'Keefe, USSS agent Tomas Escotto appears to share various specifics regarding Vance's security detail with the reporter as well as photos revealing the methods used to transport the vice president.
'When one person falls short, it places an added burden on colleagues who are left to rebuild trust.'
"What we uncovered is troubling," said O'Keefe, who indicated that the engagements took place in the wake of the attempted break-in at Vance's Cincinnati home. "We hope that bringing this to light strengthens security and helps prevent future vulnerabilities in our government."
The video and text messages published by O'Keefe appear to show that Escotto, a self-identified Biden voter, provided the reporter with:
- real-time locations of the vice president;
- insights into Vance's future travel plans;
- the particulars of how far ahead and behind agents walk in relation to Vance;
- the security detail's shift schedule;
- photographs taken on duty containing location metadata; and
- photographs providing insights into how the vice president's vehicle is secured and stored for international travel.
After indicating in the footage that he only received his citizenship in 2018, Escotto criticizes the Trump administration's immigration policies, stating, "They're deploying tactics that shouldn't be deployed."
O'Keefe noted that ahead of publishing the video, his team coordinated with the USSS, redacting sensitive operational details at their request.
Blaze News has reached out to Vance's office for comment.
Deputy Secret Service Director Matthew Quinn confirmed in a statement to O'Keefe that the incident is under investigation and "the employee involved has been placed on administrative leave with his clearance suspended and access to agency facilities and systems revoked."
The USSS is now also requiring all personnel to retake the agency's anti-espionage training "in order to ensure employees are aware of the threats posed by individuals aiming to exploit agency employees for information about our protective operations."
Quinn said in a memo to USSS employees that was obtained by O'Keefe, "Over the past several months, an agency employee was deliberately targeted and manipulated by a citizen-journalism media organization that misrepresented itself in an effort to get close to the employee and expose sensitive information. This is the second time in less than a year that our personnel have been subjected to this same deceptive tactic."
"When one person falls short, it places an added burden on colleagues who are left to rebuild trust that each of us works hard every day to earn and protect," added Quinn.
Turning Point USA spokesman Andrew Kolvet was among those who emphasized the gravity of O'Keefe's damning exposé, stating, "This is one of the most disturbing videos I've seen in some time. Those tasked with protecting the president, VP, and their families should be a top national priority."
"That a Secret Service agent could be leaking sensitive information and endangering their lives is a national security threat of the highest importance," added Kolvet.
Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, noted, "The Secret Service is a dangerous mess."
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Georgetown prof starts running after realizing he's talking to James O'Keefe — and his racial 'slurs' are on camera
Jonathan Franklin, a former race and identity correspondent for National Public Radio who now apparently serves as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, recently went into panic-mode after realizing he had made a series of damning remarks to investigative journalist James O'Keefe on hidden camera.
In the footage published on Wednesday by the O'Keefe Media Group, Franklin — whose personal website is now password-protected, Instagram profile has been set to private, and page on the Georgetown University was largely scrubbed — appears to call various black conservatives a "coon," including Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Candace Owens, and U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas Herschel Walker.
'Well, the thing is that I actually am James O'Keefe.'
When pressed by O'Keefe on why he hasn't shared such views publicly, Franklin, who is set to teach a journalism course on sourcing and interviews, appears to say, "I'd have to stop being a journalist for me to say what I really want to say."
At one point in his conversation with O'Keefe — whom he evidently did not recognize on account of a pair of glasses — Franklin appears to say, "I work with a bunch of stupid white people."
Franklin declined to comment on the situation involving the video published by O'Keefe, a representative told Blaze News.
RELATED: University of Minnesota faces backlash over project that seeks to cure the 'Whiteness Pandemic'
Georgetown University did not respond to Blaze News' request for comment.
After hearing enough racially charged rhetoric, O'Keefe asks Franklin in the video what he thinks about James O'Keefe.
Franklin answers, "I've heard from people he's an a**h**e."
"Well, he does, like, the undercover stuff and, like, exposes people, you know?" says O'Keefe. "He exposes people, you know, telling people, like, what they really think."
"There's a way to do that sort of watchdog, gotcha, ambush journalism but doing in a way that doesn't disrespect the person that you're trying to catch or yourself as a reporter," says Franklin.
O'Keefe then takes off his glasses, points to the hidden camera, and announces to Franklin, "Well, the thing is that I actually am James O'Keefe."
"No, you're not," responds Franklin.
Upon realizing the man he'd been talking to is in fact James O'Keefe, Franklin gets up and begins to run away. Outside the building, Franklin can be seen falling to the ground. After asking whether the adjunct was all right, O'Keefe tries asking him clarifying questions about his apparent "coon" comments, to which Franklin responds, "I will sue."
O'Keefe and his team subsequently took Franklin to a pharmacy to get him Band-Aids for the cuts he sustained in his tumble. After cooling off, Franklin appeared to confirm to O'Keefe on camera that while he did work for NPR, he had lied during their earlier conversation about working for CBS News.
When later discussing the encounter, O'Keefe questioned whether an individual who allegedly harbors racist views and would share them with a stranger should be teaching journalism classes at an institution like Georgetown University.
"That type of racism is not just his personal opinion," said O'Keefe. "It is a bias about a group of people that directly affects fairness, credibility and judgment. Why? Because he's a professor who is using these slurs. He is revealing a framework that shapes how he interprets information."
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James O’Keefe exposes State Department diplomat who secretly dated CCP leader’s daughter
Journalist James O’Keefe has done it again, this time exposing a U.S. State Department diplomat via hidden camera for dating a CCP leader’s daughter and hiding it from the government.
“‘I Defied My Government for Love’: US State Department Foreign Service Officer Dated Senior CCP Leader’s Daughter, Admits ‘She Could Have Been A Spy,’ Refused to Report Her,” reads the headline of O’Keefe’s latest exposé.
“This is Daniel Choi, worked at the State Department for almost 20 years and was in charge of vetting all student visas from China, a program that recent arrests show has become less about education and a pipeline for infiltration and espionage,” O’Keefe tells BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales on “Sara Gonzales Unfiltered.”
“This is a guy in the State Department talking to a random stranger about how he’s sleeping with a Chinese spy,” O’Keefe explains.
“And now he’s been fired, which is really extraordinary because it’s the first time in American history that the executive branch of government has fired a State Department official in this way,” he continues.
“I understand, James,” Gonzales responds, “you are the best at what you do, and I wouldn’t ever ask you — just as you don’t ask a magician to reveal his secrets, I wouldn’t ask you to reveal all of your ... behind-the-scenes secrets, but I just keep watching these, and I’m like, ‘How are you getting these people to talk?’”
“I think we have to look at it a little differently than the way that people look at it when they ask that question, because it’s a good question. But I think if you change your perspective on the way things are in the world, that all around us, everything’s a lie,” O’Keefe explains.
“I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s so much fraud. Things are so systemically broken in our world, in our politics, in our government. There’s a conspiracy of silence that everyone maintains. We all know it’s B.S., but we don’t talk about it,” he continues.
“So,” he adds, “when the official narrative is so far afield from reality, all you have to do is point your hidden camera in any direction, and you’ll contradict what the official narrative is.”
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Gotcha trap legend James O’Keefe unpacks Coldplay cheater scandal with Alex Stein
James O’Keefe is the king of sting operations. From Planned Parenthood, NPR, and Pfizer to Disney, the FBI, and Google, no government or corporate entity can hide its secrets once O’Keefe Media Group finds a chink in their armor. Over the years, O’Keefe’s undercover journalists and hidden cameras have captured countless executives, officials, and employees sharing damning internal secrets.
On a recent episode of “Prime Time with Alex Stein,” the gotcha trap legend joined Alex to break down an embarrassing bust that’s going viral right now: Astronomer CEO Andy Byron and his head of HR, Kristin Cabot, engaging in what looks to be an extramarital affair at a Coldplay concert.
Alex plays the clip of Byron and Cabot’s cringeworthy jumbotron moment. The camera pans to them, and Byron can be seen standing behind Cabot with his arms wrapped romantically around her. The second they recognize they’re on camera, Byron ducks out of frame while Cabot covers her face and turns her back to the camera.
Their reaction was recorded and soon after blasted out on social media, where it’s already garnered over 100 million views.
“You can tell they were caught,” Alex says. “I mean, the hand is in the cookie jar.”
“People don’t like the mirror. They don’t like seeing the reality,” says O’Keefe, who compares the suspected cheaters’ reactions to the reactions of the people he catches in OMG’s sting operations.
OMG’s latest victim reacted very similarly to Byron and Cabot. Video footage released on July 15 captures Johnson & Johnson lead regulatory scientist Joshua Rys allegedly admitting to his undercover date that the company’s COVID-19 vaccine wasn’t safe or effective. But when O’Keefe confronted him, Rys denied his identity and tried to hide in the bathroom before he finally tried to convince O’Keefe to not air the story.
To hear more about OMG’s latest project, “American Swiper,” watch the episode above.
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James O’Keefe secretly spied on by US government, shines a light on DC corruption
Manhattan federal prosecutor Maurene Comey, daughter of James Comey, was fired from the U.S. Attorney’s Office this week — after being a prosecutor in the case against accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and later against Sean “Diddy” Combs.
But that’s not all she's linked to.
“She also happens to be involved, or was involved, in the same district that was involved in the FBI raids on your home, your newsroom,” BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales tells James O’Keefe on “Sara Gonzales Unfiltered.”
O’Keefe, founder of O’Keefe Media Group, is notorious for his work exposing corruption at some of the highest levels via sting operations that often begin with a simple swipe on a dating app.
And the corporate and government entities O’Keefe targets have made it clear they are not fond of his work.
“What happened with me is they went shopping to eight different magistrate judges in 2020,” O’Keefe tells Gonzales.
“To try to get these secret subpoenas that are reserved for terrorists and traffickers, child traffickers, you know, drug traffickers, serious criminal conspiracies.”
“And they got these magistrate judges to grant them all these secret warrants to spy on me for a year. And then after spying on me, they went to another magistrate judge, Sarah Cave, and SDNY, and they presented probable cause,” he continues, noting that the document explaining why they raided his newsroom has been completely redacted.
“If you think your government is going to be transparent about sex traffickers, but they can’t even be transparent about why they raided a newsroom,” he says. “There’s only one thing that’s not redacted on this document. It's a footnote that says — an FBI agent is writing this, and he says, ‘I have learned amongst other things that cell phones are capable of sending emails.’”
“So this is a clown show. This is not even serious. This is just absurd. Completely absurd,” he adds.
O’Keefe does have a theory as to why the documents regarding the raid of his home and business were fully redacted.
“In my case, with the redaction you just saw, there probably are confidential FBI informants at Project Veritas,” he tells Gonzales. “I was raided during the Project Veritas time. So the FBI has to protect the names of their sources.”
Despite the action taken against O’Keefe, he hasn’t given up on his mission to expose corruption in those the American people are told to trust — and is expanding it with his new series, “American Swiper.”
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ESPN employee EXPOSES Stephen A. Smith’s job is to be ‘an angry black man’
Stephen A. Smith may be a star at ESPN, but those closest to his work aren’t as impressed as his audience — and a recent undercover interview recorded by James O’Keefe proves it.
“We have this one guy, his name is Stephen A. Smith. He plays the ‘angry black man’ on TV. ‘The angry black man’ stereotype is basically, you’re loud, you talk over people, what you say is not necessarily important, it’s more how loud you are and how I guess you deliver your speech,” ESPN producer Ryan Bertrand told the undercover reporter.
“He does that pretty well. I think the higher-ups at ESPN and Disney see that he’s like this angry black man, he goes on Fox News probably like once a week, and he’ll talk about Gaza, and he has no idea about Gaza,” Bertrand continued.
“And we’re like, ‘Brother, you were just talking about the Lakers like three hours ago, what do you know about Gaza?’” he added.
Bertrand also said that it’s essentially Smith’s job to “create chaos, to create controversy.”
Jason Whitlock of “Fearless” is far from surprised.
“What that confirms, and everybody knew it was obvious, but everybody knows that Stephen A. Smith is a gimmick and that there’s no authenticity to Stephen A. Smith, that ESPN knows that they’re promoting a clown, that ESPN knows that he has no credibility as it relates to politics,” Whitlock says.
“Here’s Disney, and ESPN, the worldwide leader in sports, is promoting someone who’s completely unqualified to do what they’re hired to do,” he continues. “They’re just there to create chaos, and clicks, and division, and to fit a stereotype of, as this man described it, ‘the angry black man.’”
“So Disney and ESPN, and we’re not breaking news here, but their job is to promote racial division and to promote buffoonery among black hosts,” he adds.
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BUSTED: ActBlue caught money laundering?
A gunshot was reported outside one of Elon Musk’s Tesla showrooms, as the radical left has turned on its own environmental electric vehicle dreams — but Liz Wheeler of “The Liz Wheeler Show” doesn’t believe these protests are grassroots.
“These are not people that are just trying to make their voices heard with peaceful protests. They are funded by groups, by big-name leftist donors through a platform called ActBlue,” Wheeler explains.
However, ActBlue is now accused of doing much more than just funding left-wing movements.
“ActBlue is now being accused of money laundering,” Wheeler says. “This is a scandal of epic proportions and could cause the entire Democrat infrastructure, their political organizational structure, to topple.”
“I do not exaggerate when I say that,” she continues. “There’s been a pattern of really suspicious behavior with some of the donations through ActBlue.”
One example is after President Trump was targeted for assassination in Butler, Pennsylvania, that day and the day after were the highest-grossing single fundraising days in the entirety of President Trump’s campaigns.
“Compare that, for a second, with the day that Kamala Harris staged her coup against Joe Biden. She gathered more, received more campaign donations via ActBlue than Donald Trump did the day after his assassination,” Wheeler explains.
“Now, weigh the probability of this with me for a moment. Does this seem realistic to you? Does this seem real to you? Do these two events, the intended murder of a president of the United States versus Kamala Harris, a politician that couldn’t even get 3% of her own party to vote for her in the primary a couple of years earlier, becoming the Democratic nominee without a single Democrat voting for her — do those two things seem to be of equal implication?” She asks.
“The answer to that is obviously no, and yet ActBlue collected more donations for Kamala Harris on that day than Donald Trump did the day after his assassination, which is an anomaly,” she continues. “Of course, it’s not just that. It’s not just, ‘Oh, something seems off.’ We have specific examples and reports of fraud that’s happening on ActBlue.”
Last October, James O’Keefe reported that a senior citizen named Cindy Nowe from Annapolis, Maryland, supposedly donated over 1,000 times to ActBlue in 2022.
“Almost $20,000,” Wheeler says. “That’s three donations every single day. Now, does that seem realistic to you?”
When Nowe was confronted by O’Keefe, she told him that while she has donated to ActBlue “once in a while,” she did not donate that large sum of money.
“Can you imagine the reality of that? Do you remember to do anything three times a day, every day, for 365 days in a row? Of course you don’t. I don’t,” Wheeler says, “because that’s fraud.”
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