How much money does it take to contact some organization – say, a reporter from a newspaper, through email – meet them with a hidden recorder or camera tucked away, then to finally upload the secret video to YouTube?

A lot, apparently. Who knew?

James O’Keefe, the wunderkind who brought Project Veritas to prominence within conservative circles when he used the aforementioned technique to expose ACORN for their shady practices in 2009, has been chasing after that same level of acclaim ever since, with mixed results.

Nothing since has quite measured up to that initial flash of success. He’s had a series of lackluster “reveals” that have only excited a tight circle of partisans, but generally were washed away with the tide of more important revelations, elsewhere.

In 2010, he and several of his colleagues were arrested for attempting to enter the New Orleans office of then-Senator Mary Landrieu, by posing as telephone repairmen. They wanted to tamper with the phones in Landrieu’s office, in order to prove her phone lines were not so backed up with calls that she couldn’t take the calls from Tea Party activists.

O’Keefe received 3 years of probation, 100 hours of community service, and had to pay a fine of $1,500 for that stunt.

His latest goof, as I brought to you last night,  was the attempted sting operation, meant to plant a false story about Roy Moore impregnating a 15 year old girl in 1992 with the Washington Post. The goal, of course, to see the story in print, then to jump out with their grand “A-HA” moment, as they revealed that it was all an elaborate ruse, cooked up and carried out by the keen minds of O’Keefe and company – a ruse that would not have been possible, if not for the Washington Post’s own deceptiveness, and willingness to print any inflammatory lie against a conservative candidate for the Senate.

Yeah. It didn’t work out.

The woman, Jaime Phillips, sent by O’Keefe to pose as a teen Moore victim flamed out in glorious fashion, once she realized her story would undergo a fact-checking process before WaPo took it to print.

Oh, and the GoFundMe page she posted to raise money for her move to work combatting the liberal MSM didn’t help her, at all.

The topper was when she left her final meeting with WaPo reporter, Stephanie McCrummen, where she was confronted with a print-out of her GoFundMe page, and told that other details of her story did not check out. She left the meeting and led the WaPo crew directly back to the Project Veritas offices.

Outside the offices, James O’Keefe was confronted, on video, about his attempts to plant a false story with their paper.

Of course, he wouldn’t talk to the reporters, and even, quite arrogantly, accused them of stealing the technique of Project Veritas.

Dude… really?

So, caught red-handed, and embarrassed before the world, what does O’Keefe do?

Fund raises off of the debacle, of course.

This O'Keefe fundraising email asking his supporters for money to help him "beat The Washington Post to the presses" went out hours after the Post blew up his spot. He knows his fans won't realize that. pic.twitter.com/FdXIB2YWT5

— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) November 27, 2017

You weren’t ambushed, guy. Your operative screwed up and led them to you. They approached you, introduced themselves, then asked questions.

As for the months of having an undercover operative embedded with the paper, that’s just a lie.

Jaime Phillips popped up the day after the first Roy Moore story, at the beginning of November, and has been working an angle to get a fake story posted for several weeks.

What you succeeded in doing was make the Washington Post look better. You showcased their attention to detail and proved that they do their due diligence, as far as fact checking stories before print.

In other words, where Project Veritas proved to be willing to work in deception, the menacing “liberal MSM” proved to be the honest brokers of information.

And if you’ve in fact, already got your story, why do you need help to finish the investigation? Just upload whatever you think you have to YouTube, like you normally do. An upload to your channel on YouTube is free.

So just how much does O’Keefe and his outfit pull in every year, and where does the funding come from?

Well, the word is O’Keefe is pulling down over $300,000 from Project Veritas. That money comes from donors, who receive these passionate emails about all the liberal evils being confronted by the organization, and they feel compelled to dig deep to fund the efforts.

It’s a pretty good gig, if you can get it. The problem is, in order to keep the money flowing, they have to continue to manufacture boogeymen, and in the process, they’re clowning themselves and anybody who isn’t willing to view their methods and how they choose their targets with a bit of healthy skepticism.