Campaign Said to Have Targeted Trump 'Enemies' in Government ...

WASHINGTON — A network of conservative activists, aided by a British former spy, mounted a campaign during the Trump administration to discredit perceived enemies of President Donald Trump inside the government, according to documents and people involved in the operations. The campaign included a planned sting operation against Trump’s national security adviser at the time, H.R. McMaster, and secret surveillance operations against FBI employees, aimed at exposing anti-Trump sentiment in the bureau’s ranks. Central to the effort, according to interviews, was Richard Seddon, a former undercover British spy who was recruited in 2016 by security contractor Erik Prince to train Project Veritas operatives to infiltrate trade unions, Democratic congressional campaigns and other targets. Whether any of Trump’s White House advisers had direct knowledge of the campaign is unclear, but one of the participants in the operation against McMaster, Barbara Ledeen, said she was brought on by someone “with access to McMaster’s calendar.” At the time, Ledeen was a staff member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, then led by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa. These “unelected deep-state operatives who defy the voters to push their own secret agendas,” he said in 2018, “are truly a threat to democracy itself.” Seddon recruited Tarah Price, who at one point was a Project Veritas operative, and offered to pay her thousands of dollars to participate in the operation, according to interviews and an email written by a former boyfriend of Price and sent to Project Veritas Exposed, a group that tries to identify the group’s undercover operatives. Around the time McMaster resigned, Seddon pushed for Project Veritas to establish a base of operations in Washington and found a six-bedroom estate near the Georgetown University campus, according to former Project Veritas employees. Women living at the house had Project Veritas code names, including “Brazil” and “Tiger,” according to three former Project Veritas employees with knowledge of the operations. Project Veritas released a video of the operation in 2018, saying it was the first installment in “an undercover video investigation series unmasking the deep state.” In the video, O’Keefe said Project Veritas had been investigating the deep state for more than a year. By the time Project Veritas released its first “deep state” video, Seddon had left the group for other ventures — chafing at what he viewed as O’Keefe’s desire to produce quick media content rather than to run long-term infiltration operations, three former Project Veritas employees said.