Conservative activist James O’Keefe set out to expose alleged vulnerabilities in Minnesota’s election system. Now, he faces felony charges stemming from the undercover operation.
O’Keefe, formerly of Project Veritas and current CEO of the O’Keefe Media Group, and conservative influencer Cameron Higby were charged Wednesday with unlawful voting and identity theft after allegedly impersonating registered voters at Minneapolis polling places during the state’s Aug. 11 primary.
According to Hennepin County prosecutors, the men wore disguises, used fake accents and provided election workers with the names of registered voters without their knowledge or permission. They filmed the encounters and later posted videos claiming to expose weaknesses in Minnesota’s voter registration procedures.
The operation targeted the state’s *vouching* system, which allows registered voters to verify the residency of people seeking to register on Election Day. The process requires sworn statements and identifying information from prospective voters.
Neither O’Keefe nor Higby cast a ballot or signed the required vouching oath. Prosecutors contend that misrepresenting their identities while beginning the voting process was itself unlawful.
O’Keefe defended the operation as investigative journalism, calling the prosecution an attack on First Amendment rights. Higby also denied breaking the law, saying the pair intended to expose election vulnerabilities.
The charges are the latest controversy involving O’Keefe’s undercover tactics. In 2017, reporters at the Washington Post caught him trying to sell them a false story. In 2009, he collaborated on hidden-camera investigations targeting Planned Parenthood and gained national attention for videos involving the community organization ACORN. He later settled a lawsuit brought by a former ACORN employee for $100,000 without admitting wrongdoing.
But Minnesota officials say the latest operation demonstrated something different from what O’Keefe intended.
Election workers noticed suspicious behavior and reported it, prompting an investigation. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said the state’s system for identifying and responding to potential misconduct functioned as intended. This vouching process itself accounted for fewer than 0.6% of votes cast in Minnesota’s 2024 general election, according to state election officials.
O’Keefe and Higby are scheduled to appear in court Nov. 16. Neither has been convicted.
With less than two weeks before some states begin mailing ballots for the 2026 midterms, there is plenty to worry about. Donald Trump is escalating his campaign to interfere with the machinery of American elections, demanding sensitive voter files, threatening state officials with prosecution and rewriting the rules for mail-in ballots. On Monday, the Supreme Court gave the administration a procedural victory that could let parts of Trump’s mail-voting scheme move forward, and new litigation is already underway to stop it.
But looking past the daily torrent of alarming headlines reveals another story worth telling. The Big Lie continues to cost its most committed promoters. Many of the MAGA men who cashed in on screaming — falsely — about the 2020 presidential election being stolen are finally facing a legal reckoning for manufacturing the project’s most enduring images.
Dinesh D’Souza, the conservative commentator and filmmaker, settled a defamation case on the eve of trial in Atlanta this month, ending a lawsuit over a so-called documentary released in 2022 that became one of the most influential pieces of post-2020 election conspiracy propaganda. The suit should have stripped “2000 Mules” of any remaining pretense of credibility the moment it was filed, as it claimed that thousands of people were paid to collect and illegally deposit ballots in battleground states. The film grossed more than $9 million and Trump screened it approvingly at Mar-a-Lago.
One of the supposed “mules” was Mark Andrews, an auditor in Gwinnett County, Georgia, who appeared onscreen in deceptively edited footage returning absentee ballots for himself and four family members before the 2020 election. The film treated a few seconds of surveillance video as license to publicly accuse an ordinary man of an election crime. D’Souza’s voice-over declared, “What you are seeing is a crime. These are fraudulent votes.”
They weren’t. Andrews had done nothing illegal, and after Georgia investigators cleared him of wrongdoing, he sued D’Souza and others involved in the film. The settlement amount remains undisclosed. That is less satisfying than a jury verdict, but it is still a remarkable endpoint for one of the Trump era’s most consequential election-fraud narratives. It also follows D’Souza’s own acknowledgment that the whole project was a fraud. In December 2024 he apologized to Andrews, and Salem Media Group, which distributed the movie, also apologized and withdrew “2000 Mules” and its companion book from distribution.
While D’Souza’s unraveling took years, the next chapter of MAGA’s fraud theater is falling apart in real time.
Earlier this month, conservative provocateurs James O’Keefe and Cam Higby dressed in what they described as traditional Muslim clothing. With O’Keefe in a thobe and Higby in a burqa, the pair walked into Minneapolis polling places during the state’s primary to test a decades-old voter vouching law, which lets a registered voter attest that a newly arrived or recently moved neighbor lives in the precinct. O’Keefe used a badly affected accent and, in one instance, gave poll workers the name of a real registered voter, William Pomeranz, who learned days later that his identity had been used in a viral video without his knowledge. A third member of the group, Anthony Rubin, reportedly told poll workers he wanted to vouch for people he described as recently arrived Hamas members from Gaza.
None of them actually cast a ballot or completed a registration. Rather than uncovering a loophole, they appear to have landed themselves squarely in legal jeopardy.
Falsely signing a vouching oath is perjury under Minnesota law, punishable by up to five years. Misrepresenting your identity to obtain a ballot is a separate felony. Steve Simon, Minnesota’s Democratic secretary of state, slamming the stunt, noted that fewer than 0.6% of the state’s 2024 votes involved vouching at all, and that roughly 71% of those were already registered voters simply updating an address. Local law enforcement in Hennepin County is now reviewing the footage, which has reportedly been viewed more than seven million times. O’Keefe, who was ousted in 2023 from Project Veritas, the right-wing organization he founded, over what its own board called financial malfeasance, built his career on precisely this kind of stunt. He targeted Minneapolis after Trump zeroed in on the state as a hotbed of election fraud based on nothing but racist vibes. Now it looks like O’Keefe is left holding the bag.
That is the recurring joke at the heart of MAGA’s election theater: The people who arrive promising to expose a corrupt system keep discovering that the system has rules for them too.
That is the recurring joke at the heart of MAGA’s election theater: The people who arrive promising to expose a corrupt system keep discovering that the system has rules for them too.
Scott Presler and his political action committee, Early Vote Action, offer another version of the same schtick. The watchdog group Public Citizen recently filed a complaint alleging that Presler and his group failed to register or disclose spending related to their campaign to unseat three Pennsylvania Supreme Court justices in the state’s 2025 retention election. Under Pennsylvania law, any committee spending more than $250 to influence an election, including a judicial retention race, must register and disclose its donors and expenditures. Presler’s operation reportedly ran a two dozen person paid field staff in the state, sent tens of thousands of postcards to Amish voters and texted more than 100,000 people in Bucks County alone, yet it never once showed up in the state’s campaign finance database. The complaint alleges that Presler and Early Vote Action sidestepped transparency laws meant to let voters know who is bankrolling attempts to hijack their judiciary.
The justices Presler tried to unseat, all Democrats, were reelected anyway. Since then, he has become a prominent outside advocate for the SAVE America Act, pressing Senate Republicans to embrace the Trump-endorsed legislation’s proof-of-citizenship and voter-identification mandates. A separate Public Citizen complaint alleges that neither Presler nor his affiliated super PAC registered lobbying disclosures for activity promoting the measure on Capitol Hill.
The Trump administration is building an extraordinary federal apparatus, backed by the Supreme Court’s blessing on at least part of it, to police an epidemic of noncitizen voting that its own Justice Department cannot document well enough to win a single voter roll case in 23 tries. The propagandists who manufactured the visual evidence for that epidemic, chief among them D’Souza, are settling defamation suits and apologizing to the private citizens they smeared. The stunt artists trying to manufacture a fresh round of viral fraud evidence are instead generating criminal referrals against themselves. And the MAGA media personalities raising money and influence around the cause of “election integrity” are themselves facing questions about whether they followed the disclosure rules that govern political spending.
The Big Lie was never just a rhetorical grievance nursed by Trump’s inner circle. It was a lucrative enterprise built to destroy our faith in elections. Instead, it continues to expose the people who sold it.
The midterms will bring more attempts to manufacture doubt with ominous warnings and baseless allegations of fraud. The lesson from 2020, despite Trump’s return to the White House, has not changed. Do not yield to MAGA’s performance. Fight back and protect the people who administer elections.
Federal agents searched the Washington, D.C., home of Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, on Monday morning as part of a criminal investigation, following months of public accusations against the congresswoman by President Donald Trump and members of his administration.
Agents from Homeland Security Investigations executed a search warrant authorized by a federal judge, according to the Associated Press and The Washington Post.
“This enforcement action is part of an ongoing federal criminal investigation,” the Justice Department said in a statement.
The department did not disclose the scope of the investigation or what agents were seeking. Fox News reported, citing unidentified sources, that investigators were examining immigration paperwork completed by Omar’s late father when she was a child.
The search follows repeated allegations of immigration fraud from Trump administration officials, including Vice President JD Vance, who previously said he discussed potential legal action against Omar with White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.
Omar, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Somalia, has repeatedly denied the allegations. Federal officials have not publicly presented evidence substantiating them.
Trump has frequently singled out Omar, an outspoken critic of his administration and one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress. His attacks have included calls for her to leave the United States and repeated references to a Minnesota welfare fraud scandal in which Omar has not been accused of wrongdoing.
The search comes just three weeks before the Nov. 3 midterm elections — and after voting has already begun in Minnesota.
Absentee voting in the state opened Sept. 18, according to the Minnesota secretary of state’s office. Omar is seeking reelection to Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District, which includes Minneapolis.
The Justice Department has longstanding policies discouraging investigative actions intended to influence elections. Federal officials have not explained whether election-related considerations factored into the timing of Monday’s search.
Omar’s office had not issued a public response to the search as of the latest reporting. No charges have been announced.
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