This Deplorable Mole Spent The Summer Targeting Journalists (TWEET)


Hours after The Washington Post published a bombshell story alleging that Roy Moore had molested numerous women and girls over the years and also pursued girls young enough to be his daughter, a woman named Jaime Phillips approached The Post with a horrifying tale. She claimed that a quarter-century earlier while spending the summer in Alabama, Moore had impregnated her and secretly drove her to Mississippi to have an abortion.

But there was one problem–it was all a lie. Phillips’ story was shot through with red flags, and crumbled altogether when she was spotted at the headquarters of Project Veritas, the right-wing organization notorious for targeting journalists and liberal groups with videos yanked out of context. Apparently Project Veritas hoped that The Post would run Phillips’ story without batting an eyelash–thus providing evidence that those libruls at the Amazon Post were out to get Moore. The outfit’s ringleader, notorious right-wing provocateur James O’Keefe, admitted he was behind the scheme.

Over the past two days, The Post has revealed just how far Phillips went in her effort. It turns out that Phillips may have had a number of other media outlets, as well as liberal groups, in her sights as well.

The Post did a deep dive into Phillips’ social media profile. She first appeared on Twitter in 2009 as “@JaimeTennille.” Her posts from then until 2017 revealed she was hard, hard, hard right. On election night, she proudly posed for a picture with black conservative activist Quay Manuel.

Her display name at one point was “Jaime ❤PresidentTrump,” and included a slew of pro-Trump hashtags as well as a link to the trailer for “Clinton Cash,” the Breitbart-financed movie that tried to smear Hillary Clinton as corrupt. Among the videos on her Periscope account was a video mocking the Women’s March as the “Midol March.” Soon after Trump tweeted about “covfefe,” Phillips was one of many Trump diehards who took it as a battle cry. She changed her Twitter handle to “@Covfefe2Scoops.”

In May, Phillips started a GoFundMe campaign to crowdfund a planned move to New York so she could join “the conservative media movement.” Two months earlier, Project Veritas announced it was hiring “undercover journalists.” As we now know, that GoFundMe page proved to be Phillips’ undoing; when Post reporters spotted it and called her on it, Phillips backed out of the story.

Sometime in June, Phillips made an almost chameleon-like social media transformation. She started using a picture of John F. Kennedy as the cover picture on her Facebook wall. She also created a new Twitter account, “@jtaylor18882,” that churned out tweets supporting liberal causes.


She moved to Washington a month later, and rented an apartment from Democratic National Committee communications director Brad Woodhouse on Airbnb under the name “Jaime Taylor.” When Woodhouse saw Phillips’ picture, he was naturally dumbfounded. He also doesn’t think it was a coincidence. A year earlier, Woodhouse’s advocacy group, Americans United for Change, was the target of a Project Veritas sneak attack. O’Keefe and friends made it look like the group was plotting voter fraud–while cutting out footage in which another activist said voting twice was illegal.

Phillips/Taylor then spent much of the summer attending networking events and going-away parties for reporters. Depending on the event, she posed as the owner of a start-up news blog, a graduate student in national security, or a reporting contractor.

One of those gatherings was a going-away party for Post national security editor Jia Lynn Yang, who had just gotten a job at The New York Times. Phillips chatted with another Post reporter, Dan Lamothe, about Defense Secretary James Mattis.

What Lamothe didn’t know was that a man who accompanied Phillips was recording the conversation. In a blatant attempt at deflection after being busted for its attempt to plant the false accusations against Moore, Project Veritas uploaded the video hours after The Post’s story went live. Phillips is identified as “PV Journalist #1.” You’ll have to take our word for it. In light of Project Veritas’ total lack of standards, we’re not linking to it.

Earlier, on September 14, Phillips/Taylor spent four hours talking with Student Press Law Center intern Emily Goodell. Phillips/Taylor was supposedly compiling a list of journalists with whom she wanted to chat, and Goodell helped her. Goodell later wrote that after reading about Phillips’ attempt to pass herself off as a sexual assault victim, she wondered about “all the things that could have happened”–including if she could have been targeted in similar fashion.

It would be easy to just dismiss this as harmless trolling. But consider that this woman tried to plant a bogus story in hopes of making The Post look like hacks out to get a conservative icon. Is it any wonder the reporters with whom this woman interacted now feel like they’re on edge? After all, Phillips could have just as easily targeted them. And in the process, she engaged in victim-shaming of the worst type by trying to make it look like Moore’s accusers were publicity-seeking liars. Anyone who would even think this was a good idea has no moral compass to speak of.

If Phillips thought this was going to be her big break, she wound up a dead loser. All she did was make herself virtually unemployable. The only people who would go anywhere near her at this point would be fake news peddlers like Breitbart, Infowars, Gateway Pundit, The Rebel, and others of their ilk. In this regard, she’s no different from Adam Smith, the former CFO who hasn’t been able to find steady work after he got the stupid idea to record himself berating a Chick-fil-A employee.


However, Phillips isn’t the only one whose career should be over for this. When an organization considers victim-shaming to be standard operating procedure, it’s only fair to ask whether that organization should be allowed to exist. While this stunt may have been technically legal, there’s a reason why the bar for acceptable behavior is set higher than the bar below which you go to jail. It is long past time for Project Veritas to be driven out of existence.

(featured image courtesy Quay Manuel’s Twitter)

Darrell is a 30-something graduate of the University of North Carolina who considers himself a journalist of the old school. An attempt to turn him into a member of the religious right in college only succeeded in turning him into the religious right's worst nightmare--a charismatic Christian who is an unapologetic liberal. His desire to stand up for those who have been scared into silence only increased when he survived an abusive three-year marriage. You may know him on Daily Kos as Christian Dem in NC. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook. Click here to buy Darrell a Mello Yello.