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A sting operation designed to discredit the Washington Post's reporting appears to have backfired. The paper detailed the strange situation in a story published on Monday afternoon.
According to the Post, a woman named Jaime Phillips approached reporters alleging that Roy Moore, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama, impregnated her as a teenager in 1992. Phillips told reporters that the pregnancy later led to an abortion.
The Washington Post did not publish the story the woman claimed to have on her allegation alone. Instead they detailed the series of interviews they had with her over a two week period while they attempted to verify the woman's story. However, during the course of their investigations, they found several inconsistencies in her story, including a 'GoFundMe' page under her name, boasting about her new job working in the conservative media movement.
Phillips cut off contact with the Post once confronted with its findings.
On Monday, reporters with the Washington Post spotted Phillips enter the New York offices of Project Veritas - an organization that goes after mainstream media organizations through undercover 'stings' hoping to expose supposed bias.
In fact, Project Veritas's project may have done the exact opposite. In the article detailing the failed sting, Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron points out that because of the Post's extraordinary journalistic standards, they were able to uncover the 'fake news.'
“[T]his so-called off-the-record conversation was the essence of a scheme to deceive and embarrass us,” Post Executive Editor Martin Baron said Monday. “The intent by Project Veritas clearly was to publicize the conversation if we fell for the trap. Because of our customary journalistic rigor, we weren’t fooled, and we can’t honor an ‘off-the-record’ agreement that was solicited in maliciously bad faith.”
James O'Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas refused to answer questions from the Post about whether the woman worked for the group when asked on Monday.