WASHINGTON: A former FBI agent and Pentagon contractor has sued the founder of a conservative nonprofit known for its hidden camera stings over secretly recorded videos showing the contractor criticizing President Donald Trump to a woman he thought he had taken on a date.
\nJamie Mannina says in his lawsuit that he was misled by a woman he met on a dating website who held herself out as a politically liberal nurse but who was actually working with the conservative activist James O\u2019Keefe in a sting operation designed to induce Mannina into making \u201cinflammatory and damaging\u201d remarks that could be recorded, \u201cmanipulated\u201d and posted online.
\nClips from their January conversations were spliced together to make it appear that Mannina was \u201cessentially attempting to launch an unlawful coup against President Trump,\u201d and articles released online with the videos defamed Mannina by painting him as part of a \u201cdeep state\u201d effort with senior military officials to undermine Trump\u2019s presidency, according to the lawsuit filed Wednesday in federal court in Washington.
\nMannina does not deny in the lawsuit making the comments but says his words were taken out of context, edited and pieced together in a manner designed to paint him in a false light, including in a written description on YouTube that accompanied the publication of one of the recordings.
\nO\u2019Keefe founded Project Veritas in 2010 but was removed from the organization in 2023 amid allegations that he mistreated workers and misspent funds. He has continued to employ similar hidden camera stings as part of a new organization he established, O\u2019Keefe Media Group, which also is named in the lawsuit along with the woman who pretended to be on dates with Mannina. Her identity is not known, the lawsuit says.
\nO\u2019Keefe told The Associated Press on Wednesday that Mannina \u201cvoluntarily\u201d offered up the comments in the recording and that it was important for the public to hear Mannina\u2019s remarks. O\u2019Keefe pointed out that the District of Columbia requires the consent of only one party, not both, for a conversation to be recorded. He called the lawsuit an \u201cattack on the First Amendment\u201d and said he was prepared to fight it all the way to an appeals court if necessary.
\n\u201cHe said what he said. We did not take him out of context. The words that we reported came out of his mouth,\u201d O\u2019Keefe said, adding, \u201cWe stand by our reporting.\u201d
\nThe lawsuit includes claims of defamation, false light, fraudulent misrepresentation and violations of the federal Wiretap Act. Though the lawsuit acknowledges that D.C.\u2019s consent law for recording conversations, it asserts that the law nonetheless prohibits \u201cthe interception and recording of a communication if it was for the purposes of committing a tortious act.\u201d
\nThe complaint arises from a pair of dates that Mannina had in January with the woman and a series of videos that O\u2019Keefe released in the following days. During their first date, the lawsuit alleges, the woman expressed her distaste for Trump and repeatedly pressed Mannina on his political views and about his work with the government. Mannina told her that included working as a \u201cspy catcher\u201d several years earlier when he was an FBI counterintelligence agent.
\nA recording that O\u2019Keefe released shows Mannina being asked at one point by the woman, whose name was not disclosed in the lawsuit, about his \u201coverall assessment of Trump.\u201d
\n\u201cHe\u2019s a sociopathic narcissist who\u2019s only interested in advancing his name, his wealth and his fame,\u201d Mannina can be heard saying. Asked in the recording whether there was anything he could do to \u201cprotect the American people,\u201d Mannina replied that he was in conversation with some retired generals to explore what could be done.
\nThe lawsuit says Mannina and the woman met for a second date over lunch, and as they left the restaurant, a man with a microphone approached Mannina and said: \u201cJamie, you\u2019re a spy hunter, you say. Well, I\u2019m a spy hunter, too, but I\u2019m evidentially a better spy hunter than you.\u201d The man was O\u2019Keefe, the lawsuit says.
\nMannina was swiftly fired from Booz Allen, where he worked as a contractor, after O\u2019Keefe contacted the press office and presented at least parts of the video of the two dates.
\nThe lawsuit was filed by Mark Zaid, a prominent Washington lawyer who routinely represents government officials and whistleblowers. Zaid himself sued Trump last week after the president revoked his security clearance.
\n\u201cLying or misleading someone on a dating app, which no doubt happens all the time, is not what this lawsuit seeks to address,\u201d Zaid said in a statement to the AP. \u201cThe creation of a fake profile for the specific purposes of targeting individuals for deliberately nefarious and harmful purposes is what crosses the line.\u201d
\nThe lawsuit says the O\u2019Keefe Media Group painted Mannina in a false light by misconstruing his words and his title, including in an article published on its website that said, \u201cBREAKING VIDEO: Top Pentagon Adviser Reveals On Hidden Camera Conversation \u2018with a Couple of Retired Generals to Explore What We Can Do\u2019 to \u2018Protect People from Trump.\u2019\u201c
\nAccording to the lawsuit, the characterization of Mannina as a \u201ctop Pentagon adviser,\u201d when he was actually \u201cone of a countless number of defense contractors,\u201d was intended to support \u201cfabricated claims that Mr. Mannina was essentially attempting to launch an unlawful coup against President Trump.\u201d
\nThe lawsuit does not directly say why Mannina was targeted, but it does note that in 2017, when he was working at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, he published three articles in the Huffington Post and The Hill newspaper that were critical of Trump.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WASHINGTON: A former FBI agent and Pentagon contractor has sued the founder of a conservative nonprofit known for its hidden camera stings over secretly recorded videos showing the contractor criticizing President Donald Trump to a woman he thought he had taken on a date. Jamie Mannina says in his lawsuit that he was misled by …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":81030,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81004"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81004\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":81035,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81004\/revisions\/81035"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/81030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}