MIAMI — Conservative activist James O'Keefe has released secretly recorded, selectively edited video footage that includes a Democratic activist bragging about deploying troublemakers at rallies held by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
After O'Keefe released the video this week, two Democratic operatives stopped working on the presidential race, and both the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton's campaign denounced the tactics described in the footage. Both said the activities described never took place.
O'Keefe's group, Project Veritas, promised to release additional videos ahead of the Nov. 8 election.
The central character in the recordings is Scott Foval, a Wisconsin-based liberal operative. He is portrayed in the footage as boasting about his connections to the party and the Clinton campaign, and claiming to have arranged for people to incite violence at Trump rallies. Sometimes those people are union workers, he said, and sometimes they're mentally ill and homeless people.
"I mean, honestly it's not hard to get some of these [expletive] to pop off," Foval is shown on the video as saying.
At one point, Foval appears to say the hired agitators should have their medical and legal bills covered. As with much of the video's content, it's impossible to say with certainty what Foval meant, because the video is edited in a way so that it's not clear what led to the comment.
Foval told The Associated Press in an email that O'Keefe's associates had set him up.
"This scheme to cast legitimate organizing activities as a sinister plot is nothing but a ruse," he said. "Despite our attempts to redirect the conversation and actions towards positive, results-oriented, legal and ethical political organizing, O'Keefe's crew of impostors continued to walk down a path of deception and manipulation."