
“I ran my mouth,” admits Foval. But he denies breaking any laws.
Scott Foval screwed up and he knows it.
“I made a mistake. I ran my mouth,” says the 45-year-old former political consultant and one-time Madison resident.
The mistake wasn’t minor.
In fact, it played out across the national news and was mentioned during the final debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. It also cost Foval his job and reputation. Last October, days before the presidential election, a series of videos called “Rigging the Election” were released by Project Veritas, a group with a checkered past that uses what it calls “undercover journalists” to “investigate and expose corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud and other misconduct.”
In the spring and summer of 2016, Foval was secretly filmed talking about dirty tricks political Democratic operatives supposedly engage in. At the time, he was employed by political organizations Americans United for Change and Democracy Partners. Foval is seen at the opening of the video series saying, “It doesn’t matter what the friggin’ legal and ethics people say, we need to win this motherfucker.”
That sets the stage for a number of secretly-filmed interactions with Foval and other Democratic consultants that Veritas claims shows illegal activity including voter fraud and inciting violence at Trump rallies.
Throughout the videos, Foval discusses what he calls “conflict engagement,” saying “We have mentally ill people we pay to do shit” and describing “bird-dogging,” which he explains as planting people at events of his political opponents to get the attention of the media or to disrupt candidates. A couple days after the videos were released, Foval was “summarily dismissed from both” jobs, he says.
Despite how it looks and sounds, Foval says the videos were edited so far out of context that they’re simply a lie. “It was all hypothetical,” he says of the on-camera conversations. “I was devil’s advocate to what he was talking about…. They’re giving these hypotheticals that I’m responding to.”
It all began the night of the spring 2016 election, when Foval met a man in a bar who claimed to be a political consultant. The man, who Foval says called himself Christian, was undercover for Veritas.
“He asked me a lot of leading, weird questions about this so-called client that he had and was asking me a lot of detailed hypotheticals,” recalls Foval. “We were just shooting the shit, basically.”
Foval points to part of that first recording as an example of how the editing casts his comments out of context. In the video, it appears that Foval is explaining how the Democratic Party routinely buses in out-of-state residents to illegally vote in Wisconsin. “We’ve been bussing people in to deal with you fuckin’ [Republican] assholes for 50 years, and we’re not going to stop now.”
But Foval explains, “I was referring to bussing people to rallies...because transportation is a major issue when you’re taking people out to [places like] Waukesha.”
“I may have said some things that were controversial and dumb but I never did anything illegal,” he adds.
Foval says he met with the undercover Veritas operative two other times, once at the Milwaukee office of Voces de la Frontera and once at a downtown Madison hotel. In each meeting, Foval says they were just “thinking through these hypotheticals he was giving me [that] were kind of kooky and not making sense.”
“He kept saying he had this client who wanted to do this stuff and I’m [telling him] there were laws against a lot of the things that they were talking about … When I saw what they did with the editing after the fact, I was in shock because every instance where I’m saying ‘but you can’t do that because…’ is taken out,” he says. “It makes me look like I’m coming up with this master plan but it wasn’t even my idea, I’m actually telling him why it doesn’t work.
“I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong,” insists Foval. “They were doing the promoting, not me — I was just responding.”
Russell Verney, executive director of Project Veritas, doesn’t buy it. “The blatant honesty [by Foval and others] as to the dirty tricks and voter fraud that they had participated in,” warrants investigation by legal authorities, he says. He adds that his group “didn’t target Scott Foval … but it was just his attitude toward cheating on elections that caught our attention and we felt that needed to be exposed.”
Project Veritas has itself been in hot water for dirty tricks. In 2013, founder James O’Keefe agreed to pay $100,000 to settle a lawsuit with a former employee of the social welfare agency ACORN who accused O’Keefe of misrepresenting him in a widely-distributed video. In May 2010, O’Keefe pleaded guilty to disguising himself as a telephone repairman to get inside the office of a U.S. senator from Louisiana. He was sentenced to three years probation and fined $1,500.
Verney defends the group’s tactics: “All of the news magazines have done undercover recording in the past. There’s a rich history of it.” He points to the NBC show To Catch a Predator, where producers team up with law enforcement to catch sexual assault perpetrators by posing online as would-be victims.
Seven months after the election, the videos are back in the news after state Attorney General Brad Schimel announced on a Milwaukee radio show that an investigation is ongoing. A Department of Justice spokesperson declined to comment.
Verney says that Veritas has turned over all raw, unedited footage to the DOJ. “[We want] the attorney general to investigate it thoroughly and determine whether or not [Foval and others] crossed the line from dirty tricks to illegal activities and prosecute it appropriately so we have confidence in fair, real elections,” he says.
Foval hasn’t yet found another job and has moved to Arizona be closer to family. Although The Washington Post described him as a “little-known but influential” Democratic political operative, Foval downplays his stature: “I’m not like some influential operative within the party — I don’t think anybody would ever say that.”
He is also skeptical that there’s an investigation. “I’ve never been contacted by Brad Schimel’s office. I’ve never been contacted by any investigator from any agency anywhere, ever,” he says. “If there were investigations going on, I think I would be aware of them [and] in all honesty, I’ve not done anything that can be investigated.”