On August 21, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit threw out a 10-year-old lawsuit against James O'Keefe and Project Veritas, wiping out a $130,000 judgment that had hung over the outfit since 2022. The case started in a Milwaukee bar in 2016, when a Project Veritas reporter posing as a fake political consultant got a Democrat operative talking, and it ended with an unpaid intern's fake resume becoming the linchpin of a federal court's ruling on what makes someone a fiduciary. That is not a sentence I expected to write, but here we are.

The short version: Project Veritas sent an operative named Allison Maass into Robert Creamer's consulting firm, Democracy Partners, under a fake name and a resume padded with bartending and Applebee's experience. She lasted eight days, recorded what she saw on a hidden camera, and Project Veritas turned the footage into “Rigging the Election,” a video suggesting Creamer's operation was staging violence at Trump rallies. Creamer sued for fraud and illegal wiretapping. A jury sided with him in 2022 and awarded $130,000. Last week, the D.C. Circuit wiped the whole thing out.

I read the opinion the way I read a damages report in one of my own expert witness engagements, looking for what the plaintiff actually proved rather than what the video implied. And the court's reasoning holds up.

Start with the money. The jury handed Creamer $120,000 in damages and $10,000 for wiretapping, representing lost contracts with two organizations that dropped him after the video aired. The problem, as the court explained under the Supreme Court's 1982 ruling in NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware, is that most of “Rigging the Election” was built from lawfully recorded conversations with a different operative, Scott Foval, who talked freely in public settings to reporters he believed were real donors. That footage is protected speech. Only the........

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