we gotta a lady james okeefe right here
The Liberal Activist Who Targets Republicans With a MAGA Masquerade
https://www.yahoo.com/news/liberal-activist-targets-republicans-maga-121637026.html
Mike Pence told her, “I love your heart.”
Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio confided in her that Donald Trump would soon announce he was running again for president in 2024.
Glenn Youngkin, the Republican nominee for governor of Virginia, revealed to her that he could not publicly press his anti-abortion agenda for fear of losing independent voters.
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All of them made these comments to Lauren Windsor, a liberal activist who has turned a hidden camera, a Tennessee drawl and a knack for disarming her targets with words of sympathetic conservatism into a loaded political weapon.
Posing as a true believer — in Trump or a stolen 2020 election — Windsor approaches Republican leaders at party gatherings and tries to coax them into revealing things that they might wish to keep in the GOP family.
Since late last year, as she has traveled widely around the country, several of her recordings have generated headlines.
Her encounter in December 2020 with Tommy Tuberville, then a senator-elect from Alabama, elicited the first real evidence that some Republicans in the Senate would reject the Electoral College votes certifying Joe Biden’s victory, a move based on groundless claims of fraud. “We’re going to have to do it in the Senate,” Tuberville told Windsor after a speech, as an aide hustled him away.
“More Republicans should follow his lead,” Trump tweeted after the recording was uploaded. Eight GOP senators, including Tuberville, ended up voting on Jan. 6 to overturn the election results, even after rioters stormed the Capitol that day.
Windsor, 40, calls herself an “advocacy journalist,” though her methods fall beyond the pale of mainstream journalism, where reporters generally shy away from assuming false identities and secretly recording conversations.
She says her stings are justified by Republicans’ efforts to spread disinformation about the election and to weaken the nation’s democratic underpinnings through restrictive new voting laws and measures taking greater control over how elections are run.
“Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures,” she said. Assuming a false identity, she argued, can produce a truer record of a politician’s views. “Acting like you’re one of them — you’re going to elicit different answers than if you have a recorder in somebody’s face and they know you’re a journalist.”