Former national security adviser H.R. McMaster was the target of a planned sting operation by conservative activists working to expose people they viewed as being part of the “deep state” inside the government trying to undermine the Trump agenda, according to a new report.
The scheme, revealed to the New York Times in documents and interviews, sought to catch the retired Army lieutenant general in the act of making disparaging remarks about former President Donald Trump.
The plan involved hiring a woman to speak with and secretly record McMaster at Tosca, an upscale restaurant in Washington, D.C., that he frequented, in an effort to get him to make comments that could be used to get the national security adviser to resign or get fired. An email showed $10,000 was offered to a woman named Tarah Price, a onetime Project Veritas operative, “to go undercover and set up some big-name political figure in Washington,” which was said to be McMaster, although the missive was dated after he left the Trump administration.
041617 chaitin mcmaster picThe report noted the operation began after a 2017 BuzzFeed report in which sources said McMaster said that Trump had the intelligence of a “kindergartner” during a private dinner with Safra Catz, the chief executive of Oracle, and two of her aides. Sources told the New York Times that Catz called White House counsel Don McGahn to complain about McMaster’s behavior, but she was not part of the plot that followed.
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The operation ended in 2018 after McMaster resigned as national security adviser in March at a time of rising tension between him and Trump. He was replaced by John Bolton, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, in the role.
Barbara Ledeen, a former staffer to Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, told the outlet that “someone she trusted” contacted her to help with the plot but did not get involved. Ledeen said she did not remember the identity of the person, who she noted had McMaster’s calendar and “conveyed to me that he goes to Tosca all the time,” and referred the individual to a man she believed to be part of Project Veritas. Ledeen is part of Groundswell, a conservative activist network which Axios reported last year had waged a campaign to get McMaster removed as national security adviser.
Project Veritas, an investigative reporting project that has a mixed record on its sting operations over the years, including allegations of misleading editing, is described in the report as being involved in a larger operation meant to expose FBI officials as opposing Trump. Project Veritas operatives were said to be part of the McMaster plan, but the report stressed it was unclear whether the group was directing it. Richard Seddon, a British former undercover spy who was recruited in 2016 by Blackwater founder Erik Prince to train Project Veritas operatives in the art of infiltration, was identified as the person who made the offer of thousands of dollars to Price to take part in the sting operation against McMaster.
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Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe accused the New York Times of publishing “a smear piece,” while Price, Seddon, and Prince did not respond to request for comment on the article. McMaster declined to comment.
However, in the time since he resigned, McMaster has spoken out publicly about how the “deep state narrative” was “very damaging” to Trump’s administration. He lamented the “tendency” within the administration to be deeply skeptical of government broadly, attributing this in part to “who the president’s political base is” during a discussion with Perry World House on the geopolitics of the coronavirus pandemic in April 2020.
