Conservative activist organization Project Veritas and a former British spy plotted during Donald Trump's presidency to oust then-National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and send women on dates with FBI agents in hopes of recording them making incriminating remarks against Trump, The New York Times reports. The operations, carried out through 2018, were aimed at rooting out purported “enemies” of the former president that operated within the so-called Deep State and blocked his administration’s agenda. A woman involved in the planned sting against McMaster, Senate Judiciary aide Barbara Ledeen, said someone “with access to McMaster’s calendar” roped her into the plot, which would have involved hiring a woman wearing a hidden camera to record McMaster at a restaurant where he had reportedly made disparaging comments about Trump previously. McMaster resigned in 2018, and Veritas and the spy, Richard Seddon, abandoned the operation. James O’Keefe, head of Project Veritas, said in response to the Times, “Because The New York Times is losing to Project Veritas in a court of law, it is trying to smear Project Veritas in the court of public opinion.”