The woman whose Washington Post Roy Moore sting backfired stayed in the basement of a Democratic operative

The apparent conservative activist The Washington Post busted Monday trying to spread a fake story about an underage affair with Roy Moore, the GOP Senate nominee in Alabama, rented a room in the Washington, D.C., basement of former Democratic National Committee communications director Brad Woodhouse for two weeks over the summer, Woodhouse told the Post Tuesday night. "I was stunned," he said, after recognizing the woman, Jaime Phillips, from the Post's report. "It took a little while to sink in and then it was like, 'Really? Are you kidding me?'"

Woodhouse showed the Post a record of Phillips' two-week Airbnb booking at his apartment, and said she also spent a week in a second Capitol Hill property he owns. Project Veritas founder and figurehead James O'Keefe — who is giving a talk Wednesday night at Southern Methodist University on "Real News: Stopping Bias in American Media" — declined to comment on whether he had asked Phillips to rent a room from Woodhouse, who led an organization targeted by O'Keefe last fall. But Woodhouse has his suspicions.

"That he had one of his operatives stay in properties of mine less than a year after he targeted me in one of his discredited scams seems hardly coincidental," Woodhouse said. Still, he did not recall Phillips asking any particularly intrusive questions. So maybe she just needed a place to stay while she prepared to "combat the lies and deceit of the liberal MSM," as she'd written in a GoFundMe drive a few months earlier.

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