The 33-year-old who tried to trick the Washington Post with a fake sexual harassment story has a long history of sting operations backfiring

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Conservative sting operation mastermind James O'Keefe holds a news conference at the National Press Club in 2015.

• James O'Keefe, a conservative provocateur, failed to uncover bias at The Washington Post after one of his undercover journalists pretended to be a sexual harassment victim of Republican Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore.
• O'Keefe is a self-described "muckraker" who tries to dig up dirt to expose mostly left-leaning individuals and organizations.
• His most recent attempt at uncovering bias at The Washington Post is just the latest in a string of failed undercover operations.

A woman who posed as a victim of Roy Moore, the embattled Republican Alabama Senate candidate whose campaign has been roiled by multiple allegations of misconduct, appeared to be involved in a sting operation meant to disgrace The Washington Post, the newspaper reported Monday.

The attempted sting operation failed after Post reporters discovered the woman, who identified herself as Jaime Phillips, was actually working for an organization called Project Veritas, led by the conservative activist James O'Keefe.

O'Keefe is a self-described "muckraker" whose mission is to "investigate and expose corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud, and other misconduct in both public and private institutions in order to achieve a more ethical and transparent society," according to the Project Veritas website.

In the past, he has targeted Planned Parenthood, a Democratic senator, voting rights group ACORN, and CNN by secretly taping conversations and using undercover operatives to bait people into admitting wrongdoing or bias.

His most recent failed attempt at uncovering liberal bias among reporters at The Washington Post is the latest in a string of undercover operations gone wrong.

Here are some highlights of other failed stings: