7-15 James O’Keefe

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This is Freedom Fest 2022, live from the forum of Freedom Fest.

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We’ve got wags.

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And I’ve got a guy that I consider a good friend, but I think America probably considers him one of the greatest patriots of last century and this century.

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James O’Keefe, it’s great to have you with us.

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Yes, thanks, Ken.

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James, you founded Project Veritas.

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I don’t think there’s anybody in the country and probably the world who doesn’t know who you are.

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But in case there is that one person, what is Project Veritas, and how did it come about? We do undercover investigative journalism.

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We’ve done some stories.

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You may not know that we’ve done them, but you’ve heard of our work into voter integrity.

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Exposing the mainstream media.

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Going undercover into Twitter, Google, Facebook, exposing political shenanigans.

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Politicians being too faced.

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Democracy partners in 2016, suing The New York Times for defamation and winning the FBI, rating us last fall.

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Journalists for trying to expose a source that came to us about Ashley Biden, the president’s daughter.

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Most recently, stories in South Carolina featuring Crystal Matthews talking about dope money.

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Republican primary candidates saying they have to lie to get elected.

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The list goes on and on.

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CNN, Charlie Chester controlling directors saying that they’re trying to hurt Donald Trump.

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So we kind of expose what people say in private versus public, the difference between the two.

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And investigative reporting is really questioning what we’re told, being skeptical, being adversarial.

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And you’re like, one of the only true investigative reporters out there who really has the nerve to go out there and take on, no matter what the nasty thing is that’s going on out there.

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How do you start it? In other words, what was your first case or your first assignment? I was in college, and I was writing for the Daily Targam, which was the daily newspaper of Rutgers in New Jersey.

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And I researched the difference between how much money professors give to one political party versus another.

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Was 104 to one.

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Democrats to Republicans.

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So I was let go from this newspaper.

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I started my own oldest centurion, first undercover video.

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I tried to ban Lucky Charms because it’s racist against the Irish.

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Let’s just back up.

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How did that come? This was in 2005.

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YouTube did not yet exist.

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Twitter did not yet exist.

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I was a soft junior.

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I was 19 years old, and I went in there with a straight face and said, that the serial offends my Irish heritage.

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I was obviously not being serious.

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I was being sarcastic.

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But they took it seriously and told me they would remove Lucky Charms.

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So it’s sort of a new genre of journalism was born and exposing them for who they are.

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Got it.

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So Lucky Charms is out of rutgers.

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You got that handled.

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So that evil is out of the world.

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What do you do next? Because you’ve been involved in some of the biggest scandals.

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I mean, brought to the surface some of the biggest scandals in the last 15 years.

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Well, I bring up lucky charms because I think it’s indicative of the sort of artistic aspects of what we do.

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We’re not really a political organization.

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Most organizations are.

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Most media companies have become very political where they tell you what to think.

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From lucky charms, I exposed planned parent with a woman named Lila rose.

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This is way back in 2008.

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Let’s talk about that from start to finish, how it went down, because this was really we went in there with a camcorder and an audio device, and I said I was her boyfriend, and she was underage.

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She said she was underage.

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She wasn’t.

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And the planned parent official counseled her how to get an illegal abortion.

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And then we called planned parenthood posing as donors.

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Not just any donor, a donor with racist motives.

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We were pretending to be Margaret sanger sympathizers margaret sanger founded planned parenthood and said that she believed in eugenics.

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So we sort of adopted their language and said some pretty racist things that prompted protests.

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And out of that, a young woman contacted me on facebook.

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I was then 24 years old.

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Her name was Hannah Giles.

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And she said, why don’t you go into this called acorn? I’ll be a prostitute.

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And I said, well, why don’t I be your pimp? Acting as this dynamic duo going in there and doing the sting operation with very little money, just to some equipment that we conjured up.

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And the video showed them telling us how to break the law.

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And congress defunded acorn.

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President Obama signed legislation defunding an organization that he was an attorney for.

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This is in 2009, and from out of that, the rest is history.

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What was the premise of that, staying with acorn? We said that we had underage prostitutes who had trafficked in from El Salvador, and we presented this to these workers in this group called acorn, which received government money.

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They were trying to help us get a housing loan.

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And the tax specialist came out and advised how to conceal the underage prostitutes from the authorities, which is horribly immoral, and unethical behavior might not literally be illegal because we were just pretending to be a hooker.

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And the pimp, we weren’t actually one.

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But this was prompted widespread outrage covered by south park, the daily show.

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So out of this was everyone finally understood what my mission was, and then it became sort of the rest of history.

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So you go into the acorn thing, you get the video footage, and it’s amazing footage.

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I mean, I think most people have seen it.

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If you haven’t, go check it out.

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You get the footage, what do you do with the next? I mean, that’s pretty damning evidence, and there’s no denying what took place in that room.

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I wrote a whole book about this because it’s a hard story to tell in two minutes or less, but I’ll try.

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I wrote a book called Breakthrough.

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I had the footage.

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I didn’t know what to do with it.

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I went to my elected representatives in Congress.

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They actually, funnily enough, did nothing.

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One of them actually threw me out of his office.

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Who were they? Oh, man.

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This was a guy that worked in the office of Darrell Issa.

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It wasn’t Darrell Ice himself.

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Darrell isa done some work on acorn.

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I forgot his name.

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It’s in my book.

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One of the staffers I got thrown out.

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I didn’t know what to do.

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So everyone said, why don’t you talk to this guy named Andrew Breitbart? So all path led me to Andrew Breitbart, who is now deceased.

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But this is 2009.

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I showed up at his house and I played the videos, and as soon as I did, he said, well, this is damning stuff.

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And I showed him more.

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I had more offices.

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So him and I, he came up with a strategy to release them one at a time.

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Release one, they say it’s isolated.

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Release the second or third or fourth.

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We did this.

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The House of Representatives voted to defend The Census Bureau cut ties.

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The IRS cut ties.

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Bank of America cut ties, and the president signed legislation.

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The Senate voted 83 to seven to defund Acorn with a Democratically controlled Senate.

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That’s unthinkable, right? And it’s divided 50 50 Senate that we have currently.

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I think the world has changed since then, but moreover, it’s two kids from the cast of High School Musical, three with a video camera and the grandmother chillico to break the story is just unbelievable.

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And I think it’s indicative of the kind of magic and the citizen journalism culture that embodies Project Veritas.

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Absolutely.

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So from Acorn, what was your next one? And then I want to go into this raid that happened just recently.

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We say next one.

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There’s hundreds of these things that we’ve done.

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The very next one.

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I was arrested in New Orleans for something I did not do.

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Spent three years on federal probation, started launching investigations into NPR, went undercover inside National Public Radio, posed as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, said that I was a Muslim Brotherhood fundamentalist and then wanted to donate money.

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And this man at NPR, vice president fundraising, actually said some horrible things.

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He talked about Jewish people.

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He talked about antisemitic comments.

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He talked about racism inside.

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He said that Jews controlled the newspapers, but not NPR.

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It was what this man said, that he resigned and the CEO of NPR was fired.

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And that was when people were like, okay, this’ll Keep guy, he was not a one hit wonder.

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He’s a threat.

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And out of that we did voter fraud investigations and hundreds of investigations.

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But you’ve been a threat to a lot of these people, and you don’t take any prison.

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You go for it.

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And I know you’d be one of the most credible journalists, I think, that I’ve ever met.

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In my life and I don’t think there’s anybody on the planet like you right now.

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Which leads us to you.

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Start stepping on the toes of some of these people in power.

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They’ll use any resource to try to knock you down.

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Unless that brings us up to this.

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Ashley Biden diary in your apartment.

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I remember the day you got rated not too long ago.

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What was that all about? In other words, the diary itself, what was it? How did you get it? And then what happened with this rate? Another story I was trying to compress in the 30 seconds.

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It takes seven days, as long as you want, but this is the diary of the President’s daughter source gave to us.

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And I was trying to corroborate this because in this diary, the President’s daughter, Ashley’s her name.

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Most people don’t realize that President Biden has a daughter named Ashley in addition to having a son named Hunter.

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The diary contained allegations about her father’s inappropriate things.

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So I was trying to cooperate with diary.

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Is it for real? Is it a forgery? I don’t know.

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I was fairly certain it was real, but not 100% certain.

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I reached out to Biden for comment about this document that we paid for the rights to this.

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A source gave it to us.

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A journalist has a right to publish information that someone else gives to you, even if the information was stolen by somebody else.

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And we don’t know if it was stolen, it appears not to be stolen now.

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So I reached out to Biden for comment.

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When I did that, I say, hey, what do you think about this? I reached out to Ashley Biden for comment.

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It’s my ethical response.

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Response for either one response was, we’re going to send this to the FBI, southern District of New York.

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They literally went to prosecutors when I reached out to them for comment.

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Did they tell you they were going to no, I found that out now because now these things have been coming to light.

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I did not know it at the time.

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I do believe they accidentally CCD me on an email at the time and I saw some part of that, but I didn’t think anything other people peacocking.

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Right.

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It turns out Ashley Biden’s lawyer was also the lawyer for the daughter in law of the federal prosecutor.

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Really? They obtained secret warrants, something called a 27 three or 27 five warrant to get all of my emails.

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They went to Microsoft, my email client for Project Veritas, and obtained 200,000 of my journalistic emails.

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Unbeknownst to me, this is over the daughter’s diary.

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Yes.

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I know this sounds crazy.

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I know that your audience saying your audience is shaking.

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What exactly there’s no answer to this question.

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It’s an unamerican first.

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Yes.

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They rated Roger Stone.

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Yes, they rated most recently, I think one of the guys that worked for Trump in the Attorney General’s office.

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But this is different because it involves an investigative reporter who’s been received information.

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So this is a new kind of vanilla that we’ve never seen before, and there was no allegation of any criminal activity.

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Right.

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I mean, when we say allegation the warrant, on the warrant, initially it said blackmail, or that somehow the perception is that by asking someone for comment on the blackmailing, them, I don’t know.

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Right.

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And then when they came to my apartment, the FBI rated me, they had a search warrant.

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What happens, I recall, was on a weekend, right? It was on a Saturday morning.

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Yeah.

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You have to have probable cause.

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And in America, the law is pretty clear that if you’re going to do this to a journalist, which they’ve never done before, this is a case of first impression.

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But if you are going to do it, it’s pretty clear that the statutes the Attorney General of the United States has said, we got to see what that probable cause is.

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We need to know what the evidence, because society has an interest in protecting the rights of journalists.

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So if you’re going to take that unbelievable step of taking a battering ram to a news organization, which happened, by the way, which happened to me, describe what the only time is that you’re in your place.

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To be clear, it’s never happened before.

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Right.

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They’ve never done this in the New York Times, CNN, and they never would.

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The outcry would be too great.

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They took a battering ram to my door.

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What time? 06:00.

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Am you’re laying in bed.

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I’m laying in bed.

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They knocked on my door.

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They banged on the door.

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This is two days after my colleagues so I basically knew that they were there, FBI was there, me, and I opened the door before they banged it down.

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They threw me against the wall, put me in handcuffs.

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When they put me in handcuffs, I thought I’m under arrest.

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Turns out it was a search warrant.

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They went through my apartment.

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They showed me the warrant.

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The warrant said I was an accessory after the fact, or they were looking into this.

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That was accessory after the fact.

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And I transported stolen material across state lines, which is absurd crime, because all journalists transport stolen documents across.

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When you email things, you’re transporting documents.

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Right.

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It’s so unbelievably absurd.

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It’s so patently absurd that then the ACLU, the Reporters Committee, the New York Times, a lot of groups came out to my defense, right, quite unlike Roger Stone, because this is about the First Amendment.

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And frankly, these are absurd insinuations of crimes.

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This is so unamerican and so unbelievably absurd.

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But they came into your house.

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What do they do and what do they take? And how long did this whole process take? 2 hours.

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They took only my iPhone.

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They took two of my phones.

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They left my iPad, my computer.

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They went to my colleagues and took basically everything.

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They took cameras they took laptops.

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And to your point about probable cause, they have to unseal that.

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I don’t think they want to, because if your audience unfamiliar with criminal procedure, when you get a warrant, you have to have a sworn affidavit, and in that sworn affidavit lists allegations that would lead to a magistrate judge to sign the warranty.

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The executive branch goes to the judicial branch.

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Well, that’s what they did, but we don’t know what’s in the affidavit did.

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Ashley Biden lied to the FBI.

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In order for this to be unsealed, they either have to indict me for these absurd crimes, which I don’t think is going to happen, or be they have to unseal it.

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So that’s what the judge is about to rule on, whether they unseal this affidavit, and two, whether they return my stuff.

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It’s a pretty historic case.

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And either way, whatever the judge decides, it’s going to be unbelievably historic.

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Because if they rule against me, well, that’s a constitutional crisis.

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Right? And if they rule for me, they’re basically doing something that has never been done before.

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Right.

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Let me ask you this.

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I’m not asking you for whether or not the diary was authentic, but what was in it? Was there anything in there you can reveal? I won’t say.

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Okay.

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Because one of my ethical rules is not to air allegations that I’ve been unable to confirm.

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They probably want me to do that.

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They want to make this a political thing.

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Right.

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But at the end of the day, this is no longer about divided family.

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This is about the bigger story.

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Here is the Department of justice pointing guns at journalists and taking their source material? I think that’s a much bigger deal.

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And frankly, one of the mysterious things about this is that, by the way, by rating all of us, they seem to confirm the authenticity of the document hasn’t been and it’s almost like they’ve brought more attention to it, which is something I don’t understand why they would do.

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Right.

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James, it costs a fortune to operate your operation, and I know you’ve got an amazing staff.

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You’ve also got a great legal staff.

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How do people support you? I mean, I’m a supporter.

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I encourage anybody out there that loves freedom.

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And this is all about freedom.

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This whole week is about freedom to support James O’Keefe.

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How do we do that? Well, thank you, Kent, for your support.

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Thank you personally, and I appreciate you.

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I appreciate you.

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There are 100,000 people at least that support us, that donate to us.

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No one tells us what to do, which is a blessing.

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And it’s really given us more a degree of independence.

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It is hard to raise all this money to pay the millions of dollars legal bills.

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It’s a constant struggle.

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But it’s less hard than being a surf for an advertiser or someone telling us what you can and can’t report on the tech companies, I guess, do that to an extent when they censor you.

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But I mean, just journalistically being allowed to go out, expose Pfizer and expose the SEO, right? We’re not a stenographer.

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And people say, well, how do I choose the stories? Well, the answer to that is I don’t.

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The sources come to us, right? So I don’t go into it with a preconceived.

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I’m going to target this person or this subject.

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The information kind of comes to you as you build trust with your sources, which is the bread and butter of a journalist.

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The nonprofit news model has given me a degree of independence and is allowed.

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And thankfully, we have so many people that donate to us every month, and many people donate 510, $100.

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Right.

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Quick question.

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Are there any news outlets out there besides you guys that do anything credible anymore? I really haven’t found it, frankly.

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That’s a good question.

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I think there are some good examples of journalism out there.

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I don’t have any names off of that.

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What I do encourage people to do is read everything as much as you have time for.

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Let’s say you have 2 hours a day to read, read all the papers and try to read between the lines, because I think that’s where you’re going to find the truth.

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You have to be able to be skeptical, and you can only trust what you see with your own eyes and ears now, right? I want to see the primary source material.

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So The New York Times puts out a story about Trump’s tax returns and asks us to trust them because they’re the New York Times.

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They don’t actually show me any documents.

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They don’t show me I don’t trust them.

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Right.

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I have big news companies out there.

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They take tons of money from pharmaceutical companies, from big financial companies, from tech companies.

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They take money from a lot of people as advertisers.

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Can they be objective when it comes to our news department? Is it possible? I don’t necessarily think you have to be objective.

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It doesn’t matter what your political motive is.

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It matters the information you’re presenting.

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Right? I always use this example.

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Upton Sinclair.

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Everyone knows who he is.

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He had a political agenda when he exposed the meat packing in Chicago.

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He had a pro union agenda, workers rights agenda.

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And you know what? That doesn’t matter to me.

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What matters is the information you’re presenting.

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So I want to see the actual information.

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I want to see the document.

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Show me the money.

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Show me that’s why Veritas uses video, because I don’t ask you to trust me by virtue of the decree that I’m to be trusted.

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Right? I ask you to trust your own eyes.

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They ask you to trust them because by virtue of their own decree that they’re credible because they said so.

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But whenever you actually open up the evidence, like, for example, in the discovery process of a lawsuit, they’re always lying and the New York Times defamation lawsuit is a perfect example of that.

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The New York Times said, well, you’re deceptive and you lied here.

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And then I brought him to court and said, Prove it.

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And I said to the judge honestly that we were just offering our opinion when we said that.

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There you go.

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When under oath, they admit the truth, right? Nowadays, you almost have to bring him to court, right? Just so you can get into discovery, that type of thing.

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James, you’re amazing.

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So how do people give? How do people donate to you and support you? Project veritas.com.

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Project Zeritas.com.

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We’re tax deductible, sort of like NPR.

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We’re brought to you by viewers like you.

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Except I don’t get government money.

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You can believe James O’Keefe.

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I don’t get $100 million from the federal government every year, unlike PBS and NPR.

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And we show you the evidence, and that’s what we really need.

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And I think this mission is under attack because people these days feel like it no longer matters to show people the reality.

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But I think it does matter.

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I think it’s so important not to tell people what to believe, but to show people what’s going on.

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Excellent, James.

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Thanks for being here with us.

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Thank you for what you do.

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Thank you.

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You are just absolutely awesome.

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This is Freedom Fest 2022, joined by my buddy Wags.

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We’ve had James O’Keefe.

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We’ve got a lot of other great guests coming up, including some cool stuff up on the main stage with Kennedy in just a few minutes.

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This is Freedom Fest.