Pod Insights Modern Wisdom The State Of Modern Journalism - James O'Keefe About this episode James O'Keefe is an investigative journalist and the Founder of Project Veritas.
Faith in mainstream media is at an all-time low. At a time when we need better quality information, pretty much everything seems like it's been made with spin in mind. Creating an alternative type of journalism is filled with legal, ethical, organisational and personal dilemmas and today James explains some of the biggest ones he faces.
Expect to learn what it feels like to have Anthony Fauci call you out by name during a hearing, why James O’Keefe was raided by the FBI at 6am, James O’Keefe’s response to criticisms about undercover reporting, how Project Veritas deals with the ethics of releasing undercover documents, whether James O’Keefe sees himself as impartial, how many times he's been sued and much more...
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00:00 Intro
00:44 Why the FBI Stole James’ Phone
12:53 James’ Biggest Mistake
20:59 Are People in Power Scared of Scandals?
27:54 Will Mainstream Media Ever Recover Public Trust?
33:51 How to Ensure Whistleblowers are Legitimate
40:09 Is James Concerned for his Safety?
49:55 Where to Find James
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 In communist countries, 98% of people did not want the communist outcome, but were too afraid to push back against the 2% of the crazy. They're afraid to lose something. And I see it in my own life with people that I know, that they know it's all a lie, but they're not willing to push back against it.
0:19 Speaker 00 James O'Keefe, welcome to the show. Great to be with you. Rogan called you the boogeyman. Are you the boogeyman?
0:28 Speaker 00 Um, yes, in some respects. As journalism is printing what somebody does not want printed, not being the representative spokesperson ombudsman for those in power. If you're challenging, then I guess I'm a boogeyman. Depends upon who you're talking to. The FBI stole your phone as well. Have you got that back yet? No, I have not. They took two phones in a raid against me in November, which is highly unusual because they didn't take my iPad or my laptop. But they did have a search warrant, um, signed by a magistrate judge in the Southern District of New York, which is federal court. And the federal judge ordered the FBI to stop going through my phones. And now it's in this sort of litigation, this sort of battle in court, in federal court.
1:11 Speaker 00 Um, and a special master was assigned. People don't know what that means. Usually it's a special, independent, uh, legal official to oversee what the FBI is doing. And the federal judge cited journalistic privilege, which was a big win for Project Veritas. But I haven't been charged with a crime. I mean, we could spend an hour just on this matter, but, uh, it was absolutely unconstitutional, illegal for them to do this to an American journalist. And we're going to fight it. We're going to fight it all the way. What was the story there?
1:43 Speaker 00 Well, a source had given or transmitted me a document. Ashley Biden is the daughter of President Joe Biden. Her diary. And, uh, I looked into it. There were some things in this diary. There were some, some, some things she wrote, including that she had taken showers inappropriately with her father. I didn't know what that meant. I did not know if it happened. And I didn't know with 100% certainty that the diary belonged to Ashley Biden. I was almost certain, but not totally certain. So I didn't, I didn't run the story. I, I reached out to Joe Biden for comment.
2:19 Speaker 00 I tried looking into it and I made the decision, which was very controversial internally at Project Veritas, to not run this diary, not publish the diary. And then a year later, the Fed showed up at my door with a battering ram, a search warrant, put me in handcuffs, raided my apartment and took my devices. And the Attorney General of the United States, Merrick Garland, expressly forbids this execution of these search warrants against journalists. Journalists in the United States are protected by Supreme Court law. Nikki Divopper from 2001, you can publish a document that is stolen so long as the journalist did not participate in the theft of that document. Think of it using common sense. If you stumble across a document, what is your,
3:00 Speaker 00 you can't be liable for that. But of course, we live in a clown world where two plus two equals five, to quote your George Orwell, the late and great George Orwell from 1984. Different laws apply to different people. The US attorneys in New York argued that I'm not a journalist before the judge. Their logic was, and I'm not making this up, I'm paraphrasing the prosecutors, their argument was James O'Keefe does not get permission from the people he reports on, Your Honor, and that's why he's not a journalist. Which is an argument so preposterous and so absurd, it defies reason, which is why I wrote this book called American Muckraker.
3:37 Chris Williamson? What is the line between Ashley Biden's diary and the raid? How do you know that it's to do with that particular piece of information?
3:45 Speaker 00 Well, because it said as such in the, in the search warrant, I, when I, after I was in, they put me in handcuffs. At first I thought I was under arrest. And then some 15 minutes later, they showed me a document that listed crimes, including accessory after the fact and misprison of a felony. For those of you who don't know what that means, misprison of a felony is a very seldom prosecuted crime in the United States. It's essentially a bystander law. You see someone else committing a crime and you did nothing. Accessory after the fact includes transporting stolen documents across state lines. Again,
4:21 Speaker 00 This is such an unbelievably preposterous crime. It would imply that all journalists in every newsroom should be incarcerated for emailing documents given to them improperly. In fact, the New York Times published my attorney-client privileged documents. Why aren't they raided by the FBI for transporting improperly obtained documents? But this is admittedly by the prosecutors in court regarding the Ashley Biden diary.
4:51 Chris Williamson? You already had decided that you weren't going to publish. There was pressure internally within your camp to maybe try and get you to do that, and you decided that you weren't. So I'm trying to work out what this raid achieved. Do you think it was perhaps an excuse to be able to get access to your phone so that they could go through other stuff to try and see what else you're doing? And this was just fortunate timing?
5:13 Speaker 00 Well, I don't like to speculate. That's one of my rules in my ethics chapter. I don't like to do that. I can't tell you who or what or why. It was so... I will be a little vulnerable by saying I was pretty... I had been incarcerated 10 years ago in another story, another book I'd written in New Orleans. I was a journalist in a federal building asking questions, and they shackled me and charged me with a crime. So I had a bit of PTSD after this, I guess you could say. I was a little traumatized by the incident because it was so egregious. And I'm very fortunate, okay? I have a good team. I've got good lawyers. I've survived a lot of things in my life. In fact, the first chapter of this book is called "Suffering."
5:56 Speaker 00 So I don't mean to sound like I'm whining or I'm complaining. However, when they go after the First Amendment, what, you know, to quote Martin Luther King, "A threat to justice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." When they attack the First Amendment like this, it may be one of the most egregious things the government can do. And this is a Rubicon they'd never crossed before. You have to go back to, say, the Pentagon Papers for journalism to be challenged like this. Hell, I'm not sure the New York Times would publish the Pentagon Papers in this paradigm that we find ourselves in. But it was definitely for me a wake up call. It was like, wow, they're gonna cross this bridge now? They're gonna, they're gonna do this? And, and I don't know what they're,
6:39 Speaker 00 I guess they thought, I don't know what they thought. I was gonna be intimidated. I was intimidated. I would be a sociopath not to be intimidated. Whenever they put you through a federal process with secret grand juries and FBI raids, it is hell. It is, it is a kind of Dante's Inferno. And I guess I, I, what I, I made the decision in lieu of this raid against my colleagues to make a statement. I did make a public statement. A lot of people thought that was unwise for someone who is under federal scrutiny, but I know the truth shall set me free. And I clarified what the facts were and exactly what the facts were.
7:20 Speaker 00 I made a public facing statement and I continue to do our journalism. I refuse, we refuse to be intimidated, silenced, threatened. It's un-American is what, and, and, and the ACLU and the reporters committee came to our defense, which shows me that there's still a Venn diagram in this country of left and right, and there still is an overlap. Even they, who hate me, thought that this was a bridge too far for them to cross.
7:45 Chris Williamson? People do know, these institutions and the press organizations and the FBI and whoever it is that sometimes comes after you, they do know that every time they do that, they just put more eyes on you.
7:56 Speaker 00 I don't know that they do know that. I, I,
8:00 Chris Williamson? It's like the biggest Streisand effect in, ever.
8:03 Speaker 00 That's presupposing that someone in my position can, is willing to continue. And I, I write, I wrote a chapter in this book called Suffering. And it's painful, man. I mean, David Deliden, a colleague of mine, who did the Planned Parenthood videos, he was raided by Kamala Harris's, she was now the vice president, but she was then the attorney general of California. They had a SWAT team, took his hard drives. Andy Ngo, colleague, friend of mine, thrown, cemented him at the Portland rallies. And I was in shackles in New Orleans. I'm talking federal, federal, not state. They put you in leg chains and they put you in a leather waistbelt and an orange jumpsuit.
8:45 Speaker 00 And in that moment in space and time, I actually thought my life was over. It's very hard to bounce back from these sorts of things. You're in federal prison. Everyone that you know, this is 11 years ago, everyone thinks you're done for. You're over, it's game over. Everyone's calling you a criminal, a felon. You have to be a little bit of a masochist. You really have to like pain. And, but, and I said this to Michaela when I met her too. It's like, when you're passionate, when you believe so much in something and you have a vision for seeing it through, when you have a vision for showing people things,
9:28 Speaker 00 that's the most important value to you. And all these other things are sort of like distractions, trying to get you off your game. Not easy though, certainly not easy. And you certainly have to be built a certain way to withstand it. How many times have you been sued now? Dozens. We've never lost. Veritas has never lost a lawsuit. That's something that's not on our Wikipedia page, by the way, you can go see. In fact, I'm most proud of the last year. We sued the New York Times for defamation. And we won a historic victory in that case. The judge ruling in New York State of all places, not a friendly jurisdiction, that it was the New York Times that acted with disinformation and deception towards me.
10:13 Speaker 00 People say, well, O'Keefe, how could you be suing them for defamation? Aren't you pro First Amendment? Well, the First Amendment doesn't protect defamation. You can't intentionally lie about a public figure. The New York Times versus Sullivan case established that in 1964. So the New York Times called our videos deceptive. They weren't. And the New York Times admitted in court documents, they got the facts wrong in an article about me. They have yet to correct the article, thus, actual malice. So oftentimes, they accuse me of that which they're guilty of. They'll say, I selectively edit and I deceptively edit. Well, that's what they do. They'll say, I don't ask for comment. Well, the New York Times admitted they didn't ask anyone for comment in their piece about me.
10:54 Speaker 00 And we live in this sort of weird dystopian land where the media, everything that they're guilty of, they throw those accusations against me. And when you go to court, of course, those arguments sort of melt away. When you're in cross-examination and depositions, that rhetoric no longer exists. You are forced to confront the reality. And these cases get dismissed at jury verdict or in summary judgment.
11:18 Chris Williamson? Yeah, you love a deposition.
11:20 Speaker 00 I love depositions.
11:22 Chris Williamson? That's your pastime. Like, that's how you spend a Sunday afternoon. Nice deposition, cup of tea.
11:28 Speaker 00 Love it, love it. I mean, you're not exaggerating. I mean, I actually do drink tea in the deposition. And people say, well, why would you like a deposition? Well, the reason is this, and this is a chapter called secrecy in this book. It took me 10 years to figure this out when I'm about to tell you. And it's so, it's so self-evident. I don't know why it took me this long. Secrets. I realized in the last probably three years, two or three years ago, I can't keep secrets. The only thing I can keep secret is the names of our donors and the names of our whistleblowers. Everything else is public. And they, that meaning all of the people suing me, keep so many secrets.
12:12 Speaker 00 So in a deposition, I love it because I'm like, please do see my emails. You'll see a fairly ethical organization trying to do the right thing. Are we perfect? No, everyone makes mistakes. I think I've made a few mistakes in a decade, maybe two or three. But they make mistakes all the time and they try to conceal that. So when I enter discovery in litigation, we're gonna win because in a deposition, you film the other party and you film me and please do film me. I'd like to engage you in a conversation. They don't want to have a conversation. They don't want to be asked questions, which is why they stopped suing me because they quickly realized we're gonna enter discovery and they're gonna lose.
12:53 Chris Williamson? What are the biggest mistakes that you've made? Or what was the biggest mistake that you've made over the last 10 years?
12:59 Speaker 00 Well, there was one, there was in 11 years ago, you have to go back to 10 years. 11 years ago, in an NPR investigation, there was a moment, people will continually bring this up, I had covertly filmed the vice president of fundraising for National Public Radio in a restaurant. And he was saying something to the effect of, "White people are racist and gun-toting, racist, racist people." And there was an editorial edit in that moment where he was quoting somebody else, and then halfway through the sentence, he starts to characterize himself. So people say, "Well, you deceptively edited this man." I defended the edit, but admittedly, I wish that, I wish that I had, that edit was fuller.
13:43 Speaker 00 It was a 10-minute recording. I continue to defend that, that people will bring this up as evidence that I'm deceptive editing. There was a case in 2012, when I reported on some documents showing a voter was a non-citizen. It turns out, he was indeed a citizen. I was referring to court documents that were themselves erroneous. And that's a little, all about, "Oh, the pimp costume." In 2012, people say, "Well, you didn't wear the pimp costume into Acorn." Now Hannah was dressed like a hooker. These are the pimp and hooker videos. But I, but I said, "Well, I established myself as a pimp. I said I had hookers, and I was wearing a satin tie with a camera in it." So people will use this as evidence, "I'm a complete liar and a total fraud, and you
14:27 Speaker 00 can't trust anything I say, because in 2009, I did not wear the Huggy Bear costume into the offices." That's all that I can remember, these three things. And Eric Weinstein and Joe Rogan continuously said, "Everything that O'Keefe does is a lie." But, but can you, can you tell me why? Because we won in court, you know, every single case. They say I edit, we take them to court, and the judge says, "Nothing was edited improperly." In one case in North Carolina, in the Shirley Teeter case, it went to jury verdict, and the federal judge said, looked at the plaintiffs and said, "If you sued Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes for what you are suing Project Veritas for, everyone in this courtroom would laugh."
15:13 Speaker 00 So oftentimes their arguments are not really based in reality or reason. It's based in ad hominem and kind of an emotional reaction.
15:20 Chris Williamson? I don't know legalities about recording people without their consent. I don't know how the law works in America.
15:25 Speaker 00 In the United States, in 38 states, it's perfectly legal. So, so long as one party is consenting. What does that mean? It means that you know that I'm speaking to you. You are with the person that is recording you. And if you think about it, that makes sense. It's common law in America. If you are with a stranger and that stranger records you without you knowing that they're recording your conversation, well, we would believe that the recording device is an extension of the pencil and paper. In fact, in courts, courts have made the argument that society would not consider reasonable an expectation of privacy, which would render a less accurate version of the events in question.
16:08 Speaker 00 You have more of a right there. Upton Sinclair, who authored The Jungle, ran back to his apartment and wrote down what he saw, but a written rendition of facts is oftentimes not as accurate as a recording of those facts. So as long as one party is consenting, in other words, if you and I are at a bar and I'm talking to you and I'm recording you and you don't know that I'm recording you, it's legal. Now, there's 12 states where it's illegal, like, for example, California, Maryland, Pennsylvania, unless someone nearby can overhear us. We believe-
16:43 Chris Williamson? No way. If someone nearby is able to overhear you, then recording is permitted.
16:50 Speaker 00 In California, we often do our journalism in coffee shops. And in some states like Massachusetts, the law is so draconian, Oregon, so you can't even do that. We have challenged the constitutionality of those laws. Again, we believe recording someone that you're with is a constitutional right. And again, it's self-evident. You can write down what they say. No one's going to sue you for doing that. So we've been very successful in federal court in Massachusetts. We overturned the law in Massachusetts. Project Veritas did. Again, another thing that you did not know, that's been edited out of our Wikipedia page, we even overturned the law on the grounds it's unconstitutional.
17:31 Chris Williamson? Do you think, do you struggle with it ethically? Beyond the fact that there is a legal precedent for you to be able to record people? If there are people around to hear, or if one party is the one that understands? Do you feel like capturing somebody's image, their intonation, the way that they're talking about things? When their guard is down, do you ever struggle with that ethically?
17:53 Speaker 00 Yes, I mean, this, this book, we, we struggle more with the ethics of what we do than anybody. Of course, the rap, the rub on us is that we're some unethical scumbags who just go around violating people's privacy. But the beauty and bane of ethics is that it's inherently situational to quote Jessica Midford, who authored a book called the, you know, authored a book on muckraking. And, you know, there's always, journalism is always going to harm people. Information harms people, you know, and the, the first amendment is the first amendment to the Bill of Rights in the Constitution. Because all other rights follow from the first amendment. So in a, in a society that places a primary value on information that's unauthorized.
18:35 Speaker 00 In other words, I'm publishing information really powerful people don't want published. You're going to harm people. Good journalism harms people. But that's the, that's the, really the, what makes us American, I think, the, the values codified in the Bill of Rights. And in terms of deception, a, a hidden camera is not a form of deception. It's not a form of eavesdropping because the person knows they're being interviewed. And it's not a form of entrapment. You have to go into this realm of undercover work to get to this whole idea of deception. And there's a whole chapter in this book called deception. I present the paradox of relative deception, which means you have two choices.
19:17 Speaker 00 You can deceive the audience, or you can deceive your subject. And you're going to do one of these two things. And I would prefer to deceive my subject such that I can tell the truth to my audience.
19:27 Chris Williamson? That only presumes, sorry, James, that only presumes that the subject that you are speaking to would speak untruths if they knew that they were being recorded. There is a situation in which you could speak to somebody right now. Me and you are having a conversation. I'm not trying to deceive anybody, neither are you. So there is a possibility that you can do the recording without deception happening to either party.
19:46 Speaker 00 This is correct, and this is what I talked about with Eric Weinstein, but that presupposes that the person is going to be more honest on the record. And I think it's a pretty fair assumption that we are talking about Pfizer Pharmaceutical, and the Department of Justice, and the Pentagon, that these people are like, "Yes, I'm a journalist. Please tell me about all the fraud you're committing." I think it's a pretty safe assumption that people in the Pentagon are not going to be honest to a self-identified report of the New York Times. And in this chapter called "Deception," I talk about this. I say, you know, that the leak leaks, right? Someone in the New York Times gets leaked documents. Well, oftentimes, the leaks, usually it's not in the form of documents, actually.
20:30 Speaker 00 It's in the form of an authorized statement from a two-star general. It's really a form of deception, because the person in power is usually manipulating the journalist. And usually, those leaks are authorized leaks. The information is given to the journalist consensually. So we want to do these things non-consensually. We want to do these things without the permission from those in power, which does involve deception towards the source, not the audience.
20:59 Chris Williamson? Speaking of leaks, how much of the recent aggression from the corporate press and social media companies do you think is downstream from WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden? Is everyone in power terrified of another huge scandal like that?
21:13 Speaker 00 I think that people, yes. I think that people in power are more terrified of us than we are of them. And I think that's a recent phenomenon. But I think with Ed Snowden, what strikes me about that case, not Ed Snowden, Julian Assange, is the indictment in Virginia, which I read. And what struck me about that indictment was the statement, I think in the indictment it said, Julian Assange had prodded, was it Bradley Manning? And said, "Curious eyes don't run dry." So this whole idea that Assange was involved in the hacking, he was involved. Now, I don't know whether he was. If he did indeed hack the databases, well, that's a felony. You can't do that.
21:56 Speaker 00 But if he merely prodded his source to give him more information, well, that's as American as apple pie. And journalists do that all the time. But I think that they're afraid, yes, and Ed Snowden really kicked off that. Revolution and Julian Assange kicked off that revolution, but now there's a whole army of whistleblowers inside the government that are trying to follow their conscience and try to release information. We just had a story 10 days ago inside the Department of Defense. A Marine Corps DARPA fellow that authored this memorandum that called Anthony Fauci a liar. This was a Defense Department document that was buried on a top-secret shared
22:35 Speaker 00 drive, much similar to the Assange situation. And this document was given to Project Veritas and authenticated by Dr. Anthony Fauci. There are a lot more people inside the government that want to come forward. They're just afraid to be prosecuted the way that Manning was.
22:52 Chris Williamson? Was it a surprise to be addressed by Fauci by name?
22:57 Speaker 00 There were cheers in the Project Veritas newsroom, newsroom being an SUV that we were all inside of when we were driving around that day on an undisclosed location. I think that Fauci, again, I think that Fauci fears us more than we fear him. And the Marine Corps Major was not the source of those documents, the guy who authored the guy at DARPA inside the Defense Department. But to my shock, we reached out to Joe Murphy, the Marine Corps Major, and he told us, I'm paraphrasing him here, that there's a lot of good people inside the government trying to do the right thing, trying to reform it from within. I think the Marine Corps in particular, the military, take an oath. You're not really going to
23:42 Speaker 00 find military guys, Marines, blow the whistle against their beloved corps. And I think there's really kind of, it seems to me that they're stuck in this dichotomy where they're trying to reform it from within and it's hard to do that. But, you know, this guy told us that there's other people out there that have information and they need to release it. And I think they will.
24:06 Chris Williamson? One of the criticisms that sometimes gets put forward is that the people who are leaking documents, or perhaps that are being caught on film, they're not specialists. And even if they have some specialities, they're maybe not the ones that are at the pinnacle of whatever triangle or hierarchy it is. This Marine Corps guy, I'm not sure if he's a specialist in bioengineered weapons, in vaccines, in mandates, in public policy. And the same thing for the guy from Pfizer. I'm not sure how high up the dude that you caught on tape saying that natural immunity is better than vaccine, the protection that you get from vaccines. Is there a, is
24:49 Chris Williamson? there a temptation to overblow the impact of a particular individual who you can say Pfizer worker or Marine Corps general, you must have to think, well, look, how much does this person actually know? Because it'd be very easy to overblow their credentials and to make it seem like a bigger deal than it is. How do you, how do you find that balance?
25:11 Speaker 00 Well, ultimately, accuracy is journalism's primary objective, and that's what makes journalism different than other forms of medium like propaganda or Hollywood films. Accuracy is the most important thing. So the question is, is it true? So let me give you a pattern to run anathema to what you just said. If the cleaning lady unearths the document in the Pentagon, what matters is if the document is true. If, if, if a squirrel with its mouth takes the document and brings it to me, it doesn't matter. What matters is whether it's true. And I will point you, you brought up Pfizer. Melissa was a whistleblower. She was a low level person in
25:52 Speaker 00 Kansas or someplace like that. She had a, had a relatively menial job, I would say. But she got access to the vice of the senior director's emails. She got that because she was an employee at the firm and she was able to get the documents. And the documents were indeed true. The senior
26:09 Chris Williamson? What do you mean when you say true?
26:12 Speaker 00 The emails authored by Vanessa Gelman, who is a senior director at Pfizer, said, I'm paraphrasing, guys, I don't have them in front of me, that we used fetal cells in the development of the vaccine and we don't want the consumer to know that. So the statement by the senior director, quote, "We don't want the people to know that, the consumer to know that." That's a true state, that's, she did indeed make that statement. And it is newsworthy. And it was brought to us by a low-level person who had access to high-level information. The Marine Corps major who wrote the documents, fair enough. Some people have questioned his credibility. Dr. Fauci questioned his credibility. But the Department of Defense document clearly stipulates that Eco Health Alliance approached,
26:57 Speaker 00 this firm Eco Health Alliance approached DARPA with gain-of-function research, and it was rejected. The question is, is that true? That's all that matters. Whoever made the allegation, now, I'm calling on Anthony Fauci to release information to the contrary. Because this Marine Corps major also stated in a Department of Defense document that Anthony Fauci was approached by Eco Health Alliance under NIAID and proceeded. So journalism's objective is to get, is to, is to try to use however many sources you need to use to corroborate the information. And by the way, let me just add that the paragon of investigative journalism these days at the New York Times is they don't show you any documents. The Trump tax return story, not one document, not one on-the-record source. They just ask us to trust them
27:43 Speaker 00 by virtue of the fact they think they can be trusted by the decree they are indeed credible. Well, that's a self-anointed racket. I don't ask you to trust me. I ask you to trust the evidence of your own eyes and ears.
27:54 Chris Williamson? I don't think that very many people do trust those mainstream media organizations anymore. I've never seen people who, the UK isn't massively conspiratorial, right? The US leads the charge when it comes to that. And the people in the UK are not. Yet, I see so much skepticism around what we see in the media on a day-to-day basis from people that are British. For that to have pushed people that are from this country to that degree, and then when I see the stuff coming across from America, it seems to me like mainstream media has never been in as bad of a situation as this. Even if you were to look at Vietnam, you know, the situation around Vietnam, "bring our boys home" and people are chatting, I know that that's more against the government,
28:38 Chris Williamson? but still, it's a situation where, I don't know, is this, are they redeemable? Are mainstream media ever redeemable from this situation?
28:46 Speaker 00 I think you bring up a very astute point, which I haven't heard articulated, which is, I think you're right. I think, I don't, I'm not a pollster, but just using my intuition, I think the majority of people don't trust the media. Actually, I think some polls have indicated that they have a lower approval than Congress. But, but what I write about in this book is it's about fear. What do I mean by this? This is, this is, this is the most important point of the whole book. In communist countries, 98% of people did not want the communist outcome, but were too afraid to push back against the 2% of the crazy. For fear, I don't know, fear they're gonna lose their, you know, whatever they have. They're afraid to lose something.
29:28 Speaker 00 And I see it in my own life with people that I know, that they know it's all a lie, but they're not willing to push back against it. Let me give you a less abstract example. People that complain about the censorship and complain about the lies, many of these people are unwilling to lose your Twitter accounts. You know who you are. You'll hesitate to speak the truth unspoken for fear that Jack Dorsey will ban you, or Instagram will take away your account. And we wouldn't want our Instagram taken away, would we? We wouldn't want our Twitter account taken away, would we? That's a very slippery slope you're trying to climb. And I quote this guy, Solzhenitsyn, in this book so many times. People say, "What does Solzhenitsyn have to do with it?" Well, Solzhenitsyn says, "When you start to survive at any price, when you start to
30:12 Speaker 00 sacrifice your principles and your integrity..." To maintain what is yours. There's 120,000 people working for the Department of Justice. I don't think they're all bad people. If you polled them secretly, I think the majority of them thought it was horrible what happened to me. But how many of those people have the stones to blow the whistle on the Department of Justice? Can you find me one FBI agent who is willing to speak up publicly? Of course not. That person might be prosecuted. That person might go to jail, might be incarcerated. And if nothing else, they might lose their pension. And we wouldn't want to lose our pension, would we? So I think you, I think it's, you're right that people don't trust CNN and don't like
30:56 Speaker 00 the censorship. But I think there's a fear and a hesitation to do the right thing for fear of being branded with that scarlet letter, for fear of being defamed and disliked by all the people who have the power to brand you.
31:11 Chris Williamson? Well, the problem is you kind of have a tragedy of the commons thing going on. One person's sacrifice, you know, one person goes to jail in order to tell everybody else about the lies, but nobody else has to go to jail. But everybody else gets to benefit from the expose about whatever it is. So there's always this asymmetry of benefit and cost. One person or a small number of people are always going to bear all of the cost or the vast majority of the cost. And then everybody else gets to benefit from the release of information. So, you know, from a personal situation, I see why people would be scared by this.
31:41 Speaker 00 I think though people, what's changed since 2013, when Ed Snowden did that, and Ed Snowden is the perfect personification of what you speak of, we would not know about the Fourth Amendment violations, is that what's changed, and I've seen it in my own life, and I wrote a chapter called Insiders, is that there, people place more in the variable of the equation. They place so much more emphasis on politics these days than they did five years ago because it's affecting, it's affecting everyone's children with the vaccine, for example. It's affecting where people want to live. That more people place more value on following their conscience than ever before in American history. And more people are placing more, they'll say, I'll give it all up for the public's right to know.
32:23 Speaker 00 We've seen this in my life with, for example, Eric Cochrane, who blew the whistle on Pinterest two years ago. He was the first real whistleblower I've worked with. He was making a ton of money, working for a $15 billion company. And he released documents showing that Pinterest was censoring Bible verses. Now, you would have thought he was a crackpot. You would have thought I was a conspiracy theorist. He had the code. You couldn't type in a Christian Bible verse on Pinterest. It would change it to verses, like a boxing match, not verse, not the Bible verses. And, and, and when he did it, he inspired Kerry Porch of CNN. And what happens is a sort of courage, contagious.
33:04 Chris Williamson? Domino effect.
33:05 Speaker 00 Contagious epidemic, domino effect. And, and, and I think you need to keep that. Veritas intends to release a story on Wednesday of this week, featuring someone in the medical field, showing, we'll break a little news on your program here, and I won't say specifically what, but children and the vaccine. And this story is going to outrage pros, pro-vaccine people as much as it will outrage anti-vax people. And this woman that came to me was so scared, but same theme every single time. They, they thought that people had a right to know. And they thought that people's right to know exceeded their own value on their own personal welfare. So I think you're going to see this happen more often than it did 10 years ago with
33:49 Speaker 00 Ed Snowden and Julian Assange.
33:51 Chris Williamson? I want to get into some of the ethical difficulties that you have internally within Project Veritas. I'm fascinated by this. I'm fascinated by the fact that there must be a constant balancing act around what do we choose to publish? What do we choose not to? Have we met legal limits? There must be some degree of scrutiny and whatever advice you get from your lawyers. But then there's another step as well. So one of the things that I considered is that as you gain more and more popularity and your platform continues to grow, how do you avoid the risk of people who want to give you information simply to be associated with Project Veritas? How do you ensure that your whistleblowers are legit?
34:31 Speaker 00 Well, that goes back to that corroboration. That goes back to, for example, the story, I'm just sort of teasing our video on Wednesday of this week, where the insider works for the company. We asked to see their driver's license, you know, we interview them. There are recordings they provide. I don't ask you to trust me, or I've interviewed this source, she can say whatever she wants, but there's recordings of the thing actually happening. Okay, then you say, well, is that a deep fake video? Maybe those are fake videos. So you go talk to the people in the video. And they are indeed real people, and they admit they were recorded. So you do what you have to do. There's no, there's no rule that says you must interview five sources to confirm.
35:16 Speaker 00 You do whatever you have to do. And I think the evidence behind, people say, well, James O'Keefe, you're a right-wing extremist. Well, guess what? If I was a right-wing extremist, I would have published Ashley Biden's diary. And there were people in my life that said, well, you should do that. And they have a right to say that. Maybe they want to hurt Joe Biden. But my job is not to hurt Joe Biden. I felt like the stuff in that diary, even if it were real, which I was, I was 99% certain the diary was real, I wasn't 100%. Could have been a setup. I felt that I should not see the private musings of this woman, who, I don't know, maybe she was on drugs, or she was writing poetry in her diary, I don't know. I felt there are certain things the public shouldn't see. And I wrestled with this question.
36:00 Speaker 00 And I actually wrote an email to my staff, which is an exhibit in federal court before the prosecutors. And it was, this exhibit was presented before the federal judge, and I'm going to read it to you. I wrote this to my staff, and I quoted Ernest Hemingway. And I was thinking about, what is ethics? Because of course, ethics is subjective. Ethics depends upon what value you placed on the information. People who hate Joe Biden, they release any information. I wrote this. I said, Ernest Hemingway said, "I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after." And when it comes to journalism, it's rarely what you feel good about afterward. It is only that which makes you feel better than you would otherwise.
36:43 Speaker 00 And I just felt like publishing this woman's diary... There's something wrong about it. I don't think public eye should see it. Using undercover techniques, recording people, catching people, doing bad things. You can't justify the ethics of this in the abstract. It's like trying to say that, you know, water is dry and coal is fireproof. Deception in any way, matter, shape, or form is a kind of wrong, but you have to do it sometimes for the greater cause to show people the truth. So I think we struggle with ethics. I've written a whole book about it. Honestly, that's what this book is about. Where are the boundaries?
37:27 Speaker 00 The boundaries are inherently subjective and inherently situational, and increasingly, people are more divided than ever on what should be exposed.
37:36 Chris Williamson? Would you say that veritas is politically impartial?
37:39 Speaker 00 Well, that's a pretty existential question in a day and age when we are divided on facts. I think the media is monolithic. To quote my late mentor Andrew Breitbart, "I do believe the media is part of the Democrat Party national complex." So people will come to you with information that is anathema to what is presented on TV, and that's traditionally been things that are, for example, would expose Democrats lying since CNN and The New York Times and The Washington Post are aligned with political interests. But I think increasingly, that's going to be less the case.
38:23 Speaker 00 For example, we did a story on Alex Stovall, who's a Republican in Arizona. And I don't know if you saw this video, but he's a conservative Republican guy running in the primary in the state of Arizona as a congressman, and he said some things in his vehicle privately that contradicted what he said publicly. So publicly, he says, "Yes, we need to audit that election." And then privately, he said to his colleague, who is a whistleblower in his campaign, "Oh, I don't think there was enough fraud to overturn the election." I don't think he said anything wrong. I happen to agree with Alex Stovall. It doesn't seem to be enough voter fraud to overturn the election, but it was his lack of courage to say these things publicly. And I think over time, you're going to see that asymptote
39:06 Speaker 00 of party stories approach closer to 50%, but it'll never be half and half.
39:15 Speaker 00 So long as you have all the organs of dissemination in this country completely aligned with one political party, most whistleblowers are going to be exposing the Democratic Party, since that's the message that we get from tech and mainstream media.
39:32 Chris Williamson? How many tips do you get per day? You got any idea?
39:36 Speaker 00 Hundreds, hundreds. Yeah, I call it the, not the help line, but I tell my staff, we call it the hope line. Most of these people are hopeless and cynical and want something to believe in and they reach out to us. And increasingly, the thing we hear from people is there really isn't anywhere else for them to go. They certainly can't go to the New York Times. They would probably either ignore them or burn their cover.
40:09 Chris Williamson? You put out a video the other day saying, "I am not suicidal." How concerned are you for your personal safety?
40:17 Speaker 00 Well, I think that's another existential question. The first page of this book addresses this question. People say, "Do you fear for your life?" And it doesn't matter how I answer that, in the negative or affirmative, either I will sound prideful or self-aggrandizing or naive. If I say I fear for my life, you'll think I'm full of myself. If I say I don't, you'll think I'm naive. So I don't know how to, and that was, that video was my form of answering that question. I was like, you, half the comments, "Are you afraid?" First of all, no. I'm not afraid for my life. If I was afraid for my life, I sure as shit wouldn't have started Project Veritas. I did not realize how serious this was until April of this year, when I was banned from Twitter.
41:00 Chris Williamson? What was the story there?
41:02 Speaker 00 That was the day. If there was one moment in time, it wasn't my incarceration, it wasn't my... You know, it was that day when they banned me from Twitter for quoting CNN, Charlie Chester saying that we're propaganda and Twitter banned. That's when I realized, whoa, that was my
41:25 Chris Williamson? Why?
41:25 Speaker 00 pill, black pill, red pill, up pill, down pill. I don't know what that, you know, what, but the metaphor, but because I had quoted the control room director at CNN saying what we all suspect, and they banned me for it. I, I never thought we'd crossed that Rubicon. Of course, they made up some, I don't know, some, some weird excuse, like I had created fake accounts on Twitter, which is so defamatory, we sued them for defamation and that, that matters ongoing. But for me, it was like, I guess there is an innocence. There is an idealism. There is a hope here that I feel internally and my colleagues feel there's a way the world ought to be.
42:07 Speaker 00 And we don't ascribe to the cynicism. For me, it was like, oh, they're not going to ban me for that. I'm just reporting on what this guy's saying. And they didn't ban him. By the way, I'm quoting this guy. They should be banning the guy I'm quoting, not me. So for me, it was like, oh, okay, now things are about to get real. And then that's when I sort of woke up from my idealism just a little bit. I'm still very idealistic. And then the FBI raids, that was, then it got to DEFCON one. It was like, okay, now they're, now they're raiding my home and taking my shit and putting a journalist in handcuffs. Again, I didn't think that would happen. I, I don't want to live in a world where that can happen. I reject the premise that I do live in that world. So that, that, so I put the video out, you speak of, because half the comments say I should fear for my life.
42:52 Speaker 00 And I said, well, I'm not suicidal. I love my life. I'm blessed to do what I do and it's all going to be okay.
43:00 Chris Williamson? How often do you spend, or how long typically during a day do you spend talking to legal counsel?
43:06 Speaker 00 Oh, constantly.
43:09 Chris Williamson? Is it just a guy that's like on your right shoulder for the entirety of the day? Something comes up?
43:15 Speaker 00 I mean,
43:15 Chris Williamson? You ask John a question, John tells you the answer?
43:19 Speaker 00 Something to that effect. It's something. We have many lawyers. Some of them are in house, many of them are out of house. I could effectively pass the bar exam at this point. I myself went to law school for a year, dropped out, been deposed many times, been to court many times. We've never lost a case. Everything we do is run by lawyers. You have issues of consent, you have issues of privacy, tortious interference, you have non-disclosure agreements. We, this case, Nikki v. Vop, where I effectively have the whole thing memorized. It's just, the thing about law is that we live in a nation of laws. And one of the great things about the United States of America and the American founding is this idea that we are equal, we are all created equal. What does that
44:04 Speaker 00 mean? Well, it does not mean that I run as fast as you, or I cook as good as you. It means we're equal before the law. This, this is a beautiful thing in the courts. Some of the most amazing moments of my life have been winning in court. There was a moment in the Shirley Teeter case where it went to jury verdict. And when, when people make these sort of irrational rhetorical arguments you see on cable news, all that stuff melts away in court. That doesn't matter anymore. It's all about logic and, and truth. And you get to the point in the, in the, in the, in the lawsuit when the judge is like, where's the edit, counselor? Well, he mixed this moment over here. And he said, yeah, but, but that's what journalists do. They tell stories and that's what O'Keefe was supposed
44:47 Speaker 00 to do. But O'Keefe did not opine on Scott Fogle's statements. And the judge goes, why would question the ethics of James O'Keefe if he did opine on Scott Fogle? And it was so beautiful because every now and then, once in a while, when you're in court, you actually see the administration of justice. It's very rare, but it does happen. In that case, we hired a lawyer who happens to be blind. The woman who sued me, her name was Shirley Teeter, she was a disabled woman. She had COPD, she had an oxygen tank, undoubtedly to engender sympathy with the jury. So we had some tricks up our sleeve. We brought a lawyer in court who was literally blind. And he had a cane and, you know, he listened
45:31 Speaker 00 to the transcripts through his headphones. I could tell you a story after story about litigation and about the law, but clearly it surrounds us always. We follow the law. We never break the law. And we are proponents and adherents to the First Amendment.
45:49 Chris Williamson? As the scrutiny increases with Project Veritas, the fallout, if you guys were rumbled to have broken the law or to have stepped across the line, that's going to become increasingly tight, right? There's going to be more eyes, more scrutiny. Is this something that you're conscious of? Is this something where you think as you continue to grow the platform,
46:12 Chris Williamson? there's more restrictions, it's more laborious, more effortful to get yourself to the stage where you can release things? Is this something that you, a tension that you feel?
46:21 Speaker 00 It's my cross to bear, is how I put it. I tell my staff that we have an ethics policy at Veritas. And here's the most important ethical guideline. Always behave like there's a jury in the room watching everything you do and say, even when you're alone. And people will say, I don't want to live in that world. And I say, that is the world that we live in. So as long as you behave like a jury is always watching, like you're in a goldfish bowl, then you're okay. Now, what's terrifying is when they falsely accuse you, which is what the feds did in the Ashley Biden case, that they had, I guess, insinuated that I was involved in the theft. I wasn't. I wasn't even aware the thing was stolen. Even if it was stolen, I would be protected by the United States Supreme Court
47:04 Speaker 00 to receive and/or publish the document. I didn't. But yeah, I think your question, you have to behave like you're always being watched. There's a chapter in this book called secrecy. And again, it took me many years to learn this lesson, many years. I've seen people try to keep secrets. You can never keep a secret in this business. You, we have, you understand, we have like... Two Pulitzer Prize winning national security reporters at the New York Times, who spend most of their time investigating me, that's not an exaggeration. Adam Goldman and Mike Schmidt at the New York Times are not investigating the FDA, or the Pentagon, or I don't know, stuff happening in Ukraine.
47:47 Speaker 00 They're literally staked out of my sources' houses. This is a true story. They're literally surveilling my sources, trying to dox my sources. They think that James O'Keefe and Project Veritas is what we need to investigate. So, any secret I've ever had has been unearthed. And if you don't believe me, believe that I've been to court a dozen times, won every case, been deposed, and they got nothing on me. They got nothing. And if they had something, wouldn't you know about it? So, that's my cross to bear. The one area in life where I think you can keep secrets is your sexual life. I think we should avoid that area. I think we should stay out of people's bedrooms.
48:29 Speaker 00 The exception being, if you're doing something to a minor. We did a story on CNN's Rick Salibi. He was soliciting pictures of a 15-year-old. You can't do that. That's against the law. As long as you don't break the law, I think we stay out of people's bedrooms.
48:42 Chris Williamson? Wasn't Jake Tappas' producer doing something dodgy as well?
48:46 Speaker 00 That was the individual I just spoke of. Rick Salibi worked for Jake Tapp. Rick Salibi was the second guy, after the first guy in Connecticut. This was a whistleblower who was a prostitute, who came to Project Veritas. And to your point, you said, "Well, Chris, why would we trust prostitutes?" Well, we interviewed her, former prostitute, and this woman had audio FaceTime calls. And we corroborated those. Turns out, they were real. And in these FaceTime calls, Rick Salibi was soliciting pictures of a 15-year-old girl, sexual fantasies about his fiancee, his underage daughter, really disturbing stuff. And we thought that the interests of the 14-year-old and 15-year-old girls he spoke of were paramount,
49:30 Speaker 00 because he was going to be living with this 14-year-old girl. So, we blurred the man's face. We did the ethical thing. We went straight to the fiance. She did not like Project Veritas at first, but then thanked us. The police got involved, CNN fired, or he resigned quietly, by the way. They didn't want to say anything at Jeff Zucker's network. And that's what happened there.
49:55 Chris Williamson? James O'Keefe, ladies and gentlemen, American Muckraker. People can get that on Amazon for it'll be out. It'll be out by the time this is out.
50:02 Speaker 00 Yes.
50:03 Chris Williamson? Where else can people go to keep up to date with what you do?
50:06 Speaker 00 Well, all proceeds from this book go to our nonprofit, Project Veritas, AmericanMuckraker.com. You go to Amazon, it's top 10 on Amazon right now. And we're an organization, we're a charitable nonprofit news organization. We're very independent, so we encourage people to have an open mind and to learn how to do journalism in clown world where truth is upside down and two plus two equals five. Support our work, buy the book, send us a tip at [email protected] . If you're there in the United Kingdom or anywhere you are worldwide and you want to speak the truth unspoken, buy this book and read about how to do it.
50:43 Chris Williamson? Stay safe, mate.
50:45 Speaker 00 Thank you.
50:45 Speaker 02 Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all keep the blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.
51:02 Speaker 00 What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled, you freeze to death, that's what.
51:06 Speaker 02 With great power comes great deniability.
51:09 Speaker 00 I'm not the first then.
51:11 Speaker 02 Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.
Previous Carl Benjamin - Surviving The Madness Of 2022 Next The Crisis Of Modern Masculinity - Nina Power Page updated October 8, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
