James O’Keefe | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 137 - Transcripts

The board's treatment of James was met with indignation from conservatives who have supported and cheered on James' work over the years. Many questions still remain, but he isn't letting this setback stop him. I sat down with James to discuss his brand new venture, O'Keefe Media Grouping, and his vision for the future of citizen journalism. We also discussed the FBI raid on his home, recovering from the Project Veritas ousting, and what comes next. Hey, and welcome. This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special. Excited to

I never really focused on board composition or board management. But I can tell you that while there was some really horrible things that happened, I also saw a lot of goodness in the people around me, some really good journalists. And right now I've assembled a team of about a dozen elite journalists. And I'm going to alter my vision a little bit. And I'm going to crowdsource out the journalism and decentralized journalism. So I can give hundreds of cameras to other people. So that's everything in a nutshell, but I can get more into some of the detail if you want.

That was a 501c3 non prop, but this is not a 501c3. It has no board. I own it. But it's just like daily wire, it's a subscription based model, but the subscriptions are to sponsor these cameras. These cameras are not cheap, they can run 800 bucks. But there's also the Jeff Bezos version, which is 20 or 40 bucks, people are buying those by themselves. So the mission is to teach people then about journalism ethics, teach people about technology, teach people about recording laws in various states. I intend to open source all of that on the website, which is not yet built out. It will be in the coming weeks ahead. And basically teach everyone how to do this. That's my vision. It's a very ambitious mission.

But I intend to do that,

It's a lot harder for me to try to infiltrate or to get someone inside. It's a lot easier for people out there who already know someone who's there to do it themselves. And again, Andrew and I talked about this many years ago. I just wasn't ready for it yet. I wasn't well known enough. I didn't have the goodwill. In many ways, Ben, the story I did on Pfizer, which you covered a month ago, this was the guy who was talking about mutating the virus. He smashed the equipment when I showed him the story. I think me being thrown out of the company that I founded, I actually think that inspired a lot of people. They were like, whoa, that's crazy that you were ousted from an organization that you founded just a week after that story. The timing was very peculiar to people, and it led more sources to come to me. I got 10,000 emails saying, hey, give me one of those cameras.

So I didn't have that 10 years ago. We have that now. We're going to capitalize on that goodwill by making this mission come to life, come to life.

It's good for our bottom line. So it's like, why does he want that to be kept secret? If you say these things, if you're doing these things and you're powerful, you should be proud of what you're doing. CNN, another example, CNN, we famously caught them about a year or two ago saying that we're an anti-Trump network. Okay, then just say that. If that's what you wanna do, if that's what Jeff Zucker, former president, then say, we are the anti-Trump network, but don't try to hide it. So that's what I specialize in. I am not a public policy expert. I don't claim to have some special knowledge about that. I guess that's what Congress is supposed to do, which is pass laws in the interest of the citizens. What I'm trying to do is get information into the hands of the citizens so that they make the best decisions to elect the right representatives. Cause I actually believe that if people had any idea what was actually going on in the three letter agencies and the schools, I think we're seeing more of that now, then they would be rightfully outraged and they would make the right public policy decisions.

Maybe that's the libertarian in me. I believe that people need to have access to the information. I believe the people did. They would make the right decision. Some say I'm an optimist for believing that.

The best thing about ExpressVPN, it's really easy to use. You don't need any technical skills to get set up, just fire up the app, tap one button, and connect. That's it, even your grandparents could do it. Trust yourself with the VPN I use and trust. Visit expressvpn.com slash Ben. Use my link, expressvpn.com slash Ben. Get three extra months for free. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S, vpn.com slash Ben. There is no reason that anybody else should have control over your data, so keep control over your data with expressvpn.com slash Ben. James here, one of the things that's been really evident throughout your career, and again, you and I have known each other since you first walked into Andrew's basement, actually, with the acorn tapes. That's actually when I first met you. That must have been circa 2008, maybe, 2009, somewhere in that neighborhood.

And the critiques of you have taken a few different lines. So the main critique, as I say, has been that he's not a journalist, and then attendance on that critique has been, well, you know, he edits. He edits. You hear the phrase selectively edited coming up a lot. This has been true all the way since the acorn tapes when you revealed acorn station after acorn station talking about how they would essentially facilitate funding for underage child prostitution. And you revealed that tape. And then oh, it's selectively edited, selectively edited. Can you speak to the difference between quote unquote selective editing, the way that they're accusing you of doing it,

All journalists edit. All good journalism is edited. All Pulitzer Prize winning reporting is edited. Journalism is not just releasing raw stuff. It's giving the who, what, when, where, why. It's assembling it into a package because you have limited time. You can't put out three hours and 48 minutes of tape. You can't, for example, show unredacted source material. You can't show the hidden camera part where the guy forgot to turn off and urinated in the stall. There are certain things that you have to redact. There are certain sources that you have to protect. And in order to get the information out in a limited amount of time, and everything has to be done in context.

It's not easy to do. It's an art. But if you look at the New York times today the hyperbole and the mendacious innuendo of the newspapers, the Washington Post and the New York Times in particular, the way that they arranged, you know what I'm talking about, they chopped the quotes, they described things in this mendacious way. So you don't even know what you're reading. It's almost like you have to twist the newspaper to figure out what, let me give you one quick example. They did this to me last year. The New York Times said this is their actual headline, Ben. They somehow got a copy of my attorney client memos after the FBI raid against me. And they said, documents show that Project Veritas and James O'Keefe tried not to run afoul of federal laws and all this. So they wrote this article in this mendacious way when what they're really saying is James O'Keefe tried really hard not to break the law as the way that they wrote it. So they're the ones who edit. And they accuse me of that which they are guilty of, they project on to me precisely who they are.

So of course, they're going to accuse me of editing when they wordsmith articles in that mendacious way. But they can never actually point out what the edit is James O'Keefe edit, please tell me identify for me where the edit in my work is. And I will

Now, they try to go after him for California Penal Code 632 recording without permission, but can you imagine Kamala Harris raiding undercover journalists to record puppies being abused? She would never do that. That's the lack of equality before the law and that's why I've defended Deliden. It's never about the methods, Ben. It's about who you're exposing. It's about power. I think we should level the playing field and get cameras in the hands of everyone. On this OkifMediaGroup.com, you can actually sponsor a camera, again, about $800,000 to get these special James Bond cameras, which, by the way, I'm now in the manufacturing business. I am going to be modifying them and we will make sure that we have the legal primer on our website because, again, there are 38 states where this is legal and 12 where you have to be careful. For example, in California, you have to be in a public place.

When you have thousands of people recording, what you have to then do is not curate it yourself, but teach them how to curate it themselves. In other words, you have to help them identify what a story is. You have to help them perhaps produce the material themselves, tell the story themselves. People do often struggle with finding, communicating in a very short amount of time what's important. I intend to teach people how to do that. In fact, I won't say which, because I don't want to have what happened to Charlie Kirk or the anti-focum or whatever, but I've been invited to speak at a journalism school, a very famous one. This is the first time in my life. I've been invited to teach a course on ethics of covert recording. I intend to film it and produce it like you would see a masterclass. These are the sorts of things I want to do. I want to teach people how to do it themselves so that I don't have to curate it. If that vision comes to life, I think that could change the world.

That's really what I want to do. In the interim, I have this team of 12 that I've identified in

The vice president of HR, a woman named Carolyn Knight Cole with a straight face took copious notes and said, can you tell me that again? How is the leprechaun offend you? I said, well, it offends my heritage. As you can see, we're not all lucky. We have our differences of height. I was trying to keep a straight face. I failed to. I actually laughed out loud. I turned it into a nervous cry. You can see it. I repost it today. They actually told me they would ban Lucky Charms.

I took out the campus speech codes, which said you can't offend anybody's heritage. As an Irishman, I said, well, this offends my heritage. It's sort of like making them live up to their own book of rules and they're damned either way, because if they don't ban Lucky Charms, they're going to break their own law. If they do ban Lucky Charms, they become a laughing stock on campus. That dichotomy is what launched what I would call Veritas visuals, which eventually became Project Veritas. I've been doing this for 20 years. You might ask, what prompted me to do that? I don't know. I guess it was the artist in me wanted to bring things to light and to expose things for what they were. What prompted me to do that? I was a thespian in high school. I was a person who did like to read the newspapers.

I watched local news and I was very contemptuous

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That's Genucell.com slash Shapiro. Go check them out right now. So let's start for the story. You and I know the story because we were there, but why don't you tell the story for people who don't know the story of the the acorn videos? Because that's really when you first broke into sort of the American public imagination, breaking the series of videos demonstrating that a very highly networked democratic front group was in fact engaging in what would have been a legal activity if you'd actually been not an undercover journalist, but actually had been the thing that you purported to be. So why don't you first explain to people, because it's been a long time, what exactly acorn was doing, how you decided to go after acorn, how that story developed, and then

She was a young woman who was an intern for a group called YAF. And I said, Hannah, maybe you should do the sort of work. And she said, James, why don't we go into acorn? And she actually proposed that she dress up like a prostitute and do a secret shopper sting. And I said, well, I'll be a pimp. And we thought this would be novel because they were engaged in various law-breaking so it was alleged. So we thought, what an ingenious idea. Go in and present yourself as lawbreakers with this sort of hilarious, agitprop punk rock, Borat, Mike Wallace sort of thing. I had a camera embedded in my tie. It was a pinhole camera with a wire into my pocket. These cameras were different about 15 years ago. And there was no Amazon where you can buy them.

And I recorded in Baltimore this lady telling me I was scared to death, and my heart was beating 180 beats per minute because I'm saying outrageous stuff about underage hookers and I'm going to use the money to do illegal things. And she told me how to lie on my tax forms and classify the underage girls, all of which I was just making up, but she didn't know that. She said, call them dependents on your tax forms and lie to the government and don't let the police catch you. I met Andrew Breitbart. I went to his home in Los Angeles, knocked on his door, showed him the tapes, and we became kind of a dynamic duo. He told me, release the tapes one at a time. The media will say it's an independent, isolated incident. They did do that on day one. CNN said it was isolated. They released the second, third, fourth, and fifth tapes. And then by the fifth tape, the House of Representatives democratically controlled voted to defund Acorn. The Senate voted 83 to 7.

This is a democratically controlled United States Senate to defund Acorn. And Barack Obama signed that legislation probably because he wanted to distance himself. But nevertheless, that's how the world has changed. You could never see an even Republican led Congress defund anything, let alone a social welfare organization funded by your tax dollars. And South Park covered it. Jon Stewart covered it. This is a little bit of a different world 13 years ago. This is September 15, 2009. And then everyone realized, wow, this sort of journalism works. It's funny. It's interesting. And Project Veritas was born.

Was it the Koch brothers? Was it the billionaires? Of course, there were no Koch brothers. I still haven't got funding from the Koch brothers. They're welcome to sponsor me if they're watching this. But there were no there were no billionaire anything. It was literally as crazy as you can imagine. It was Hannah and I putting it on our credit card. I use my grandmother's chinchilla coat to be the pimp. So the media couldn't fathom this. They needed to personalize it. They needed to make it about this.

They even wrote a story about, you know, about where I got the video camera from. It was actually a Christmas gift from my mother. So and then I would say then the personal attacks became much more vicious. My Wikipedia page was vicious. They tried to claim the tapes were edited. And I remember I was 25 years old, sitting in front of my computer, literally tearing up about being presented in such a horrible way on Wikipedia. And there's really nothing I can do about it. I can't edit the Wikipedia page because they immediately they have like an army of people, I guess media matters or whoever it is, that's editing it right back to what it so yeah, this is really hard thing to to digest, to accept, you have to accept it. And you and there are certain things that we can't control. And I just learned that a very young age, the only way is to just keep going to keep putting out more stories, you're only as good as your next story. And that's what I did, probably put out 1000 investigations over the last 13 years. And every one of them, they attacked me.

And every time I said, you know, I just got to keep going even even recently, look at the last 45 days of my if I was thrown out of the corporation that I founded and was the chairman of. And I said to myself, I just got to keep going. I got to start another organization. And this is a may perhaps a life lesson embodied in the poem by Rudyard Kipling, if, if you can see the things you gave your life to broken and rebuild them with worn out tools. I've been through this a number of times arrested, raided, sued, falsely accused, exonerated, vindicated. But you just sort of have to keep going. And I wish Andrew was alive. He died March 1st, 2012. I wish he was alive to see some of these things. But you were very close with him. I was close with him. And, and for the first three years of my journey, he was by my side when it

Um, I ran to the door at 6 am This was november 6 2021 Um, and they had mag light flashlights in my eyes blinding me at 6 am on a saturday. You're you're asleep You're you're awoken from your slumber Um, and they and they and they come in and one of the things that struck me about the fbi Was I actually believe that the majority of these people are really good people Um, I I believe the people at the top are are fairly compromised And what what struck me about their body language is they realized That they were not doing the right thing and and I think some of them had a conscience and I know that Because one of them blew the whistle a guy named kyle serafin Uh fbi agent leaked some documents to to to us From a different source showing us that the the fbi knew we were news media. So my advice. Um, Uh, yeah, i've been attacked a lot legally Uh, you have to have good lawyers you can't you can't let lawyers stop the creative process But um, but there are uh, you have to do the right thing And you have to have backbone and you have to have integrity and um, even when you do the right thing and have integrity and behave ethically They'll accuse you of doing the wrong thing and you have to stand your ground in this matter with the fbi with the FBI, the ACLU ban, the American Civil Liberties Union, has defended me. That should shock your audience. The Reporters Committee, which consists of Wolf Blitzer, Andrea Mitchell, has defended me. And why are they defending me? Because they do the exact same thing I do. They publish material that was stolen. They print the Pentagon papers. And so what's his name? The Politico guy, Josh Gerstein, published the Roe versus Wade documents.

Politico covered this favorably. Do you think Josh Gerstein wants to be raided by the feds for publishing the leaked? And by the way, I defended. I may not like the leaker. We may not like the person in the Supreme Court to leak that. But I defend the right of the journalists to publish the leaked material. That is a very important American tradition. And and I think a lot of these left wing journalists are bent. Ben, they're afraid that that the three letter agencies might come for them. So in a strange twist of fate, they defended us. And I think that's actually a very hopeful thing.

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There was nothing illegal about what I did, but it was entry by false pretense, a misdemeanor because I was covertly recording. And I often for many years, I thought I wish that never happened. But it was actually the best thing that ever happened to me for three different reasons. A, I really started sending cameras to other people as opposed to doing everything myself because I was forced to. B, it humbled me without destroying me. It's very rare for a man to be humbled, but not ruined. I think the same thing sort of happened to me in the last 45 days. And it really, really taught me about the intricacies of law and how to manage attorneys. I didn't complete law school. I didn't go to Harvard Law School. I went to a small law school and dropped out after a year, but I feel like I'm an attorney. I think all good journalists sort of have to be lawyers because you have to, when you're in the field, you have to do the IRAC, issue rule analysis, conclusion, while you're recording, you have to understand the dynamics.

I've spent more time researching First Amendment law than most lawyers. In fact, as of last year, I had 22 outside counsel working for me and four inside counsel. So that process taught me so much. So you say, do you regret it? No. What do I regret? I mean, I will tell you that I've learned a lot from the Project Veritas situation. I never focused on board composition then. I probably should have. I never really focused on what was in my bylaws and my corporation. I probably should have. I'm a very tough man to work for, a very exacting guy.

I drive people pretty hard. I push people. But I probably should have done a better job of selecting who is on my board. And I need to make sure that the people that I surround myself with, particularly in an area like at the board or at the top, have really what we call testicular fortitude and who have a lot of integrity. I built a great production team and a great journalism team. I could have done a better job in those areas. And I learned from it. And because I learned from it, I don't regret it. I just, I'm going to be more effective moving forward.

It means to me, people who actually wouldn't take a bribe, they're in their soul, they're good people and they care about you. Like Jordan Peterson, who I know that you've been on with, he says it better than I can. He says, when you're doing well, they're happy for you. That's very rare. And when you're doing, when the chips are down, they'll have your back, never trust a man who, when the chips are down, they're gonna have your back. And I've been able to see these people, it's like that line in the movie Wall Street when he says, from the moment I laid my eyes on you, I knew you were gonna be successful. And then he says, after the guy was arrested, from the moment I laid my eyes on you, I knew you were no good. I can't tell you how many times I've seen that, But it's very difficult, Ben, to assess this in a person right away. And again, I haven't done the best job of that always, but these experiences help you. And on a personal level, yeah, it's hard to have really close friends and people want a piece of you. I know you're aware of this. People want a piece of you.

They want a photo with you. It's like everyone wants a part of you and it's tough to be a sane, normal human being and give yourself to everyone. So I think it is about surrounding yourself with the right people. And I am proud to say that OMG, O'Keefe Media Group.com, I think I've succeeded. And at least so far, I've identified 12 people. These are ride or die, excellent human beings. Let me tell you one more quick story. We're in a startup right now. We had to sit on the floor here. People were volunteering. One of my guys is a pastor in his real life and he put the whistleblower's flight on his credit card last week. Luckily, we've been able to pay all the credit cards off because of the subscriptions.

But these are the sorts of people that you need. You need people who are willing, who are brave, who are just excellent human beings. And I don't know if that makes sense, but you gotta go through the SHIT

And there wouldn't be an Acorn investigation had not had that flair. And credit to Hannah, she's the one who came up with it. She had a flair too. Not everyone likes it, but it's who I am. And if you saw my advertisement for OMG, I danced. It's just who I am.

I do think they do some good things. I think the drug companies are needed in some respects, but I think some of the lies that we've exposed, like why are they lying to their consumers of other products? Those are three areas, I think. If that sounds good to you and you're watching this program and you're a citizen out there, it's not for everybody, but we can ship you a camera if you go to this website, okeefmediagroup.com, that will help you tell your stories, because there's a lot of people with a conscience