James O’Keefe on His New Book: American Muckracker

CLAY: Project Veritas‘ James O’Keefe. He joins us now. James, what’s the latest on — it’s crazy to say this, but — the FBI investigation into the daughter of Joe Biden, the journal…? Kind of fill people in like how crazy this whole story has been.

O’KEEFE: Well, the latest… It’s hard to summarize in a New York minute, but I’ll do my best. The federal judge ordered the FBI to stop going through my phones. A federal judge has assigned what’s called a specializing master to oversee the FBI after the FBI raided my home, took my two iPhones, which is a horrible violation of my rights as an American journalist. Again, a source transmitted me the daughter of the president’s diary some year, year and few months ago.

We did think it was stolen. Now it’s coming out it wasn’t, but even if it was, it was my right as a reporter to receive information and publish it. I chose not to. There’s a lot of unanswered questions, and this one’s just a complete stunner. It doesn’t make any sense why the Department of Justice would execute a federal search warrant on a journalist’s home for a source transmitting document.

U.S. attorneys in the Southern District of New York argued before the judge that I’m, quote, “not a journalist,” because I, quote, “don’t get consent from the people” I report on, Buck. This is an argument so absurd and so preposterous it was rejected by the judge. But the question remains: Why is my government targeting me? Is it because I’m doing the right thing?

Is it because we’re exposing what people don’t want to be exposed? Well, that’s the paragon of journalism. It’s what I write about in this book called American Muckraker. Certainly, they’ve been coming after me for years for exposing what people don’t want exposed. But there’s a lot of unanswered questions, and I don’t know what the answer to those questions are.

BUCK: Yeah, James, I’m sorry to pose another question I think you probably will have a difficult time answering ’cause I’m not sure — in fact, I would wager — the DOJ couldn’t even answer it. But even taking their stolen property premise prominently, and I’m essentially asking you now to go into the minds of the American Cheka, for those who are historians or know about the secret police inside of Russia pre-KGB. They’re telling you that it was a stolen journal. How is that a federal crime? (laughing) That’s a part of it. How would that be the FBI? It’s someone’s diary.

O’KEEFE: Well, first of all, it appears not to have been stolen by virtue of their own admissions in recent revelations and documents and New York Times stories where it was abandoned.

BUCK: Right. Important point, James. But let’s just… I’m trying to say their pretext here, which clearly it is a pretext —

O’KEEFE: I don’t think they care, man. I don’t think they care. I really don’t. I was incarcerated in 2010 — a story which I write about in American Muckraker — where they have me in shackles and they say, “Oh, you that boy that did them ACORN story,” referring to a story about I did about ACORN, these federal officials in New Orleans.

BUCK: We remember that. Yeah.

O’KEEFE: And then they said, “Oh, you the boy that did the ACORN. We gonna have to keep you overnight.” This is about power! This isn’t about justice or law or standards or anything. They would never, ever, ever raid a home of a 60 Minutes reporter, obviously, because that would create a backlash. And in this case, Buck, it did create a backlash by the ACLU. The ACLU defended me. the Reporters Committee defended me, the Society of Professional Journalists.

How many times in your career have you guys seen the ACLU defend someone like me because the Supreme Court of the United States has established in Bartnicki v. Vopper from 2001 that a journalist has a right — a constitutional right — to receive a document from a source, even if that document was stolen by a third-party, so long as I had nothing to do with the theft. Why is the FBI raiding journalists’ homes over someone’s diary?

Well, that’s a question that seems to have a self-evident answer, but I don’t want to speculate. But furthermore (chuckling), why are the Feds involved? And obviously, you know, it was slightly terrifying at the time, but it has not stopped us. If anything, it’s emboldened us. More people are coming to us now than ever before because they seem to trust us by virtue of the fact that we are being targeted by our government.

CLAY: Well, first of all, I give credit to the ACLU for standing on principle here, as opposed to standing on politics because it’s a hundred percent on the right side to be defending you. But we know that the ACLU has not always been standing on principle of late. But I just wanted to ask you this, James, ’cause I think it’s kind of a fascinating question. Imagine that Ivanka Trump had had a journal that contained potentially disparaging commentary about Donald Trump and that journal had made its way to a journalist and — while Trump was president — the FBI had raided that journalist’s home. The resulting fallout is what?

O’KEEFE: That’s a paradox because that would never happen. It’s an American paradox, and I think we’re living through history. I don’t know how else to put it. I write in this book American Muckraker, the suffering that we have to endure as citizens for doing the right thing and the pain, clearly you have to be a masochist to do what we do here because no one wants to be in handcuffs. They put me in handcuffs.

They had a battering ram at 6 a.m. and they raided my home, and it was a kind of psychological carnage. For doing the right thing, by the way. Because you want to be presented with a paradox, here’s one. What should I have done? If someone sends me a document, we try to corroborate it. I failed to — or at least I thought I failed to — authenticate the document. It appears to have been authenticated by now.

But at the time you stumble across something as a reporter, you try to corroborate it. You try to do the right thing. And I said, “You know what? I don’t think public eye should see this, these writings because I can’t verify them if they occurred and if it belongs to her with a hundred percent accuracy,” and then I tried to give it back to local law enforcement in Florida — and then my home gets raided and they put me in handcuffs.

So, this is a dystopian piece of science fiction. But I think if you keep going — and this is the message of my book, America Muckraker. If you keep going… We just had a story last week involving documents from the Department of Defense that Anthony Fauci talked about them in the Senate. The source came to us with those documents precisely because the FBI is targeting Project Veritas, and because the New York Times works in harmony with the FBI. This is the reality that we’re living in, and we have to figure out how to do journalism in Clown World.

BUCK: Speaking to James O’Keefe. He has a new book out, American Muckraker. James, I’m just gonna put this out there: How many journalists, even in back channel, right — ’cause obviously if you work at CNN or New York Times, whom I think are journalistic entities that are devoted to the destruction of conservatism and conservatives generally.

But you specifically, I think that’s fair to say, I think they would be very pleased to see you not only ruined professionally but even imprisoned if they could, if they get away with it. Do any journalists, though, reach out to you who are from mainstream publications and say, “Hey, I just appreciate that you actually do what we pretend to do,” or they too scared?

O’KEEFE: I would say they’re too scared to say that publicly. Many do reach out. Some, in fact, do do it publicly. Ben Smith at the New York Times — and I think he was quite courageous. Now, what’s ironic is that he just left the New York Times. I don’t know if these two are related. Ben Smith came out and said, “Journalists should not be cheerleading the attacks against Project Veritas,” and once Ben gave others the permission to do so, you had a lot of others come out like Trevor Timm at Freedom of the Press Foundation.

But most of these things that people say are said covertly. You know, for example, we have a story — I’ll break a little news on your program — of New York Times reporters who are covertly recorded. That’s gonna be coming out in a few weeks. And the things that they say and the things that we’ve heard people say inside CNN is that CNN is not doing what they’re supposed to do. But most of these people, of course, have their mortgage and they have their pensions, and they have their material possessions in life.

And they’re too afraid to go against the established narrative because, let’s face it, the New York Times and CNN have enormous power because of the power that’s granted to them by the algorithms at tech. So if you go against that orthodoxy, you will be targeted, defamed, have your reputation dragged through the mud, and people just don’t like that. I write about, in this book, how to survive that psychological abuse, how to deal with it, how to muster the strength and sometimes the courage by telling the stories of people who did blow the whistle and did take those arrows. And it’s not as bad as you might think, particularly in this day and age when there is a majority of people on our side.

BUCK: James O’Keefe, founder of Project Veritas. American Muckraker is the book. James, stay safe, man. Come back and talk to us. Tell us how the fight goes.

O’KEEFE: Thank you.