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Feb. 3, 2022 - Firebrand - Matt Gaetz
39:41
Episode 25: Raided (feat. James O’Keefe) – Firebrand with Matt Gaetz
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The embattled Congressman Matt Gaetz.
Matt Gaetz was one of the very few members in the entire Congress who bothered to stand up against permanent Washington on behalf of his constituents.
Matt Gaetz right now, he's a problem in the Democratic Party.
He could cause a lot of hiccups in passing applause.
So we're going to keep running those stories to keep hurting him.
If you stand for the flag and kneel in prayer, if you want to build America up and not burn her to the ground, then welcome, my fellow patriots!
You are in the right place!
This is the movement for you!
You ever watch this guy on television?
It's like a machine.
Matt Gaetz.
I'm a canceled man in some corners of the internet.
Many days I'm a marked man in Congress, a wanted man by the deep state.
They aren't really coming for me.
They're coming for you.
I'm just in the way.
We begin with our brand new poll with Ipsos.
It shows big challenges for President Biden heading into this year's midterm elections.
Three out of four Americans are pessimistic about the state of the economy.
Only 29% support deploying troops to counter the Russian threat to Ukraine.
And more than three-quarters of all Americans questioned the president's pledge to consider only black women to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, saying he should consider all possible nominees.
Well, there you have it.
Right from the Mount Rushmore of the mainstream media.
Joe Biden's paradigm to only consider black women for the Supreme Court is deeply unpopular with more than three-fourths of Americans.
But Republicans aren't standing up against it.
Frankly, too many are tacitly embracing it.
This is racist.
Can you just imagine telling a woman of Hispanic descent, maybe a Native American male, that they just haven't experienced enough oppression, they just don't have the right identity even to be considered to serve in the highest court on the land?
What's happening to us as a country where people's identity is just conflated inexplicably with their experience?
See, I think people have diverse ideologies and experiences and viewpoints of all races, of both genders.
And so I think that we ought to take a tougher stand.
Republicans in the United States Senate should vote no against a nominee who is only selected through a corrupt, racist, and un-American process.
We talk a lot about how critical race theory is now affecting decisions all throughout government.
Make sure to check that out in our prior episode.
This week, we have an exclusive interview with James O'Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, and it'll help you connect a lot of dots.
When the Department of Justice wanted to smear me, predictably, they went to the New York Times.
But there's another part of that loop.
When the New York Times fears losses in court, when they couldn't get their motion to dismiss Project Veritas' litigation granted, who did the New York Times turn to to stick it to James O'Keefe?
That's right, the DOJ. And it's increasingly concerning that corporate media like the New York Times have become incapable of honest reporting.
Yet highly capable to influence the next location of an FBI raid.
In my interview with James O'Keefe, in just moments, he discusses being targeted, being raided, handcuffed, all while remaining determined and optimistic as an American journalist.
He lets you know who might be deposed or exposed next.
Is it the DOD or the DOJ that have their own insiders and whistleblowers working with Project Veritas?
See if you can catch the hint that James O'Keefe drops on that.
I caught up with James at the iconic Fountain Blue Hotel in Miami Beach.
We had celebrated the inspirational courage of whistleblowers who exposed big pharma, big tech, and big business.
We honored the journalists who brought us the truth.
Take a listen.
Project Veritas is the media organization doing the most fearless reporting.
They're doing the boldest work.
And I would argue some of the most important work in all the media in the United States of America.
Its founder is James O'Keefe.
His recent book is American Muckraker.
I've read it and it speaks a lot about modern day media and journalism and the intricacies with power and big tech.
And I want a chance to chat with you about it, James.
You seem to have written this book As a critique of modern journalism in America, what are they getting wrong?
Journalists these days only print what the powers that be want disclosed.
And really, journalism is supposed to be printing information that they don't want disclosed.
So in a world where the FBI and the New York Times and pharmaceutical companies are sort of acting in concert with one another, that's not how it should be.
And this book talks about these different themes, privacy, propaganda, ethics, secrecy, surrounding this genre of publishing unauthorized information.
Well, you have been breaking the big stories that I think expose those intricacies with power and then the way narrative is portrayed to the American people.
And one of the ways people try to criticize you, diminish you, deplatform you, is to say that you're not a journalist, you're an I'm an activist.
I have spent now the last couple days meeting with the dedicated journalists of Project Veritas and the thorough work they do to develop leads and review reporting.
And they're very, very detailed, far more than the press corps that we interact with on Capitol Hill that have to spit out 21 stories in the next hour or they don't get paid.
And so what do you say in defense of these folks who really put it all on the line when you're smeared in that way?
Well, I think that, you know, journalism is distinguished from propaganda because you verify the information.
And there's a chapter in this book called Deception.
Yeah, we do use undercover techniques and we use whistleblowers.
And whistleblowers sometimes have to violate their own non-disclosure agreements with their organizations.
But the only way to get the truth to the people, to the millions of people out there, is to use these techniques.
If you present yourself as a journalist to the Department of Defense, if you say, hi, I'm from the Washington Post, tell me all the fraud you're committing.
You're not going to get an honest truth.
You're going to get a kind of authorized statement.
Well, and it's access journalism, right?
Yes.
And in Beat Reporting, there's this tension between access and autonomy.
And that's a tension that's always existed.
We've gotten to a place now where, due to the consolidation of these companies and a few tech companies, and you basically have an oligarchy with the Washington Post and the New York Times, that's basically it.
There's no investigative journalism.
Those organizations only will give you the things that the powerful people want you to know.
And in the extreme case, they work alongside the FBI. And it's sad and it's tragic, but it's getting harder and harder to break through.
Well, people think about the FBI and big media as if they're separate entities, but isn't the reality that a lot of these folks leave the deep state and then they go work for the media organizations?
James Clapper?
Andrew McCabe?
Andrew McCabe.
Yeah, these guys show up, Peter Strzok, they show up then working for the media companies and they're kind of like walking springing leaks.
Now, you write in the book about the power of The image of the video, right?
The ability to have raw, verifiable information to allow the consumer of that media to make their own judgment about the information.
And it strikes me that there's a certain arrogance with modern mainstream journalism where they don't really give us the raw information to analyze.
It's all through their lens.
Also interesting is, remember, it's illegal to possess these stolen documents.
It's different for the media.
So everything you learn about this, you're learning from us.
Right, and so talk about how Project Veritas, despite the extent to which, you know, big tech has tried to de-platform you, you guys break through because the video doesn't lie.
Exactly.
There's a second chapter of the book called Image, and I believe that human nature is such that if you show people the reality, They'll have the right information.
The whole Jeffersonian notion of the First Amendment is the idea that you give people unauthorized information.
Images transfix in a way that words don't.
I mean, I'm in Miami here, and you were at the event last night, and I showed people.
I re-enacted things.
There was theater.
There was music.
You felt it.
And we call it veritas, Latin for truth, cinema verite.
You can see the people's lips moving.
You can hear their intonation.
And the most important part about journalism, I think, is first-person observation journalism.
So you're actually seeing it with your own eyes.
I'm not asking you to trust me by virtue of the fact that I declare myself credible.
And I know that you work on Capitol Hill and these journalists say credible sources and people familiar with the matter.
Well, you don't know who those people are.
The source is close.
That's the biggest lie in Washington media.
But what does that even mean?
People familiar with the matter.
And I'm not opposed to anonymous sources.
But we have no reason to trust these institutions because every time you actually look at the sources and see what they said, it never matches up.
And furthermore, the people in the government that are leaking this information, it's effectively a form of counterintelligence propaganda because they're giving the newspapers information that's not necessarily true.
So Veritas shows you with your own eyes.
I don't ask you to trust me.
I ask you to trust the evidence of your own eyes and ears, and that's precisely what they don't want you to trust.
Do you feel that that makes you a target, makes your organization a target?
Well, it's self-evident.
I mean, the first chapter of this book is called Suffering, and you might say, why did you write about that?
Because I think it does involve pain.
My life and the lives of the people that work with me have experienced sacrifice.
They've been fired from their jobs.
David Delight was raided by Kamala Harris when she was Attorney General of California.
I've been put in handcuffs on two separate occasions by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
I'm an American reporter.
But they do this to us because we're telling the truth, not despite it.
And I also believe that in some regard it's emboldened us.
In other words, the sources that come to me, we had a source come to us with documents inside the Pentagon.
Project Veritas has obtained a separate report to the Inspector General of the Department of Defense, written by the U.S. Marine Corps Major Joseph Murphy, a former DARPA Fellow.
Major Murphy makes claims in his report to the Inspector General that if true could be damning to the official narrative that has been played out to the world over the past two years.
Major Murphy's report states that EcoHealth Alliance approached DARPA in March 2018 seeking funding to conduct gain-of-function research of bat-borne coronaviruses.
The proposal was named Project Diffuse.
DARPA rejected the proposal because the work was too dangerous and could violate the gain-of-function moratorium, despite EcoHealth's position that it would not.
According to the documents, the NIAID, under the direction of Dr. Fauci, did not reject the proposal.
I went ahead with the research at Wuhan and several sites across the U.S. Those people come to us because we are attacked.
It's almost like they trust me.
They trust me because they say you must be doing something right if the powers that be are trying to silence you all the time.
And you are always making the pitch to whistleblowers out there that if folks are in a corrupt organization, And feel compelled to speak out that you have an infrastructure that you've built with this brave team at Project Veritas to ensure that that does get out.
I had a chance to meet with several of your whistleblowers and Project Veritas was not typically the first place they went.
With information.
They would typically try to go to a mainstream media outlet and they'd get rejected, laughed out of the room.
But then when they brought their evidence here and when it was thoroughly vetted, then it seemed they had a burden lifted.
I mean, talk about the most inspirational whistleblowers that you still think about that you might use to inspire someone else.
Eric Cochran, the young man, I don't know if you saw him, he blew the whistle on Pinterest.
And he was 25, I think he's 26, 27 now.
He was making a lot of money as an engineer, as much as a young man can make in San Francisco.
And he said to me, he's a Christian guy, he says, I'm just gonna fall to ashes one day.
And he's speaking in a sort of existential way.
Walk people through what goes through your mind in that moment when you decide to risk it all.
I tell a lot of people, Like, what are you saving your ammo for?
Like, you're building up your wealth, you're doing all this stuff, and it's like, in anticipation of what?
This is the moment that matters.
This is what I'm gonna do with my life.
This is how I make an impact on the world.
Most people don't think like this.
Increasingly, I think more people are.
He's like, what does life mean?
What's the point of living if you're not following your conscience?
And I think as our society drifts towards whatever dystopian reality we're already living in and maybe headed worse towards, People put more emphasis on that.
That is to say, what is the meaning of life?
Because I do think we all struggle and go through pain and even if you do nothing, you go through pain, maybe more so.
So I find more people are following Eric's lead and Eric did that first.
Eric was like kind of the first test case.
And then other people watch what he did and said, well, why don't I do that?
So I can't philosophize courage.
I can't tell you to do it by virtue, you know, making a good argument for doing it.
I can only lead by example.
So in the first part of my life, I went through this, you know, endurance test and then Eric found me and then someone saw Eric do it.
Another story in the book about a Marine guy worked for the Postal Service.
He signed an affidavit saying he saw a ballot being backdated.
The FBI and the Inspector General sent federal agents to interrogate him.
We have Senators involved.
We have the Department of Justice involved.
We have Trump's lawyers teams got a hold of me.
I'm not...
Well, I am actually.
I am trying to twist you a little bit because in that, believe it or not, your mind will kick in.
Okay.
We like to control our mind and when we do that we can convince ourselves of a memory.
But when you're under a little bit of stress, which is what I'm doing to you all purposely, your mind can be a little bit clearer.
And we're going to do a different exercise too to make your mind a little bit clearer.
Good to go.
But this is all on purpose.
Roger.
I am not scaring you.
I am scaring you.
They basically put a metaphorical gun to his head and said, you must recant this testimony.
You must recant.
And you would not have believed it had he not recorded it with his iPhone.
Washington Post said, sources familiar with the matter.
A study recanted.
He had an audio.
So somehow, sources familiar with the matter superseded the actual recording of the people talking to him.
Believe the mainstream media, not your lying ears.
Not the actual tape.
Who are these sources familiar?
There's only two guys in the room.
So who are they talking to?
The guy that was recorded or some guy who the guy talked to?
And this is the propaganda that we have to deal with, and this is the story of how to endure it, I guess.
Yeah, American Muckraker certainly lays bare the corruption that's in big media, but that's not the only headwind you face as you go armed with the truth and with these videos that folks collect.
You also face the headwinds from big tech, and you write in the book about the vertically integrated vortex of propaganda.
What is that?
It's something that we all know so much about in our day-to-day lives, the consolidation of these tech companies.
And you've done some good work with Facebook.
We did a story on some of the censorship of the human algorithms combined with machine learning.
You have previously given testimony to the Congress saying that there is not editorial manipulation that disadvantages conservatives.
And just like in the case of Google, there have been whistleblowers from Facebook that not only have Offered evidence indicating the testimony was not truthful, but there's even video that suggests that content moderators that you employ...
If you bring the game to it, it could work on the left side.
I'm wondering if you are familiar with the experiences of Zach McElroy.
The truth is more powerful than any NDA. Ryan Hartwig.
I've seen them interfering on a global level in elections.
Two people who participated in Facebook content review.
I saw a stark contrast between Republicans versus Democrats in that queue.
I saw upwards of 75 to 80 percent of the posts in that queue were from Republican pages.
Politicians, journalists, and pages that supported the president or supported conservatives.
I think both in the case of these content moderators and in the case of the testimony you just gave regarding Mr. Luckey and firing people over their politics, There is serious question as to whether or not you're giving truthful testimony here or whether it's lying before Congress.
I'm not a member of Congress.
I don't know what the solutions are.
That's your job and you're good at it.
My job is to expose what's happening and what are they keeping secret.
And in the beginning, they were kind of shadow banning.
They were de-boosting.
Morgan Comm and a Facebook whistleblower even released documents showing vaccine hesitancy.
Facebook uses classifiers in their algorithms to determine certain content to be what they call vaccine hesitant, or they call it vaccine hesitancy.
and you doubt the user's knowledge, they assign a score to these comments that's called a VH score, the Vaccine Hesitancy Score.
And based on that score, we'll demote or leave the comment alone, depending on the content within the comment.
And one of the most remarkable things, Matt, about the documents that Morgan Common released was, it said, even if the information is true, they'll still censor it.
That was an extraordinary admission, albeit one that they did not want you to know.
It was a private document.
Even if it's true, they'll censor it.
So now we've crossed this Rubicon where it's no longer about misinformation.
It's about information that's actually true, but people are drawing conclusions from the true information they don't want you to draw.
I guess that's what they mean by disinformation.
I'm not very sure.
And I think about how you got your start making, at times, comedic or satirical videos on YouTube and then provoking thought and questions about events that were happening around us.
We basically wanted to bring a matter to your concern that we noticed that at the dining halls here at Rutgers serve lucky charms.
And we think that this promotes negative stereotypes of Irish Americans and we don't think it's acceptable in an academic setting, especially one of higher learning.
And I wonder if the next James O'Keefe arrived on the scene today and relied upon YouTube for reach, would that even be possible?
Because you've exposed in your reporting how the very platform that brought you to prominence cheats.
It's almost like someone said to me earlier in our career that we were like the boxers who stepped outside the box and climbed to the mezzanine and started punching the people up there.
We're not supposed to investigate NPR. You're investigating YouTube.
You're investigating the hand that feeds you.
Our Pfizer videos are still up there, to my shock.
We have 1.5 million subscribers on YouTube.
Maybe they'll take that away.
I don't know.
But the funny thing about our Pfizer videos, and I'm not here to tell you I'm pro-vax, anti-vax.
It doesn't matter what my opinion is.
The videos were of the Pfizer employees.
This is a Pfizer scientist.
This is a senior director at Pfizer, Vanessa Gelman, who said in these emails, these are her words, not mine.
She goes, we need to keep this secret from our customers.
From Vanessa Gelman.
From the perspective of corporate affairs, we want to avoid having the information on the fetal cell lines floating out there.
We believe that the risk of communicating this right now outweighs any potential benefit that we could see, particularly with general members of the public who may take this information and use it in ways we may not want it out there.
Many fetal cells are used in the development of many vaccines, but why would the senior director at Pfizer want to hide that from their customers?
I don't think people should be hiding things from their customers.
But why would they ban our video for quoting a Pfizer executive?
It's really dystopian.
Unfortunately, it's become political.
I don't know why it's political.
There shouldn't be any disagreement on this.
Well, you talked about the remedy being in the purview of the Congress, and you're right.
And frankly, it's an area where we have bipartisan agreement and bipartisan disagreement.
I have some colleagues who say, well, if we reform Section 230, peel away a few immunities, we can leave these companies intact, and that will resolve these free speech Issues that Project Veritas certainly champions.
And there are others of us who believe that these companies have grown more powerful than the most powerful nations in all of human history.
And that the only way to deal with them is to reshape them, is to break them up, is to force Google to alienate YouTube, to create more voices and more opportunities.
And I'm not going to ask you to weigh in on what the right policy choice is, but talk about how it will affect journalism going forward if Alphabet, if Twitter, if the metaverse continue on this kind of transhumanist path with the ability to define the nature of truth itself.
The meta experiment is something that I've, you know, Zuckerberg is now calling it meta, and we're going to live in a world, they say, the predictors say, in five years where we're all just living in this virtual reality.
Imagine you put on your glasses or headset and you're instantly in your home space.
It has parts of your physical home recreated virtually, it has things that are only possible virtually, and it has an incredibly inspiring view of whatever you find most beautiful.
I'm not going, Jay.
Actual reality has been too good to me.
That's why I don't need to be launched off into space with other celebrities.
I was at a conference and someone actually said the quiet part out loud and said, how does one have sex in this world of meta?
And I said, well, okay.
I'll let them figure that out.
I'll let that figure that out.
But that's what they're saying.
We're going into a world where you're going to not be on location.
I don't know what that world's like.
Is there a meta-journalism?
Let me get into that.
Going back to this cliche, journalism is printing what somebody does not want printed.
It's the American founding.
The First Amendment is the thing that makes all of our other rights possible.
Information is accountability.
I was giving a speech at Naples.
At the seat-to-table restaurant.
And they were asking me all these existential questions.
Because you're a member of Congress and I'm a journalist.
So we have totally different roles.
You provide legislative solutions.
And there needs to be more of those, by the way.
I just give you the reality.
My job is to show, like members of Congress, here's the truth.
That's my job.
And I actually do believe that the tragedy in modern life is that we don't agree on facts.
We should not be disagreeing about whether this is a Fiji bottle or not a Coca-Cola.
We should all agree this is a bottle of Fiji, but for some reason we're divided on what this is.
So my job is to make sure that 80% of Americans agree this is water.
And it sounds crazy, but George Orwell wrote in 1984 that freedom is the freedom to say that 2 plus 2 equals 4. If that is granted, all else follows.
And that is being challenged right now.
When I'm banned for quoting CNN, Matt, the videos we did on Twitter in April, The guy at CNN, the control room director, actually said, we're propaganda.
We got Trump out.
Wow, this is Charlie Chester.
He's talking about the numbers on CNN, the death numbers.
They put like a ticker every day.
He goes, why aren't the numbers higher?
This guy's talking to a hidden camera in a public restaurant.
He goes, Why aren't the numbers higher?
We need more people to die.
We need those deaths higher.
COVID gangbusters are great at us, right?
Which is why we constantly have a death toll on the side, which I have a major problem with that we're tallying how many people die every day.
Because I've even looked at it and be like...
look at it and be like, let's make it higher.
Like, why isn't it high enough, you know, today?
Like, it would make our point better if it was higher.
And I'm like, what am I rallying for?
That's a problem that we're doing.
His words, not They removed me from Twitter for quoting someone at CNN. And for me, that was like, whoa.
That was my moment after 12 years of doing this.
So can regulation liberate the true values of journalism that you're talking about in your book?
Or does it have to be a reshaping?
I feel like you've got 430 of your people are smarter than me.
You're more qualified to answer that.
Yeah, but you're on the front lines of the battle because...
Your organization tries to get the truth out, whereas most corporate media, it's not about money anymore, it's about power.
Here's the answer.
Another theme you write about though is that these entities used to just exist for profit and now it's about the power as much as the profit.
I think as long as you are living in a world where, at least politically, if you want to speak about politics, That Congress is so divided on things they should...
I feel like they shouldn't be divided on.
I mean, if you don't...
If people don't agree on facts, there can't be consensus.
And if there's no consensus, how do you...
I mean...
Our political system is...
The Senate is tied 50-50, and an obscure senator from West Virginia dictates the national agenda.
Thank God.
Government...
Thank God, but...
Joe Manchin's holding this country together right now.
Where is this heading?
How do you have a functioning...
Is this what the founders intended?
I don't know.
Well, but it's actually one of the areas, the way that the consumer interacts with the digital world is a place where we see some fissures in just kind of the red team versus the blue team stuff.
And I'm not pessimistic about how strident that is because you look at how Trump really reshaped policy paradigms with a more populist realignment.
So, you know, I don't think we're forever married to, well, it's a 50-50 country.
We can never I mean, you look at this Ukraine conflict now, you've got more and more Republicans cautioning against a war-first strategy.
That wouldn't even have happened in the 90s.
So I'm hopeful for that.
But you fight these fronts, not just against big media, not just against big tech and big government, But really, against all those institutions align, and you do it in court.
That's something that a lot of journalists don't have the courage to do.
I just wanted to give you a moment, and there's a great review of this in the litigation chapter of the book, but talk about the cases that Project Veritas has maybe been involved in, or the matters that you think are the most important to journalism.
There's a whole chapter called litigation, and I believe you're an attorney, correct?
I am.
I went to law school for a year and dropped out.
And I'm glad I had that one year because I learned IRAC issue rule analysis inclusion.
We don't settle litigation.
I'm one of the only chairman of any media company, and Veritas is a non-profit.
We're also a media company.
We've never settled a lawsuit.
And if you don't settle, you go through the discovery phase of a lawsuit.
And that means you get to depose the other side and they get to depose me.
What I learned in my life after a decade of doing this is that they, i.e., our opponents, the opponents of freedom and information, they tend to keep secrets.
I don't really keep that many secrets, Matt.
I mean, I do keep the identity of our donors secret.
That's a freedom of association issue under 5.1c3 regulations.
It's essentially the source code of your organization.
And also the freedom of association right under the First Amendment.
Now, donors don't tell us what to do, but A hundred thousand people donate to us and it would create a constitutional crisis if we were to identify those people.
And then you have the identity of whistleblowers.
But other than that, I don't keep secrets.
So in a deposition, I love being deposed.
Please do interview me and ask me all these questions about what motivates me.
You're not going to find anything incriminating.
They hate being deposed.
So in the beginning, they would sue me thinking they would break my will and get me to fold like a cheap suit because they're projecting onto me their own insecurity.
Well, they're bigger than you.
And so they think that might makes right.
Correct.
And sometimes the courtroom flips that.
Absolutely.
They think that and then they realized, whoa, This guy's not going to settle.
There's a story in this book about a jury verdict.
I actually went to a federal jury trial in North Carolina.
It was a civil lawsuit.
And I quoted this guy, Scott Fogle, talking about this other woman.
The woman sued me for defamation.
I don't know why she sued me.
He said it.
And it got to a jury verdict and the federal judge in North Carolina looked at the seven lawyers representing Shirley Teeter and said, why on earth are we here?
Because if you sued Mike Wallace for what you're suing O'Keefe for, everyone would laugh at you.
It somehow got past summary judgment, probably because my reputation is so sullen in Wikipedia.
And then after that, they stopped suing me because they realized we don't settle.
And now recently, Matt, we sued the New York Times for defamation.
We got past motion to dismiss.
We're entering Discovery there.
And on Christmas Eve of this past year, the judge ordered the New York Times to sequester these memos.
Who are you looking forward to deposing most in the New York Times case that now goes to Discovery?
I think Maggie Astor, the reporter that wrote the article.
She, in the first sentence of this article, she wrote, deceptive videos released by, you know, and her defense in the answer to the complaint was, Your Honor, that was just our opinion.
And the judge said, well, then why was it in the A section in a news article?
Why did you disguise it as, you know...
It seems the judge also took occasion to remind the New York Times that there were media organizations on both sides of this case.
He did.
He said we're both media companies.
And he said it was the New York Times that engaged in disinformation and deception by injecting their opinion in a news article as they're claiming.
So it's really...
And by the way, Matt, after that article that came out in the New York Times, this is about our Minnesota voter fraud videos, they said that we were using disinformation and...
Facebook banned the video because Facebook uses the New York Times as their fact-checking source.
So it's this vortex of propaganda.
It's an oligarchy between tech and the newspapers.
And then they say there's no voter fraud.
Now, I don't know if there was enough...
I don't have enough information to say whether there was enough voter fraud to overturn that election.
However, there was voter fraud.
There was an anecdotal case in Minnesota of a Somali man saying, here's all these ballots, I'm filling them out illegally.
Numbers don't lie.
numbers don't lie.
There was video You could see the video.
There was a video out and about that he has the ballots in his car.
Right.
And talking about the only way you can win is with money.
I was looking at them and they were not filled.
They were blank.
Money is the key in this world.
If you ain't got money, you should not be here, period.
We reported what he said.
And Facebook took down the video because of this New York Times article.
If people want to get to these investigations and review these clips and make these decisions, where do they go on the internet?
How can they become part of the project?
Well, they can go to our website, but Facebook took that video down.
And to your answer, you know, try to answer your question from earlier.
You said, what's the solution?
Again, you and I have different roles.
My solution, and I believe this is the solution, Is if the story is strong enough, it will override the censorship.
You have to get the story that's so good, like impossible to ignore.
I mean, there would be some folks that would disagree and say that Hunter Biden laptop story was a pretty big story.
And the way that you saw these institutions that you're always fighting against come together to suppress that story was powerful.
I think they failed to a degree to suppress it.
And I think people are waking up.
I'm very optimistic, which some people don't like.
They want me to be cynical, and I'm not, and I believe that...
It's the Irishman in you.
Perhaps.
But I totally...
Nobody knows a pessimistic leprechaun.
Nobody knows.
That's something I've never heard in my life.
I believe that you're right.
They censored that story.
But in doing so, I think they woke people up.
There was a significant moment for me last night, James.
I was at the Project Veritas experience and I got to meet the journalist who did the Charlie Chester interviews.
And who, in many ways, vindicated what I was telling people, that CNN was trying to propagandize my life because I'm an effective congressman.
And I always dreamed that I might be able to meet this person and express my gratitude to them.
And the fact that the Project Veritas event here in Miami gave me the opportunity to do that and to share How grateful I was that someone showed that courage when you are in the barrel and you feel like everything's against you and you just want to get some elements of truth out.
For people to be willing to do that and step forward, it really is something.
And the fact that you provide this sense of relief that people feel when they're a part of your mission, They don't feel burdened by the mission at Project Veritas.
They feel very relieved by it.
I wanted to thank you just from the bottom of my heart for giving people that platform, for inspiring that courage in folks doing that.
And I am hopeful that there will be more Project Veritas-styled entities.
I'm sure you love cornering the market, but I worry that the fact that your organization is the only organization in America that does what you do It brings a certain frailty to it.
And that's what I fear most is that something could happen to Project Veritas and then there would almost be no way to get corruption out.
There would be no platform for whistleblowers.
And so I just wonder, what do you fear most as you wake up every day with the burden of managing this organization, inspiring these whistleblowers, being the caretakers of their stories?
What worries you?
Well, good question.
I don't think what worries me is what worries everyone else.
I mean, people ask these questions like, do you fear for your life and this sort of thing?
You should.
I guess the question presupposes that one is afraid to begin with.
And I think it's the fear that is dangerous.
Like FDR said, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
Well, I think being a leader is hard.
Veritas has like 70 employees now and quite a budget that's given to all these, you know, by these generous people, thousands and thousands of people.
Just leadership.
It's hard being a leader.
It's hard commanding respect from being in the office and running a company.
I've had to learn how to be a CEO. I've had to learn how to be an organizational entrepreneur.
That's probably the hardest thing about what I do, not so much the external battles.
I also think it's how you respond to things.
The FBI raid was traumatizing.
I was incarcerated briefly.
Ten years ago.
But you went right on TV? A lot of folks wouldn't have done that.
Okay, there was a moment there.
Spencer Meads and Eric Cochran, that's the Pinterest guy who is our director of Whistleblonde, former colleague of mine, they raided his home and then they knocked on my door two days later.
And of course, the moment they knocked on my door, pounded on my door.
I knew at that moment it was the feds because they had done it to my colleagues.
And there was about two days where I was kind of, I was scared.
And I'll say it, I was definitely scared.
But I got through that.
So you do experience fear.
It's not that I'm completely unafraid, but you try not to let it affect your decision-making and you make rational decisions.
After they raided my colleagues, I had to make an extraordinary decision that most people would not or could not make.
I went public.
Remember that video?
I filmed a video.
That was the day before my raid.
The magistrate judge had signed the search warrant prior to be making the statement, so it wasn't my statement that made them raid me.
But I said, I need the world to know what is happening right now.
Late last year, we were approached by tipsters claiming they had a copy of Ashley Biden's diary.
We had never met or heard of the tipsters.
The tipsters indicated the diary had been abandoned in a room in which Ms. Biden stayed at the time, and in which the tipsters stayed in temporarily after Ms. Biden departed the room.
The tipsters indicated that the diary included explosive allegations against then-candidate Joe Biden.
At the end of the day, we made the ethical decision that because, in part, we could not determine if the diary was real, if the diary in fact belonged to Ashley Biden, or if the contents of the diary occurred, we could not publish the diary in any part thereof.
Now, Ms. Biden's father's Department of Justice, specifically the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, appears to be investigating the situation, claiming the diary was stolen.
This federal investigation smacks of politics.
Project Veritas never threatened or engaged in any investigation.
Illegal conduct.
Should the Southern District of New York try to take away our First Amendment rights and uncover and publish newsworthy stories without government intimidation, be assured Project Veritas will not back down.
Nothing stops at Project Veritas.
In other words, being honest and transparent is going to protect me.
And that's really the premise, right?
Publicity is going to protect us.
So for two days I was scared.
What scares me?
I think the thing that, you know, the thing that I hope I'm concerned about is I hope good people inside these horrible institutions do the right thing.
I hope there's one person at the Department of Justice out of 120,000 people that have the stones to come forward.
That may be the next entity that we learn about.
That's right.
Well, the always foreshadowing, the bold, the fearless James O'Keefe, thanks for what you do for really just the state of the First Amendment and for all these great folks that make sure we get the truth out.
Thank you.
Thanks for joining us for Firebrand.
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