American Pravda

by James O'Keefe

  Two of my friends posed as telephone repairmen. They were supposed to get the office workers talking about the telephones. As a casual office visitor, I was to record the conversation. That was the sum of it, but we had not prepared nearly as well as we should have. When our sting fell apart, the Feds fell upon us outside the building as if we were an ISIS cell.

  Throughout the day, they moved us from cage to cage in that same building. At day’s end, they shackled us and sent us by bus to the St. Bernard’s Parish jail. There I got to wear my first and hopefully last orange jumpsuit, perfect for the photo op that would follow the next morning. The media still trot out that photo when it suits their purposes.

  Eventually we were charged with a misdemeanor—18 USC § 1036, “Entry by false pretenses to any real property, vessel, or aircraft of the United States or secure area of any airport or seaport.” Although we showed our real driver’s licenses upon entering the federal building, prosecutors insisted I had committed a crime by telling the Landrieu staffers I was waiting for someone when I really wasn’t. (As a matter of fact, I was waiting for my undercover reporter to arrive, so even on that basis there wasn’t a “false pretense.”) This was pure petty political retaliation. The New Orleans Times-Picayune would admit “we were off a little bit” in its characterization of the charges against us but turning a silly misdemeanor into Watergate is more than a “little bit.”32

  In reality, we had offended the deep state, New Orleans branch. Our attorneys advised us not to contest the federal judiciary in New Orleans. It was a losing cause. Their operatives had already confiscated the exculpatory video I shot and had no intention of surrendering it.

  “We don’t try cases in the press,” US Attorney Jan Mann said at the time about my case. But while she was spinning, her colleague Sal Perricone was anonymously blogging on a Times-Picayune website: “Sure [O’Keefe] should be punished. Throw the book at them.” Both Mann and Perricone later resigned under pressure after similar mischief was exposed in the “Danziger Bridge” case, which is now taught to US attorneys in ethics classes. In that case, convictions against several police officers were vacated in September 2013 as a result of “grotesque prosecutorial misconduct.” The prosecutors had been posting anonymous online comments defaming the accused officers.33 Had the Danziger case been made public before I pleaded guilty, my case would have been thrown out. In December 2014, we filed a bar complaint against prosecutors, Jim Letten, Jan Mann, Jim Mann, and Sal Perricone, all of whom resigned. Although there was no formal response to our complaints, they became part of the file against the attorneys.

  After all was said and done, the federal court document signed by the US attorney stated unequivocally that there was no evidence or intent to commit any felony. Our goal, the court conceded, was “to orchestrate a conversation about phone calls to the Senator’s staff and capture the conversation on video, not to actually tamper with the phone system, or to commit any other felony.”34

  ”O’Keefe was sued for ‘invasion of privacy.’”

  Still another fact that appears regularly in articles about Project Veritas is that we were once sued for invasion of privacy and settled the case for $100,000. The suit was brought by an individual recorded in one of the California ACORN videos, Juan Carlos Vera. This lawsuit, by the way, relied on unconstitutional two-party consent laws that we are currently fighting in states such as Massachusetts. We settled the suit for $100,000 because it was a far cheaper option than fighting Vera in a California court. The actual court document affirms that the settlement “is in no way representative of any actual or implied admissions of liability regarding the recorded conversations among Vera, O’Keefe and Giles . . . but is executed solely to avoid costs and risks of potential litigation.”35

  If a $100,000 payout brands us as rogue journalists, then what does that say about operations such as ABC News, which recently settled a defamation lawsuit for $1.9 billion with Beef Products Inc.,36 or NBC News, which famously settled for umpteen millions with General Motors after the faked staging of a fiery test crash?37 Just in the year 2017, media companies have been attracting lawsuits left and right. The New York Times was sued for defamation by former Alaska governor Sarah Palin for reporting that she was linked to an Arizona mass shooting in 2011. The case was dismissed only because Palin could not prove the acknowledged error by the Times was malicious.38 In another case, John Oliver and HBO are being sued by coal company Murray Energy for “false and malicious” coverage.39 Murray Energy also filed a lawsuit this year against the New York Times for libel. But major news companies get to brush these lawsuits aside and are never described, for example, as “the New York Times, which has been sued for defamation.”

  In September 2017, an appeals court sided with University of Virginia fraternity brothers against Rolling Stone magazine in the “ ‘Jackie’ Rape Dispute.”40 With no video evidence and only a single source, Rolling Stone published a defamatory piece alleging that “Jackie” was gang raped during a frat initiation. Although Rolling Stone eventually retracted this horrible story, the damage had been done. Unlike with Project Veritas, however, this incident will be considered an aberration, not the norm. That it could even run such a story with so little homework confirms the suspicions of the public that much of the news even from established journals is fake.

  ”Their work degrades the ‘public’ discourse.”

  Still another routine criticism of the work of Project Veritas is that it somehow coarsens the national conversation. In the words of Yael Bromberg, an attorney representing Democracy Partners and Robert Creamer in a lawsuit against me, our videos “degrade public discourse during a time of heightened importance, which is when the public is most in tuned into politics.”41 This of course, is not an argument. It’s a worthless characterization made by somebody who doesn’t like the effects of our work. The thing about “public discourse” is that it’s public. The people ought to decide what’s worth discussing, not some litigator looking for a contingency fee. What degrades “public discourse” is trying to silence discussions before they can even begin.

  In another ongoing dispute, the League of Conservation Voters is asking the California attorney general to initiate a legal action against us, specifically asking for my criminal prosecution. Its attorneys allege that three people who might be associated with Project Veritas may have used a hidden camera to record them. In tune with deep state rhetoric, the letter the League sent to the state attorney general lobbying for my criminal prosecution claimed “the actions of [Project Veritas does] nothing to further legitimate political discourse.”42 Someone obviously likes the term “discourse.”

  In the absence of evidence, the media make stuff up

  If the half-truths, endlessly repeated, were not annoying enough, the major media complement them with flat-out falsehoods. In that these journalists at least feign objectivity, when pressured they will often “correct” what they have reported. This happens so often, in fact, that we have a dedicated “Wall of Shame” at the Project Veritas office filled with their retractions.

  Our first major sting also netted our first major retraction. Embarrassed by our ACORN revelations, the media retaliated with the most lethal weapon in their arsenal—race. According to the Washington Post, we “targeted ACORN for the same reasons that the political right does.” Specifically, the Post decided that I planned to undermine ACORN’s “massive voter registration drives that turn out poor African Americans and Latinos against Republicans.”43 Without a shred of evidence, the Associated Press piled on, attributing thoughts to me that had never crossed my mind. “James O’Keefe, one of the two filmmakers, said he went after ACORN because it registers minorities likely to vote against Republicans.”44

  I had no major media backers, no friends in Washington, no resources beyond my overextended credit cards, and now the AP and the Washington Post were trashing me as a racist smear artist on America’s front pa
ges. Both the Post and the AP issued retractions, but they were halfhearted and went largely unread. “Th[e] article about the community organizing group ACORN incorrectly said that a conservative journalist targeted the organization for hidden-camera videos partly because its voter-registration drives bring Latinos and African Americans to the polls,” said the Post. “Although ACORN registers people mostly from those groups, the maker of the videos, James E. O’Keefe, did not specifically [sic] mention them.”45 For its part, the AP blamed the Post.

  Embarrassed by our ACORN sting, our journalist friends howled for revenge after our arrest in New Orleans. As soon as we had been arraigned, they were calling the affair the “Louisiana Watergate” or, given our age, “Watergate Jr.” The New York Times put us on the front page, “4 Arrested in Phone Tampering at Landrieu Office.”46 Our guys did not even have tools with them, let alone know how to tamper with phones. The Washington Post thought our arrest worthy of its front page. “ACORN Foe Charged in Alleged Plot to Wiretap Landrieu,” screamed the headline.47

  A day later the Post’s Carol Leonnig was forced to correct her headline story, but she did so on page four. Wiretapping? What wiretapping? Now, Leonnig was reporting, “O’Keefe, 25, waited inside the office and used his cellphone to record his two colleagues saying that the senator’s phone was not receiving calls.”48 That was our Watergate. But again, who reads corrections?

  There is no love from the establishment for those of us without credentials, those of us who approach journalism as an ethical activity. The deep state–media complex does not trust citizen journalists. Indeed, those who dwell within that complex cannot afford to trust us. It is not just their jobs they are worried about. It is their power—their power over the flow of money to them, their friends, and their causes; their power over the elected and the appointed; their power over you and me. As a consequence, its agents actively target, harass, and, if need be, use police power and the courts to silence us. If this talk of harassment sounds like a conspiracy theory, the following chapters will convince you that it is not. Harassment is one very real occupational hazard.

  Crossing Borders

  In 2014, illegal immigration was not a problem, at least not officially. “The border is secure,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told reporters in the summer of that year.1 Reid cited a Democratic senator from New Mexico who assured his colleagues “without any equivocation” that the border was “secure.” In the minds of statists and their media allies, the border would stay secure for the next two years. It had to. Democratic victory in 2016 hinged on preserving this illusion.

  Hillary Clinton picked up where Reid left off. “I think we’ve done a really good job securing the border,” she said on the campaign trail in 2016. “The immigration from Mexico has dropped considerably. It’s just not happening anymore.”2 Hudspeth county sheriff Arvin West knew better. The cartels knew better, and by this time I did too. I knew something else as well. There was a price to pay for proving Reid and Clinton and the media not just wrong, but preposterously wrong.

  ***

  Texas border, August 2014

  Sheriff West and his deputies in their F–150s escorted me to a godforsaken spot sixty miles southeast of El Paso. In his Texas bowl hat and deeply lived-in jeans, the man seemed to have stepped right out of Central Casting. Never less than poker-faced, the good sheriff said no more than he had to, and when he did speak it was to the point.

  “You’re an idiot,” West said to me casually in his monotone Tex-Mex drawl as I scanned the border country through a pair of binoculars.

  “Why’s that?” I answered, not knowing which of a dozen likely responses I might provoke.

  “For doing this,” he said. The “this” in question was crossing the Rio Grande dressed as Osama bin Laden. “The US government is going to come after you big time.” Soon enough, customs agents in airports across North America would prove that the sheriff understood the ways of government much better than I did.

  A dry, wry sense of humor made West’s Sisyphean border work bearable. When I asked him, for instance, whether the border at this spot was secure, he looked at the nearby fence and answered, “If you think four strands of barbed wire is securing the border, it is secure.”3 For whatever reason, irony seems to thrive in two states like no others: his Texas and my New Jersey. Don’t ask me why.

  The sheriff did not know my background, but I sensed that somewhere in his heart he sympathized with what I wanted to accomplish. He had just complained that no journalist cared about his ninety-eight-mile stretch of the border, that none ever dared to air the story he desperately wanted to tell. This frustrated him, as he was the kind of sheriff who said his piece when he had a mind to. His was the power of the hardened lawman. Even the federal border patrol agents feared him. In West Texas the local sheriff could arrest these federal agents, and they knew West wouldn’t hesitate if he had to. He did not think twice about assisting me and asked no one’s permission to do it.

  As tough as he was, West had a healthy fear of the border country. The positioning of his deputy sheriff said as much. Lean and eagle-eyed, the man stood on top of the truck cab, his denim shirt blowing in the wind, a cigarette dangling from his lip. He held binoculars in his left hand and an AR-15 in his right. He was a guy I wouldn’t want to mess with.

  West did not carry a rifle. He relied on a .45 revolver strapped to a brown waist belt sheltered by his ample belly. He caught me looking at it—the gun that is, not the belly.

  “You know why I carry a .45-caliber handgun?” he asked. I shrugged. He winked, “Because they don’t make anything bigger.” Of course.

  With me was Joe Halderman, an unfiltered, Type A, Emmy Award–winning producer who came to Project Veritas by way of CBS News. Joe chain-smoked Marlboros that day and paced anxiously between me and the sheriff. Joe had been in spots rougher than this during his career—Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Somalia, and Bosnia, among others. The danger did not faze him. What did faze him was his fear of not getting the story he wanted in the face of that danger.

  While Joe surveyed the scene and fidgeted with his black frame glasses, West took a phone call. He looked concerned. Watching him, we all fell silent.

  “He did what?” said West. “Okay, yeah, you got it,” he whispered into his cell phone and then turned to me. “If you want to do this you better hurry.” That was the sheriff’s way of saying, “If you don’t do this in the next thirty seconds, you just might get your fool head shot off.”

  Joe understood exactly what West meant. He pointed at Jerry, our cameraman, and said, “Camera, speed.” I grabbed my Osama bin Laden gear and waded thirty or so feet across the Rio Grande into Mexico. I wasted no time. I slipped into my sleeveless Afghani beige dress and turban, donned an Osama mask, and waded back across the Rio Grande, camera rolling. If the cartels were watching us, the Border Patrol was surely not. There was no agent in sight. I literally could have been Osama bin Laden, and no one would have seen me, let alone stopped me.

  This was the easy part. Still dressed as Osama, my sneakers squishy with mud, I set out to duplicate the walk of countless illegal crossers, some relatively harmless, some not harmless at all. I doubt West Texas weather is ever pleasant, especially in August, but I lucked out that day. It was cloudy and only ninety degrees. With my GoPro camera on a stick, I trekked through the desert and saw not a soul. I did see two white Border Patrol vehicles, but they were speeding away from me, not toward me. This all felt unreal, almost comical.

  When I reached I-10 six miles away, muddied and dehydrated, I imagined how an illegal immigrant must have felt upon reaching that same spot. That highway could take him anywhere. If he were a terrorist, someone would likely be there in a minute to pick him up. As I stood in this otherwise desolate spot, hard by the highway, I thought about my other colleagues in the media. I wanted redemption, but I knew they would not grant it. The next wee
k we would release a blockbuster video. We would save and store the footage in multiple locations. I had learned the hard way four years earlier, after a New Orleans magistrate ordered our footage destroyed.4 This time, however, I did not get caught in the act. I had just turned thirty and had gleaned a little wisdom along the way.

  With the tape secured and the video produced, we would show Harry Reid for the reflexive liar he was. We would embarrass the White House. We would highlight a problem that desperately cried out for a solution. More than a million people would watch our video on YouTube alone. While the major media were busy preserving statist illusions, we were busy shattering them.

  ***

  New York, December 2014

  US Customs and Border Protection paid more attention to our work than the media had. Unfortunately, it was the wrong kind of attention. On December 3, 2014, I flew into JFK Airport in New York from overseas. Upon disembarking, I casually followed the crowd to the passport control area and inserted my passport into the device that verifies it. Out of the device came a white document with my picture on it. To my surprise, there was an “X” straight through all my information.

  A Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent gestured in my direction and told me to follow him. We walked for what seemed like a quarter mile through the airport. Upon reaching our destination, he took my passport and the document with the X, escorted me into a small room, and told me to sit. He then put my passport in a desk drawer and walked away. I attempted to make a phone call, but another CBP agent across the room shouted, “No phones allowed in here.”5 I tried to explain that I needed to alert my travel mate to my detention. He wasn’t hearing it. “I said put the phone away,” he snapped. “Do not make me ask you again.”