Digital Social Hour - Hall of Shame List, Exposing Fortune 500's and Getting Phone Tapped | James O' Keefe DSH #278

Episode Date: February 11, 2024

James O' Keefe comes on the show to talk about why he does what he does, his recent investigations and how he reacted to being on the Hall of Shame list. APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://forms.gle/qXvENTeurx7Xn8Ci9 BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [e-mail] SPONSORS: Opus Pro: https://www.opus.pro/?via=DSH Deposyt Payment Processing: https://www.deposyt.com/seankelly LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

And he was discriminating against Asians, said if you hire the wrong people, we'll dock your pay, we'll terminate you. And one of his subsidiary companies, Red Hat, the chairman of that company, which is owned by IBM, said they have terminated people if they don't follow along with these racial quotas. And our lawyers said that's a violation of the Civil Rights Act to use that kind of discrimination in the hiring process. Wherever you guys are watching this show, I would truly appreciate it if you follow or subscribe. It helps a lot with the algorithm. It helps us get bigger and better guests

and it helps us grow the team. Truly means a lot. Thank you guys for supporting. And here's the episode. Ladies and gentlemen, we are back. We're here with James O'Keefe today to expose some companies, aren't we? That's right.

Yeah. So the latest one was IBM, I believe. You bet. What happened there? Well, there's a CEO of IBM, Arvind Krishna, was on an all-staff call. And one of the higher-ups in IBM provided that recording to me. And he was discriminating against Asians, said if you hire the wrong people, we'll your pay will will terminate you and his one of his subsidiary companies red hat the chairman of that company which is owned by i mean so they have

terminated people if they don't follow along with these racial quotas and our lawyers said that's a violation of the civil rights act to use that kind of discriminant discrimination the hiring process right that's interesting because there are certain are there laws that make it required to hire certain races and genders? Well, there are laws that prohibit discriminating on the basis of race and gender. And then Title VII and also this recent Harvard Supreme Court case, which makes it even more problematic.

And as I was coming into your podcast, I was just recording one on a pharmaceutical company called Sanify, same sort of thing. The vice president was on a Zoom meeting called santa fi same sort of thing the vice president was was was on a a zoom meeting with it with her leadership yeah and she was saying this you you must hire these many people of color etc so it's a it's problematic and the ceo of ibm responded uh on another all emergency all staff call brought me up and said now don't now don't give this any

reaction he was telling that to the whole company and that was leaked to me and i published it All staff call brought me up and said, now don't, now don't give this any reaction. He was telling that to the whole company and that was leaked to me and I published it. You think he would have found out who leaked it the first time before having another call? You know, I've been doing this for 20 years. I'm 39. I started when I was 19 and I've never seen this sort of explosion of whistleblowing before. Wow. One or two people usually, and they'll fire the person.

That's why, but, but if there's a hundred people leaking and talking and providing information, there's really not much the leadership can do. That's true. So what do you think caused the spike in whistleblowing recently? It's a great, that's a great question.

Um, I think a couple of factors, uh, people are generally, they're, they're more passionate, I think about doing the right thing and following their conscience than they've ever been. Politics has become more important in society. There's more at stake and, um, there just seems to be something happening. I mean,

the world's on fire. People are very divided. Uh, people place a lot of emphasis on, on their conscience more than they ever seem to have before. And maybe people are overcoming their fear as well. Yeah. I think maybe social media is amplified, um, amplified it a bit. People are more open to speak about it if they see more people exposing things as well. I think so. I think that's, that's another variable. Yeah. Um, and you also exposed BlackRock, right? We did a story on BlackRock that was in Juneune uh that was a a recruiter at black rock saying that they buy the wallets of politicians and they don't want people to know about their their

influence and this is a guy that was uh met an undercover reporter on bumble or tinder or hand that's where we meet a lot of the people and they're they're loose-lipped and they talk over lunch or dinner and they share spill their secrets wow so you got undercover people on bumble yes that is smart because they would never expect to find an undercover person there correct it's sometimes the subject reaches out to our person as opposed to us trying to like kind of target someone we don't we don't really set out to find a particular person oh got it you know we kind of cast a wide net and the stories tend to find us. Yeah.

So are there any large companies just doing things by the books or is there corruption at every single one of them? I think there's, you know, Lincoln Stevens was a legendary muckraker 110 years ago. He said, you can shoot me out of a gun and wherever I land, there's a story.

Or you could throw me at a dartboard and wherever I land, there's going to be a story. It's just human nature. And I think people say and do things that they're not willing to publicly disclose. There are demons inside of all of us. Perhaps there are skeletons in everyone's closet. There has to be a certain threshold where the public has a right to know it. But there usually is always a story somewhere.

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and institutions has become very greedy. And maybe it was that way, all of it. We just never knew. Could be, right? But nowadays, there's a concerted effort to with what we do, exposing people. I think people are afraid of getting caught.

Yeah. But there's arrogance. There's a sort of conceit. There's narcissism or nihilism. And people keep doing the dirty deeds. That's true. So you haven't seen a slowdown at all since you started 20 years ago? No, it's been actually the last couple, the last two weeks, there's been an exponential uptick.

The IBM thing was a first for me because I've never seen so many insiders. I mean, the X, I think Elon Musk, another variable was the purchase of X. I think X is the greatest thing to happen to the first amendment or free speech in history of the United States. That's crazy. And I think X is going to eat Instagram for breakfast in terms of how much engagement that you get. You can just put a video on X, like your investigative report, put it right on X and bam, it blows up as long as you've got the goods. Yeah. So that IBM, I was getting DMS, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Like, I mean, 190 DMS from IBM employees just DMing me on X.

Insane. I mean, I've never seen that before. Yeah. And X won't, is the one platform where you can't get shadow banned. That's what they say. I, I don't know how it works. I was banned on Twitter in 2021 what'd you get banned for um there was an incident where we filmed outside of a um facebook executive's house in

palo alto and we failed to blur the number on the lamp post outside of his house so a d-docs or whatever yeah but first of all all, CNN ambushed some grandmother outside of her trailer home and didn't blur the number on the house. There's definitely a double standard. Right, right. Dang. Yeah, that's unfortunate because that wasn't

your intention, but it just so happened to be there. Yeah, so we were very careful about blurring, over blurring every license plate, every. Oh, really? So when you film now, You have to blur car license plates There's definitely a double standard We go above and beyond What typical news organizations do

They can get away with doxing people Targeting people But that's the reason they gave There was another thing where they Said I was creating a fake Twitter account Because one of my undercover people Was using a Twitter account And says well you're creating a fake Twitter account because one of my undercover people was using a Twitter account. And says, well, you're creating a fake Twitter account.

But that wasn't actually true. So I sued Twitter for defamation. Oh, wow. Tried to get around Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. That didn't work. They dismissed the lawsuit. And then in December of last year, 2022, Elon Musk reinstated my account. Have you had any communication with him he's

just yesterday he's tweeted about um the the spaces that i did on the story i did i'm in here in las vegas i came from phoenix and um i was reporting on the uh the buses bringing migrants into the airport the black limousines. So I walked up to the limousine driver and said, hey, who do you work for? Migrants are getting off the bus. And we did spaces on that. And some of the airline pilots were whistleblowing and went on spaces last night with me

and concealed their voice. Now X has a feature where you can distort your voice on space. Oh, wow. So Elon, I was talking to Elon on Twitter, but I've, I've never met him face to face, but, but on. Yeah.

But on, I guess. What a cool feature, man. Yeah. Because now people will really speak up. Correct. Yeah. What caused you to be this passionate 20 years ago? Was there a specific incident?

Yeah, I was watching local news and as a high school student and I was pretty outraged at what I view. This is in the late 90s early 2000s um just the lack of the media's ability to accurately and properly report the news something inside of me was um felt contempt towards the way the media operates so i started reading newspapers every day or the new york every day. And I'm from New Jersey. So same.

I went to Rutgers. I saw you did as well. Yeah. Uh, star ledger. Classic. I never read it, but now this is 2003.

So they gave the USA today star ledger in New York times. And I would sit in the dining hall and I would just read from, you know, 9am to noon. I would just read the paper back to back, just sort of obsessed with the news. And, and I became quite passionate about these issues.

And, uh, I eventually started my own little monthly magazine at Rutgers called the Centurion in October, 2004. That's interesting. So you knew back then, cause I feel like people really started waking up when Trump got elected, but you were on this 20 years earlier. Yeah, yeah. And a kind of gonzo, kind of gonzo muckraking video. I guess the best way I've heard it described is like Borat meets 60 Minutes.

And there was this group called the Yes Men. I don't know if you've ever heard of them, but they were an ag an agit prop punk group where they would you know um it's like borat they would go to oil conferences and they would they would um uh dress up as in these large survival ball suits and they would say the world's going to be global warming is going to kill us all and they would try to put people in these awkward situations and expose people so that was one of the inspirations. And this was 2004. Facebook had not yet even barely started. YouTube didn't exist. Twitter didn't exist.

The iPhone didn't exist. It's certainly a different world now. And I had a magazine where I did Adobe photo InDesign and I laid it all out every month and just handed them out on campus. Nice. That's cool, man. What a start.

Grassroots. And how are you able to expose these companies without opening yourself up legally to getting sued or something like that? Well, oftentimes I do. I've been sued 30 times. Damn. I've been sued by the company I founded, which

ousted me. That's another story here we could discuss. But oftentimes the companies don't want to sue because by giving a reaction, they're bringing more attention to like Google. We did a whistleblower store in Google four years ago and they didn't sue. They, they often peacock or, uh, threatened to

sue, but I think they're, they're, they're a little bit, uh, in danger of feeding the flames. Cause in a discovery stuff's going to come up and that could be usually you don't want to go that far if you're barreling towards discovery then you're going towards a jury trial but i've i've gone the distance in in court i've gone to jury verdict twice in three years which companies were those against the first case was involving um a woman named shirley teeter who sued me for defamation and she was uh alleged to have bird dogged at trump rallies basically coming up she was a a woman in a democratic party woman in

north carolina and she would get trump people to sort of punch back at her so the idea was that was she instigating this or not right so i reported on that and she sued me for defamation and it went all the way to a jury trial in north carolina federal court took two years i don't settle these cases and then right before the jury issued the verdict the judge threw it out in what's called a directed verdict which is very rare and the judge said this is ridiculous if you sued 60 minutes for what you're assuming james o'keefe where people would laugh at you sometimes you have to take it all the way to the end for for people to kind of see yeah how absurd it is and it's very expensive

and the second case was involving um a group called democracy partners in washington dc went undercover as volunteers inside this group. And they, they sued for breach of fiduciary duty and trespass arguing that I have a duty to the company because I was a volunteer. Now we argue, we never signed any documents, no non-disclosure agreements. So that too went to jury verdict and we, and It was a civil case, not criminal. Got it. In DC. And that's currently being appealed. Got it.

Wow. Now, how stressful is this? Like dealing with this many legal battles? You said 30 battles since you started. I think it's most stressful managing the lawyers. Dealing with lawyers is not easy. Yeah. And the cost must be insane.

It's just beyond. I mean, it's very. Are you interested in coming on the Digital Social Hour podcast as a guest? We'll click the application link below in the description of this video. We are always looking for cool stories, cool entrepreneurs to talk to about business and life. Click the application link below. And here's the episode, guys. Philanthropic.

You really can't be greedy doing this because, you know, profitable thing would be not to not do it at all right and and you have to figure out how to manage the lawyers which is something i still haven't figured out exactly how to do yeah so you see it as like just the price you pay to be able to expose it's a price and i don't know if the commercial imperative or making money is compatible with investigative work it's very expensive it takes a toll on you psychologically, emotionally, financially, and it, which is its own type of hell because, you know, usually these sorts of traumatic things last minutes, but this lasts years. Yeah. And if you don't have the right partner or the right wife or the right situation, you know, they'll put pressure on people around

you. So you have to make sure you surround yourself with good people. Wow. I don't think many people would want your job, man. Well, it depends upon what your values are and what your passions are. And if you might look at it from the position of I'm passionate about what I do and not focused on the fear and the other secondary effects of it. Yeah. I want to talk about cancel culture, which you seem to have just gone through when I was researching you, getting ousted from your own

company and stuff. So what exactly happened there? I don't exactly quite yet know. I don't think the story has fully come out and perhaps it may, but I mean, I, I, uh, I have my board of directors, a nonprofit organization and 501c3, you know what this 501c3 is? Charity, right?

It's a charitable group. Um, you have to have a board and and we did this story on pfizer i don't know if you saw that in in uh in january february it was the it was the biggest most watched video i ever did and and then right after that story there was kind of an emergency and and they they had a board meeting on february 6th and a six hour long meeting and they had a bunch of what, what a lot of people felt were bizarre grievances against me. Like I stole this woman's sandwich or I took black limo, black cars instead of Uber X. And, um, there's nothing illegal about taking a black car. One would argue that perhaps I should be having a driver who's not a random driver um so we had to hire

a driver for me and these sorts of things and they brought these things up and and then they they had a they had a vote and they indefinitely suspended me without unanimous um the minutes i made public in my departure video i believe it was one board member who who voted against it there were there was a c3 and a c4 5-1 c4 and the first in the meeting they combined the two boards so now there was five people and then one of them voted against it so that's a real guy right there yeah and and he actually died uh oh whoa steve alembic he passed away um that's a shame two months ago he committed what yeah okay that seems i mean i gotta look into that more but that seems weird to me it's a whole yeah so anyway that was a very difficult thing but i learned a lot and and uh sometimes

as crazy as sounds um what happened to me there i think things happen for a reason and um i started a new company called OMG. It's, it's going very well right now. And I've got a really solid core team and I learned a lot about human nature and, and, you know, sometimes the enemy is not, not out external. It's, it's, uh.

Right next to you. It's right next to you. And that's crazy. Cause sometimes it's inside you. It's the people you surround yourself with. And you started that company. That was your baby. Yeah. I started at my It's the people you surround yourself with. And you started that company. That was your baby. Yeah, I started at my dad's attic when I was 24.

Yeah. With nothing but a crappy laptop and a Yeti microphone and a credit card. And the fact that they're able to kick you out of your own company, having a Steve Jobs too, is just crazy to me. Yeah, but we know how that story ended up. I mean, I think it took him how many years? Five, 10 years? A while, yeah. Get back there.

He started Next. And then he sold Next to Apple. So it's very painful. And that saying, what doesn't **** you makes you stronger, you're familiar with it, because Nietzsche or whoever. Well, people have to remember the first part of that saying, what does not **** you. So you have to survive it.

And if you do survive it, it makes you incredibly stronger. I'm not sure that many people can survive that type of pain because it feels like your newborn baby is stabbing you in the back. 20 years. But I think it's also human nature. I think it's also people. It's much more common than you would think. People get envious.

People get greedy. People, it's like that Mike Tyson quote, I can't remember, but it's like people will stab you in the back the moment they can and if you're strong enough to get back up usually you're stronger than the guy that stabbed you in the back mike tyson says it much more eloquently there but i get it though but uh adrenaline kicks in and you're ready to fight but if you have what it takes to found a company and create something out of nothing and create jobs and and raise capital and and have vision if you if you can do that once you can do it again as long as you don't get disheartened yeah it's really the hard part is getting disheartened discouraged

and it seems like it all was kind of coordinated and at once like forbes put you on the hall of shame list around that time right and it just seemed like everything was coming at once. Yeah. That, that, that's, um, you know, that,

that, that Forbes thing, it's like, that didn't mean I've been defamed so many times, but you, um, you have to learn to be hated in this business. I think that was something I learned.

That was something I learned 10 years ago, 15 years ago, which is that psychologically being disliked is a very difficult thing for people. And that was one of my first lessons, which is Wikipedia, lying about you. There's nothing you can do about it. On your own page, lie about you. Oh, it's horrible.

It's like right now, it's Dr. Tapes and all this sort of thing. They highlight no successes and only perceived failures. That's crazy. And Wikipedia is user controlled, right? Like users can edit it. I believe so. So that's just someone probably hating on you or something. Yeah, but it's be lying to say it's not painful,

but you have to get used to being hated. Yeah. And you have to be comfortable with being hated. I think things are changing though. I think there's a populist movement in this country, independent media. I mean, you're doing independent media right now. You're not a CNN person or a New York Times person.

I love independent media. It's harder to compromise them, in my opinion. Yeah. And in my business, you can't have any strings attached either. You can't have anyone telling you what to do or what not to do. Yeah. And it's very liberating. The newspapers used to say 120 years ago, operate without fear or favor.

Without fear and without favoritism. But that's really the greatest challenge, isn't it? Yeah. How do you think traditional media can be fixed? Because from a business perspective, they're getting all these donations and the advertisers are funding their whole business. So that's kind of why they're being influenced, right? It could be fixed with the right people of character in leadership.

If you have men, there was a book by a guy named Clarence Jones who wrote a book. He was a reporter in Florida working for these corporate, you know, these, these late seventies,

early eighties. And so you have to have bosses with balls. You have to have leadership, men in leadership, men and women who, women who who have strength like even that movie spielberg made about katherine graham running the story on the on that was that was the pentagon papers or whatever it was yeah and she told her the guys on the board let's run it you have to be able to have testicular fortitude you have to be able to take the beating and stand up.

And I just don't think we have a lot of people like that. I think we used to have that. And frankly, in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, I think you had this phenomenon where people in media would invest money as a loss into investigative journalism. Really? Yeah, like it was a lost leader, meaning it was not profitable.

That particular vertical in the company did not generate the revenue, but they did it anyway as a kind of philanthropy in the company. I don't think you have that at all. I think media companies are, just read the news. They're all losing money and firing people

and laying people off. It's hard to find a business model for, for journalism at all. So you need, you need leaders with the willpower to be kind of philanthropic, take a beating because it's the right thing to do. Yeah. I like that point of view. It shouldn't be for the money. You're right. But it sadly, it, it, it is.

It is. I guess. Yeah. They feel like they have thousands of employees they got to take care of. Yeah. They want to be profitable. I see it from their point of view. That's part of the problem with becoming big is that now it becomes employing people and making sure everyone has a job.

And if your motivation is to make money, if the purpose of your existence is to generate a profit, then you're not going to do the sorts of things that jeopardize that. Yeah. And I don't, I think investigative work is, I haven't found a business model. I'm working on that, but I too, I run the company, my companies, it's a loss leader on the balance sheet. Sometimes you'll spend half a million dollars doing investigation. Wow. Yeah. That much?

Yes. And sometimes you spend $5 and you'll spend half a million dollars to investigation. Wow. Yeah. That much? Yes. And sometimes you spend $5 and you'll get something amazing. It's not linear, but you do what you have to do to get the story. Now, where does that half a million come from? Break that down for me. Well, it came philanthropically. Project Veritas was the 5-1-C-3 and people donated. No, I'm saying like when you're spending it on the investigation, is it for flights,

hotels? Well, let's say you have 50 employees or 70 employees, you have payroll costs, you have legal costs, which are one third of our budget. So as much as five to 7 million a year on lawyers, you have the cost of the overhead, the payroll, the legal, the the technology the training and your time as you grow the the value of your time becomes uh more expensive so if you're doing whatever how

many stories a couple dozen a year or a dozen or two dozen a year then divide the total number of stories about your budget by the total number of stories you get the cost per per investigation and how are you ensuring your your news company doesn't get compromised like the employees and everything you mean the new one yeah i think i learned a lot about human nature and i think i learned that i have to be more discerning with people because i've always i've always as a leader you try to empower people even bad people you try to bring the best out of bad people right so i would find i mean people citizens come to me and like i want to do this i want to do that and i don't know them from adam i don't know if they're good bad or evil good good person but if they want to do something that's important, I'll help them do it.

But maybe they should not be like my right-hand man, just because I'm, I'm empowering them or assisting them or, or, or training them doesn't mean they have to be as part of my core, right? Core, keep your core group real, real tight. And I think you have to find people around you who are not, not for sale. So let me put it to you this way. If someone was offered a $25 million bribe and all they had to do was hurt me, how many people would take that bet? A lot of money. Yeah. I just met you. I mean, face to face here in the last 20 minutes, I don't know you that well.

Um, and I don't, I don't assume to know whether you'd take that bet or not, but a lot of people would take that bet. And, and, and towards the end of my tenure, I kind of, I, my last organization, I kind of, I kind of said to myself, you know, we're getting, we're getting pretty big here and how strong are these people? Um, and you have to be fearless and moral and strong and you have to trust each other with your life. Yeah. It's almost like combat.

Um, so I would say that certainly when you burned, when you're burned so bad like that, you, you, you, you're learning a valuable lesson. I think I'll be stronger and wiser as a result of what I've been through. And you'll scale a lot more slowly on the hiring side, right?

I got, I got 200 resumes for each position. Damn. I mean, unbelievable. I mean, everyone wants a job. I don't know if you experience this in your business, but everybody wants a job these days. And it's like, my position is,

I'm not just going to give you it. You have to prove yourself. Right. It's like, I want to do undercover journalism. So you think I'm going to hire you and then see if you can do it? No, no, you have to go do it and then I'll hire you after you do it. Interesting. I I'm going to hire you and then see if you can do it? No, no. You have to go do it and then I'll hire you after you do it. I'm not going to hire you and then train you and you might fail.

Yeah. Here's a camera. Here's an instruction manual. Here's the O'Keefe Academy, OMG. You can buy it for a hundred bucks, 200 bucks. You got all the tools. Go do it. Yeah.

And I'll pay you 5,000 bucks or 8,000 bucks, depending on how the video performs And then I'll talk about whether I want to hire you or not I like that Because instead of offering a six figure salary from the jump Let me see what you can do first That's one of the ways that we're doing it now You recently interviewed Vivek right

Yes and he interviewed me First Wait I went to his Ohio headquarters And we did one or the other Nice what was your overall take on that Because with politicians it's hard to say First, wait, I went to his Ohio headquarters and we did one or the other. Nice. What was your overall take on that? Because with politicians, it's hard to say.

He's definitely an interesting one. I've got more people telling me, oh, do you trust him? Like everyone says, oh, what's his deal? Or they say, it reminds me of Obama. He's very smooth. I mean, he's very smart. I mean, I like a lot of what he says. I like what he says.

And I'm glad that he's saying a lot of what he says and and um i read his book woke inc and i think we had a great interview and we had some good chemistry just we're about the same age um i like a you know some of his experience on on wall street work for goldman sachs i talked about that so i i think you know it's hard i think people really want to know who, who is he inside? What's his motivation? That's what I was trying to ask him and ascertain. And, um, he's, he's very young. I'm very young too. So we have a lot in common and, uh, you can watch that interview and make up your own mind. Yeah. And his perspective is unique because he's coming from the corporation side of things, which you're exposing. and he has that experience on his belt yes yeah i think the world is is certainly changing inside

these companies like jp morgan banks ibm you saw it i think a lot of people are kind of waking up and they're and they're they're wanting to blow the whistle or or expose what's happening it's a phenomenon actually yeah it's crazy. I don't know if this has ever happened in history. Never. This level of exposure. Not where you can just DM someone on X. I mean, back in the day it was fax machines

and carrier pigeons and everything like that. But these days you could just send me a signal message from anywhere on the planet. Now, are you trusting signal in terms of encryption? I mean, there's only so much I can do. I don't know if I trust anything but God. I have to trust to a degree in order for me to operate. And I'm not dealing yet, not right now,

with national security secrets to the extent of a Julian Assange or Ed Snowden, at least not yet. I'm sure I'll get there and I'll have to cross that of a Julian Assange or Ed Snowden. At least not yet. I'm sure I'll get there and I'll have to cross that bridge. Very quickly, I think, too. I also think you have to be careful with that because, I mean, as a journalist, I have First Amendment rights and protections. Once you start getting into that stuff, that's when they start to indict you. Yeah.

And you have to be very careful what you say to the source. And they'll just accuse you of saying something. And with Julian assange with was it bradley manning they indicted him and i think i think his quote was telling bradley manning over whatever he was talking over some type of encrypted thing he goes well you know cure my curious eyes will never run dry also known as please keep sending me stuff and that was enough to indict him? Wow. I mean, as a journalist, if someone else is breaking the law, as long as I played no part in it, and I say, I'll take a look at whatever you send me,

I think the journalist has a First Amendment right to receive that information. Yeah, I think going up against the government is probably the toughest fail you can face. I've been arrested by the FBI in 2010 and raided by the FBI in 2021. Jeez. That is crazy.

Yeah. Why'd they raid you? Over the president's daughter's diary. President's daughter? Biden's? Biden's daughter, Ashley, had a diary and some tipsters tipped us off to it. We looked into it and we actually reached out to the Biden campaign for comment. And then the lawyer for the Biden sent that email to the Department of Justice, U.S. attorneys in New York, and said, basically, I'm trying to extort them.

I was asking for comment. So then they got a search warrant, a secret warrant in 2021 to get my emails, records, photos, secret. It's like what they do to terrorists. And then a year later they raided my home i just took my two phones complete insanity damn you must you probably had a lot of stuff on your phones too that's what i mean think about what you have on your phone and that's nothing criminal but personal things memories personal things bank accounts and then they can

leak that to the new York Times. Yeah. So it's very psychologically terrifying. Wow. I also saw on your Instagram, someone was tapping your phone or something. Oh, I mean, I don't have any direct evidence of that. It's just circumstantial. Yeah. It's certainly suspicious stuff happening.

I mean, at your level, you probably just assume you're being watched or something. Yeah, you have to. I call it the 12 jurors role. 12 jurors rule. You always have to assume there's someone watching. So never do anything that you'd be ashamed of doing. It's your private life, personal in your bedroom.

That's different. I'm just talking about in your business affairs, you know, in your, um, operating and doing an investigation, you can, you can't keep secrets in this business.

The only real secret you can actually legally keep is the identity of a source. The Supreme Court has protected that. And the Supreme Court has also protected the identity of a donor, a financial person, their First Amendment right to associate with you. Yeah. That's actually a case from 1954 uh naacp case because people were donating to that organization to protect african americans and the donors didn't want to be retaliated against yeah so that's the same uh right but other than those two things

your life has to be an open book yeah james i can't believe we're out of time already i just looked and we're at zero but where where do people find you, man? And what are you working on? O'KeefeMediaGroup.com. And I'm working on these whistleblowers in immigration and corporate America and in 2024 elections. Stay tuned. Thanks for coming on, man. Thank you.

Yeah. Thanks for watching, guys, as always. See you next time.