james o'keefe and your new book american muckraker you write that there's an indecently close personal and professional relationship between reporters and the people they are supposed to cover. is that a bad thing? parts yes. there has been tension between

access and autonomy. some people need to get close to their sources. some need to adversary late investigate their sources. these days in journalism, -- they have delivered on a platter what the sources in the government what the government wants them to see. they're acting as delivery people for the sources rather than being adversarial or skeptical. you don't want to be too adversarial because that can engender biases of their own but you have to strike the balance. there's no more balanced. the national security force in the new york times act as servicemen for the people they administration. >> i want to ask about the subtitle of your book rethinking journalism for the 21st century. how does that fit with being a

muckraker? >> the early in the mid 20th century, investigative reporting was you had the chicago sun-times doing these investigations where they are posing as bartenders. you had most famously upton sinclair wrote the jungle. he had an ideology. he was a valid socialist. there was a willingness to go there and speak aggressively toward the powers that be. you don't really see that anymore. people just sort of sit up there and opine and talk about what they think. none of these journalists on cable right big aggressive stories. most of the stories are broken into people like me. washington for example the washington post wrote a pulitzer -- won a pulitzer prize for investigating me not corruption in the government.

you need to have the spirit of investigative reporting and citizens need to do it. have a renaissance to go back to what was done decades ago. now it doesn't happen anymore. it goes back to what i talk about in the book which is economics. the commercial imperative which a lot of news organizations have slashed their budgets. abc news recently slashed their investigative bureau. it has become a commercial enterprise not a journalism one. that's why we are philanthropic nonprofit organization. nobody tells us what to do. >> what is the goal with project veritas? how do you pick your subjects? >> they find us. in the same way that any journalism -- journalists find their sources. in the same way of james snowden. that contractor found him.

much is the case of project veritas. this year and fbi agent found me after the fbi raided my home. that agent came to us with internal restricted documents from within the fbi computer systems where they were calling us news media which is very big deal because the case hinges on whether we are news media. they tend to find journalists they can trust. these days, most people don't trust media. we don't pick our subjects, our subject find us. >> how many times have you been sued? or jailed or indicted? >> we're sitting here in an exhibit hall and my attorneys are five steps away from a laughing. a couple dozen pieces of litigation over the last 10 years. we've never lost a case.

we don't lose because we are in the right and we don't give up. if you are in the right and you don't ever settle, you eventually win in a court of law. in some cases, we have to appeal. we end up going on offense. in the beginning of my career, people would sue me and there was the opportunity to settle cases and i said i'm not settling any of these cases. we found out in that discovery process of a lawsuit, i've been sued for all sorts of things, the people who sued me never wanted to be deposed themselves. they never wanted discovery into their own operations. we are fairly ethical at veritas. we don't break laws or do anything improper. the people over there are is ethical. they say if i sue james o'keefe

i will have to be deposed and they don't want that so they stopped suing us and now we sue them. >> there's a chapter in the book called deception. your question is interesting because it's a question of relative deception. either you deceive your subject that you're investigating to tell the truth or you don't deceive your subject and you tell untruths to your audience. you take your subject at face value you will be disseminating millions of people. there's an ethicist who argues in a thesis paper you have a moral imperative to deceive your subject if your mission is to tell the truth your audience. this is also written about called the journalist and the murderer that was written in the 90's. a legendary journalist wrote that a journalist always

deceives their subject. it's a confidence game you must play if your intention is to do investigative reporting. if your intention is to read off teleprompters and to tell the public what the two star general once you to know, i would argue that's a worse deception. you must choose between these two types of political deception. it is paramount that you tell the truth to your audience. >> how do you get started in this business? ask lucky charms. i went to rutgers university. there was a lot of censorship on campus. being an irish american, to prove a point i said lucky charms was racist against my irish heritage. thought it would be laughed at that one of the deans took me seriously and had a meeting and

informed me they would ban lucky charms because it was racist against me and that was the beginning of this undercover investigative work which showed these people for who they were. sort of an artistic mission or than a political one. >> whenever in the mainstream media you read about project veritas, there is usually the line in selected edited video project veritas . >> that's a hyperbole. all journalism is edited. rightfully so. words are arranged into sentences. it's an absurd insinuation because they can never name the edit. it's just that it is edited. then when i release the full route 8, they say we don't know that you turn the device off and

on. they're engaged in conspiracy theories and an court woman litigate this stuff, it all falls apart. i've had multiple federal judges say that nothing was edited out of context. might wonder why that isn't covered more. our attorneys attempted to go to wikipedia to get that put on there, with the pds said something to the effect of legal documents are not legal sources. we say these things that they can edit and paste but they never name the edit. the only case where they can name a point is in 2009 when i went into these acorn offices wearing a pimp coat. i didn't wear that into all the offices that i presented myself as a pimp. i said i wanted to create these brothels when i was undercover. i said on my website pimp protocol doesn't require wearing a costume. if that's all they have on me is

that i didn't wear the pimp costume 12 your seo, all journalists make mistakes. our track record is unbelievable compared to the track record of the mistakes made and admitted by the likes of the washington post cnn and the new york times. >> james o'keefe, has there ever been a moment in your career where you said i just can't do this again? this is really hard this is really uncomfortable. >> first chapter if you don't mind holding it up, first chapter of american muckraker which is a journalism textbook, it's about suffering. you might say how would you write a chapter in a journalism book about a theme like that? i think there's a lot of trauma that has occurred in my life and the lives of the people that work for me. whether you are being a whistleblower and violating your nondisclosure agreement, fired from your job. i was arrested in 2010 by the

fbi. eventually exonerated from what they were accusing me of. these are federal agents taking journalists work products rifling through anonymous sources in order to find out if you have committed crimes. it could be a traumatizing thing that shakes the foundation of what it means to be an american and you live through that. you're falsely accused, your suit, you have the most powerful people in the world pharmaceutical companies federal governments the president the attorney general coming after you. there are moments where he said i don't know if i can do that anymore. i talk about that in the book. it's a very personal story. then you begin to realize there's a lot of people out there who believe in you. all they have is you. then you begin to realize there's more of us than there are of them. then you have these

whistleblowers that come to you and i say in the book the hunter becomes the hunted. they are more afraid of us than we are of them. people like the whistleblower, all these people most recently were interviewing an individual in the government talking about child trafficking trying to corroborate that. the passion that you have forgetting the story exceeds whatever pain that is inflicted upon you. >> it's because of some of the topics that you are addressing that you are ignored or edited ridiculed the mainstream media. >> it's not so much politics as power. as noam chomsky wrote about, he wrote a book called manufacturing consent 1987. there is a symbiotic relationship between the people

and the media it a reciprocity of interest. for example, cnn one of their main advertisers is pfizer pharmaceutical. it's a cliche brought to you by pfizer. they take that for granted in the commercials but if you are literally paid by a billion-dollar corporation, can you investigate that corporation? of course not. we take this for granted growing up in america. these are not right arguments. noam chomsky is not a right-winger. these are just honest things about the state of our media. in the 1970's and 80's, journalist newsman were willing to sacrifice profits on their balance sheet and have a loss leader on their balance sheet to do that investigative reporting. no more. now it's all about the money and preserving the relationship you

have with the powers that be. that's not journalism under any accepted understanding of what journalism is. >> in your book, use bend a bit of time talking about -- and -- >> i think he has smart things to say. from chicago, he wrote a book called rules for radicals. he talks about make them live up to their own principles. he said that's the most important thing to do is to use their own rules and make them up to them. another way of saying that is exposing hypocrisy. he also talks about the idea of picking a subject and focusing on as opposed to lofty broad narratives. this can be applied to what i do. focusing anecdotally on voter fraud it's a hot button issue in the united states. some people say there is no voter fraud and others believe the whole election was stolen.

there are instances of fraud for example in minnesota and texas, someone was arrested by the attorney general after we caught her on tape bragging about the crime she was committing. there's a methodology which is to focus on the actual facts not on these broad narratives which is what most people in media do. >> in the book, you use a technique of referring to yourself as the muckraker in the third person. why? parts i wanted this book to be -- this is my life's work. took me five years to write. it has 800 footnotes. it reads like a thesis paper. i want it to outlast me. i wanted to be about principles. my first book rate through was about basically my 20's. i am 38 years old. my incarceration, going to

court, it was a perverse -- first person narrative. this one is a boy scout manual for people who want to follow in our footsteps. of all the people to follow in our footsteps, it is the whistleblower. there is a chapter in the book called whistleblowing. it's like you're being on the margins of society. you're a spacewalking astronaut whose umbilical cord has been cut from the mothership. i want people to understand what it's like and i think the most important chapter in the book is the first chapter. the psychological effects are unbelievable. the number one question i get asked is are you worried? are you afraid? i say no. i try not to worry about the things i can't control. fear is the thing that holds most people back in this country. the fbi raids remarkably it has helped project veritas because sources now trust us.

they say you must be for real. i wasn't sure, but you must be for real because the feds are raiding you. we have had sources come to us as a result of what the feds did. >> where we raised? >> i am from bergen county, new jersey. my mother is from rochester, new york. dad is from buffalo, new york. they moved to new jersey the time i was born. project veritas is located in westchester county, new york 45 minutes north of new york city. we have a few dozen journalists roaming the country undercover. >> was your life like zero to 18? >> are right about that in my first book. my father and grandfather were in construction and property maintenance and i help them up until my teenage years. i write about some of that story and the story of resilience in my life.

i didn't ever think i was going to be a journalist, but i watched local news in new york fox five nbc four abc seven. i read the new york times every day. i read newspapers every day for a year or two. i found mike wallace once said this. he said it best. things were not as they seemed and rarely as they should be. i didn't know what to do with that sentiment. i didn't know what that meant to meet. was i going to be an actor? work in finance? work with my dad? i wanted to do something about that. things were not portrayed accurately. as a student at rutgers, i became a columnist for the paper

. it was the daily newspaper at rutgers university. i was let go from that job. i wrote a column about how much money professors give to each political party. the ratio of democrats to republicans was 104-1. i said why don't i create my own newspaper so i did that. i didn't know what i was doing. most of the work was layout design. i had to learn how to layout newspaper magazine. i did that and i had a staff. it was called the centurion and the rest is history. >> in a few remaining minutes, i want to ask you about two people you brought up here in my notes i have listed a lot of them muckrakers that you talk about. you brought up daniel ellsberg and mike wallace. are they heroes do you? are they effective people in

their field? >> some of the things they have done or heroic. mike wallace was an unbelievable questioner. he made people feel comfortable in his interviews and i respect that. not just a protected class for priesthood, people want journalism to be an identity like a cartel. i admire virtues from each of these different people. it might lead her audience -- why is o'keefe appreciating? because there are virtues in all of these people. one almost went to jail and they went to the supreme court the washington post and new york times litigated to the supreme court. whistleblowing can be heroic. it can also be illegal. ed snowden can be breaking the law but there is a place in the world for people like that. without people like that,

investigative journalists can't do their jobs. it's the bread and butter of what it means to be an american. that right to report what someone tells you is being fundamentally it's in jeopardy right now. in our case with the fbi. they are trying to take that right away from us. right now. i had the aclu lawyers in my office last month telling me and by the way, they are defending us. the aclu is writing to the judge trying to unseal the warrants that are against me. they said this is never happened in american history. what's happening to you has never happened before to any journalist. now they're starting point guns at us. and take our notebooks. i admire people like edward snowden, julian assange, mike wallace. i don't know what is happened. i don't know why the

billion-dollar corporations are doing the job. his left scrappy broke entrepreneurial enterprising people but so be it. >> james o'keefe project veritas and of the author of this book american muckraker rethinking journalism for the 21st

i'm so excited to have this conversation with you. you know, as a fellow saint louis and i followed your political career and you actually represent the district that i was raised in. oh, wow. yeah, like i'm from florissant. yes. yes. i used to live in floors. yes, i have heard. so i'm just excited. and so let's just dig in. i'm talking to you about your new