AUG 4, 2022 - JAMES O’KEEFE： WHY I’M SUING THE NY TIMES AND CNN
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Summary
James O'Keefe joins the show to discuss his latest legal action against the New York Times and CNN, as well as his ongoing legal battle against the FBI and the Department of Justice. He also discusses the recent raid of his former home, and why he believes it was justified.
Transcript
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We are excited to welcome back now Human Events Daily. None other than man, the myth,
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the legend himself, Mr. James O'Keefe. James, you've just finished the, I would almost say
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speech, but a routine. I would say it's more of a routine now that you're doing at the Turning
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Point events. You attempted to do a performance in Las Vegas. You were prevented from doing so,
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much of the chagrin of everyone who wanted to come. But tell us, what is the latest? Because
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I understand you are pressing forward with legal cases against both the New York Times
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and, was it CNN? Yes. And CNN, yes. So we sued CNN for defamation. We sued the New York Times for
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defamation. And the CNN case, CNN filed what's called a motion to dismiss. Of course. And in this
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document, they said, because what happened was we recorded this Facebook guy outside of his house.
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Right. And there was a number on his lamp post. Like, you know, lamp. The number was not blurred
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in the video. Oh, my gosh. And all journalists filmed numbers. So this was an accident. It wasn't a
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big deal. Twitter banned us citing this. We violated this guy's privacy. But CNN, the same thing with
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Brett Kavanaugh. Yeah, they routinely do this to their targets. But we did it. It wasn't malicious or
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anything. So they banned us from Twitter. And then CNN goes on the air and says, we were banned for
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promoting misinformation. Well, that's not why we were banned. Right. So we sued him for defamation.
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The judge in Georgia, as a federal judge, said, well, there's no difference between posting a number
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on a lamppost and promoting disinformation, which is absurd. There is a difference. So we appealed that
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to what's called the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. Yes. And that's where it sits. And a judgment will be
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delivered in a year from now. In the New York Times case, that's really, again, if I say these things,
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it sounds like comedy. And you might like your mouth is wide open. That's because it's so ridiculous.
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We sued the New York Times for defamation because they called me deceptive and part of a disinformation
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campaign. The New York Times defense of court was that that was an opinion. The judge said,
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well, you putting your opinion in the first sentence of an article and a news factual article,
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that is deception and disinformation. The New York Times appealed that judgment to the appellate
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division. And they said that the words verifiable and deceptive have no actual meaning. So now the New
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York Times is saying that words have no meaning, which is really rich because you can't have it both
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ways. Kind of endemic of where we are today. It is. And the USA Today and Facebook relies upon groups like
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the New York Times to do their fact checking. So what is fact? What is opinion? These are really seminal
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constitutional issues. All the while that's happening, the FBI raids me. Correct. I filed two motions in
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federal court in New York City, federal court, try to get my stuff back. Also filed a motion to unseal
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the basis, the probable cause for the raid, which remains a mystery at this point.
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Wait, wait, wait. So the last time I interviewed you, we had you on the show. It was, I want to say
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December. Yeah. Right. And this was something we were talking about. We were saying we wanted to get,
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you wanted to get the warrant, right? Because everyone is under the Fourth Amendment. You are,
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you have the right as an American citizen to at least see the warrant. What are the charges?
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What's come up against you? What is the purpose for this rape? And it goes back to being able to
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face your accuser. This goes back to Roman law. Believe it or not. Well, if you get, if you get yet
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to actually see that. No. And if you're a federal search, federal search warrants are quite rare. I mean,
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for the FBI to execute a warrant and raid someone's home, it may be followed by an immediate
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indictment upon which time it does get unsealed. The affidavit gets unsealed in a criminal trial.
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But there has been no trial of me. No one has been charged with anything. I'm not. The things
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on the warrant were accessory after the fact, transportation of stolen documents across state
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lines, which you do routinely. The New York Times, every journalist transports stolen material.
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That's what journalists do. So for them to put this on a warrant. I've got a couple of copies of
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the Hunter Biden hard drive with me. Right. So it's a ridiculous, absurd, even it's not, it's not
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like it's a non-crime, but it's absurd to put on a warrant. These are the things that justified the
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raid. So what we're trying to do is show the affidavit. I want to see who lied to the FBI.
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Was it Ashley Biden? Right. Well, well, are they going to prosecute the president's daughter for
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lying to the FBI? And Ashley Biden's lawyer is also the attorney for the daughter-in-law of the
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federal prosecutor who obtained the warrants. A lot of this stuff is in the weeds. It's very
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people's eyes sort of glaze over. But this is the process is the punishment. Like they put you
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through this. Well, this is this is Kafka, right? This is Kafka's seminal work, The Trial. In the
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original German, the name of the book is Der Prozess. And that, of course, by the end of it, Kafka is
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led off for execution in the for which the crime is never actually stated to Kafka. Right.
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To the main character, I should say. I think it's Joseph F is the main character. He's never
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actually told what what he's being charged with. Well, this is the Kafkaesque thing here
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is that the federal judge in December when I spoke with you appointed what's called a special
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master. Yes. And in this motion, she goes, well, there's First Amendment issues. These are
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journalistic concerns. That's her word. But if you're a journalist, the United States law
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says you have to unseal that affidavit. You must show people the evidence. That's self
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evident, right? Let's say they were raiding your home, Jack, and they said, I need to look
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through all of your source material to make sure you're not breaking the law. You would
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say, well, that's absurd. Right. You want to look through all my anonymous sources to ensure
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I'm not breaking the law? That's circular reasoning. They would never do that to NBC News. They
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would never do that to The New York Times because they couldn't get away with it optically.
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And here's the thing, and I'll be very clear about this. Every working journalist in America
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that uses sources to receive documents, recordings, obviously recordings, James O'Keefe, you're
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infamous and famous for your recordings, right? Of course, we are constantly asking our sources
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for these tidbits, whether it's a document, whether it's a factoid or up to the level of, I would
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say pretty much the highest thing you could get is a report. That's probably the hardest
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thing to achieve. And the fact that you were able to do so, so masterfully, I don't know
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if everyone out there understands, it's actually quite hard to achieve these. You're running
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potentially weeks of time that goes into this. Well, the most remarkable thing that happened
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since I saw you is we had an FBI whistleblower come to us, an FBI. That's what I saw this.
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And this person gave us a document on their own computer system that called us journalists.
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The prosecutors in our own case refused to call us that. They actually said, you're not
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a journalist because you don't get consent to record people, which is also absurd on five
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different levels. Primary being many people at NBC News expose Jiffy Lube and Chicago Sun
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Times undercover work. I'd love to ask the FBI if they have a practice of getting consent
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before they go to record people. This whole thing is so, it's Kafkaesque. I consider it
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some combination of Orwellian and Kafkaesque because, you know, George Orwell, the famous line,
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1984, doublethink. Doublethink means holding two contradictory beliefs in one's own mind and
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believing them simultaneously. Exactly. It's not, I don't know if it's an ideology. It's a form
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of irrationality. But the good news is, as irrational as it was, these FBI agents, one of them blew
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the whistle. One of them assigned to my case blew the whistle. That's extraordinary.
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James, but let me take it back a second because you find yourself fighting these fights. You're
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still out there. You're still working in the midst of all this. You're doing on national
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tours, essentially. Why go through all this? Why fight? Wouldn't it be much easier to just
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say, you know what? They're going to write what they write about me. Why fight the fights? Why
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go to court? Why go tooth and nail the way you do? Why not just, why not just push it off and forget?
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Well, because you're passionate about it and your passion exceeds whatever, whatever pain you
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experience. When you're really driven to achieve this, you want to get the story and show people
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what's going on. You're so passionate about meeting that goal, getting to the top of the mountain,
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that it justifies the pain. The first chapter of the book, American Muckraker, which came out in
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January, it's called Suffering. The first chapter of my book, the preface is called Suffering. And I,
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and I, and I take this head on. And, uh, after the raid, it was certainly traumatizing to my
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colleagues. They went, they went to Spencer's home, Eric's home. These are colleagues of mine.
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Um, and they point guns at you. They're pointing guns at us now, Jack.
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Right. Uh, since we last spoke, I had an incident in Davos.
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Yes, you did. I was detained, um, was not arrested. And the fact checkers were trying to play some
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weird game that I had, I had, I had said something that didn't happen. I said detained. We were detained
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at gunpoint. Uh, none of us were handcuffed, but every sitting myself, every single member of my
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crew frisked, uh, fully frisked, full body frisk, um, behind a, a stack of tables over around the
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corner of the food court, which is attached to where the world economic forum was being held
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for the crime of standing and filming and reporting on the world economic forum.
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But these officers had, they were holding MP5s. That's a nine millimeter semi-automatic.
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And in some cases, uh, flagging us with the guns, right? And I've said this,
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that's where the barrel is directed, you know, where it could hit you. And we're never told
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what it was. They had patches or half a dozen of these guys that said world economic foreign
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police. And so I reported it. We seem to have been detained by the world economic foreign
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police. The fact checkers left to the defense, not of us, right? Same way they wouldn't lead
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to your defense, but to say, actually those patches are ceremonial and it's, it's a detachment
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of the local police that's assigned to the world economic forum. You see, you need to
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be accurate when you're reporting. Meanwhile, I'm actually standing on the road on the side
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of an, of an Alpine mountain, uh, being held by these police trying to get my own story.
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Well, I mean, and that's another example. You're a threat, Jack. I mean, you, what you do that
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you're, you're one of the top 10 threats and you're still on Twitter, right? Still for
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now. Last I checked, I was tweeting just before we came on.
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Then they removed me for, for photographing in a photograph. There was a lamppost with a
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number of, it's a, these are absurd things. I mean, it's so absurd that it, but there was
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a lot of good news. And, you know, I said in my speech here at Turning Point, the fact that
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both of the two restaurants in New York city, the Twitter guy ran into, they were fans of
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mine. The owners of the restaurant loved us. In fact, you had an FBI whistleblower come
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forth. And I think, and I think the truth wins in the end. The arc of the moral universe
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can, is long and it bends towards justice. Most important thing is to not give up. The
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most important thing is to just not give up. Cause when you don't give up and you keep
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running towards the fire, like as, as Breitbart once said, you, you send a message to people
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that, that they can do it too. And there are, and it's also a lot of fun. I mean, if you see
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my speech here today, it was just, the whole thing was a comedy bit. Like the whole thing
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Well, I appreciate that you, you're able to turn it into that, right? You know, being
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from the military, you know, we deal with a lot of heavy stuff and you just, you have
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to have, you have that gallows humor that's black.
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And if you don't turn that on, that's, that's when you, that's when you turn into Nietzsche
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Well, you know, there are moments of that, but there's also moments of extreme hope. And the
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amount of people that come up to us, the amount of people that come up to me and say,
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don't stop, you know, keep doing this. That's, that's, that's, and there's more, more than
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you might think. I mean, people inside the media talk to me that are in the mainstream
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media. They, they secretly, uh, secretly like project Veritas, right? But they're afraid
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to like the Sami stop in the Soviet union. They're afraid to say anything publicly for fear of
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retaliation. All it's only, all that matters is to keep going. And we have a very historic
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case of the FBI. They rule against us on this motion. That's, that's historic. If they rule
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before us on this motion, that's historic. We expect a ruling any, any month now.
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No, I know, I know we're pressed for time, but the last thing I want to ask you on, I
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know we're in an election year. Elections have historically been something that you
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are very known for. Uh, do you have anything in the works campaign wise as we lead towards
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The answer is yes. I mean, what, what don't we have in the works? I mean, we have people
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everywhere. So you'll see in September and October, I don't know if you saw the Crystal Matthews
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story we did in South Carolina. That was a, um, United States Senate candidate running
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against Tim Scott. And she goes, I got dope money. This is a Senator or I'm sorry, a Senate
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candidate running in the, in the general election, bragging about duffel bags filled with dope
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money. And she won the primary against Tim Scott.
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And then she says, we're white supremacists. I don't know where she got that from. And then
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she apologized for what she said. So yeah, we have more, we have, we have people everywhere.
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And, and, uh, if you're watching this, uh, Veritas tips at protonmail.com is our encrypted,
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uh, email. Um, that's how we got the recording of Crystal Matthews in a jail.
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She was talking on the phone in the jail cell to an inmate bragging about all these things.
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That was a whistleblower. Wow. That was a source, which is really, I mean, where else
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are they going to go? They're going to go to the Washington post. True. They can't go
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there. So, so the FBI rating, uh, journalists homes, obviously their whole intent was to
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go through 200,000 of my emails. Apparently they didn't get to anything because Lord knows
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they would have leaked that to their, to the Hardy boys of the New York times, like Mike
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Schmidt and Adam Goldman. That'd be the entire national security apparatus. The New York
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Times investigating Project Veritas. So they got nothing. All they got were a few legal
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memos that were like, look, maybe look, look, make us look good. So stay tuned. Veritas
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tips at protonmail.com. And I hope to talk to you soon. James, always a pleasure. Thanks Jack.