James O'Keefe at Restoration Weekend: "MSM Is Dead"

James O'Keefe: Thank you very much. I only have about 10 to 15 minutes before I go to lunch, but I wanted to say a few words. I was invited here at the last minute. My friend, Jim Young here, invited me, and thanks for having me. I want to say a few words and show just a very few clips from Project Veritas. I wanted to say that we did it, and the media in this country, as Bill Little said last night, is now discredited. It's dead and we have killed it and it's been a long time coming because they put us through so much over the last 10 years: Planned Parenthood, civil lawsuits, jail, defamation, lies, slander and now we've won.



I'm going to walk you through very quickly just some of what I think are the poignant historical moments. It all started 4 weeks ago when Twitter kicked me off. I was kicked off Twitter for releasing the videos, and out of nowhere thousands of people sent messages to the CEO of Twitter. Thousands of people sent messages to Jack Dorsey and they reinstated my account 36 hours later, and when they did we had 40,000 new followers.



I met Donald Trump two years ago. I did a story at Cornell. We went into Cornell and we said we were an ISIS club, and we wanted to get money from Cornell to do it, and we released this video on Cornell giving day, the day when all the alumni are supposed to give money to Cornell. We had alumni stop giving to Cornell and started giving money to Project Veritas. I got an email from New York from the Trump Tower that said Donald Trump would like to meet you. This was two years ago. And he printed out this video and said that that's Donald Trump's signature. James Graywork, as always "Best wishes, Donald Trump." Donald Trump was always a fan, but this is well before he ran for president. Fast forward two years and we release the first video.



[Video Clip of Scott Foval, former Americans United for Change Field Director:]



Scott Foval: If you're there and you're protesting and you do these actions, you will be attacked at Trump rallies. The whole point of this is we know that Trump's people will freak the f--- out, the security team will freak out and his supporters will lose their s---.



James O'Keefe: So it turns out, sorry for the language, but this is your taxpayer dollars hard at work. So these people were doing these awful, immoral things, illegal things and they were working directly with and for the DNC, paid by Hillary Clinton to do them. We released video after video.



[Video Clip of Scott Foval:]



Scott Foval: We did it to them when we were in charge too. What'd we do? We did the exact same thing. We manipulated the vote with money and action, not with laws. It's a very easy thing for a Republican to say, "Well, they're bussing people in." Well, you know what? We've been bussing people in to deal with you f------ a------ for 50 years and we're not going to stop now. We're just going find a different way to do it. So, I mean I grew up with that idea. They used to bus people out to Iowa.



James O'Keefe: Finally we had people actually admitting what actually happens behind closed doors. This took us a year. We had eight people imbedded full time in the Hillary Clinton campaign for 1 year. We had to set up elaborate aliases. We created an offshore account and wire transferred $20,000.00 in real money to this guy. We had exotic sports cars. We had private planes that were lended to me so that I could convince these guys that we were big money people, and finally, we got them to confess that it was in fact Hillary Clinton's idea to dress people up in these ridiculous costumes to get punched in the face.



[Video Clip of Robert Creamer, Founder of Democracy Partners]:



Robert Creamer: In the end it was the candidate, Hillary Clinton, the future president of the United States, who wanted ducks on the ground. Well, by God we will give ducks on the ground. Don't repeat that to anybody.



James O'Keefe: Yeah, don't repeat that to anybody. Just say it right into my microphone. Could you just say that the way you just said it right into my button camera?



That man is not some low-level guy, some ACORN employee. That man is married to a United States congresswoman, is best friends with Obama, was a community organizer with Obama, and resigned right after this video came out. These videos were the No. 1 trending video -- that's a beautiful sight to behold -- in the world. The No. 1 trending video on YouTube. Every one of them was trending No. 1 worldwide and that happened over the course of a week and a half. That means when people went to YouTube.com the first thing they saw were these videos, and the reason why that was is because there's just nowhere else for the citizens to go to get their information. I tried and this is an unbelievable series of events. Before these videos came out, I worked with some media organizations and I tried to partner with them. I will not give you their names. It's not just Fox, but I went to these companies and I said I got a big story. They were excited, they had everything lined up. At the last minute they were threatened and they spiked, in journalism that means they didn't run the story, for fear of retaliation from a future Clinton Department of Justice. They spiked this story at the last minute, and the only people who could have done this were people without any stake in any media company. We broke these stories on YouTube. We broken them on Twitter and after the people resigned there was a groundswell. We had 75 million people on Twitter see these videos, 20 million people on YouTube. CNN has an audience of 1 million people, okay? Things are changing. So, but the traditional victory is when you do get things like this to happen on CNN.



[Video Clip of CNN:]



Anderson Cooper: [There is] video emerging of a group of pro-Clinton political operatives talking about stirring up trouble and provoking violence at Trump rallies. The video comes from Project Veritas, brainchild of James O'Keefe, who's got a less than stellar reputation for accuracy, however some of the things you'll hear on the tape are hard to ignore, enough, we're learning, for one person to be fired so far, another one to resign. A lot of questions being asked about the recording. Senior Investigative Correspondent Drew Griffin tonight.



James O'Keefe: So there are people, I didn't know these people, with signs in the audience [saying] #Veritas. It was a groundswell. But we have reached the tipping point in this country. I thought it wasn't going to happen, but it just happened, where the social media is now more powerful than the mainstream media. That's just the way it is. And then this happens. And then the White House gets asked about it, and I want you to listen very carefully to what Josh Earnest, the press secretary for – oh, by the way, Obama was best friends with Bob Cramer. These guys were organizers together, and Cramer met with Obama 47 times according to public records. It's a matter of public record and, of course they asked him about it.



[Video Clip of C-SPAN:]



Reporter: The Project Veritas videos that had been asking the rounds of late. Does the White House have any reaction to this dismissal or the severance of two veteran Democratic operatives after the release of the latest Project Veritas videos, in particular, I want to draw your attention to a Robert Cramer, a convicted felon, who visited the White House according to reports 342 times. Also met personally with the president some 47 times, the most recent occasion being in June of this year.



Josh Earnest: I've been asked about videos that have come from this outlet in the past and each time I've tried to urge people to take those reports not at face value, and not just with a grain of salt, but maybe even a whole package of salt, because despite what the name might suggest, these videos have not often revealed the truth.



James O'Keefe: Now you know and I know that a few minutes later when Josh Earnest went behind the curtained part of the stage he goes, "Damn it, we've got to cover that up somehow," and it's that moment when Josh Earnest walks away and tells the truth. That's what Veritas wants to reveal. People are fed up. They're fed up with watching people go on stage and lie over and over again, and that's why they lost. Because the American people want authenticity. They want realism, and they want the truth, and these people just go on stage and say exercise extreme suspicions with James O'Keefe. They're tired of the people lying. So then what happens? In front of 80 million people, this happens.



[Video Clip of 2016 Presidential Debate:]



Donald Trump: I have a feeling how they came. I believe it was her campaign that did it. Just like if you look at what came out today on the clips where -- I was wondering what happened with my rally in Chicago and other rallies where we had such violence. She's the one and Obama that caused the violence. They hired people. They paid them $1,500.00 and they're on tape saying, "Be violent, cause fights, do bad things," and I think it's her campaign.



James O'Keefe: You see how uncomfortable she looks? So we're trending everywhere Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the mainstream media's trying to cover it up. There was an extraordinary moment, and just by way of background, when I was at this debate and I was standing there next to Hannity -- and Hannity, by the way, this guy is a good guy. He had to personally call Scott Foval himself to get a comment to see when he was fired because nobody else would do it. He had the guts to do that and because of Sean Hannity this story became what it became. It takes some people in the media. Sometimes they have to go around certain people to make things happen. That's what Sean Hannity did. And then there was this moment, which I just thought was incredible.



[Video Clip of MSNBC:]


Reporter: Are you worried about violence? If they're found to have --



Hillary Clinton: I know nothing about this. I can't deal with every one of his conspiracy theories, but I hope you all have something to eat and something to drink on the way back to New York.



James O'Keefe: Let's go to Applebee's! Yeah, what do you think about the violence? Okay time to get some food. So then we make the front page of the New York Times, and these reporters really must have hated writing that [headline], but that's what we call "breaking through." By the way, no one really reads the New York Times anyway, but it's still pretty cool and it wasn't just this. It was the voter fraud. We actually caught these elections commissioners saying that there's so much fraud, but they wouldn't say it publicly. They would only say it in private. We actually got offered Huma Abedin's ballot. Somewhere here, Laura Lumer -- where are you Laura? There she is. She got offered – she dressed up in a full burka and was offered Huma's ballot because there's no photo I.D. in New York City.



So I'm just going to show you a couple [more things]. The media is trench warfare. This is a trench warfare. People like Veritas and Sean Hannity and other warriors are the tip of the spear. We're fighting them in the trenches and that's what's important.



[Reading media tweets:] CNN, Brian Stelter: "Hey, Jim." He calls me Jim. "My program had 1.35 million TV viewers last week." "Hey Brian, our YouTube videos had 10 million views in the last 7 days." The Daily Show: "James, would you be willing to produce the raw unedited footage?" "You are a producer for The Daily Show. Are you willing to publish your raw videos to accompany your segments?" The Washington Post selectively edited out of their article the fact that Creamer was scheduled to meet with Obama 47 times. Dave Weigel, at the bottom there, says, "Now if you show me video from the meetings with Obama, I'll shine your Pulitzer Prize." I said, "Hey, Dave with the Washington Post, shouldn't this be your job? I'll never accept the bullsh-- Pulitzer from the corrupt media." And then of course after the election you had all these journalists -- so smug, so smug.



[Reading Politico reporter tweet:] "Trump is a media failure. Oh, shut up." And I said to Politico, "I will never shut up. Your organization Politico censored and attempted to discredit many contrary sources of information. One of the many reasons why the media failed." And then there was this. This is the most amazing thing [reading journalist tweet:] "How journalists can protect themselves from a hostile Trump administration." Where were you when the California attorney general raided the home of my colleague David Daleiden after the Planned Parenthood videos? Where were you when they put me in jail and destroyed my evidence? Where were the stirring First Amendment op-eds when they tried to shut down citizen journalists who had to overcome your firewall to get to the truth? These people are such corrupt scum. But the good news is they lost and the facts prove it. This is another one of these corrupt journalists: "Just a reminder that at this moment when serious journalism needed more than ever Facebook and Google constitute 68 percent of all ad revenue," and I said to them, "Because the people left your media institutions to get to serious journalism being done on Facebook and YouTube and you don't understand that." People are leaving the mainstream media because they want to know the truth. And then another one: "Go buy a subscription to the New York Times. We're going to need robust press." I said, "One would have more success just getting a camera and YouTube account."



So in closing, my mentor Andrew Brietbart, God rest his soul, you can really fight and defeat the mainstream media at their own game. There's a sort of performance art to it. Project Veritas is a 501c3 nonprofit organization. We're tax exempt. We have thousands of people who give us checks. I am crowd-source funded. I have no one who fiduciary controls me unlike the corporate mainstream media and we've got so much work to be done. A word about courage. Do you fear for your life, all these things? I don't want to address that, but I will say that there's physical and there's moral courage, and people go to Washington and they become corrupted, but what I've learned is that you can play the media, you can defeat the media and you can get the media to react. You can get the media to react to your narrative, but we've got to focus on the truth and we have to have both physical and moral courage. We need people in this country who are going to fight for something greater than themselves, but the politicians are never going to do it. It has to be the citizens. It has to be ordinary people who do extraordinary things. It was my team. Twelve full-time undercover journalists risking their lives to do this. We need more people risking their lives on our soil and on this soil because the war, as Marcus Luttrell said, is not overseas. The war is in the media trenches. That's where the war is now and we're going to have to continue that war and thank you very much for having me.