James O'Keefe

James O’Keefe is a renowned American journalist and media innovator known for using undercover footage, whistleblowers, and unconventional flare in his reporting. He’s founded three media organizations over his 15-year career and currently serves as the CEO of O’Keefe Media Group. The O’Keefe Media Group was founded after perhaps his most viewed investigation ever, an exposé of pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and is dedicated to empowering citizen journalists to replicate his model of exposing corruption and fraud.

O'Keefe's work has led directly to the passage of new legislation, federal and state investigations, congressional inquiries, and defunding of corrupt federal programs. His series of voter fraud exposés has inspired several states to reform their election laws, has forced resignations in Washington, and has pushed FBI and Department of Justice officials to defend themselves before federal lawmakers. 

O’Keefe’s earliest investigations resulted in the successful exposure of human smuggling and fraud groups such as ACORN in 2009, in the termination of several executives in National Public Radio, Planned Parenthood, and Enroll America, and in Congressional file hearings for Obamacare navigator fraud. 

In May of 2014, O'Keefe prompted a U.S. Senate investigation by releasing videos at the Cannes Film Festival showing Hollywood environmentalists agreeing to take money from fraudulent Middle Eastern oil tycoons to fund anti-fracking movies. In the same summer, dressed as Osama bin Laden, O’Keefe crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico into the United States to demonstrate the neglect of National security at the border, and shortly afterwards, an investigator dressed as an ISIS terrorist crossed Lake Erie into Cleveland. In his grilling of officials from the Department of Homeland Security, Senator John McCain referenced the investigations as proof of the national failure to secure the border. Then, in the historic Fall elections of 2014, four corrupt Senate candidates lost crucial voter support in key Senatorial battleground states when O’Keefe exposed their hypocrisy and lies.

In 2015, O'Keefe provided the vision and direction for the training, professionalism, and reach of journalism within his multiple organizations, which uncovered corruption within the Veterans Administration, extreme language censorship at American college campuses, and multiple instances of the Hillary Clinton campaign violating state and federal campaign law. During the 2016 election cycle, videos exposed key Democrats not only admitting the existence of voter fraud, but also showing how to successfully commit it on a massive scale, and a New York City Democratic election commissioner was forced out of his position by Mayor de Blasio and the New York Assembly as a result. 

O'Keefe also released videos showing that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee worked with consultants to organize paid protesters at Trump rallies, which sometimes erupted in violence. His investigation into Democracy Partners caused two key Democratic operatives to resign, sparked a response from the White House, and caused Donald Trump to bring up the videos in the final presidential debate. O'Keefe was ultimately credited with having a significant impact on the 2016 presidential elections for his October Surprise video series. As soon as January of 2017, these investigations also led the FBI, CIA, and DC metro police to arrest and convict three individuals who planned to put butyric acid into the ventilation systems of the National Press Club. 

In 2017, O'Keefe’s investigations into CNN exposed its anti-Trump bias and raised serious questions about the news organization's credibility, and his videos became the top trending in the US at the time. Not long after, attention moved to corruption and censorship in the New York Times, and the company was compelled to fire an irresponsible employee and change its social media policy.

O’Keefe’s 2018 investigations into Twitter revealed its attempt to silence conservatives through a stealthy technique called "shadowbanning;" users were effectively erased from the platform in all devices but their own, and Twitter engineers additionally admitted that they handed over Trump's personal Direct Messages to the Department of Justice. In the same year, O'Keefe promised to investigate the deep state, releasing undercover videos within multiple government agencies such as the DOJ, DOS, GAO, and HHS. This video series resulted in responses from each agency, multiple dismissals of government employees, and a reaction from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Fox News. 

First Amendment history was made in December of 2018 when the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts deemed the Massachusetts law prohibiting secret recording of public officials to be unconstitutional. In the new year, O’Keefe launched his “Be Brave” campaign to focus on recruiting insiders at corrupt organizations to come forward with their testimonies, and courageous whistleblowers from Pinterest, Google, and Facebook quickly appeared: following an exposé showing Facebook's "deboosting" strategy, O'Keefe took the stage at CPAC in Washington, DC to massive applause and praise from the crowd; in the weeks following, Pinterest software engineer Eric Cochran gave explosive evidence to the actions Pinterest was taking in censoring Pro-Life content from LiveAction; Google engineers Greg Coppola and Zach Vorhies revealed Google's conspicuous agenda in "Algorithmic fairness", news blacklists, and "human raters". With the protection of Project Veritas, Vorhies provided the Department of Justice with over 950 pages of leaked documents. Project Veritas' examinations of Big Tech have shaken Silicon Valley and spurred discussion in Congressional hearings, notably from Senator Ted Cruz and Rep. Dan Crenshaw, who berated Google executives for what had been uncovered. 

O’Keefe’s work in 2019 brought attention to voter fraud and to First Amendment controversy. In North Carolina, United States District Judge Martin Reidinger sided with the push to protect and encourage citizen journalism, stating: "if citizens and the media are handcuffed by a fear of liability, that's detrimental to political discourse, it is detrimental to society as a whole, and it is detrimental, really, to our fundamental freedom." 

A 2019 insider provided video showing then ABC reporter Amy Roach discuss on a hot mic how the network spiked coverage that would have exposed Jeffery Epstein caused the partisan blog the New Republic to publish coverage of the video with the headline “is James O’Keefe Good Now.” That video was also shared by members of congress on the left and right. 

Many insiders in government, tech and medicine have courageously come forward to testify against institutional and national corruption due to O’Keefe’s work, culminating in 2023 with a Pfizer investigation to expose secret and intentional mutation of the covid virus to further profit from its vaccine. O’Keefe’s current work through the O’Keefe Media Group emphasizes the importance of citizen journalism and empowers truth-seekers around the nation to take a stand and openly fight for justice alongside him.

Recognitions

James O’Keefe has founded three organizations and has written and released three books in his fifteen-year career: Breakthrough: Our Guerilla War to Expose Fraud and Save Democracy (2013), American Pravda: My Fight for Truth in the Era of Fake News (2018), and American Muckraker: Rethinking Journalism for the 21^st Century (2022). He is a 2014 recipient of the Young Professional Conservative Leadership "Buckley Award" awarded to "young professionals in recognition of significant achievements in advancing the conservative cause." He is the recipient of the Robert Novak Award for Journalistic Excellence (2011), has been named "Fox News Power Player of the Week" twice, and was on the Forbes "30 Under 30" for media moguls. After his series of successes in 2018 and 2019, President Donald Trump thanked O’Keefe personally at the White House Social Media Summit for his work in journalism, remarking: "Somebody said he's controversial. He's not controversial, he's truthful! He's truthful! That was a great job. That was one of many."