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

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 lawyer said that's a violation of the Civil Rights Act to use that kind of discrimination in the hiring process.

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And here's the episode.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are back.

We're here with James O'Keeffe 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.

One of the hire-ups in IBM provided that recording to me, and he was discriminating against Asian, 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.

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 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 Santa Fi.

Same sort of thing.

The vice president

was on

a Zoom meeting with her leadership.

And she was saying

you must hire these many people of color, et cetera.

So

it's problematic.

And the COVID IBM responded

on another all-emergency, all-staff call, brought me up and said, now don't give this any reaction.

But 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.

I've never seen this sort of explosion of whistleblowing before.

One or two people usually, and they'll fire the person.

But if there's 100 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 this spike in whistleblowing recently?

That's a great question.

I think a couple of factors.

People are generally,

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

there just seems to be something happening.

I mean, the world's on fire.

People are very divided.

People place a lot of emphasis on their 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 has

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 another variable.

Yeah.

And you also expose BlackRock, right?

We did a story on BlackRock that was in June.

That was a...

a recruiter at BlackRock saying that they buy the wallets of politicians and they don't want people to know about their influence.

And this is a guy that

met an undercover reporter on Bumble or Tinder or Hinge.

That's where we meet a lot of the people.

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 kind of target someone.

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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A stunning lack of integrity

within people and institutions.

It's become very greedy.

And maybe, maybe it was that way.

All of it, we just never knew.

Could be.

But

nowadays,

there's a concerted effort to,

with what we do, exposing people, I think people are afraid of getting caught.

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 in the

last two weeks, there's been an exponential uptick with the IBM thing was a first for me because I've never seen so many insiders.

I mean,

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 of free speech in the 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 investigator 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 is the one platform where you can't get shadow banned.

That's what they say.

I don't know how it works.

I was banned on Twitter in 2021.

What'd you get banned for?

There was an incident where we filmed outside of a

Facebook executive's house in Palo Alto, and we failed to blur the number on the lamppost

outside of his house.

So a DDox or whatever.

Yeah, but first of all,

CNN ambushed some grandmother outside of her trailer home and didn't blur the number on the house.

It was 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.

Oh, really?

So when you film now, you have to blur car license plates?

There's definitely a double standard.

Like we go above and beyond, you know, 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.

It says, well, you're creating a fake Twitter account.

But that wasn't actually true.

So I sued Twitter for defamation.

Oh, wow.

Try 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.

Nice.

Have you had any communication with him?

Just yesterday, he tweeted about

the spaces that I did on the

story I did.

I'm here in Las Vegas.

I came from Phoenix, and I was reporting on 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 a 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.

So Elon.

I was talking to Elon on Twitter, but I've never met him face to face, but on

what a cool feature, man, because now people will really speak up.

Correct.

Yeah.

What caused you to be dispassionate 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.

Just the lack of the media's ability to accurately and properly report the news.

Something inside of me was

felt contempt towards the way the media operates.

So I started reading newspapers every day or the New York Times every day.

And I'm from New Jersey.

Same.

I went to Rutgers.

I saw you did it all.

Starledger.

Classic.

I never read it.

No, this was 2003.

So they gave the USA Today Star Ledger and New York Times.

And I would sit in the dining hall and I would just read

from

9 a.m.

to noon.

I would just read the paper back to back, just sort of obsessed with the news.

And I became quite passionate about these issues.

And I eventually started my own little monthly magazine at Rutgers called The Centurion in

October 2004.

That's interesting.

So you knew back then, because 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 agit punk group where they would,

you know, it's like Borat.

They would go to oil conferences and they would

dress up 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.

You know, it's certainly a different world now.

And I had a magazine where I did Adobe Photo InDesign.

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.

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 story on Google four years ago and they didn't sue.

They often peacock or threaten to sue, but I think they're a little bit in danger of feeding the flames.

Because then in 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 in uh 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 she was she instigating this or not.

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 suing James O'Keeffe for, people would laugh at you.

Sometimes you have to take it all the way to the end for people to kind of see how absurd it is.

And it's very expensive.

And

the second case was involving

a group called Democracy Partners in Washington, D.C.

went undercover as volunteers inside this group.

And

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 argued we never signed any documents, no non-disclosure agreements.

So that too went to jury verdict and we lost is 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...

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Philanthropic, you really can't be greedy doing this because, you know, the profitable thing would be to not do it at all.

Right.

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,

which is its own type of hell because, you know, usually these sorts of traumatic things last minutes, but this lasts years.

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,

you know, 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 have my board of directors, a nonprofit organization.

And 51c3, you know what this 501c3 is.

Charitable group.

You have to have a board.

And we did this story on Pfizer.

I don't know if you saw that

in January, February.

It was the biggest, most watched video I ever did.

And then right after that story, there was kind of an emergency.

And

they had a board meeting on February 6th.

a six-hour-long meeting, and they had a bunch of what a lot of people felt were bizarre grievances against me.

Like I stole this woman's sandwich or I took

black cars instead of Uber X.

And

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.

So we had to hire a driver for me and these sorts of things.

And they brought these things up and

then

they had a vote and they indefinitely suspended me without.

Was the vote unanimous?

The minutes I made public in my departure video, I believe there was one board member who voted against it.

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.

That's a real guy right there.

Yeah, and he actually died.

Oh, whoa.

Steve Olembeck.

He passed away

two months ago.

He committed

what?

Yeah.

Okay, that seems, I mean, I got to 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 sometimes, as crazy as it sounds, what happened to me there, I think things happen for a reason.

And

I started a new company called OMG.

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,

you know, sometimes the enemy is not out external.

Right next to you.

It's right next to you.

And that's crazy because 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 my dad's attic when I was 24

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, ten years to

started next.

And then he sold next to Apple.

So it's very painful.

And you know that that saying what doesn't you makes you stronger.

You're familiar with his 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, 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.

I get it, though.

The 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 raise capital and

have vision,

if you can do that once,

you can do it again as long as you don't get disheartened.

It's really the hard part is getting disheartened and discouraged.

And it seems like it all was kind of coordinated and at once.

Like Forbes put you on the Hall of Shamelist around that time, right?

And it just seemed like everything was coming at once.

Yeah, that's, you know, that Forbes thing.

It's like that didn't, I've been defamed so many times, but

you have to learn to be hated in this business.

I think that was something I learned 10, 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, you know, Wikipedia, you know, lying about you.

There's nothing you can do about it.

Oh, your own page lied about it.

Oh, it's horrible.

It's lied right now.

It's a doctor 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.

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.

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 a guy named Clarence Jones.

He wrote a book.

He was a reporter in Florida working for these corporate, you know, these, these are the late 70s, early 80s.

And he said, you have to have bosses with balls.

You have to have leadership, men in leadership, men and women who, who, who have strength.

Like even that movie Spielberg made about Catherine Graham running the story on the, on the, was it, was it 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 loss leader, meaning it was not profitable.

That particular vertical in the company did not generate the revenue but they did it anyway right as a kind of philanthropy in the company I don't think you have that at all I think media companies are if you 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 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 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 is, as I haven't found a business model.

I'm working on that, but I too,

I run the company.

My company's, as it's a lost leader on the balance sheet.

Sometimes you'll spend half a million dollars to do an 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 51c3, 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 were one-third of our budget, so as much as $5 to $7 million a year on lawyers.

You have

the cost of the overhead, the payroll, the legal, the technology, the training, and your time.

As you grow, the value of your time becomes

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 by your budget by the total number of stories, you get the cost per investigation.

And how are you ensuring

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,

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 Just because I'm empowering them or assisting them

or training them doesn't mean they have to be as part of my core.

Keep your core group real tight.

And I think you have to find people around you who are 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?

It's a lot of money.

I just met you, I mean, to face here in the last 20 minutes.

I don't know you that well.

And I don't assume to know whether you'd take that bet or not, but a lot of people would take that bet.

And towards the end of my tenure, I kind of,

my last organization, I kind of said to myself, you know, we're getting pretty big here.

And

how strong are these people?

And you have to be fearless and moral and strong.

And

you have to trust each other with your life.

It's almost like combat.

So I would say that certainly when you've burned, when you're burned so bad like that,

you learn a valuable lesson.

And 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 200 resumes for each position.

Damn.

I mean, it's unbelievable.

I mean, everyone wants a job.

I don't know if you experienced 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 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'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 $100, $200.

You got all the tools.

Go do it.

Yeah.

And I'll pay you $5,000 or $8,000, 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 of offering a six-figure salary for the jump, let me see what you can do first.

That's one of the ways that we're doing it now.

Yeah.

You recently interviewed Vivek, right?

Yes, and he interviewed me.

First, wait.

Yeah, 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 tell me, oh, do you trust him?

Like, everyone says, oh, what's his deal?

Yeah.

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 all he says.

And I'm glad that he's saying a lot of what he says.

And 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.

I like some of his experience on Wall Street working for Goldman Sachs.

I talked about that.

So I think

it's hard.

I think people really want to know who is he inside?

What's his motivation?

That's what I was trying to ask him and ascertain.

And

he's very young.

I'm very young too.

So we have a lot in common and 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.

And I think the world 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 wanting

blow the whistle 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 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 like national security secrets to the extent of like 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.

I also think you've got 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.

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, was it Bradley Manning?

They indicted him.

And I think his quote was telling Bradley Manning over whatever he was talking over, some type of encrypted thing.

He goes, well, you know,

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 foe 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,

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, the Biden sent that email to the Department of Just 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 up my emails, records, photos, secret, it's like what they do to terrorists.

And then a year later, they raided my home,

took my two phones.

Complete insanity.

Damn, you probably had a lot of stuff on your phones, too.

That's story.

I mean, think about what you have on your phone.

Nothing criminal, but personal things.

Memories.

Personal things.

Bank accounts.

And then they can leak that to the New York Times.

And 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.

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

operating and doing an investigation.

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.

Interesting.

And the Supreme Court has also protected the identity of a donor, a financial person,

their First Amendment right to associate with you.

That's actually a case from 1954 NAACP case because people were donating to that organization to protect African Americans and the donors didn't want to be retaliated against.

So that's the same 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 out of zero.

But where do people find you, man?

And what are you working on?

O'KeeffeMediaGroup.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.