James O'Keefe, Political Operative. Part 1

A little history & a morality tale from the man behind Project Veritas and O'Keefe Media Group

A fascinating thing happened last week. James O’Keefe, the owner of an undercover investigative journalism agency, revealed a little of his worldview in a short Twitter/X post. On April 15, 2025, he wrote:

I find this with everybody, good people and bad people.

When you got them backed into a corner with the truth about the wrong they’ve done, they have to lie.

I say the post is fascinating because before he shared this observation with the world, I’d never given much thought to James O’Keefe’s personal ethical operating manual.

I suppose if you’d asked me to guess I would have imagined him to be a a true believer of some sort - in an ideology, in fighting for the downtrodden, in justice - in something, anyway. I’d have assumed a certain level of zealotry would be required in order to use people the way O’Keefe does both in terms of undermining targeted strangers for the purposes of his investigations and in terms of hiring people who he will use to take these risks on behalf of his company.

His post today, however, seems to show that O’Keefe is anything but a zealot. His flippant remark that both ‘bad’ people and ‘good’ people will do wrong and then lie to cover it up reveals a flaw in his supposed mission to expose corruption: how does he decide which organizations are ‘good or bad’ when he is selecting his targets?

What sort of person could do the work O’Keefe does without ever questioning themselves, without ever wondering whether or not they may have mistakenly harmed the innocent in their quest to get a story out? Is James O’Keefe an amoral journalist?

I’ll delve more deeply into my thoughts on his post later in this piece, but first I want to give a brief history of O’Keefe’s journalistic evolution. I do this for context, and to give a little background information to my readers unfamiliar with him and his style of journalism.

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James O’Keefe’s current operation is called O’Keefe Media Group [OMG].

OMG bills itself as a news agency but its business model goes far beyond reporting about issues and events. The business model of OMG is to create the news by selecting targets, making contact with them by any means necessary and then carrying out undercover operations which its ‘investigators’ capture on hidden camera. The secretly recorded footage is then edited and spun to create a narrative which can be used to sway public opinion or to pressure organizations to make changes to the way they do business (or politics.)

O’Keefe’s method - in which he was mentored by Andrew Breitbart - has taken some scalps and generated buzz. In 2009, for example, O’Keefe and his confederate Hannah Giles targeted progressive organization ACORN, going from office to office asking ACORN employees for advice on how to open and run a business involving prostitution and human trafficking. In the end, O’Keefe presented a spectacular selection of undercover footage which appeared to show that ACORN was willing to help such a business get off the ground and avoid legal trouble.

After the operation was complete and the videos edited, the team got a marketing idea: when presenting their exposé, O’Keefe and Giles would dress ostentatiously as a pimp and hooker.

If this pair wandered into your office asking for advice on opening a brothel, wouldn’t alarm bells go off for you? Of course they would, and in fact two of the ACORN employees called in police reports after O’Keefe and Giles left their offices. The truth of the matter is, though, that these costumes were only used for promotional purposes after the videos were made. When O’Keefe & Giles went to ACORN in person they were dressed conservatively; the outfits therefore are another layer of deception - this time against their own intended audience.

In spite of ACORN’s claims that the footage was manipulatively edited, the scandal exploded. O’Keefe’s exposé, was boosted by Andrew Breitbart on his Big Government and Breitbart TV web sites. In the end, the long-running progressive organization lost most of its public and private funding. ACORN filed for bankruptcy in 2010.

On the heels of his victory, O’Keefe set up his first business: Project Veritas. Veritas was a ‘news agency’ dedicated to the same sort of sting-journalism O’Keefe had used in the ACORN project. At first, O’Keefe met with abject failure. He and 3 others were arrested when attempting to install bugs into a Louisiana Senator’s office phones; then only months later he was foiled by one of his own staff who warned the mark - female journalist with CNN Abbie Boudreau - that O’Keefe was planning to set her up at an interview in what would be portrayed as raunchy seduction scene. These humiliations weren’t enough to deter him, though. O’Keefe kept at it. His organization survived and, eventually, thrived for a time.

In February 2023, responding to allegations of bullying and harassment against its chief James O’Keefe, the Project Veritas Board of Directors ejected the leader and founder from his own organization. As he always manages to do, O’Keefe found new backers and started again. His new, current ‘news agency’ is OMG. O’Keefe Media Group.

All right. That’s enough for background history for the time being.

I plan to expand my coverage of Project Veritas and the O’Keefe Media Group in an upcoming Part 2, but as I said in the introduction to this piece, I want to use the rest of this space to take a peek inside the mind and heart of James O’Keefe by examining something he wrote on Twitter/X.

Good people and bad people, according to O’Keefe, both ‘do wrongs’ and both will lie when confronted about it. As you can see I challenged him by replying “Good people don’t lie.” He rebutted my point with, “Good people will lie in order to feed their family and pay their mortgage.”

Perhaps he does know better than I - after all, this is how he makes his living. I’ve never personally put anyone into the dilemma O’Keefe describes. I wonder how many times he has, what with his line of work being to find compromising info on people.

OMG trains and pays attractive men and women (who they call journalists) to troll the internet looking for mid to high level bureaucrats or other political targets. They then ask their ‘journalists’ to lure these targets into going on dates, preferably to well lit restaurants with a nice selection of alcoholic beverages. OMG’s ‘journalists’ will wait until the target has had a few drinks and then pester them with leading questions about their work. The hidden recording devices are in place in the hopes that the target will say something off colour or otherwise incriminating - something that can be framed and edited to make a political statement against the wider agency for which the target works. Often this effort means going on multiple fake dates with the same target and asking the same questions over and over.

I assume that for every ‘gotcha’ exposé OMG releases to the public there are 10 attempts that don’t see the light of day. Many of the pieces they’ve released in the past two years are underwhelming. They come off as what they probably are: half intoxicated men with pretty boring jobs who are saying things to try to impress their dates.

We are in an information war and political stakes are very high. Exposing corruption is a vital function of investigative journalists. No matter how you slice it though, deception is the heart of OMG’s process. The entrapment, the play-acting, the hidden cameras, the editing, and the framing. All of it is ripe for manipulation. One wonders how often the ‘journalists’ have stopped and asked themselves:

“Wait. Are we the baddies?”

As I wrote above, it’s happened at least once in the past when a Project Veritas staffer alerted the CNN reporter that she was about to get ‘punked.’ More recently a Veritas investigator, Justin Leslie, has claimed that O’Keefe failed to use his undercover recordings at pharma giant Pfizer, instead choosing to bury the story.

Now look back at O’Keefe’s twitter/x post. All this talk of good and bad people doing wrong and having to lie. Could it be read as a sort of confession?

What exactly qualifies someone as ‘bad’ in O’Keefe’s estimation?

According to him, good people also ‘do wrong’ and ‘have to lie’ about it when confronted. This seems to make good people and bad people the same, negating his point entirely. Yet we can assume that he does draw a distinction - or at least he pretends to. After all, his life’s work is focused on exposing ‘bad people’ in order to help destroy ‘bad organizations.’ If he can’t tell the difference between good and bad, right and wrong, then how does he make his journalistic decisions? How could he sleep at night knowing that he was going to get up the next day and try all over again to destroy someone who might actually be a decent person after all?

Maybe O’Keefe believes he is a ‘good person who does wrongs’ as opposed to the ‘bad people’ who do? I’d ask him, but he would never admit it. By his own confession post we know that if we were to back him into a corner about it he would have to lie.

How much of this behaviour can someone get away with before he or she is classified as ‘bad?’ Is it a matter of the seriousness of the wrongs they’ve done and if so, according to whose definition? Does it depend on the person’s political leanings? Does it have to do with the judgments and aims of the person paying O’Keefe and his ‘journalists’ for the investigation? At ACORN for example were they ‘bad people’ or ‘good people’ doing wrongs?’ Only O’Keefe understands the difference.

One more thing. Recall my reply to O’Keefe’s post and his comeback afterwards:

Now there’s a potential confession.

Maybe some of this ‘investigative journalism’ never makes it to public viewing. Maybe instead, the recordings his staff make are used to threaten privately. Is it possible that James knows that ‘good people will lie to feed their family’ because that’s exactly the position his OMG organization has put people into in the past?

When is an undercover investigation considered to be journalism and when is it spying or entrapment? In the case of Veritas’s alleged undercover investigation into Pfizer, for example, the whistleblower claims the footage he recorded was never used to create a documentary exposé. Why not? Was it that none of the footage was usable or was it that Project Veritas believed there was more to be gained by keeping that information under wraps? If so, in what way? Are there people at Pfizer who are now leveraged by Project Veritas into lying (in order that they might keep on feeding their families?)

This is all pure speculation, of course. A thought exercise. But there’s a lot of history I didn’t mention here that might lead one to believe that James O’Keefe and his team of operatives are not purely truth-seeking, corruption-exposing journalists.

I’ll get into that soon.

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Part 2 coming shortly:

Leveraging People - O’Keefe Media Group

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