Patriot,

Early one morning in November 2021, FBI agents showed up at my home with a search warrant, and the first thing I did was ask to call my lawyer.

An agent handed me my phone, and I unlocked it so I could make that call.

And he took it right out of my hand.

For almost five years I could not show you why they came, because the papers that explained it were sealed. Then this year a federal judge ruled that the government's secrecy had gone too far, and the FBI's sworn affidavit was finally filed in public.

I have now read every page of it, Patriot, and it is worse than I thought.

Here is what the FBI already knew before its agents ever came to my door.

They had my emails. They used search warrants to collect them from Microsoft, and they read the private messages I had written to my own team.

That means they read the email I sent on October 12, 2020, after a tipster brought us a diary that was said to belong to Joe Biden's daughter. In that email I told my team we would not publish it, because it was “not worth it” and it was “indefensible to publish what we currently have.”

Nine days later I wrote again: “We can't publish this. The evidence is not incontrovertible.”

The FBI quoted both of those emails in its own sworn affidavit, and then, more than a year later, it raided my home anyway.

Let that sink in.

The agent who signed that affidavit also swore that it “does not appear” my reporters “are, in fact, credentialed journalists.” In other words, an FBI agent decided, under oath, who gets to count as a reporter in this country.

Then they tracked my phone. According to the affidavit, they used cell location data to find me at a hotel upstate, and their plan was simply to wait until I came home.

They even asked the judge for the power to press my fingers onto my phone and hold it up to my face, so that my own body would unlock my reporting notes for them.

In the end they didn't need any of that. All it took was asking for my lawyer.

Now here is the part that matters most.

After the raid, the seized phones, and years of legal bills, the government never charged me with a single crime. Not one. The judge put it plainly in her May 29 order, writing that “no criminal charges were forthcoming.”

They swore to a judge that they had probable cause. They also had my own words, in writing, saying I would not publish. Five years later, they have charged me with nothing at all.

But a conviction was never really the point, Patriot. A raid doesn't need a conviction to work, because all it needs is my time, my money, and my attention, year after year, over a story I chose not to run.

That is exactly why the O'Keefe Defense Fund exists. When someone weaponizes the courts and the government to drain me, I should not have to choose between paying my lawyers and paying the reporters who work for me.

When you give today, I will send you the key pages of the FBI affidavit along with the judge's order, so you can read them for yourself and see exactly what they wrote about me.

In Truth,

James O'Keefe
Founder and CEO
O'Keefe Media Group