Westchester Reporter

Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe over the weekend said the watchdog group is going to continue suing news organizations that defame his organization.

“We believe it’s time to go on offense. We’re going to start suing these places,” O’Keefe told The Epoch Times’ “Crossroads'' at CPAC 2021.

Last year the watchdog group sued The New York Times for defamation after the paper claimed Project Veritas spread misinformation in its expose of a money-for-ballots scheme in Minnesota. The group had published video and audio evidence toward this.

Project Veritas accused the paper of conspiring with “a left-leaning group of academics and college students to near-simultaneously have that group publish a blog post” making the misinformation claim, quickly followed by the paper’s story hyping the blog post. 

"They worked together to convince the public that Project Veritas’ investigation should be disregarded outright as a deceptive, untruthful report, published not by a journalistic organization, but a ‘conservative activist.'”

The group, called the Election Integrity Partnership, includes researchers from the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, it claimed the Project Veritas video was part of a planned elite disinformation campaign.

Lawyers for the New York Times said in a motion that their articles do not always need to be fair and balanced and that Project Veritas failed to link Rep. Ilham Omar (D-Minn.) to the alleged ballot harvesting scheme.

“In my review of the Video, I observed no material credibly supporting the Video’s claim that Representative Ilhan Omar’s campaign was engaged in an illegal ballot-fraud scheme,” reporter Maggie Astor added in a separate filing as reported by The Epoch Times. 

To this, O'Keefe responded: "if a videotape of cash in exchange for ballots is considered misinformation, that’s about the most Orwellian thing — that’s beyond George Orwell, that’s craziness. So that concerned me. I realized I had no other option. It was a choiceless choice. My lawyers informed me it’s gonna cost millions of dollars to get to a jury verdict, but we will win. We will win because we can’t settle. We don’t settle," he told The Epoch Times. 

He also highlighted they were going to file more lawsuits.

“CNN has lied about us. Brian Stelter lied about me last week. Fidelity, which is a banking institution, has told our donors that I’m under criminal investigation. That’s false. That’s in Texas. We’re going to start suing all of these people, and the reason why is, obviously, it’s actual malice. You can’t defame someone,” he said to The Epoch Times.

“But also, in the discovery process of litigation, you force them to answer questions under oath, that is videotaped. That is content, as if we went into their institutions with a hidden camera. So we look forward to deposing the head of The New York Times, Brian Stelter, Anna Cabrera, all of the folks that have defamed Project Veritas. The only thing they understand is power. So we look forward to seeing them in court.”