James O'Keefe suing Twitter for defamation in New York
Project Veritas founder reacts to being permanently banned from Twitter.
Project Veritas founder James O'Keefe provided an update on his ongoing defamation lawsuit against The New York Times and panned the written responses that were submitted in court.
"The New York Times just filed an answer to our defamation lawsuit and it is a doozy," O'Keefe began his remarks in a video shared on Wednesday. "And now, the New York Times has requested a jury trial as we barrel towards discovery."
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O'Keefe knocked the Times for their formal response to the legal complaint, which stemmed from the paper's report last fall that cast doubt in Project Veritas' reporting, for repeatedly claiming that they "lack knowledge or information" in response to various inquiries.
"They feigned ignorance no fewer than 40 times in their answer claiming they 'lack knowledge [or] information,'" O'Keefe exclaimed.
O'Keefe panned the Times for admitting that its journalists didn't reach out to the sources that were cited in the report published by Project Veritas.
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"The New York Times- all you have to do is pick up the phone and call him... but you didn't do that!" O'Keefe scolded the Times. "And maybe you didn't do it because if you did do it, you'd have to publish that it was real! But what you put in your A-section news article, you said that we were quote 'making claims without evidence.' You didn't even pick up the phone to make a damn phone call! And you call yourselves journalists!"
"The only people that the New York Times reached out to were those people who supported the narrative that they wanted to tell," O'Keefe added.
O'Keefe later knocked the Times for admitting the author of its report, Maggie Astor, is "not an opinion writer" after previously claiming in their motion to dismiss the lawsuit that she used "unverifiable expressions of opinion."
He closed the video by issuing a direct message to Times executive editor Dean Baquet.
"Dean Baquet, I will depose you under oath... Do you understand what it is like to have tens of millions of people getting notifications, calling you fake, saying that your videos are false and you defend yourself with this garbage?" O'Keefe asked. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself. You're lucky there aren't thousands of more people suing you for defamation for what you've done."
"And you better prepare for a jury trial, my friend, because there is no amount of money that you can give me to make me settle," O'Keefe warned Baquet.
Last month, a New York judge denied the paper's motion to dismiss the suit by the right-wing guerilla news outlet over the Times' portrayal of Project Veritas' reporting last fall on alleged voter fraud in Minnesota's 5th Congressional District, which is represented by U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democrat.
Times reporters Maggie Astor and Tiffany Hsu described Project Veritas' reporting as "deceptive," "false," and "with no verifiable evidence."
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"The facts submitted by Veritas could indicate more than standard, garden variety media bias and support a plausible inference of actual malice," Supreme Court Justice Charles Wood ruled last week. "There is a substantial basis in law to proceed to permit the plaintiff to conduct discovery and to then attempt to meet its higher standard of proving liability through clear and convincing evidence of actual malice."
Wood elaborated, "If a writer interjects an opinion in a news article (and will seek to claim legal protections as opinion) it stands to reason that the writer should have an obligation to alert the reader, including a court that may need to determine whether it is fact or opinion, that it is opinion."
O'Keefe and Project Veritas have also filed defamation lawsuits against Twitter and CNN.