Dear Patriot,

I want to explain something about the lawsuits, because almost everybody misunderstands what they are actually for.

They are not trying to win.

Look at the record. AFT v. O'Keefe. Koerber v. O'Keefe, all the way to the California Supreme Court. Teter v. O'Keefe. Democracy Partners v. O'Keefe, in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Every single person who has sued me has lost.

And the most recent one was not decided on a technicality. A federal appeals court in Washington threw out the jury verdict against me and held that undercover reporting like ours is protected by the First Amendment. For fifteen years I was told that what I do is not legitimate journalism. A federal court has now concluded otherwise, in writing.

The people filing these cases can read that record as easily as you can. They know exactly how it ends. They file anyway.

So ask the obvious question. If you already know you are going to lose, what are you actually purchasing?

You are purchasing my calendar, and I want to show you the receipt.

There are three things a lawsuit buys the person who files it, and a verdict is not one of them.

The first is distraction.

A deposition consumes an entire day. Discovery consumes weeks. There are filings, motions, calls with counsel, documents to locate, and every one of them lands on my desk rather than somebody else's.

A day spent in a conference room answering questions about footage I shot three years ago is a day I am not looking at what is in front of us right now. They cannot stop the next investigation. They can absolutely make me late for it.

The second is demoralization, and this one is aimed at my people, not at me.

Within days of that federal appeals ruling, another lawsuit was filed against one of my undercover journalists. Not against me. Against a young reporter who did the field work. Somebody who never attended law school, has no legal department, and has no corporation standing behind them.

Understand the message that sends to every talented young person considering this work. We can reach you personally. We can put your name on a docket. We can make the next five years of your life expensive and frightening.

The third is time, which is the only thing in this business you genuinely cannot replace. Appeals take years. Defenses take years. And they are counting on the arithmetic that a reporter who spends five years defending old work is a reporter who is no longer producing new work.

That is the entire strategy, and it is working on exactly one front.

Now I have to be very clear with you, because I do not want a single dollar landing in the wrong place.

I am not writing to you about legal bills.

Our legal defense is funded separately. That is handled, my attorneys are outstanding, and it is not what I am asking you for today. Please do not send this gift thinking it pays a lawyer, because it does not.

Here is what the lawfare actually costs, and it never shows up on an invoice.

It costs investigations that never happen.

The tip that came in during a week I was buried in discovery. The state I could not put a team into because I was in a deposition on the day the decision had to be made. The story that was live for eleven days and then closed, because the person willing to talk stopped being willing.

Nobody ever sees those. There is no video of the investigation you did not fund. That is precisely why this strategy is attractive to the people using it. The damage is invisible, and I am the only one who can tell you it happened.

So let me tell you how this actually gets beaten, because it is simpler than it sounds.

There is exactly one measurement of whether their strategy worked. Did O'Keefe Media Group publish more this year, or less?

That is the scoreboard. It is the only scoreboard. And not one line of it is decided in a courtroom.

It is decided by whether there is money to put a team on an airplane. Right now I have two teams working undercover in two different states. I cannot tell you where and I cannot tell you what they have. I can tell you that they exist because somebody funded them, and that keeping both of them out there costs real money every single day.

Your gift does not go to a lawyer. It gets on a plane.

That is the answer to all of this. Not a better legal argument. More cameras, in more places, more often. The lawsuits are designed to make me smaller, and the only response that has ever worked is to get louder.

America starts voting September 19, when the first federal ballots go out. I intend for my people to be standing in the right locations when that happens, not sitting in a conference room reading a court docket.

You fund the mission. My team takes the risk. You see the result with your own eyes.

There is nobody else writing this check. It has always been you.

Thank you for all that you do, and please . . . stay tuned.

P.S. Four lawsuits, four defeats for the people who filed them, and a federal appeals court that just described our work as protected journalism. They are not trying to beat me. They are trying to keep me busy until I stop filming. The only thing that has ever answered that is another camera in another state, and that is what your gift buys.