RIGHT-WING ACTIVIST AND UNDERCOVER VIDEO AUTEUR James O’Keefe struck again last week when he released a video that purports to offer yet more proof that the Trump Justice Department is covering up the Jeffrey Epstein case.
In the video, a man O’Keefe describes as a “senior Justice Department investigator” named Glenn Prager—apparently caught on camera by an O’Keefe associate on a plane, and then at a restaurant after the flight—says that Trump is refusing to release Epstein files because he’s “protecting a lot of other people.”
The Justice Department shot back after the video’s release, sarcastically dismissing O’Keefe’s “BOMBSHELL” and saying Prager hadn’t worked for them in fifteen years, and that he’d no real knowledge of the Epstein case during his short tenure back then anyway.
“Exploiting survivors of sexual abuse by fabricating stories for personal gain is reprehensible,” a statement posted on X read. “Enough with the clickbait.”
The Prager video marks at least the fourth undercover video O’Keefe has released showing people with some DOJ connection claiming Epstein is being covered up since the Justice Department tried to close the Epstein case in a July memo. It’s a strange position for O’Keefe, who now finds his videos being embraced by congressional Democrats and cited as proof of Trump administration malfeasance.
Why is O’Keefe—a former Trump stalwart whose nonprofit even received $10,000 from Trump’s foundation a decade ago—going after Trump’s administration? For his part, O’Keefe insisted to me that this isn’t about attacking Trump or the Justice Department at all.
“I’m just playing video of other people’s mouths moving,” O’Keefe said.
The latest video wasn’t all bad for Trump. Whatever Prager’s real knowledge of the Epstein case is, he claimed that Trump wasn’t connected to any Epstein rapes, and claims former President Bill Clinton was far more implicated in Epstein’s crimes.
Still, it’s not the first time O’Keefe has trumpeted supposed proof that there’s a coverup at Justice. It’s been a predominant concern of his since the summer. On stage at a TPUSA event in July, he professed incredulity over a DOJ memo claiming no third parties had been implicated during the Epstein investigation before saying, “It is time to take matters into our own hands.” He announced a new project focused on FBI leaks and played an audio clip of an FBI agent describing the Epstein case as a “shitshow.” The same day, he released a video in which the agent also said law enforcement had “turned a blind eye” or “missed things” related to Epstein’s crimes.
Then came a series of further videos filmed in O’Keefe’s signature style. On September 4, O’Keefe put out footage of a Justice Department official claiming that Republican names would be redacted out of any future Epstein files release. (The official explained, in a screenshotted statement posted to the Justice Department’s official X account, that he had been targeted by an undercover operative posing as a Georgetown au pair named Skylar).
On September 8, O’Keefe released a recording of an FBI “paralegal specialist” saying the Epstein files were being withheld to “cover” for powerful people who might be implicated by them. And the Prager video came out on September 24.
What’s driving this? One former O’Keefe associate speculated to me that O’Keefe—a theater kid who was accused of lavishly spending money from his Project Veritas nonprofit on his musical performances—just really loves attention and knows that Epstein is a hot topic.
I have my own theory. O’Keefe, who’s trying to rebuild his operations after departing Project Veritas two years ago, has invested heavily in the Epstein investigation, running footage from Epstein’s island over the summer. If he followed the presidential line and ditched Epstein coverage on the grounds that it’s a “hoax,” O’Keefe would be abandoning a key storyline for his new operation.
Again, O’Keefe insists he isn’t trying to criticize Trump.
“It’s not an anti-Trump thing, I don’t know where you’re getting that from,” O’Keefe said.
O’Keefe seems uncomfortable on this new terrain. As Epstein victims held a press conference on Capitol Hill in September to demand the release of more files, O’Keefe tried to engage Democratic protesters in the kind of conversations that could produce a viral argument, only to find out that they were more or less on his side when it came to Epstein.
In another video, O’Keefe showed himself trying and failing to catch popcorn in his mouth as he chuckled about MSNBC clips celebrating his undercover footage.
“I’m not going after the Trump administration!” he lamented at one point.
As many people grasping for a piece of Charlie Kirk’s legacy have done, O’Keefe closes his latest video with something Kirk said to him: In their last exchange, O’Keefe says, Kirk advised him to keep following the story. (The undercover footage of Prager was filmed two days before Kirk’s assassination.)
“I told Charlie I was conflicted about what to do,” O’Keefe said in the video. “And Charlie Kirk’s last words to me were: ‘James, you should be a journalist first.’”
Today Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that twenty men who were awarded the Medal of Honor for their participation in the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre would keep their medals, despite more than a century of controversy over them. The defense secretary who preceded Hegseth, General Lloyd Austin, had ordered a review of the awarding of those medals to “ensure no awardees were recognized for conduct inconsistent with the nation’s highest military honor.” Hegseth today called the men “brave soldiers” and said: “We’re making it clear that [the soldiers] deserve those medals.”
It’s fitting that Hegseth, a political appointee whose tenure has been marked by incompetence, would defend the awarding of those particular Medals of Honor, because they were awarded to cover up the incompetence of political appointees that led to the deaths of at least 230 peaceful Lakotas, as well as about twenty-five soldiers who were caught in their own crossfire.
The road to Wounded Knee started in 1884, when voters angry that the Republicans had sold out to big business elected Democrat Grover Cleveland to the presidency. The first Democrat to occupy the White House since before the Civil War, he promised to lower the tariffs that squeezed ordinary Americans in order to protect big business. Horrified at the growing opposition to a government that worked for those industrialists who would soon be called “robber barons,” Republicans began to circulate pamphlets as soon as Cleveland was elected, claiming that lowering the tariff would destroy the economy and warning that voters must return Republicans to power or face economic ruin.
Hours after delivering his delusional and offensive speech to the United Nations yesterday, President Donald J. Trump did an about-face on his previous support for Russia in its war against Ukraine. After he met with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, his social media account posted: “I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form,” which would be before Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea. Trump noted the profound toll the war is taking on Russia’s economy and speculated that Ukraine might even be able to take Russian land. “In any event,” Trump posted, “I wish both Countries well. We will continue to supply weapons to NATO for NATO to do what they want with them. Good luck to all!”
As Nick Paton Walsh of CNN noted, this statement doesn’t actually change much on the ground in the war. What it does, though, is suggest that Trump has lost interest in the conflict and is attempting to wash his hands of it.
I spent September 9 in a cave. It wasn’t planned: I had been promised a waterfall. But there was a long drought, and the streams dried up, leaving a cavern of color and a series of interlocking caves. Cliffs soared above and holes gaped below, beckoning me to explore.
I waded through wildflowers and entered the largest lair, calling to my husband that I was alright, and crawled as far as I could go. The view from the cave was clearer than the view from the cliffs. In the dark, every detail of the outside world shines brighter. In the dark, I move slow and gradual, contorting myself to its crevices, observing everything and pursuing nothing. I took pictures because we had stopped at this park on a whim, and it was not supposed to look this way. I had gotten lucky, and I wanted proof that there was such a thing as good luck.
Sarah Kendzior
September 9 was a big day. We had dropped our daughter off at college and were taking a detour on a long drive home. The park was a distraction from the pain of leaving our baby behind.
I’m not giving away the location — if you know from the photos below, shhhh — but I will say that it is an oasis near a highway landscape that even I struggle to make interesting. As a result, I spent the ride back reading the news we had missed.
It is hard to catch up with all of Israel’s murders and violations of international law in one car ride. Miss one day, miss countless corpses. Israel had attacked six countries in the last 72 hours. Netanyahu was unrepentant, promising more.
“Even Trump condemned Israel,” I informed my husband. “For Qatar.”
“Trump’s still alive?”
“Still alive!”
Trump’s alleged demise had dominated “news” for weeks. I use quotation marks because there is no longer “news” in the US: only speculation, propaganda in oligarch-run newspapers, dark money posts disguised as articles, the occasional well-researched but paywalled piece, and independent reporting blocked by algorithms.
The rumor that Trump was dying was sparked by a hand bruise and a dream. It was greeted with celebratory anticipation tempered by thoughts of JD Vance.
If that rumor was a test of whether the prospect of Trump’s death would galvanize support, it failed, I thought. I imagined Trump reading the giddy tweets. I imagined his propaganda team reeling, knowing that they would need someone new around whom to consolidate power. Vance would not suffice: he was tainted as VP of the second Trump-Epstein cover-up regime.
In recent weeks, Trump’s base had been shaken by revelations about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein as well as the reemergence of old horrors that should have been addressed decades ago.
That Trump had been accused of raping a 13-year-old trafficked by Epstein in 1994 was old news. I reported it in my book Hiding in Plain Sight and included the court documents from her case. But some information was new even to those of us who had covered the Epstein operation for a long time. Unearthed documents revealed deeper ties between Trump and Epstein and hinted at explicit pedophile proclivities. Their release followed a devastating September 3 press conference by Epstein’s victims.
A criminal conspiracy that had been buried for decades, then memed to the point of inscrutability following Epstein’s 2019 “suicide”, then reburied in the Biden years, was finding a mass audience. And they wanted answers.
Insistence that the Epstein conspiracy must be fully revealed had long united not only left and right, but all Americans who hate pedophile rape traffickers — which is to say, almost all Americans, with the unfortunate exception of those inhabiting the highest halls of power.
I wrote in my 2022 book They Knew: “At this sick, sad point in our national history, Jeffrey Epstein may be the only thing holding Americans together. That our unity rests on shared loathing of a billionaire pedophile and his network of wealthy accomplices is an indictment of the United States itself.”
I wrote that paragraph in 2021, hoping that the victims’ cases might be reexamined after the 2020 arrest of Epstein partner Ghislaine Maxwell. But Biden’s approach was no different than Trump’s: install people close to Epstein in major roles (for Trump, Bill Barr, whose father had hired Epstein and launched him into high society; for Biden, Antony Blinken, whose stepfather was the best friend of Robert Maxwell — Ghislaine’s father and a mobbed-up espionage operative for Israel — as well as Epstein’s advisor) and shun the pursuit of justice.
The news was vile, and the 9/11 anniversary loomed. I dreaded media commentary but was curious what regular folks would say. Much as Epstein’s operation had been dismissed as a “conspiracy theory” that proved to be an actual criminal conspiracy, aspects of 9/11 once derided — that some US officials may have known the attacks were coming, that some foreign leaders may have welcomed them, that a 1997 paper by Iraq War architects claiming the US needed “some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor” may be of note — had entered mainstream discourse.
There is a gulf between awareness of an atrocity and justice for its victims. I expected little of the latter but wondered whether talk could be free without being cheap. Anger at preventable deaths is another nonpartisan cause. Americans had stopped viewing skepticism over the official 9/11 narrative as offensive — a belief instilled through the hijacking of honest inquiry by propagandists like Alex Jones — and yearned for truth.
By 9/10, we were home, conservative pundit Charlie Kirk was shot dead, and the damning news stories of 9/9 were dying with him.
* * *
In 2001, I worked at the New York Daily News and spent the summer cataloguing its moronic tales. Gary Condit, the congressman accused of killing an intern, deemed innocent long after the fact. Actress Anne Heche proclaiming that she was “Celestia, the reincarnation of God” and came from “the fourth dimension”. (The press ignored that this was how Heche coped with a lifetime of abuse.) And sharks, always sharks. The sharks weren’t doing much, but the notion that they could strike was considered news. Later, the tabloid replaced its shark template with Muslims.
All these stories collapsed with the Twin Towers. On 9/11, we entered After, and those tales became irrelevant vestiges of Before.
The stories that faded in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder are different. They are serious, and Kirk also covered them. Kirk was close to Trump and his staff. He wanted the Epstein case examined, though he vacillated due to his administrative ties. He was a longtime supporter of Israel, though in 2023 he questioned whether Israel had allowed the 10/7 attacks to happen.
These topics are a live wire. Stories are not being knocked out of the news: news is getting knocked out of the stories, because people are afraid to tell it.
Conservative pundits are debating whether Kirk had retracted, or was considering retracting, his support of Netanyahu’s regime, with severalclaiming that Kirk worried Israel was targeting him for murder. They say other pundits feel threatened and that pro-Israel donors have been pressuring them. Netanyahu’s many proclamations that Israel did not murder Kirk have raised eyebrows due to their overzealous tone. Kirk had a large audience of Americans under thirty years old: the very group that has the lowest opinion of Israel. Whatever position he took would be influential.
This controversy is but one in the Charlie Kirk murder saga, which has provoked endless theories about the gunman and motive while being weaponized by the Trump administration to slander innocent Americans and curb free speech and assembly.
On September 9, it felt like the only story big enough to stop the Epstein coverage, which had run ceaselessly since July, would be another frightening event laden with celebrity intrigue. On September 10, one arrived, and the state embraced it.
I hesitated over writing this article for many reasons, but the main one is that a snuff film is at its center. That is a sickness, a depravity, that should be neither seen nor overlooked. Whatever one thought of Kirk, he did not deserve to be murdered, nor does he deserve to be dehumanized in a way that has become common in American culture. The defining feature of the 21st century is disregard for the sanctity of human life. The livestream is a deathstream with no way to turn it off.
* * *
There was a time when I had never seen the murder of a human being. That time was my entire life before I got a smartphone.
In 2025, murder videos circulate regularly. The victims are usually poor and unknown until their posthumous fame. Dead human beings are scrutinized, analyzed, and in the end, degraded, on plastic rectangles of sacrilege. People used to carry snuff in their pockets; now they carry around snuff films.
I saw the killing of Kirk. I wish I hadn’t, but I couldn’t opt out: it played no matter how I adjusted my social media settings. Now the video has taken on a life beyond the life that was taken. His murder is marketed as martyrdom and pushed as proof: of every theory and every rationale, of every worst assumption and every lost cause.
These are dangerous, manipulative times. There is both honest heartache from his fans and cynical directives on mourning from the powerful. There is both a chilling murder and a chilling effect caused by discussing it. A culture of censorship has claimed its spokesman, and he cannot speak, not even to protest his position.
The state seeks to denote a demarcation: September 10, 2025, the new Most Important Day. I don’t know if government attempts at creating a Before and After will succeed, regardless of certain factions’ ever-burning desire for a Reichstag Fire.
But I know two children lost their father, and that they will have to live in the eternal shadow of his murder on replay, and that horror is a sickening shame.
When I feel lost in the morass of threats and violence, I remember September 9. Not the news, but the reprieve from it: the solace of nature, the mystery of the caves, the pool where the tunnel ended, too far down for me to jump. I had to retrace my steps and crawl backward, hoping I would make it to where I began, and travel the same path with new vision.
We must do the same with history, before it is erased.
I document the news of September 9, 2025, in case America is at a turning point. As we learned after 9/11, turning points have a way of dissolving into spin. Remember the recent past — and reclaim the stolen future.
* * *
Thank you for reading! I would never paywall in times of peril. But if you’d like to keep this newsletter going, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. That ensures every article remains open to everyone. This newsletter is the main source of income for my family of four, so I appreciate your support!
If the topics of this article interest you, please check out my books Hiding in Plain Sight and They Knew, as they give more background on the alliances described above.
