James O’Keefe donned clear-framed glasses, a dusty pink sport coat and a shaggy, ill-fitting wig when he dined with an employee of a government contractor in a hidden-camera sting operation last year.
The person’s employer, ATI Government Solutions, is now fighting back in court after the video published by O’Keefe — whom ATI called a “known online provocateur” — has cost the company $130 million in canceled government contracts, it alleges, plus more than $500 million in prospective business.
ATI filed a lawsuit on Thursday not against O’Keefe but against the federal government, alleging that the U.S. Small Business Administration and the Trump administration official in charge of the agency, Kelly Loeffler, unlawfully barred the company from federal contracting based on “unfounded allegations” in what ATI calls a heavily edited and manipulated video.
In the complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, ATI alleges that Loeffler — a Republican who briefly served as a U.S. senator from Georgia — quickly amplified O’Keefe’s report on social media, claimed that it was evidence of fraud against the government and an abuse of government diversity initiatives, and then began taking action against the company, which is owned by the Susanville Indian Rancheria tribe.
The O’Keefe video, published in October 2025, shows an ATI employee purporting to say that the business is a “front” using its minority-owned status to win “no-bid government contracts” and outsourcing the work to other companies that would not qualify.
The ATI employee also ran a catering company on the side, and the complaint alleges that O’Keefe “created a fake company to catfish” the employee as a potential catering client. It also claims that the employee handled “little more than data entry and organizing electronic files.”
ATI was certified by the SBA’s 8(a) Business Development Program, which helps businesses from “disadvantaged communities” including businesses owned by Native American tribes. Its 8(a) certification allowed ATI to compete for certain government contracts.
But O’Keefe in his video alleges that ATI operated fraudulently — which the company in its lawsuit says is false and unfounded.
O’Keefe, the company said, “took issue with ATI’s success” and on Oct. 20, 2025, he “scammed a low-level former employee,” who he falsely claimed was in senior company leadership. The complaint says that O’Keefe met with the man under false pretenses and “baited” him into agreeing with his own “mischaracterizations” about how ATI operated.
ATI declined to comment beyond the lawsuit. The Small Business Administration and O’Keefe did not respond immediately to requests for comment.
O’Keefe is a right-wing activist known for undercover sting operations and hidden-camera videos. He founded and previously ran the group Project Veritas but in 2023 was ousted by the group’s board of directors amid revelations of improper spending. He then started O’Keefe Media Group and serves as the company’s CEO.
In 2010, O’Keefe pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of illegally entering a government building, in a deal that let him avoid jail time. He and three others entered the office of a Democratic senator posing as workers in an attempt to tamper with the senator’s phones.
A Democratic consulting firm in 2022 won a $130,000 judgment against O’Keefe tied to another sting operation, but an appeals court in August 2026 overturned that judgment.
O’Keefe also once attempted to fool The Washington Post. After a woman claimed to Post reporters in 2017 that she, as a teenager, had been impregnated by Roy Moore, then a Republican U.S. Senate candidate, The Post discovered that it was a ruse set up by Project Veritas.
In the case of ATI, the company alleges the federal government is responsible for carrying out punitive measures based on O’Keefe’s allegations.
Hours after O’Keefe’s video about ATI was published online, Loeffler reposted it on social media and announced an “investigation” into ATI and its tribal owner.
“@JamesOKeefeIII has exposed an important truth. Like every other government program rooted in DEI, the 8(a) Program is rife with grift and fraud,” she wrote on X.
The next day, the complaint alleges, SBA suspended ATI from all government contracting without giving the company an opportunity to respond to or contest O’Keefe’s allegations. The agency later separately suspended ATI from the 8(a) program and issued additional contracting suspensions to other companies affiliated with its tribal owner.
An administrative law judge in May ruled that, in defending ATI’s 8(a) suspension, the agency made “no effort whatever to substantiate” the employee statements cited in its original suspension letter. The judge sent the matter back to the agency and SBA lifted the 8(a) suspension but kept the broader suspension from all federal contracting.
On Wednesday, ATI said, SBA informed the company that the broader suspension would be extended another six months.
ATI in its lawsuit is asking a federal judge to declare the suspensions unlawful, lift them and prevent the agency from taking additional steps to blacklist the company.
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